The group has about 150 members, and about 15 members spend their Sunday afternoons planting and tending their crop of arugula, tomatoes, hard squash, peppers and potatoes.

Transition Louisville member Shari Heinlein said the garden is a great way to go for those who don’t have time to tend a garden on their own.

“You have different people coming to tend the garden,” she said. “You have neighborhood backup.”

Dave Clabots, a Transition Louisville member and a city councilor, said the group hopes other residents will allow them to use their land so they can produce even more local vegetables.

“My goal is to get everyone to plant,” he said. “Or if you don’t want to, maybe your neighbor does.”

The garden, at 501 South St., is on Transition Louisville member Barbara Butterworth’s property. Butterworth said one reason she gave up her backyard to the group was a simple environmental one.

“I had never liked growing and cutting grass,” she said. “It’s a waste of our resources.”

Transforming her backyard from lawn to garden would result in using water in a mindful way and cutting down on pollution from power tools, she said.

David Greenwald, one of Transition Louisville’s original leaders, said the group is negotiating with an undisclosed school in Boulder County, adjacent to Louisville, to create a garden on a piece of its 29-acre parcel.

Greenwald said the agreement should be finalized in the next month. The group’s garden on Butterworth’s property is for members only, but the school garden would be a CSA — community supported agriculture — garden. Transition Louisville members and maybe families of students at the school, would be able to buy “shares,” which would give them a portion of the garden’s bounty.

Get more information about Transition Louisville here.

The festival focuses on harvesting dandelions instead of battling them with chemicals.

“Dandelions are not a problem for the environment,” said herbalist, author and event co-director Brigitte Mars. “Herbicides are.”

Mikl Brawner, co-owner of Harlequin’s Garden, will be teaching a class on the basics of how to garden without chemicals. Brawner has spent 35 years researching and testing alternatives to toxic chemicals, and has managed the nursery and his display gardens organically for 19 years.

“The festival is to celebrate the natural world as good in itself, as not something that you have to fight; something you can be partners with. We’re entering another age in relationship to our planet, having more to do with corporation than domination,” said Brawner.

Randall Weiner, a local environmental and personal injury attorney, is the originator, a major sponsor and driving force for the Dandelion Festival.

“In the mid-90s, the Sierra Club first asked City Council to ban pesticides in City parks and along rights of ways. Boulder’s City Council and Boards have struggled with how to achieve that for 15 years,” Weiner said. “The Dandelion Festival recognizes that it will take individual, not just governmental, action to achieve a community with less toxins in our midst.”

Betty Ball, head of The Citizens for Pesticide Reform, has taken the lead in coordinating the event along with Deb Sanders, also from the organization.

“We are very excited about this fun and celebratory festival and its potential to educate people about the value of gardening and farming organically and in a sustainable manner,” said Ball. “We are also excited about introducing the world of edible plants and herbs to people who may be unfamiliar with their attributes.”

Speakers will lead classes in subjects like gardening without chemicals, edible landscapes and edible and medicinal wild weeds. Vendors from the farmers’ market will be serving dandelion treats as well as organic foods, and festivalgoers will be treated to live music throughout.

Sanders, from The Citizens for Pesticide Reform, highlights the current environmental activism in Boulder but hopes the festival can be a step towards making more improvements.

“The Dandelion Festival is designed to celebrate not only Earth Week and the welcomed signs of spring, but to educate folks on sustainability and how to green up the environment,” Sanders said. “I think that this festival can be a great way to celebrate our commitment to act in more healthy, environmentally friendly ways.”

The inaugural Community Climate Action Summit, planned for April 16 at the Millennium Harvest House in Boulder, is meant to serve as a clearinghouse for ideas on how to combat climate change at the local level.

The City Council, which approved the concept last summer as part of its Climate Action Plan, wants to host the event every six months with the goal of creating a central place to share ideas and set goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in the city.

“We felt like it was important to engage the broader community in the city’s goals,” said Sarah Van Pelt, who is coordinating the event for the city’s Local Environmental Action Division. “The school district has a role to play, the other nonprofits have a role to play. We need to figure out how we can best communicate with one another.”

The all-day summit is free to attend and will be open to the public. Van Pelt said the first summit is designed to focus on high-level policy, and a fall summit will be geared toward community involvement.

