About Transition Guelph

Peak oil. Climate change. Economic instability. Environmental degradation. These are just a few of the most pressing issues of our time. The Transition Initiative movement, which is spreading quickly around the world, provides a foundation upon which to build a promising future together that is more fulfilling, creative and sustainable. Transition is a process for strengthing community resilience and building sustainability in a post-peak oil world that is uniquely designed by each community based on their local needs and resources.

It began in Totnes in Devon in 2005 and has now spread to many hundreds of initiatives in 30 countries around the world. The premise is a simple one. We are now moving into an increasingly uncertain future, whether because of the debt mountain we sit on, the impending peak in world oil production or the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing around us. The Transition movement argues that our communities have become alarmingly unresilient; that is, they have lost the ability to respond to shock from the outside at exactly the time when we need them to be more resilient.

Transition Guelph is proud to be Canada's second official Transition Initiative, joining Peterborough, Ontario, Canada's first, on May 14, 2009. The transition movement is gaining a strong foothold in Canada and around the world, with over 275 official Transition Initiatives worldwide and, as of December, 2011, twenty-two in Canada. Thousands more communities worldwide are in the initial organizing stages. (For a complete list, see www.transitionnetwork.org.)

Transition Guelph is a group of concerned and active Guelph residents who have come together with the shared vision of building resilience and sustainability into our community in response to the challenges of peak oil, accelerating climate change, and global economic instability.

Our model, and the model of all Transition Initiatives, is described in The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins (below), which not only explains the challenges we face, but also provides a comprehensive blueprint for creating a richer, more vibrant community through the re-localization of all the services and resources that we need to survive and thrive in a world of depleting fossil fuels, global warming, and increasing instability in the world economy.

It is the aim of Transition Guelph, in collaboration with the other Transition Initiatives in Ontario and across Canada, to encourage our citizenry to become involved and empowered, to offer their own ideas and insights, and pitch in to help create a viable and sustainable future for ourselves, our children, and our children's children.

We firmly believe that, with dedication and committment on the part of our community, its citizens, leaders and businesses, the serious challenges facing our society today can be met, and overcome, and that we can build a strong, resilient community that is significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.

We urge you to become involved, and bring your talents, your skills and your vision to help us build a better future for ourselves, and our descendants.

To anyone visiting for the first time, please take a few minutes to browse this site and learn more about the transition initiative, the challenges of peak oil and climate change, and about how to create and maintain local resilience and long-term sustainability in our community. Be sure to join our mailing list and follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep informed of upcoming events, news, and other information of interest!

Two New Books from The Transition Network