Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT).
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 6:30 Eastern. Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the auto-publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometime, the diarist du jour shows up much later, that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Just let us know in the comments. You can click on the Morning Open Thread "heart" if you'd like us to show up in your stream every day.
Doing one of these diaries is a good way to get your feet wet if you have been hesitant about writing a diary. You can write as much or as little as you want. The audience here is always supportive.
As an intro to this diary, I want to preface that each local Occupy Movement is reflective of both the values of the community in which it is located, and also the political climate in the community. What is happening in Tallahassee is unique to Tallahassee and we are very fortunate to be able to look at big picture ideas such as Transition Towns because of our community's acceptance of Occupy Tallahassee.
On Monday evening, I went to Occupy Tallahassee for a presentation on Transition Towns by six local people who are involved in trying to bring the concept to Tallahassee. I had never heard of this movement before, but it has promise to help our communities become more sustainable in the face of peak energy and environmental challenges. The idea is to transition communities away from heavy reliance upon fossil fuels and into more livable and sustainable communities in a positive way that brings us closer together.
The Transition Towns movement began in Kinsale, Ireland and then spread throughout Britain. The leading proponent of this movement is Rob Hopkins and here is an introductory video about Transition Towns.
This link on Transition Towns provides more detail about the twelve steps a community can use to become a transition town. Some of the more intriguing aspects of the transition movement as explained in Monday night's presentation at Occupy Tallahassee are creating locally grown food, free exchange markets where unwanted items are offered free to anyone who wants them, using a barter system whenever possible, and even creating local currency.
The people who made the presentation at Occupy Tallahassee on Monday night have already contacted the city parks department to try to develop a free vegetable garden in a downtown park. The director of the city parks department is on board with this idea and now they are working out the details. They also would like to eventually create gardens at every public school as a teaching tool about the local foods movement. The idea is that by eating locally grown products, we save the cost of transport and gain fresher and more nutritious food. This approach to food is just one of the many initiatives that the Transition movement hopes to implement to make our communities more sustainable and more livable.
Now, I hope to learn more about the Transition Towns movement and how we can apply the concepts to our own communities. It is an exciting and very positive approach to change. Hopefully, I can write much more about it in the future. It seems as though we are all striving to find a more livable and human scale model in our lives beyond the big box and global driven economy.
So that is what is on my mind today. What is on your mind?