News

Writing Contest

Announcing our winners!
Check out the winter edition of Greenzine to read their stories.

Ist place - Carleigh Cathcart who attends Crestwood Secondary School in Peterborough

2nd place - Cameron Kuntz who lives just outside Peterborough

3rd place - an anonymous contributor who seems to know a lot about growing food!

Transition Town Peterborough is holding its first Transition Tales writing contest! Cast yourself into the future - to 2030 - and tell us what you see. How have our actions today created a more locally resilient Peterborough? Look back to the year 2009 and tell us what happened along the way. Who got involved, what did they do?

Everyone’s invited to submit an entry, especially younger writers who will be there to experience this new world. The top 3 entries will be posted on our website and winners will receive a “Transition Tales Everywhen 2030” t-shirt.

Entries should be 500 words or less
Deadline: December 31st, 2009

Transition Town Peterborough in the "United Church Observer"
January 2010
Read it here

Transition Town Peterborough on CBC Radio - The World This Weekend
August 8, 2009
Audio - 6 minutes
Listen here

Transition Town movement on CBC Radio - Dispatches
August 27, 2009
Audio
Listen here (scroll down to segment, Reaching Peak Oil)

Peak Oil and Canadian Agri-food on CBC Radio - This Hour
October 2009
Audio - 10 minutes
Listen here

Jeff Rubin (former head of World Market's for CIBC bank) explains the relationship between economics and oil depletion
January 2010
Video - 45 minutes
Watch here

New Off-setting Program
For skeptics of carbon off-set programs. Click here to see that something *can* be done.


Permaculture Lifestyle Practices Session Successful!
by Trent Rhode, Jan. 15/09

On January 14th, 2009 we had a great turn out for the Permaculture Lifestyle Practices town hall, with about 70 people in all showing up. The best turnout yet! Paula Anderson of Peterborough Green-Up gave a great introductory talk on permaculture, showing us how we all already had a pretty good idea of what the concept means, in many ways, and that most of us practice permaculture in our daily lives in some way.

The essence of the presentation and discussion was that we must consciously design our homes and communities to work with nature as opposed to fighting against it. We must shift our perspective from one of lack, to abundance, and to seeing that we can truly have everything we need if we can start to be creative about how we design our lives. We do not need to just sit back and follow the default patterns of the current system, which is based on an outdated way of looking at the world in a fragmented way. We must begin to see that we can actually work towards enriching the earth and our communities as opposed to simply trying to do less harm.

In Paula's presentation, she introduced to us a few key points that I will go over below:

First we have this definition of permaculture:

Originally meaning 'Permanent Agriculture', but has evolved to mean ‘Permanent Culture’

“Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fiber and energy for provision of local needs.”~David Holmgren

Some other definitions and points about permaculture::
-A design system that enriches the earth with our permanent culture.
-A design system to make human land use sustainable.
-A self-contained and sustaining system: no waste exported, no resources inputted.
-Works with rather than against nature.
-Looks at plants and animals (including humans) in all their functions – it is all about the connections and relationships.
-Mimics working systems of nature.

Ethics

We also learned of the three main ethics that permaculture is built upon:

Earth Care: caring for the earth, since without the earth people simply cannot exist

People Care: caring for the people, all people, everywhere

Fair Share: distributing resources and surplus goods fairly and ensuring that everyone has basic necessities

Next, we looked at a small part of a wonderful video demonstrating the amazing potential of urban living spaces to provide for their own food, water and energy needs. This video, The Global Gardener, can be seen on

YouTube here

The part we watched was about 16 minutes into Part 3 (Urban Permaculture). There are four parts in all (though on YouTube these parts are split into smaller parts), and I highly recommend checking the video out, as it is quite inspiring.

We wrapped up this session with a nice activity where we took various elements of a sustainable community that the group came up with, and illustrated them in groups, keeping permaculture principles in mind as we looked to see how the various elements of a sustainable community fit together (e.g. energy production, love and respect, functional commons space, transportation, food production).

Thanks to everyone who came out, and remember to check out the Transition Initiatives section of this website to find out how you can get involved!