If we can’t imagine the future we want, we won’t be able to create it.
EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE – We are marking EARTH DAY, 2022 with the relaunch of Peterborough/Nogojiwanong’s Greenzine magazine – online!
The hard copy, paper version of the Greenzine was available all over the local area for almost 10 years – up until the Covid pandemic sank it.
You see, Transition Town Peterborough’s popular little local magazine was supported by the advertising in it purchased by local businesses – the backbone of a healthy economy. We are forever grateful to them! When the pandemic hit, they suffered a lot and their advertising budget had to be sacrificed. Moreover, Covid isolation and distancing restrictions ended delivery of the magazine to many locations around the City and County by the dedicated core of Transition Town volunteers.
So, living up to the goal of community Resilience as the heart of climate change adaptation, the editorial volunteers are keeping the Greenzine alive online! If you are a new reader, welcome. If you knew us before, thanks for coming back.
Two years away is not a long time in climate crisis terms. In those two years, the Earth’s condition worsened while the pandemic recovery is improving. COP26 didn’t move markers significantly. The UN’s Climate Chief issued stark calls for action NOW to end fossil fuel use or it will be too late and we will exceed the tipping point of 1.5 degrees. Big oil companies are still being subsidized and given new drilling rights.
But right here in our local communities lies the best field of action. Where else, after all, are the impacts of the changing climate and rising CO2 felt but right here where we all live and breathe?
Given all that has happened and is still anticipated, the Greenzine will keep alive one of the biggest and most effective responses to the climate crisis – local living.
Now that’s not a very dramatic term as an answer to our dramatic times but when we stop to think, locally is where we have the most agency. It’s where we grow food, produce electrical energy, ensure out water supply and safety, define ourselves as a community with its own distinct culture, and enrich our social and spiritual lives with our cultural activities.
Locally is where we can create real adaptation and mitigation of climate impacts.
We’ve already begun in many ways: our local municipalities have Climate Change Action Plans. Pollinator gardens are abounding. More of us are growing some of our own food. There are more Farmers Markets and small enterprises dealing in local food and other products. Our local electrical utility is investing in solar power. Organizations are helping neighbourhoods to go greener. Schools are ramping up environmental education. But we still have a long way to go.
Our Greenzine aim is to deepen and extend our understanding of local responses to the greatest crisis the human population has ever faced. To help imagine the many possibilities toward a positive direction inherent in becoming challenge on the way to becoming a resilient community.
Things are going to change. In the Greenzine, we aim to be a site for sharing information, imagination and practical hope. For learning how to localize – that is, grow the berries as well as make the cream right here locally.
The new Greenzine will continue to showcase the solutions that lie locally, no need to wait for outside rescue, including the advances in thinking beyond just changing light bulbs and driving EVs. We’ll present deeper analysis of our economic and social predicaments and belief systems that got us into them. We’ll face the “inner” transition” to new ways of thinking and the griefs of living on a planet in such crisis.
Following our launch Teresa Kaszuba from Global News Morning Peterborough interviewed Cheryl Lyon.
And then that got picked up and celebrated by @TransitionTowns worldwide!
Great to see this news coverage about @TransitionPtbo, Canada’s first ever Transition group. After a decade of producing GreenZine they re-launched it as an online magazine on #EarthDay.https://t.co/zgi2yV6Kzg
— Transition Network (@transitiontowns) April 27, 2022
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