Welcome to the Brisbane Transition Hub. Transition Towns and Initiatives: A Transition Initiative (which could be a town, village, university or island etc) is a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and increasingly, economic contraction. There are thousands of initiatives around the world starting their journey to answer this crucial question: “for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly rebuild resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and economic contraction) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?” More on how Transition Town work can be found HERE. Cheerful Disclaimer!
So what’s happening in Brisbane?
There are several Transition Town initiatives in the Brisbane area. The Brisbane Transition Hub helps to establish and support these initiatives. These pages will tell you what the Brisbane Transition Hub and Brisbane Transition Town Initiatives are up to. We are targeting action on the twin and related issues of Climate Change and Peak Oil, as well as broader issues of sustainability. We feel that the Brisbane City Council (and indeed all levels of government here and world wide) are failing to plan for these issues adequately, and are therefore, our society is not sustainable. As such, we, as members of the Brisbane Community, aim to assist and work with Brisbane City Council to address these issues. It is early days yet, but we aim to work with the council, both at the officer and elected member levels. We are non party aligned. Councils can only push the sustainable agenda as much as the community will give them the mandate to do so. If you would like to be actively involved in the Transition Town Movement in Brisbane, please join our ning here.
The Role of Brisbane Transition Hub
The following is adapted from the Transition Initiatives Primer:
The Brisbane Transition Hub (which includes all Brisbane based Transition Initiatives and their members) role will be to fire up transition initiatives in the Brisbane area and maintain a role of inspiring, encouraging, registering, supporting, networking and possibly training those initiatives. The process of building that role will take time, and newly formed groups (and those operating without funding) can’t be expected to perform all those tasks right from the start. We envisage that the relationship between the Hub and the initiatives in the Brisbane Area will be mutually supportive and, at least initially, informal. We’re hoping that the various initiatives within the Brisbane area will also network vigorously together and become mutually supportive, recognising that a community is only as resilient as its neighbours. As we’re in the very early days of this massive transition experiment, these roles and models are likely to evolve as experience shows us what works and what doesn’t. As Brisbane City Council is the largest council in Australia (other capital cities have several Local Government Areas), this model will be different for Brisbane. The Brisbane Transition Hub is also responsible for carrying out the “transition network” role in the Brisbane area of making sure that each initiative works on the baseline Transition criteria right from the outset. As individual initiatives within the Locale mature, the Hub will encourage them to apply to the Transition Network for consideration as an official transition initiative. Over time, we expect the task of “registering” communities to official status will be taken up by the Brisbane Transition Hub.
The Brisbane Transition Hub will be a focus for communications with the local initiatives in that area. We think this Local Transition Hub model is crucial for the cities, and larger scale rural initiatives, but the early adopters are going to have to carefully feel their way into this role. It’s virgin territory and by no means a trivial undertaking… proceed with caution. If you would like to be actively involved in the Transition Town Movement in Brisbane, please join our ning here. Alternatively contact us by completing the form below: Comments or questions are welcome.