The goals of the first summit include learning about the existing climate action programs in the Boulder area, identifying programs that overlap objectives, sharing problems and developing goals to achieve in a six-month timeframe.

“Everybody else’s efforts contribute to our ability to meet our goal,” Van Pelt said.

Boulder has set a goal of meeting the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Last summer, Boulder officials said the city is projected to reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 396,800 metric tons by 2012, which is just short of the 400,000 metric tons needed to meet Kyoto.

New estimates of how far Boulder still has to go are expected to be released in May or June. The City Council is scheduled to discuss new, long-term goals for reducing the city’s carbon footprint at an April 13 study session.

California’s Sonoma County has one of the most ambitious carbon-cutting goals in the country: to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2015.

Ann Hancock, executive director of the Climate Protection Campaign in Sonoma County, will be the keynote speaker at Boulder’s summit.

She said the focus of the discussion should center on better cooperation between the private sector and the government.

“When you collaborate, then you can create solution that no one sector can create,” she said.

She said the city should also work to create new incentives and financing that prod people to make meaningful changes.

“It’s unleashed market forces big-time here,” she said. “We all know that business is the driver of change.”

Other activities scheduled for the summit include presentations from 10 local businesses and other groups, which will be selected from proposals that can be submitted online through Friday afternoon.

Workshops will include small-group discussions and setting the agenda for the next summit.

The estimated cost of hosting the summit is $12,500 which includes providing lunch for participants. The city hopes to defray most of the cost by reaching out to sponsors.

The bill would allow people to buy into a solar array not on their property and receive credits from the state’s largest utility, Xcel Energy, for the resulting electricity. As it stands currently, homeowners must install solar systems on their own property to qualify for rebates.

“The intent of (the bill) is so people can have the benefit of what they would get if they had solar panels on their rooftops,” Levy told the Boulder Daily Camera. “It’s for people who are renters, who live in condominium projects and don’t have rooftops, people whose lots are shaded, people whose houses aren’t the right orientation — a whole variety of things.”

The idea for the bill came from stricter green building standards in Boulder that requires many new buildings to generate some portion of their own renewable energy. “The idea is that if somebody cannot meet the renewable energy requirements on site, and if there are solar gardens available within Boulder County, that they would be able to put their renewables at the solar gardens as a way of meeting the requirement,” Commissioner Will Toor said.

The purpose of the gardens is to demonstrate the beauty of edible gardens and to inspire and encourage Denver citizens to grow more vegetable gardens.  The gardens will also engage community participation by inviting local residents, nonprofit groups, schools and businesses to “adopt” and tend one of the garden plots.

“In 2009 we were thrilled to partner with the City in growing a productive vegetable garden in Civic Center Park,” says Grow Local Colorado Campaign Director Dana Miller.  “This pilot project was a great success, so much so that the edible gardens will be expanding to additional Denver Parks.  The purpose of the Grow Local Colorado Campaign is to promote local food, local economy and local community, and these gardens support our mission beautifully.”

Individuals, community groups, nonprofits and local businesses are invited to “adopt” a garden and help plant, maintain and harvest the plots from May through October of 2010. To volunteer and for more information go to: www.GrowLocalColorado.org, or call Dana Miller at 303-300-3547.

The Grow Local Colorado Campaign is a grassroots volunteer organization founded by representatives from Transition Denver, the Mile High Business Alliance, the Living Earth Center and Denver Botanic Gardens.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the spoof initiative, Xcel Energy agreed to pay for the transition to renewable energy out of its own deep pockets.  The letter assured Colorado ratepayers: “While, over the past several years, we have raised rates for our customers numerous times, our new approach will put the burden on Xcel’s executives rather than our loyal and hardworking customers.  And, rest assured, we can afford it.  With an annual profit of nearly $700 million and CEO pay in the millions each year, our ‘responsible by nature’ executives are volunteering to take pay cuts to ensure the success of our plan.”

The press release was sent to a wide variety of media outlets, including business and financial journals around the country.  In addition, the press release was sent to politicians and public agencies throughout Colorado, as well as to to various fossil fools, including coal and gas companies and lobby groups such as Americans for Clean Coal Electricity, to remind them which way the wind is blowing.

Beyond that, activists throughout the state distributed thousands of copies of a “letter from Xcel” to ratepayers and renewable energy companies, who were encouraged to email Xcel Energy’s Board of Directors to thank them for their “bold renewable energy proposal.”

