Green conference a success (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

Green conference a success

10:03am Tuesday 22nd April 2008

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THE annual conference of one of the UK's most revolutionary environmental movements was held in Cirencester this week.

The transition towns conference was held at the Royal Agaricultural College on Friday and in her opening speech, Dr Caroline Lucas MEP, who sits on the European Parliament's influential Environment Committee, told visitors of the urgent need to address the increasing cost and scarcity of oil.

She said: "I truly believe that the transition town network is the most exciting, most hopeful, and most inspirational movement in Britain today.

"It is exciting because it's such a fast-growing, grassroots, direct response to an oil crisis which will affect us all.

"The Transition Town project proposes meaningful solutions to the two greatest challenges we face today - peak oil and climate change.

"It doesn't wait for government, politicians or corporations to act; it's about people in their communities taking action now, and joining together to create an alternative vision of how society could be."

In the current system of globalised trade, food production is largely dependent upon oil, with 95 percent of all goods in shops involving the use of oil.

Dr Lucas warned that only by consuming more locally-sourced food and services, and improving support for domestic producers, can we decrease our reliance upon unsustainable fossil fuels.

She highlighted the positive message of the transition town network, which works to wean communities off oil at a time when oil production may have already peaked and regularly surpasses the $100-a-barrel mark.

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