Environmental Graffiti

According to Marion King Hubbert, 2005 was the year the oil peaked, and having sailed past it without even a nod in its direction, it is little wonder we might be feeling out of the loop. But there is a chance to be, not only in the loop, but actually create it, by joining the Transition Town Movement.

Set up to address the challenge of a life without oil, transition towns relocalise food, energy, clothes and building material suppliers, turning a commuter town into a fully working community and thereby establishing low impact living as the precedent. This ultimately involves retraining the community to work for itself, and perhaps even remoulding the community’s value system, but this will eventually lead to a fully independent, oil free settlement.

Lampeter in South Wales has already started down this route. In April 2007 the community of Lampeter held a meeting in which there was a resounding agreement to go ahead with the transition town proposal. Some of the suggestions which were made in the meeting were turning a local playing field into a community allotment, other suggestions were focused around installing a wind turbine to power the town. One month after this ground breaking meeting many other towns across Wales began to show interest in the proposal, from North to South towns were signing up to turn away from oil.

Unfortunately we use oil in almost everything we do, 95% of our food products require the use of oil, and the supply of food accounts for 21% of Britain’s energy use. Even a humble steak takes 3.5 litres of oil to produce half a kilogram. The Tranisiton Culture is backed by the Soil Association, and the need to move away from oil based produce is becoming ever more apparent. There are other possible solutions, which have been put forward, such as hydrogen or biofuel production, but these are still in their infancy. Just to run all of the UK’s cars on biodiesel it would take over 25m hectares of arable land, and the UK only has 5.7m hectares of arable land.

With increasing consumer power and a greater public desire to change the way we live the Transition Culture is set to spread.

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