Transition Towns are working to transform society from oil dependence to community resilience in the face of peak oil, climate change, and economic collapse. They engage the heads, hands, and hearts of people from across the community to strengthen the local economy and make better use of local, renewable resources.

Last summer [in Vermont], Transition Town Montpelier held a Village-building Convergence that brought the Transition Town concept back to its roots in early permaculture. Permaculture is now a set of design tools so broad that even its inventors shy away from defining it, but it originated as a form of landscape design. The design emphasizes perennial crops and ecological interactions that simplify management. The productive landscape is designed around dwellings.

Montpelier’s Village-building Convergence (VbC), held in August last year, was inspired by a similar week-long gathering that’s been held in Portland, Oregon for eight years. The 2009 event was a success, and organizers are hard at work to plan this year’s event, scheduled for August 14-22. The VbC emphasizes projects with large numbers of volunteers who learn new skills while reshaping landscapes near dwellings, using perennials.

Much of last year’s activity was around a private house on Main Street, where the owners wanted to convert a rocky, forested back yard into a terraced, edible forest garden. Mark Krawczyk of Burlington Permaculture led the week-long conversion, recruiting volunteers who wanted to learn to clear a small woods using hand tools, turn a slope into a terrace with steps, or design a permaculture landscape for that space.

The landscape design and installation on Main Street was also a backdrop for workshop about components of the permaculture landscape. Alissa White taught backyard gourmet mushroom gardening, Nicko Rubin taught an introduction to edible landscaping and small fruits for central Vermont, and Krawczyk demonstrated how to create habitat for bats.

The VbC also featured projects and workshops in spaces more public than the Main Street back yard. Gail England directed a crew building an earthen oven at the Adamant Co-op. Emma Melvin conducted a city-wide tour of rain gardens and an installation of a new one at Hunger Mountain Co-op. Adrienne Allison led a medicinal plant walk starting at Montpelier High School, and Zachary Brock headed up a bicycle tour of inspiring gardens, starting with the food garden on the State House lawn.

While the focus was on Montpelier, some events were scattered in the hinterlands (as they’re called in Transition-speak)[the outlying towns] of Plainfield, Marshfield, Worcester, and Calais.

Though classical permaculture elements dominated the VbC, there was more. I gave a talk about bicycles and motorcycles as practical transportation, and a workshop on Nonviolent Communication taught how to listen and speak so as to connect with what’s alive in other people. And there were simply parties at the opening and the night before the closing.

The Transition work involves many elements, like launching local currencies, organizing energy co-ops, and planning emergency response in a time of prolonged fuel or electricity shortages. And sometimes it’s important and just plain fun to gather in community, roll up your sleeves, and build a new rain garden or earthen oven. That what’s the Village-Building Convergence is for.

I’m Carl Etnier, and that’s this week’s Peak Oil Check-In.

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