good hopeful stuff
Apr. 8th, 2007 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonHow to Wean a Town Off Fossil Fuels
Excerpt:
The story of the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan is an extraordinary one. A mid-thirties Englishman with a penchant for permaculture and an interest in peak oil moves to rural Ireland, starts teaching at the local further education college, and ends up writing, with his students, a ground-breaking document: the first timetabled strategy for weaning a town off fossil fuels. And what is more, that small Irish town actually adopts the action plan and starts to implement it.
Kinsale is a seaside town of 7000 inhabitants renowned as Ireland’s gourmet food capital, as well as the home of a well-known jazz festival. Kinsale 2021 is the title of the document: Rob Hopkins is the man, who persuaded Kinsale Further Education College to start the first full-time two year course in Europe training in people in Practical Sustainability.
He had a simple idea for his students: to ask them to think practically about all the aspects of a town that would need to be changed if a low-energy future was to happen, and how they could do so over a fifteen-year period. So far, so standard college project. But what was extraordinary was the way they went about it – seriously, meeting the movers and shakers of the town in a “community think-tank,” and researching and writing with every intent of making the project real. The result was named ‘Version 1’, because the plan they devised was all about continual refinement, community input and gradual growth. As the team says, “We describe what we are doing in Kinsale as a process, not an imposed plan in the town.”
The first draft was launched at a conference in Kinsale in June 2005, and two of the students set up a not-for-profit company to handle the project, called Transition Design. Then the big step came when in December 2005, Kinsale Town Council unanimously passed the motion to support “its initiative to act as process leaders in Kinsale’s transition to a lower-energy future and in developing the concept of a ‘Transition Town;’ making the transition from fossil fuel dependency to a state of energy independence.” Kinsale really hit the headlines.
Full article
Excerpt:
The story of the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan is an extraordinary one. A mid-thirties Englishman with a penchant for permaculture and an interest in peak oil moves to rural Ireland, starts teaching at the local further education college, and ends up writing, with his students, a ground-breaking document: the first timetabled strategy for weaning a town off fossil fuels. And what is more, that small Irish town actually adopts the action plan and starts to implement it.
Kinsale is a seaside town of 7000 inhabitants renowned as Ireland’s gourmet food capital, as well as the home of a well-known jazz festival. Kinsale 2021 is the title of the document: Rob Hopkins is the man, who persuaded Kinsale Further Education College to start the first full-time two year course in Europe training in people in Practical Sustainability.
He had a simple idea for his students: to ask them to think practically about all the aspects of a town that would need to be changed if a low-energy future was to happen, and how they could do so over a fifteen-year period. So far, so standard college project. But what was extraordinary was the way they went about it – seriously, meeting the movers and shakers of the town in a “community think-tank,” and researching and writing with every intent of making the project real. The result was named ‘Version 1’, because the plan they devised was all about continual refinement, community input and gradual growth. As the team says, “We describe what we are doing in Kinsale as a process, not an imposed plan in the town.”
The first draft was launched at a conference in Kinsale in June 2005, and two of the students set up a not-for-profit company to handle the project, called Transition Design. Then the big step came when in December 2005, Kinsale Town Council unanimously passed the motion to support “its initiative to act as process leaders in Kinsale’s transition to a lower-energy future and in developing the concept of a ‘Transition Town;’ making the transition from fossil fuel dependency to a state of energy independence.” Kinsale really hit the headlines.
Full article
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Date: 2007-04-09 03:03 am (UTC)