About the Transition Towns movement

The Transition Towns movement first came to Ann Arbor in a weekend Training for Transition on January 2009. Participants came from as far as Minnesota, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Ohio, with the majority coming from Ann Arbor, Detroit, Ypsilanti and Chelsea. The weekend was an opportunity to come together and learn a new way of thinking, living, and working together to make our communities more resilient and abundant. Such trainings are one of the ways the Transition Towns movement is spreading around the world.

The Transition Towns approach empowers communities to face the challenges of peak oil and climate change, and to unleash the collective genius of their own people to find the answers to this momentous question: For all those aspects of life that this community needs to sustain itself and thrive, how are we going to drastically reduce carbon emissions (in response to climate change), significantly re-build resilience (in response to peak oil), and greatly strengthen our local economy (in response to economic instability)?

Transition Towns (also known as Transition Initiatives) make no claim to have all the answers, but seek solutions by building on the wisdom of the past and accessing the pool of ingenuity, skills and determination in our community. Now is the time for us to take stock and start re-creating our future in ways that are not based on cheap, plentiful and polluting oil, but on local food, sustainable energy sources, resilient local economies, self-reliance and an enlivened sense of community well-being.

The Viral Spread of Transition Towns
At the forefront of this new approach is a growing band of communities who are adopting the Transition Model as they devise a new way of thinking, living and working together to make our local communities more resilient and more abundant.

Since the “unleashing” of Transition Town Totnes, in Devon England (the first in the United Kingdom) in the summer of 2006, the Transition idea has spread rapidly around the world. To date, there are about 206 officially designated Transition Towns (including cities, villages, districts, islands) in the UK, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Japan, and the USA.

Transition Boulder County became the first Transition Initiative in North America in May 2008.  In May 2009, Transition Ann Arbor became the 26th "official" Transition Initiative in the U.S. (and the 161st in the world).  There are some 700 additional communities who are in various stages of becoming Transition Initiatives or considering whether they’re ready for this journey, and many more join their ranks nearly every day.

Preparing for Energy Descent
The aim of a Transition Initiative is to pull the community together to explore the practicalities of re-building local resilience and reducing carbon emissions. Typically, solutions involve re-building a community’s capacity to meet its own essential needs in the areas of food, water, energy and economy. Taken together, these strategies will form the backbone of a local Energy Descent Action Plan. This time-tabled road map will define the strategic steps leading towards a life that has minimal reliance on fossil fuels—and dramatically reduced carbon emissions—and one that profits from the abundance of resources and capabilities within our communities.

The Transition Towns movement is growing in Ann Arbor.  Stay tuned to this web site for the latest news!  Let us know how you would like to get involved.