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Community Corner

Transition Albany Unleashes Abundance of Ideas

Transition Albany held its "great unleashing" event Sunday, sharing ideas on how to live without fossil fuels.

Some folks started planning a community garden. Others shared advice on ways to retrofit homes to reduce carbon emissions. Still others talked about supplying local restaurants with vegetables and fruit grown in Albany yards.

At “” event Sunday, ideas about how to become an oil-free economy flowed like fresh bio-fuel from a spigot.

About 75 people participated in discussions that are part of making Albany one of about 380 cities around the globe known as Transition Towns.

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“The idea is to get a lot of Albany residents together to brainstorm together about ways to make the community more resilient,” said Catherine Sutton, founder and facilitator of .

“I think we’ve got a good start here,” she said, surveying the buzz of conversation underway Sunday at the .

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“It’s about planting seeds so that if life, as we have come to live it, becomes untenable, or if cheap oil gets as expensive as they say it is going to, or if the economy tanks again, instead of all floundering around we will already have in place some alternative ways of doing things,” she explained.

Those alternative ways are based on community, sharing, training each other in skills such as gardening, poultry farming, carpentry, building rain- and greywater catches, sewing and singing. In short, living in ways that don’t deplete non-renewable resources, Sutton said.

So Albany residents who are expert in these areas came out to share their skills. , an environmental architect, spoke to a circle of people with ideas for reducing the carbon footprint of their homes, describing how to install a thermal solar hot water heater, and how to divert laundry greywater to a garden. 

Alexa Hauser helped people brainstorm about how actually to take action on ideas that would lead to more sustainable lives.

 talked with her group about sharing skills, and Lawrence Schectman got more than a dozen people started on planning a community garden.

“We can’t continue living as if I’m separate from all of you,” Sutton said. “We’ve got to realize that, by coming together, we can do so much more than we can as individuals.”

The Transition Town movement, started in Ireland six years ago, is based on the idea, disputed by some, that oil production worldwide is about to peak, even as demand for oil continues.

What will inevitably follow this peak, according to the Transition movement logic, is a spike in oil prices and economic dislocation in the sectors dependent on oil, from transporting farm crops to manufacturing, commuting and airline flights.

Transition Towns prepare for this shift by fostering local and sustainable economic activity, from neighborhood farming to commuting by bicycle, to relearning lost domestic arts of growing chickens, sewing clothes, making bread and the like. The Transition Town movement also throws in a dose of optimism that this could be a more pleasant way to live.

“Transition starts with the premise that life will be better without fossil fuels. We are going to live without them anyway, so we might as well make the most of it,” said Richard Heinberg, author of An End to Growth, and keynote speaker Sunday.

Heinberg argued that economic growth won't continue because oil production has peaked, and the use of debt to finance growth has maxed out, creating a house of cards that has begun to crumble.

"We are hitting a wall," he said. As we move forward, he continued, progress will need to be based on efficiency, innovation and conservation.

Resiliency will be key for community growth, he said. “That means preparing locally for local consumption.”

The bright side, he and others said Sunday, is that these changes will unleash other forces that have been quieted by our dependence on cheap oil.

What might the world in transition look like?

“Community, satisfaction for honest hard work, cooperation," said Heinberg and Sutton. "An inter-generational society, free time, happiness and an appreciation for the beauty of the environment."

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