The press release was sent out by “Simon Grunwasch.”  Grunwasch is German for “greenwash,” indicating that Xcel Energy is masking its environmentally destructive reliance on fossil fuels behind a public image that emphasizes renewable energy.  Currently, 90% of the company’s electricity in Colorado is generated by fossil fuels and only 10% from renewable sources.  However, this is not for a lack of wind, solar and geothermal capacity. Xcel has received 15,000MW of bids for renewable energy projects – more than double its peak demand – but has only accepted a small fraction.

Though the company has recently announced its support of legislation that would retire or modify three Front Range coal plants by 2017, it is simultaneously opening the Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant in Pueblo – the largest coal plant in the state.  The lifetime emissions from operating Comanche 3 will overwhelm any savings from retiring Front Range coal plants a few years early.  Worse still, these coal plants could be replaced with natural gas, which still emits roughly 60% as much CO2 as coal, in addition to methane – a highly potent greenhouse gas.

“While this spoof announcement is unfortunately nothing more than an April Fools’ Day joke, it is an honest representation of what Xcel Energy needs to do,” said ‘Simon Grunwasch.’  “Xcel Energy needs to stop raising rates on Coloradans to pay for new coal plants, expensive natural gas and perks for their executives.  Instead, they need to invest their vast resources in renewable energy for Colorado.”

More information about Fossil Fools Day is available at: http://www.fossilfoolsdayofaction.org/2010/

The spoof website can be viewed at: www.xcelresponsiblebynature.com

Eli Nogueira rakes a garden plot near the Environmental Design Building with other members of CU Going Local. ( Cliff Grassmick )

For a group of University of Colorado students, the “freshman 15″ says less about the sedentary lifestyle, underage drinking and stressful schedules of students and more about CU’s food system and the lack of understanding about food waste and food production by their peers.

CU Going Local is a group of students working to get locally grown food into dining halls, educate fellow students on how to grow and produce their own food and work with the Boulder community to build urban gardens in elementary schools and low-income housing developments.

“I really want everyone to have an awareness of the benefits of eating more local and sustainable food and how they can go about doing it in an affordable way,” said Bryant Mason, a junior and one of the eight students on the group’s steering committee. “Growing your own food is doable for students and we want to help them understand that.”

Getting their hands dirty

The group’s leaders didn’t grow up on farms. They came from suburbia and rural areas all over the United States: South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Colorado. They chose CU not only for the school’s green reputation, but for Boulder’s as well. While the group’s student leaders have bigger social and environmental issues they are trying to tackle, they also just enjoy gardening and are inspired being able to create food from a tiny seed.

Since 2007 Going Local has from about 20 involved students to having an email list with more than 200 people on it, said Mason. The group organizes gardening days, on-campus documentary screenings, potlucks or other events such as the spice tasting they held at Savory Spice last weekend

At a workshop last Saturday morning led by Growing Gardens, a small group of CU students and Going Local leaders learned about composting, crop planning and fertilizing soil naturally using cover crops. Growing Gardens, a nonprofit community garden in North Boulder that also donates food to low-income families, waived the $35 fee in exchange for four volunteer hours from each of the students. Ben Turner, who taught the class impressed the students when he talked about making compost tea. Turner, standing beside the 11-acre plot of land, held a glass jar filled with the brown colored liquid compost. He made the nutrient-rich fertilizer by putting compost in cheesecloth and soaking the bundle in water. Albert Strasser, a committee member, calls Turner a “genius.”

“He is really a wealth of knowledge,” said Lindsey Zemler, a committee member.

Starting in March, on most Friday afternoons, Going Local’s steering committee and as many as 20 other students have gardening days at either the garden behind CU’s Environmental Design building or the Hill Garden on Seventh and University avenues. The group has big plans for the gardens. They want to grow hops and grapes along the wooden trestle and use a rotten log to grow mushrooms. At the campus garden’s first gardening day in March, students raked up fallen leaves and sprinkled fresh coffee grounds to prepare the soil for the herbs, tomatoes, tomatillos, lettuce, chard and kale they will plant. Students also turned the compost housed in a large wooden chest and painted small fence posts with bright-colored paint for their hill garden.

