Dear all,

You may be aware that Somerset County Council passed a resolution in July 2008 to officially become a Transition County. It was the first county council to do so and several others have followed suit.

This decision was not made in conjunction with Transition initiatives in Somerset. Feeling some concern about that, a group of Somerset Transitioners decided to get together to request meetings with the county council and form what they hoped would be a constructive relationship helping to facilitate the transitioning of the county council. I am a member of that group, although I joined quite late in this process. Dan Hurring initially worked with the County Council to audit their existing transition related activities and make suggestions for how to build on these. However, no sooner had the report on this work been issued, when there was a change in administration and accompanying change of attitude amongst members of the cabinet.

With the financial cuts, the county council have now made the decision to stop completelyall “climate change work, work on renewable energy, natural environment policy and delivery,”. Thus, we believe that they no longer qualify to call themselves a Transition Council.

Towards the end of 2010, we wrote to the council pointing out this dilemma and asking them to either make the Transition Resolution real or revoke it. They are currently refusing to do either.

Where does this leave us?

We have let Rob Hopkins know the situation, so that Somerset County Council are no longer cited as some kind of pioneering transition authority. Clearly, they are not.

The current oil price escalation shows how sensitive this market is to political instability in producing regions. The latter merely exacerbates an already precarious situation for net importers of fossil fuels, such as the UK. This situation underscores the reckless short-sightedness of an authority which has in a short time moved from a potentially leading position in preparing for a low-carbon or zero-carbon world, to one where our county is sleepwalking toward the shocks and disruption that will follow, as sure as night follows day

We believe that, if Somerset is to transition as a county, then it is now up to all of us as transition enthusiasts to make this happen, despite the county council, rather than with it, sad as that may seem.

To this end, the folks at Carymoor Environmental Centre have kindly offered the idea of Carymoor (and maybe other similar centres) being used as “Transition hubs” for Somerset. These would be resource, exhibition and training centres for all things transition -- alternative technology, reskilling, food growing, the inner transition etc as well as venues for local transition conferences.

We would like to see representatives from transition initiatives and other green groups across the county getting involved in this in order to move it forward.

So far there are some other transitioners and a couple of people from related green groups who have shown an interest.. If you would like to put your name forward or comment on this idea in any other way, please do so via this google group. If you belong to the group you can post to it by email to
transition-somerset@googlegroups.com.
If not, why not join?    http://tinyurl.com/5tahl2o.

Yours in Transition

Adrian Tait, Paul Birch, Chrissie Godfrey, Linda Hull, Dan Hurring, Alex Malcolm, Cara Naden, Sally Lever.

To visit the Transition Somerset wiki please follow this