For years I’ve followed the “Transition Towns” movement in the U.K. via the blog of its founder, Rob Hopkins. Now, finally, I feel it is time to try out some of these ideas here in Los Angeles.

Rob’s new book, The Transition Handbook, summarizes years of grassroots work he’s done in his town (neighborhood) to prepare for the “twin opportunities of global warming and peak oil.” His movement is a major positive response, a What We Can Do approach, to these sweeping problems.

Thus, this September, we’ll be kicking off what I believe is the first Los Angeles effort toward this movement, what I jokingly think of as “Transition Town Los Angeles.” Calling this sprawling metropolis a “Town” is the joke - Rob works with U.K. towns of perhaps 2,000 people, and even our immediate Westchester neighborhood in Los Angeles is far more than that. Admittedly, any “Transition Town Los Angeles” effort has an enormous scoping problem. But that is no reason to stop. The way I see it, we really have no alternative.

The converging challenges of peak oil and climate change mean that change–on an almost unimaginable scale–is coming, whether we want it or not. –Rob Hopkins

The danger is in entering into this era of vast changes unprepared: uneducated as to power down possibilities, and unplanned for the direction society must inevitably take.

At Environmental Change-Makers we’ve spent 2.5 years doing what Rob calls “creating a sense that something is happening.” Rob conducted a series of events he called “Skilling Up for Power Down.” In many ways, the past year or so of Environmental Change-Makers meetings has been our “Skilling Up For Power Down” series, or at least that’s been my covert intent. I’ve tried to include peak oil, global warming, biocapacity, power down, and sustainability in every one of them (even as seemingly incongruous topics as last night’s “Greener House Cleaning”).

Our September event will be a series of gatherings, which I hope will kick off the idea of planning for a post-oil Los Angeles. I’m calling it a “Life After Oil” conference to begin Designing the Transition to a post-oil culture. We’ll bring many of the ideas from Rob’s work alive here in our “town.” We’ll have an intro event, screening the movie “The End of Suburbia” and holding a community discussion on what Rob calls “post-oil stress syndrome.” The full day session will include guest presentations on climate change and peak oil. We’ll introduce the Great Turning, and Rob’s Transition Towns movement. That afternoon, I’m planning what I believe are the first Los Angeles working sessions toward a “Transition Town Los Angeles.” Follow-up events are calendared for the following Thursday, and a month thereafter.

If you’re in Southern California, I hope you can join us. In the working sessions, we’ll divide by geography. People in neighborhoods who are ready, can explore the idea of what an Energy Descent Action Plan means and what it will take to begin to create one. ( see http://transitionnetwork.org/Primer/TransitionInitiativesPrimer.pdf ) People from scattered areas of Southern California can explore how to lay the foundations, to get your neighborhood ready. We’ll share our two year journey of how we “created the sense that something is happening.”

You can read more about our September events here http://envirochangemakers.org/TTLA.htm

Copies of Rob Hopkins’ book, The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, are available through his blog, www.TransitionCulture.org If you follow his links, they will ship you a copy from the U.K. The book will not be available though the U.S. distributor until September. If you are in the Westchester/Los Angeles area, I imported a dozen copies, and you can purchase one at our cost at any of the next few Environmental Change-Makers meetings. (Sorry, we cannot ship).

The future with less oil could be better than the present but only if we engage in designing this Transition with creativity and imagination. –Rob Hopkins