PEDAL -> Portobello Transition Town

We are a Portobello, Edinburgh based, com­munity run, envir­on­mental group.

We believe that Portobello can and should re-localise. This means, for example: grow­ing more of our food; gen­er­at­ing our own energy; cre­at­ing a wider range of jobs close to home, find­ing ways to get to ‘zero waste’… We’ll all get more out of liv­ing here — and help the planet at the same time. Rather than hop­ing that gov­ern­ments might act in time, we are work­ing now to re-localise, and to help other com­munit­ies do the same.

We believe that the huge wave of com­munit­ies becom­ing Transition Towns, Going Carbon Neutral, mak­ing Community Buy Outs, kick­ing out plastic bags or get­ting more local food bought and sold, are show­ing that people have had enough of the way we’ve been doing things — and that there is another way — or lots of them! The huge chal­lenges of Climate Change and Peak Oil have gal­van­ised people into action, and we have huge poten­tial to make a fun­da­mental dif­fer­ence to how we live in a way that gov­ern­ment so far has not man­aged, and indi­vidu­als on their own often feel is bey­ond them.

We star­ted the pro­cess of work­ing towards becom­ing a Transition Town in 2005, just as our com­munity was cel­eb­rat­ing its vic­tory in a long battle against the Superstore. Inspired by Rob Hopkins’ descrip­tion of the work done by his per­ma­cul­ture stu­dents in Kinsale, Ireland, we decided that we were ready to fol­low their example and in 2005 we began to develop our own Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) and to begin to take steps to imple­ment it. Many steps have been taken — by us and by oth­ers - which align with the plan. However since 2005 we have mostly focused on aware­ness rais­ing and get­ting pro­jects off the ground. We hope to now revisit the 2005 vis­ion (see Porty Energy Descent Action Plan 2005) and see what to add, what to change, what to build on, what to dis­card. It’s a good moment to join us!

We’ve gone some way towards this; learned a great deal; run sev­eral pub­lic events; and have a num­ber of ener­getic work­ing groups with pro­jects on the go up and run­ning. As the first such ini­ti­at­ive in Scotland we have also worked to inspire a range of sim­ilar ini­ti­at­ives. Some of us have been involved in set­ting up an organ­isa­tion to sup­port other com­munit­ies to make the trans­ition to sus­tain­able liv­ing (www.transitionscotland.org) and also work­ing with other com­munit­ies to encour­age the Scottish Government to develop a clear strategy that will enable all of Scotland to make the trans­ition (www.holyrood350.org). Clearly there’s plenty more to be done, but we feel that we’ve made a great start and have inspired other com­munit­ies in our turn. You are wel­come to join us!