About Us

We are now beginning to experience ever more dramatically, the financial and environmental effects of a population which has more than doubled in the last 50 years and many of whom are consuming resources at a rate never seen before. This website is a small aspect of the work which is going on all over the country, as people begin to understand the importance of acting now to mitigate the effects of some of the most direct impacts of peak oil and climate change.

While we may presume all kinds of things about how our future may look - positive or negative, we cannot know for certain. However, we can be quite sure that our actions, our ideas, our thoughts, our intentions, our words and what we imagine that future will be, will all contribute to the future we cocreate together. If we leave it up to parental authorities, or pass off the responsibilities to our children and their children, we will have lost a great opportunity. We are in times of great and rapid change and this is the moment to have the greatest influence on how that change plays out.

This site

What you will find within the pages of this site is a mere glimpse of the work of hundreds of people who are rolling up their sleeves, sometimes literally, and embracing the opportunities they are making and seizing, to move from oil dependency to local resilience. You will find fierce conversations going on about local fuel production possibilities, and at the same time news and views about the industrialised fossil fuel-driven mono-cultural corn for ethanol programmes. You will find a calendar of events that shows something happening almost every night of the week, and sometimes several Transition Town sponsored events taking place in one day - all over the country.

Organism rather than organisation

This work is going mostly unpaid. There is no institution behind the loose, interconnected Transition Towns community. There is no legal structure, though a Trust service organisation is being considered.

There has been an unspoken commitment to open, respectful, honest and inclusive dialogue with everyone and all aspects of our New Zealand society. As this site develops organically through everyone's participation, an agreed purpose and culture is also evolving.

There is an consistently expressed desire to keep Transition Towns as a broadly horizontal organism as possible. Direction for how this site and the Transition movement in New Zealand Aotearoa as a whole might develop, are considered in lively and open debate. At the same time a respect for those who are engaged and doing the work, and those who are holding the knowledge of a lot of the previous dialogue, is also in evidence.

How is this funded

There are a few donations being received into a Transition Network account, and a great deal of mutual support taking place. Some people who have some financial abundance are supporting others to do work that is seen to be of value in moving the vision forward, and nurturing it's sometimes tentative, sometimes bold, steps towards building the brighter future we can imagine.

Your imagination is the preview to life's coming attractions - Albert Einstein

Welcome

You are welcomed to this site, to browse and to contribute. Your contributions can take all kinds of different forms. You can edit a page that you think needs some changes or additions (much like a wiki). You can create new content, by adding new pages, forum topics or comments to other forum topics, events for the calendar that you believe is relevant to the Kaupapa of this Transition Community. This is your website. And more than this site are all the people out there thinking that this is probably a good time to get down and get dirty, and make a difference.

Another world is not only possible, on a quiet day I can hear her breathing - Arundhati Roy

How to contact us

If you like to get in touch with Transition Towns, please contact a local group in your area. For any general enquiries fill out the contact form, or just post in the forum.