Town prepares for peak oil

A small but determined Woodstock group is attempting to change the way their community thinks about and uses energy.

It’s called Transition Town Woodstock, a push to slowly reduce the community’s dependence on fossil fuels and to prepare for rising oil prices, group member Keith Helmuth says.

“The idea is to do what we can at the local and regional level to prepare for change,” the 74-year-old retired college professor, farmer and businessman said.

The core concepts behind Transition Towns are those of sustainable transportation, food supplies, households and businesses. The movement was sparked by British permaculture designers in the early 2000s and has spread across the globe.

Today, there are over 400 official Transition Towns in the world. Currently, Woodstock and Cocagne are the only two communities in the Transition network in New Brunswick.

With a population of just over 5,000, the conservative Western New Brunswick town doesn’t appear a likely place for an organized attempt at large-scale sustainability.

However, many in the community have show interest in the movement and have embraced the principles behind the movement, Helmuth said. Some have retrofitted their homes with homemade solar heating systems, while others have begun to lay framework for biodiesel farming.

Since its inception, the local Transition Town network has led to a number of initiatives aimed at educating the public and turning the tide on energy use in the community. The group built a solar-powered cooker that’s used at public events (like Canada Day and The Dooryard Arts Festival), compiled a local food directory and established a community garden.

Currently, the network is putting the finishing touches on an “energy analysis guidebook” that calculates all the energy usage in the community and suggests alternatives.

“As that builds within a community, you get a community that is more generally able to sustain itself,” Helmuth said.

Though Transition Town has a solid base in the community, Helmuth says they hope to attract more locals interested in alternative energy, community gardening and the elements of the model.

“It’s a matter of more people taking seriously the long-range view of what will help our community to be resilient in the face of economic uncertainty and rising oil prices. People doing this are positioning themselves to adapt to these changes, and it’s just a matter of more and more people doing it to make our community stronger.”

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