Sabina Bastias, a freshman and member of the steering committee, sprouts lettuce and tomato seeds in her dorm room by balancing small planting containers on the window ledges. Despite the spectrum of gardening abilities and knowledge among its members, Going Local students are trying get students and the campus community to embrace a garden to table approach to eating and food production in the dining halls and in their own homes.

Watching what students eat — and what they don’t

Freshman and committee member Sara Brody grew up gardening in Denver, but until recently, considered it to be a chore. She was instantly drawn to the garden on campus and wanted to know who was in charge of taking care of it. Brody is focused on improving the dining halls as well as gardening and glad that she still has three more years to work on a process that has been slow going. Brody sees students piling up their plates from the unlimited buffets in some of the dining halls with more food than they can eat, then throwing out the rest.

“The food in the dining halls is absolutely unacceptable,” Brody said. “People gain so much weight at school, even if you don’t eat that much, it’s just so bad for you.

“There needs to be less food, too much is going to waste.

CU’s Environmental Center has tried to encourage students about only taking what they can eat and composting leftover food through campus education campaigns, but according to the Going Local steering committee, student habits have not improved. There are other students working to get more locally grown food into the dining halls, but many campus leaders think that mobilization and the power of a group with a large number of members.

“I think it will be important for Going Local to improve numbers, but what they have done is lay the framework for a vibrant and robust community to emerge,” said John Hallett, a senior who has been a leader on campus on environmental issues. “The rest of the leaders on campus have been interested in building a larger community, and we aren’t going to be around much longer so we want to identify who is going to keep the movement going.”

Donating their time

In addition to education outreach and promoting sustainable food on campus, their mission includes civic engagement. They are currently developing plans for setting up gardens in affordable housing developments. They are brainstorming ways to engage Boulder restaurants that serve local and seasonal produce. Many of the Going Local students volunteer at a student-run farm in Boulder called Beyond Organic Farm, which sells produce at the Farmers Market and offers CSAs. They recently became involved with the Growe Foundation, a Boulder County nonprofit that has established gardens at 11 elementary schools in Boulder Valley School District. The CU students will help maintain, cultivate and engage students at six elementary schools during the month of April.

“In many ways it’s great for young students to see the older student out there role-modeling and promoting social responsibility,” said Bryce Brown, founder of the Growe Foundation said. “This generation of university students will be taking on many of the problems we are facing in terms of the environmental problem.”

Initiated in 2007, the ten-year campaign is designed to expand the capacity of our local food system and promote closer connections between community members and those who grow our food. The campaign pesents positive pathways to engage citizens, communities, businesses, and local governments to take the far-reaching actions that are required to strengthen the local food and farming system.

Since the campaign’s inception, many positive changes have already arisen across the county, whether  either directly or indirectly stimulated by the EAT LOCAL! campaign:

• Restaurants using locally-grown food have increased ten-fold.
• Boulder County government formed a Food and Agriculture Policy Council.
• Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions have increased exponentially.
• The Boulder County Farmers’ Market is now one of the top 10 in the country.
• Boulder County is now a major hub for permaculture training and practice.
• The Boulder County Community Gardens now have a growing waiting list of people wanting garden plots.
• Transition Colorado alone provided 10,000 people hours of Great Reskilling courses

EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide & Directory

The campaign is supported by the newly-published Boulder County’s EAT LOCAL! RESOURCE GUIDE & DIRECTORY, with 10,000 copies now in distribution, and another 30,000 to be printed in early summer. This 36-page publication features a comprehensive listing of all the local food sources and local food supporters in the area, including CSAs, dairy and eggs, herbs and flowers, honey, meat and fish, plants/seeds and supplies, produce, water, wine and mead; plus farmers’ markets, gardens, grocers and retailers, organizations and community services, permaculture design, restaurants and caterers, schools and training.

In the EAT LOCAL! Guide (available online at www.EatLocalGuide.com), readers will also find a series of useful and inspiring articles about the challenges and opportunities in the local food system, which together constitute a kind of manifesto for a local food and farming revolution, including:

• Why Eat Local?
• The Boulder County EAT LOCAL! Campaign
• The Local Foodshed: Where Does Our Food Come From?
• “What can I do? Where do I start?”
• Towards a Boulder County Food Summit
• What Is Sustainable Agriculture?
• The Promise of Transition
• Boulder County Farmer Cultivation Center
• Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered

10% LOCAL FOOD SHIFT Challenge and Pledge

The Guide also introduces Transition Colorado’s key focus for the 2010 EAT LOCAL! Campaign: a 10% Local Food Shift Challenge, encouraging individuals, families, restaurants, and institutions to make an online pledge to shift 10 percent of their food budget to local food.

