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Faringdon often leads the way on social and environmental issues. In 2004, Faringdon became the first Fairtrade Town in the South East, and also has active groups working for peace through non-violence, Amnesty, Trade justice, and Aid to former Eastern Europe. In 2007 Faringdon signed the Nottingham Declaration on Climate Change, and is now aiming to become a “Transition Town”, with carbon footprint targets and future plans that are appropriate to a post-oil economy.
We hope to be able to take this next step during Faringdon ECOWEEK in June.
We may even get there before Ambridge - although Pat Archer is pushing hard!
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A Transition Town is a community that is willing to unleash its own latent collective genius to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and to discover and implement ways to address this BIG question:
- "for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"
The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.
The community also recognises two crucial points:
- that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
- if we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.
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