If we look around us, we can discover with surprise and scaring that we are drowned in petrol objects, from the synthetic clothes, plastic Barbie girl, to the gasoline for cars.

Petrol is a fossil energy so exhaustible, and we are living the “peak oil”, the period of the highest quantity of petrol that we can produce in the world just before it declines. We won’t have this wonderful pollutant forever, and we need to find other proper energy for the planet and us. Moreover, this extraction, manipulation and transformation of the petrol cause a lot of pollution around the world which contribute to the global warming, injure the planet and our health, and make us buy more chocolate from far away to forget all these bad things.

Can I keep my chocolate addiction and being eco friendly as much as possible?
How can we Think global, act rural, and this with others people as me who want to do something?

The “Transition town” movement is one of the alternatives. It is born from a British author and permaculture teacher, Rob Hopkins, who wanted with his students to think, organize, and act rural in order to reduce the energetic consumption, recreate a local web and live it in joy.

Quickly, the philosophy of the movement has been adopted by a lot of British citizens, and all around the world. The concept? People who feel that we cannot continue to use fossil energy but have the impression to don’t be able to act alone meet each other in a group, in their village, town, city, capital, and together create a transition town/territory, working to find concrete solutions.

These one can start as individuals daily acts as buying local and natural, saving energy, sharing materials, but create a “transition group” add others dimensions: meet different persons with others backgrounds, learn from that, get others views on the same topic, and be present for the others when the global problems seem to crush us. Because our power is to be, and to be with the others.

A transition group works on two sides: the internal one, to work in team, and an external one, which makes differences with act alone: create events as documentary screening, work in huge public gardens… one of the main goal is inform the citizens about these two topics, peak oil/global warming, induce a thinking which will lead to rural acts. Many of them are possible without money or not much: just be creative!

For example, the Dijon transition group was born in the beginning of 2011. After learnt how to work, think all together, we started to search some owners of lands that they didn’t use in order to create public organic garden. We got one garden of 2000 square where we garden in a permaculture way, and where we can go in bike in 20 minutes. The other garden we got is 4000 square and we planted about 100 fruits trees that we saved from a land where a highway will be built. More than gardens, that is all than daily acts we adopted all together as sharing cars, knowledge as baking bread, making leathers shoes, hive clay… but above all, live together, not in the fear of the future, but the happiness of the present.

To live without, or at least, with less petrol, it is not “survive”, but live BETTER.

If you want to check if there are some initiatives near you, and learn deeper:
http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

And about my chocolate addiction???
Well, that is hard to plant chocolate tree in our region, so at least, buy less but of more quality, fair-trade…and share with your neighbor 😉

Alice and Wendy