Thursday, January 14, 2010

Transition Community Vs Citta Slow Community

A transition community is exactly what it sounds like; it is a community where people who are part of that community want to make a change for a more sustainable community. The first part to achieving this goal is to gather together a group of motivated individuals with the same concerns, and ask them, how our community can better ourselves to respond to peak oil and climate change. This group is the initial stage of starting a transition community. The following steps must be followed for best results of seeing a smooth transition. Step 1 is to make it real, this mean make everyone in the group realize the important of their day to day actions that can impact how a community can work together. Step 2 is to work with special interest groups such as local governments and municipalities and try to get them on board as well to make stricter policies and laws. Step 3 is include everyone in the community from youth to elders, if everyone in the community feels important they will feel like they’re word as just as important as anyone else’s. Step 4 is to attend to inner and outer transition groups to seek others opinions and ideas to have a different view on how to carry out tasks. Step 5 is build and holds positive visions for the future, which is best said by staying positive and stick to the goals at hand no matter what. Step 6 is let it go where it wants to go, this means implementing such things as using bike trails more frequently, planting more trees, and hold local farmers markets. The municipality of Colwood in Victoria, B.C. where I reside, is not presently a community that is starting to make a transition that I am aware of. Through working with the municipality of Colwood in the upcoming months of our sustainability class I am hoping that our cohort can make a change for the better and provide Colwood with an initial plan to start making a transition to be sustainable. Citta slow community is a concept that I have never heard of or been aware of until a presentation that I witnessed today, that was actually very interesting. Citta slow is essentially a way for a community to be self sustainable, by means of living on foods and materials that are grown locally by farmers or made locally by individuals. A citta slow community, is a community that has stricter regulations about building policies, codes, and what kind of establishments can be built such as not allowing big companies or fast food restaurants such as Costco’s, Wal-Marts, Macdonald’s and Tim Horton’s to be established. These communities strictly want to run on local products only. The idea is to take the community back in time and try to establish everything that was native to the land before the community was made. This includes native species of trees, grasses, fish, animals, and plants. As I am a resident of Colwood, I am not aware of my community trying to implement anything like this, but an example we learnt of today was the community of Cowichan on Vancouver Island. A local farmer of this community opened a bakery in town. Lots of people from this community supported this farmers business because it was all locally grown and they were on board for supporting local products. Another local dairy farmer saw that the community was supporting the local food a lot and thought to himself, why sell my cheese on my farm when I can open up my own cheese shop beside the bakery, due to the community coming together and supporting the locals. To me, this shows how a community can come together and make a difference on a smaller scale, and hopefully other communities can cease the opportunity and make a difference by becoming a more sustainable community. Both of these different ways of approaching change in a community are great ideas and I hope that when we work with the municipality of Colwood that our cohort can help implement a start to a more sustainable community.

2 comments:

  1. Nice post, Jay... a few comments.

    "Citta slow is essentially a way for a community to be self sustainable, by means of living on foods and materials that are grown locally by farmers or made locally by individuals." I don't think anyone thinks in the short run we can move to total local self-reliance... but clearly, we don't need Canadian butter cookies going to Denmark and Danish cookies coming here. SO in between, we have to find a way to reduce our dependence on long distance movement of foods and increase of ability to take care of ourselves without, as you might put it, going back in time. It will be quite interesting to see how the project in Colwood will turn out, eh?

    Rick

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  2. Nice work on the Citta Slow community, Jay! I'm interested in this bakery in Cowichan... road trip maybe??

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