Upcoming Event in Tantallon this Weekend!


Building Community Resilience to Global Challenges
          transitionbay.ca
         
Transition Bay St Margarets is pleased to invite you to our coming big celebration, the Great Unleashing- Maritimes: Building Resilience in an Era of Limits to Growth.  We hope you will be able to enjoy this event which has never before been held in the Maritimes (and perhaps anywhere in this particularly innovative & regional way).  The event will be Friday evening and Saturday day, November 23 & 24.  Additional information is available at our website at  http://transitionbay.ca/ and at http://transitionbay.ca/content/great-unleashing .

We wish to particularly draw your attention to Nicole Foss, our dynamic keynote speaker.  Her address will be particularly relevant and important to understand in the face of current world and local events.

Building Resilience in an Era of Limits to Growth
  
Keynote address by Nicole Foss at 7:00pm, Friday, November 23rd, entitled “Building Resilience in an Era of Limits to Growth.”  The address will be given at St Luke’s United Church, 5374 St. Margaret's Bay Road (HWY 3), Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia. Suggested donation at the door: $10.00.
 
 
Nicole Foss, a world recognized author and blogger about economics and energy, and co-founder of www.theautomaticearth.com, promises to deliver a frank, hard-hitting and timely assessment of the current status of the global economy and global energy supplies -  two major factors impacting the human race today, and the need for communities around the world to implement transition-orientated changes.
 
"We are the generation that is going to find out what unsustainability really means, as we are approaching many limits to growth, both natural and man-made. In laying out the scope of the problem, I will be focusing primarily on resource limits, notably energy, and limits to the credit expansion in our financial system,” said Ms. Foss. “I will also be looking at the consequences and what we can do to mitigate the impact if we act in advance. The Transition Towns movement has a great deal to offer in this regard. We need to relocalize, restore the local control and safety margins that confer resilience, and build strong communities to help us navigate challenging times. We can achieve a great deal if we are prepared to work together."
 
Ms. Foss is the Senior Editor of TheAutomaticEarth.com, where she used to write under the name Stoneleigh. She and co-author and Editor-in-Chief Raúl Ilargi Meijer have been chronicling and interpreting the on-going credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted predicament. The site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and real politik in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it.
Nicole is also an international speaker on energy and global finance. She has lectured in hundreds of locations across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and has made numerous media appearances.  Nicole was previously the editor of The Oil Drum Canada, where she wrote on peak oil and finance. She also ran the Agri-Energy Producers' Association of Ontario, focusing on farm-based biogas projects, grid connections for renewable energy and Feed-In Tariff policy development.
  
While living in the UK she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level.   Her academic qualifications include a BSc in Biology from Carleton University (neuroscience and psychology), a post-graduate diploma in air and water pollution control, and an LLM in international law from the University of Warwick, UK. 

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the international Transition Movement, will deliver a closing address from England about Transition Initiatives in Maritime Canada in the context of the global Transition Movement. 
 
The keynote address is the opening event for Transition Bay St Margarets’ The Great Unleashing – Maritimes.  Saturday, Nov 24th, will feature a full day open house.

 On Saturday, Nov 24th, from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, there will be a full day regional public open house at St Luke’s United Church featuring transition-oriented groups and organizations from throughout Maritime Canada. Information tables and displays will be punctuated with guest speakers, networking, and break-out groups. Topics to be covered during the event include: local money, slow food, local gardening and farming, alternate energy, biofuels, transportation alternatives, local markets and economies, relearning of old skills and more. 

This exciting day will have 3 concurrent venues – the Expo, the Mainstage, and the Transition Café. The Exposition on Saturday, Nov 24th will include display and information tables from at least 18 organizations from across the region involved in transition and sustainability.  There will be speakers throughout the day on the Main Stage, including several newly elected HRM officials.  The Transition Café will host discussions groups on topics which include Transition in the Maritimes, Peak Oil and Peak Economy and Resilient Energy for the Home and Community.

Our festive finale features a local food and live music reception. All free, but a donation at the door of $5.00 appreciated. 

We are quite excited about this event and plan to have a lot of fun while we help set the stage for the Transition Movement to have an ever wider impact in the Maritimes. 

About Transition Bay St Margarets:
Transition Bay, a registered non-profit volunteer organization, is part of an international movement (transitionnetwork.org) dedicated to following and extending the innovative Transition Town model.  Thousands of Transition Initiatives worldwide are each unique responses to the need for resilience at the community level in order to address the many possible global impacts due to economic fragility, energy supply instability or environmental changes in the years ahead.  Transition Bay St Margarets is the first registered Transition Initiative in the province of Nova Scotia, with over 60 other registered transition communities in Canada.  

Transition Town Initiatives and the Transition Movement are poised to play an increasingly beneficial and influential role in the Maritimes.  We invite you to attend, and to start now to learn about this dynamic energy in our area.

“Transition Bay is all about the community being able to take charge, and engage its residents in the areas of food, energy, transportation, economy, relearning of old skills, and other key areas of rebuilding local resilience,” says Chair person Bob Cervelli. “There’s no point is a community being at the mercy of global events as they unfold, when it could be building its adaptive strengths.”

We look forward to seeing you there to share this celebration and growth.
And please share this widely.

We now have a Facebook page.  Please "like" us there.  https://www.facebook.com/TransitionBay


Thanks much,
David Wimberly