“The economic impact of this Local Food Shift could be considerable,” says Brownlee. “According to a 2009 study, Boulder County consumers spend more than $660 million buying food each year, but less than one percent of that is going to local growers.”

Campaign Mission

The overarching mission of the EAT LOCAL! campaign is to catalyze a more resilient local food system for Boulder County, based on deep ecological principles and a more connected populace, with far less dependence on fossil fuels and petroleum-based inputs.

“We are learning that not only can all this greatly reduce the amount of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions embedded in today’s food from fertilizers, pesticides and transport,” says Brownlee, “but adopting a more local organic diet will greatly contribute to our health and our children’s health.”

As part of the EAT LOCAL! campaign, Transition Colorado also provides a variety of community events, speakers and panel discussions, documentary film screenings, and community forums and dialogues. The organization has delivered some 10,000 people-hours of Great Reskilling instruction, covering practical life skills from growing, cooking and canning food, to permaculture design courses.

About Transition Colorado: Mobilizing Colorado communities to make the transition from dependence on fossil fuels and globalized economic systems to local resilience and self-reliance, Boulder-based Transition Colorado (formerly Transition Boulder County) is at the forefront of the rapidly-growing international Transition Movement. Inspired by the visionary community-engagement process pioneered by Rob Hopkins in Totnes, England, thousands of communities around the world are mobilizing around this process. In May 2008, Transition Colorado became the first officially-recognized Transition Initiative in North America. Other official Colorado Transition Initiatives include Transition Lyons, Transition Louisville, Transition Denver, and Transition Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield. More Initiatives are already underway in Colorado Springs, Estes Park, Evergreen, Ft. Collins, Gunnison, Longmong, Loveland, Manitous Springs, Niwot/Gunbarrel, Salide, and at the University of Colorao and Naropa University, with regional and neighborhood Initiatives emerging in the West Front Range, South Boulder, and Capitol Hill areas.

“Why can’t you buy raw milk, ice cream with eggs in it, or home-made sausage?,” asks Salatin. “America’s food system, enslaved by a global corporate bureaucratic fraternity, offers less choice amid the perception of abundance. The only reason the framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights did not guarantee citizens freedom of food choice was because they could not have conceived of a day when private treaty neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce would be demonized and criminalized.” In this call to grass roots food activism, Salatin seeks a Food Emancipation Proclamation, freeing citizens to opt out of the industrial food fraternity.

Joel Salatin is a farmer, father, author, and speaker whose PolyFace Farms was featured in Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  Salatin recently appeared in the documentary film, Food Inc. and has written several books, one titled, Everything I Want to do is Illegal:  War Stories from the Local Food Front.

Note Due to overwhelming response, the venue for the Change We Can Eat! presentation has been moved from Plymouth Congregation to the Lincoln Center, Canyon West Room in Fort Collins, Colorado (417 W. Magnolia, corner of Mulberry and Meldrum)

Seat reservations can be obtained through the Lincoln Center Box Office Tuesdays – Saturdays from noon – 6:00 PM.  There is a suggested donation at the door of $15, cash or check made out to the Front Range Permaculture Institute.  Donations help pay for event expenses and any extra proceeds will further projects of Front Range Permaculture Institute, like Feeding the Families Project by Happy Heart Farms.

“Change We Can Eat!” is hosted by the Front Range Permaculture Institute but is also sponsored by the following organizations and businesses:  Abbondanza Seeds, Bath Nursery, Be Local, Chimney Rock Restaurant, Fort Collins Food Coop, Fort Collins Sustainability Group, Grant Family Farms, Happy Heart Farms, John “The Worm Man,” Mennonite Fellowship, Monroe Farms, Plymouth Congregational, ReDirect Guide, Sustainable Living Fair, Transition Colorado, Waste Not Recycling, Whole Foods, Wolverine Publishing.

