TN2 -One Year In Transition

What if we only had three years to save the planet? was the question Tully posed to the whole of Transition Norwich on June 16 last year. Inspired by the Transition Conference in London, he wrote a challenging paper Transition 2.0 and called an extraordinary meeting where a more urgent, ambitious and bold approach to creating a better world was laid out. 54 people came together to step up personal action in the face of climate change. Out of this the Transition Circles were born, followed by the TN Blog, this Low Carbon Life, The Transition Cafe and the Low Carbon Roadshow.

A year ago I proposed a bold vision for transforming Norwich to a radically low-carbon city. I suggested that we had years, not decades, to reduce our carbon emissions to zero, and that we could do this by creating small groups of people willing to make radical lifestyle changes, and growing the numbers of those groups very rapidly – for example to include a thousand people within a year.

A year on, and TN has laid some wonderful foundations. We have three Transition Circles – strong communities of people who share their experiences and insights into low-carbon living, encouraging and supporting each other in questioning our relationship to our carbon emissions and consumption in general. We’re running our fourth Carbon Conversations group, offering a more structured approach to measuring and understanding our carbon emissions and making formal plans to reduce them. TN is also finding new, creative ways to reach out to the wider community with messages about peak oil and climate change, for example through the Low Carbon Roadshow and the Millenium Babies project. And we’re exploring ways of offering all these through schools, libraries, businesses and so on. I feel TN is a great bunch of people pouring a great deal of creativity, energy and integrity into this work.

That leaves the question of whether we’re making enough of a difference, quickly enough. We haven’t achieved the rate of growth I suggested last year the planet needs. In my more optimistic moments I hope the world will give us more time – through economic downturn, Icelandic volcanoes or whatever. And that our effort flows into a much bigger river, and that it is enough. (Tully Wakeman)

Tully will be co-facilitating a Transition Circles workshop called Getting Personal: small groups working on personal carbon-reduction at the Transition Conference held this year in Newton Abbot, Devon, 11-14 June.