Thursday March 22, 7:00 pm
Innisfil Town Hall Meeting Room
All About Seeds
Join us on Thursday for a discussion about getting started with vegetable gardening.
We'll be discussing
• heritage seeds
• seed starting
• seed saving
• seed diversity
Here are some future threats to our community:
- Increasingly expensive energy - Peak OilWe get our various forms of energy very largely from fossil fuels - stored energy from hundreds of thousands of years of sunshine. Although, in the past, there has been a lot of this magical energy, we’ve been using it wastefully for three hundreds of years. There has never been an unlimited supply, although we have used it as if there was. In fact, we’ve used up most of the easy to obtain fossil fuels and are now having to work harder to obtain a supply.
More . . . - More unpredictable weather, chaotic climate - Climate ChangeThere's a lot of information floating around about climate change. Most people know it has something to do with industrial pollution, changing weather and car exhaust, and they kind of get what Al Gore was trying to say in An Inconvenient Truth. But when asked to explain the problem in lay terms, they get tripped up in a lot of verbal stumbling.
More . . . - Recession? Depression? Inflation? Which is it? - Economic InstabilityWhat does “Economic Instability” mean? Most of us tend to expect that the future will be much like the past, and try to base our planning on that. Now we are beginning to recognize the somewhat overwhelming changes that have already happened, and the changes we can reasonably expect in the future.
More . . . - I'm not sure I believe any of this. What about me?You don't have to fully accept any of these concerns as real threats. The central objective of Transition is to find effective ways to strengthen our community. When we have strong communities, we can work together to deal with any threats to the community, regardless of what the threats specifically are. So work with us to build friendships, strengthen connections, and renew partially forgotten skills.
Our start-up Steering Committee will have it's next meeting at the Town Hall, Thursday, February 23 at 7 PM. New volunteers are always welcome.
Working Groups
These are some topics that that other Transition organizations have worked on. These and other topics can form the basis for starting some Working Groups.
These are some topics that that other Transition organizations have worked on. These and other topics can form the basis for starting some Working Groups.
- Energy
- Food
- Water
- Transportation
- Health
- Local Commerce
- Housing
- Communication
- Finance
- Heart and Soul
A small, but dedicated collection of Innisfil residents have been meeting regularly the past few months to raise awareness of how local people can do their part to help preserve the environment.
The Innisfil in Transition movement is part of a larger organization that has chapters in 34 countries, explains core member Ross Pityk.
“It’s spreading across Ontario,” he says. “There are groups in Ottawa, Barrie, Orillia and Prince Edward County. We have acknowledged that energy is getting much more expensive, the climate is becoming increasingly chaotic and economic dislocation is all around us. Our group was founded in response to these threats.”
The first Transition movement began six years ago. The Innisfil chapter launched last year and made its public debut at the opening of the Innisfil Farmers’ Market.
Last Thursday evening, the group screened a film titled “Hijacked Future” which detailed how agricultural seed production has become almost totally dominated by a handful of multinational companies.
The Canadian-made documentary examined the increasingly fragile state of the North American industrial food system that is based run on oil, from fertilizers and pesticides to the trucks and planes that transport food to our tables.
Local farmers are being squeezed into buying genetically modified seeds from these multinationals, limiting their choice of crops and driving up their costs. Not surprisingly, these seeds are dependent on fertilizers manufactured by the same companies.
Organizations such as Innisfil in Transition hope to counter this threat by gradually reducing the dependence of consumers on foods grown in this fashion.
Options include the establishment of community gardens throughout the municipality. For instance, a town in England, Todmorden, has already set up 72 community gardens with the goal of being completely self sufficient in producing vegetables by the year 2018.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing citizens, the film states, is whether or not the political will exists to make major changes to the existing global food distribution system.
At the local level, Innisfil in Transition will focus on “building community resilience” to economic, climatic and energy cost challenges.
The group next meets at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 22 at Town Hall at 2101 Innisfil Beach Rd. All welcome.
- Innisfil Journal
Innisfil In Transition Member Login