For this article, I interviewed leaders from six of the most active and successful Transition Initiatives in Colorado, including a major city (Denver), a few small and mid-size towns (Manitou Springs, Louisville, and Lyons), a collection of suburbs (Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield), and a university (Naropa), asking questions such as: “What would you say is your proudest accomplishment?” “What has been the most challenging aspect of your Transition work?” “What advice would you give to someone starting a Transition Initiative in their community?” and “What is your vision for the continued growth of the Transition Movement in Colorado?” The following is what I found.

Most of the work that has been done so far by Transition Initiatives in Colorado has been laying the foundation for Transition in these communities: raising awareness about The Long Emergency and Transition, building relationships with individuals, other nonprofit organizations, local businesses, and local government, and hosting practical Reskilling workshops. This is not surprising, as most of these initiatives are only about a year old. The first Transition Initiatives in the UK, which were founded over four years ago, are just now starting to publish their Energy Descent Action Plans, and only one initiative in the United States, Transition Sandpoint in Idaho, has reached the point of hosting a Great Unleashing event and forming working groups.

Nevertheless, many of the accomplishments made by Transition Initiatives in Colorado during this short period of time are actually quite impressive. Transition Louisville has started a Neighborhood Supported Agriculture program, based on Kipp Nash’s Community Roots Urban Farm in Boulder, hosted a solar home tour in the Fall of 2009, and is working towards bringing carsharing to Louisville—among other activities. Together with the Living Earth Center, the Denver Botanic Gardens, and the Mile High Business Alliance, Transition Denver launched the Grow Local Colorado campaign, which this year planted a garden in Denver’s Civic Center Park, passed a citywide Grow Local proclamation, and was honored with the creation of Grow Local Day by Mayor John Hickenlooper on May 14, 2009.

Transition Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield created the first-ever community Permaculture garden in their region and distributed approximately one ton of produce to members of the Broomfield Presbyterian Church, where the garden was based, volunteers, and a local food bank. They are currently planning a second garden at the Crescent Grange in Broomfield in 2010. Transition Lyons inspired their local Chamber of Commerce to run a month-long Buy Local campaign, which will hopefully be expanded into an ongoing program. And, in the Spring of 2009, Transition Naropa initiated a community market on campus that featured local growers, artisans, artists, healers, free bike tune-ups, and live music. While there is, undoubtably, much more that needs to be done to rebuild local resilience and self-reliance in these communities, these pioneering Transition Initiatives should be celebrated for their already-significant contributions.

Whether they recognize it fully or not, Transition leaders everywhere have committed themselves to work that is both extremely inspiring and outstandingly challenging at the same time. Transition Initiatives have placed themselves at the crossroads of the most complex issues of our time – resource depletion, climate change, and economic crisis – and aspire to completely reinvent all of their most fundamental systems – food, energy, economy, health care, transportation, government, education, and culture—from the bottom-up. In order to do this, Transitions needs to be able to reach across traditional political, religious, and socio-economic divides to unite their communities behind a common vision that is very different from the one currently promoted by mainstream media. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that Transition Initiatives and Transition leaders would encounter difficulties during the course of this highly ambitious journey.

Some of the challenges faced by the various Transition Initiatives in Colorado have been not having enough funding and relying too much on volunteer help, leading to burnout of initiating group members; difficulty in reaching a critical mass of awareness and support, particularly in sprawling suburbs such as Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield; a lack of training in effective group facilitation; and dealing with populations that are transient, overly busy, in denial about the magnitude of the social and environmental problems we face, and highly individualistic with competing hidden agendas. None of this is unusual, as these findings are consistent with what was found by researchers at East Anglia University in England in their 2009 survey of the UK Transition Movement—“The Green Shoots of Sustainability”—available for free online here.

Nevertheless, if these issues continue unaddressed, they are unlikely to resolve themselves. There have been many Transition Initiatives in Colorado and around the world that have never managed to get off the ground or, after a period of great enthusiasm, have gone into decline and ceased to exist. An interesting case study of one such initiative is Transition Oxford, who made it all the way to beginning their Energy Descent Action Plan before disbanding. Fortunately, Transition support organizations, such as Transition Colorado and Transition US, are starting to provide valuable tools for both thriving and struggling Transition Initiatives everywhere.

