Transition Brattleboro is Brattleboro Vermont's local Transition Town chapter.  We are dedicated to helping the Brattleboro community respond to a triple challenge:  climate change, the end of cheap oil and economic instability.   We believe that facing these global challenges locally as a community will ultimately lead to a better quality of life for us all. We believe that twenty years from now we can live happier, healthier, safer lives than today.    It  WILL NOT look like life today.   It WILL be a stronger future with increased individual and community self-reliance.

Energy costs are predicted to go up within a few years, increasing the cost of food, home heating, transportation and nearly everything in our lives.  Rising energy costs, economic deterioration and climate change pose challenges that require strong and concerted action.  We can’t wait for others to rescue us.  It is daunting to face the future alone.   Together we will face the challenges by creating resilience, the ability to respond to shocks outside our control because we have done and continue to do the work within our control that we think is most important.

Some of us are already involved in initiatives that build resilience and are willing to share what we have learned.   Some of us are just beginning to notice that we have fears for the future that are hard to acknowledge.  We are in this together.

The Transition Movement is global in its spread, distinctively local in tone and activities.    Begun in Totnes, England in 2006, the movement engages local communities – each in its own way -- in vibrant, grassroots initiatives that build community resilience and trust.   This movement includes everyone, even those who don’t believe  change is needed and those who don’t think a better life on the planet is possible.

In some places the engagement in a Transition Town starts from scratch.  In other places, like in Brattleboro, certain individuals, groups and businesses have been working on projects that build local resilience for years or even decades before there was such a movement as Transition Town.   Transition Town Initiatives differ from other sustainability and environmental groups by engaging communities in home-grown, citizen-led education, action, and  planning activities that most concern each group, not somebody else’s ideas of what is good for the group.  We each have something to contribute and we each have something we want to learn.   Eventually local governments – if they haven’t already done so – will see the benefits of making their own necessary contributions and learning what they want to learn.

We are living in an age of converging crises. Climate change, global economic instability, overpopulation, erosion of community, declining biodiversity, and resource wars have often stemmed from the availability of cheap, non-renewable fossil fuels.     Globally we are finding only one new barrel of oil for every five that we are in the habit of using.  There are still oil reserves in the ground or under the ocean, but it is becoming more expensive to extract than the oil we have already extracted.   Some solutions to the problem of oil extraction make global warming more of a concern for living species and for cities.   Some solutions to the problems of climate change ignore our dependence on oil and products made from petroleum. 

The coming shocks  from converging crises are likely to be catastrophic if we do not prepare.   

As our friends in Britain who developed the first Transition Town in Totnes say:

Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact.

We truly don't know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.

What we are convinced of is this:

• If we wait for the governments, it'll be too little, too late
• If we act as individuals, it'll be too little
• But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.

Everything that you read on this site is the result of real work undertaken in the real world with community engagement at its heart. This site, just like the transition model, is brought to you by people who are actively engaged in transition in a community. People who are learning by doing - and learning all the time. People who understand that we can't sit back and wait for someone else to do the work. People like you.

Transition Brattleboro meets every 4th Monday from 6:30-8pm  at the Brattleboro Holistic Health Center on Elliot Street.  Fair warning - this meeting usually focuses on Core Group organization.  

Transition Brattleboro is now hosting the Brattleboro Community Conversations every 3rd Thursday.   Join our mailing list at riseup.net for the monthly conversation topic, time and location.