June 2010
Transition Epping - forging ahead
Transition Epping began earlier in the year with the founders Sandra Nichols and Deborah Burt designing a series of 8 workshops to which local residents and business people were invited to enrol at an initial launch 'town meeting'.
These workshops embraced the history and present resilience of the local area, the natural environment and our ecological footprint on it, local food production, waste and water, home energy use and efficency, health and wellbeing, building community and finally creating a 2020 vision for North Epping.
The final visioning session proved the value of the process and produced a great set of local transition projects with participants taking on team leadership roles and membership to take these projects forward,
The projects were:
Why Transition? - because governments don't have the will to act
The flavour of government spin (and budgeting) seems to be changing from bold action to prevent runaway climate change to minimising the impacts of inevitable climate change. This might be a realistic response but it also confirms the Transition Network's explanation of why Transition initiatives are necessary - "if we wait for governments to act, it will be too little, too late"
See the recent SMH article from Ben Cubby on the NSW Government's version of giving up on climate change prevention in its 2010 budget: