After a prolonged wait and plenty of anticipation, the Energy Descent Action Plan for Totnes and District being produced by Transition Town Totnes was presented at this public event. The EDAP which has been designed to assist people in Totnes and District has been developed through a series of public workshops and discussions and provides a route map from 2009 – 2030 for building local resilience to the impacts of declining oil supplies and climate change. The challenges we face in the very near future are enormous. Energy prices are already rising pretty rapidly due to global oil supplies being on the wane and we have no choice about implementing measures to reduce global warming. We can’t do this as individuals, the scale of the changes we need to make can only happen if we work together in partnership with our neighbours, our friends and right across the sectors. We need to take practical steps and start now. The purpose of this event is to broaden understanding of energy descent planning and discuss how it can be integrated into our local community and daily lives. ” Said Jacqi Hodgson who has been coordinating the project. The open event in the Civic Hall had an interesting programme. (click here to view). In the true tradition of Transition, it was a lively interactive event to open minds and hearts to the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change. The introduction to the EDAP was followed by informal discussion sessions looking at some specific areas of the work; including the relevance of the past to planning the future, measuring progress and a more detailed look at 4 specific areas of the plan, Food, Energy, Transport and Inner Transition. Discussions groups looked at the kinds of questions we need to be asking to get the EDAP into the thinking of all sectors. The closing discussion session looked at who we should be taking the EDAP too and how we can get their involvement in the actions. Many pople at the event signed up for pledges to be involved in the EDAP
To close the event some live interactive theatre was presented by Transition Tales under the able enthusiastic guidance of Steph Bradley. A set of 'children' were solicited from the audience to ask questions about the past of what, why, and how people lived back in 2009. Monsters representing war, poverty, pollution followed by climate change, global warming, peak oil and finally credit crunch arrived and he was right here in town. The children asked questions and we discovered that all the monsters are related to each other and that we can't tackle them alone but must take them all on at once ....and then the EDP was created as the hero and we moved back to 2009 & the audience found how the EDP plan helped win the day against the monsters