Two particularly bright spots are Transition Colorado’s Transition Times: Colorado Edition, which offers “Information, Insight, and Inspiration for The Long Emergency,” and the free webinars and conference calls currently being offered by Transition US on topics ranging from “The nitty-gritty of getting Transition rolling in your community” to sessions on group decision-making and managing working groups.

The most consistent piece of advice for those considering taking on this work that I received from the Transition leaders I interviewed had to do with “letting it go where it wants to go.” This principle allows an initiative to evolve naturally in response to changing conditions and the energy of the group. It also points to what is commonly referred to as “The Heart and Soul of Transition.” Transition Manitou Springs Initiator Brian Fritz put it this way:

“For me it really isn’t THAT challenging… I just sort of watch where the energy goes (watch the dynamics of the field) and respond appropriately… Because I don’t have a lot of personal attachment to what occurs in my life these days (which doesn’t mean I am not naturally passionate about what I am naturally drawn to), I don’t feel a lot of stress about ‘making it all happen’… AND I do appreciate watching the unfolding that is occurring…”

Transition Denver’s Dana Miller echoed this same realization: “Trust the process, be willing to start small, realize that creating relationships and friendships is the foundation of a successful project… Take the first few steps and see what comes of it. Don’t overplan… We have a wonderful role to play without having all the answers!” This attitude of non-attachment and trusting the process has enabled many Transition leaders to persevere through the uncertain early stages of the Transition process, effectively engage the interests of those who show up, and balance self-care with the overwhelming amount of work that needs to be done in each community.

Another observation that came up again and again in these interviews was that the greatest joy and motivating factor for staying with the Transition process is the deep relationships that are created along the way. In fact, this kind of community is at the very heart of Transition. Donald Studinski of Transition Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield asserted that “If we choose cooperation and work together, then things can actually be BETTER than what we’ve known in our lives thus far. We can have MORE connection to the earth and to each other, deeper more meaningful relationships. It is possible.” And Margaret Emerson, also of Transition W/A/B, emphasized the larger Transition community that is continuing to grow in Colorado and worldwide, weaving a vast web of interconnection:

“What excites me most about Transition is that it is growing so rapidly worldwide, and that so many people are looking for ways to make a difference in their community. I also love the idea of a more localized economy and closer-knit, more resilient community. Having made so many new friends and acquaintances in the last year has certainly increased my optimism and personal happiness.”

Transition is here to stay in Colorado, not only because of the tireless effort of the thousands of people already involved (there are now over 1,300 members of the Transition Colorado social networking site), but also because it meets a real need in our communities. David Greenwald of Transition Louisville mentioned that “When I look deeply at ‘the long emergency’ that we all face, I always come back to resilience and sustainability at the local level as the most credible response. “ This way of thinking is likely to spread like wildfire in the next few years as conditions continue to change. Several of the Transition leaders that I interviewed expressed that they believe we are rapidly approaching a tipping point of awareness and engagement with Transition. Costen Aytes of Transition Naropa speculated that “As economic conditions worsen for people many will come to the movement out of necessity versus prescience. The movement will be re-invigorated.”

Other visions for the Transition Movement in the years ahead included more classes and workshops offering critical leadership skills, including a revision of the two-day Training for Transition to make it more useful for Transition Initiators. Currently, the training is more of an introduction to the Transition concept than anything else, but it could just as easily serve as a vehicle to provide the tools and practice needed to run more successful Transition Initiatives on the ground. Another powerful idea is the establishment of Transition Centers throughout the state and around the world. These centers could serve as markets for local produce, gathering places for those interested in Transition, event spaces for Transition Initiatives and other nonprofit organizations, and much more—the possibilities are only limited by the confines of our imagination. These centers could become powerful focal points for Transition activity and culture in each community in the future.

Taking a broader outlook, Coco Gordon of Transition Lyons suggested that Transition should “honor those who pioneered what came before: Bioregionalists, Permaculturists, our indigenous elders”—to learn from them and collaborate more with these communities. Wherever Transition happens to go in 2010 and beyond, it is important for us all to remember that, in the words of Transition Westmister/Arvada/Broomfield Initiator Donald Studinski: “This is a marathon, the long emergency, it’s not a sprint. Burn out is real. Set a pace you can handle and just keep trying. Know deep in your soul that eventually, things will work out such that Transition is attractive to people.” Best wishes for the entire Transition community in 2010! Thank you for everything you do and keep up the good work!