Moving Illinois Toward a Sustainable 21st Century

Are you are concerned about the future of Illinois and want to ensure its sustainability for current and future generations? Do you want to help Illinois' communities and residents meet the dual challenges and opportunities of peak oil and climate change? If so, you are cordially invited to join two new initiatives. The statewide Transition Illinois and the first of its county-sized counterparts, Transition Champaign County. If you like what you see, read up, then start a transition initiative in your community.        

Transition Illinois and Transition Champaign County are part of a national and global network of other communities confronting the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century. Starting with the Transition Town [11] initiatives in Ireland and England in 2005, this movement has now grown to include over 100 communities worldwide. The U.S. network has been created using Ning social networking software (developed by Marc Andreesen, University of Illinois graduate and co-developer of Netscape) and there are now Ning sites for each of the 50 states. For more information about the Transition Initiative, see the Transition Primer [12] and Transition Handbook [13] (available via amazon.com [14] for $16.47) and this video of Transition founder Rob Hopkins [15].

Can Illinois Move Beyond its Dependence on Fossil Fuels?

Illinois is currently dependent on cheap and abundant supplies of fossil fuels whose future availability cannot be ensured [1]. And Illinois, like other states in the U.S., is responsible for contributing a large amount of greenhouse gases emissions to our atmosphere and oceans. Although China has recently overtaken the U.S. in total greenhouse gas pollution per year, the U.S. continues to lead the world's large countries in the amount of climate-changing and ocean-damaging emissions per resident and is responsible for more accumulated emissions of CO2 than any other country (27.5%).

On the positive side, Illinois has impressive natural and human resources to transition to a sustainable and more resilient local economy able to provide residents with energy, food, shelter, transportation, education, health care, recreation and art. Wind resources in Illinois can provide impressive amounts of renewable electrical energy as demonstrated by the 396-megawatt Twin Groves Wind Farm [2] in McLean County. Germany is a world leader in converting sunlight into electricity, yet Illinois receives significantly more solar energy per unit of surface area than Germany does. We also have opportunities for creating energy from biomass, including agricultural, animal and municipal waste and sewage. We have the best agricultural land in the world, although its primary use for industrial monoculture (corn and soybeans) is input intensive, unsustainable and inefficient (10 calories of fossil-fuel energy burned for each calorie of supermarket food sold [3]) and contributes agricultural chemicals to the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico [16 ]. Although little of the native tallgrass prairie remains in Illinois, native plants are thriving in many preserves and gardens because of the efforts of concerned individuals and organizations who want to see native plants and wildlife become a larger part of Illinois' preserves, parks, gardens, farms, roadsides and neighborhoods.

Illinois also possesses many active environmental and conservation groups whose members are dedicated to making Illinois and our lifestyles more sustainable. But until now there has been no common forum and no overall social organization to coordinate the knowledge, skills, energy and visions of these many forward-looking groups and individuals.

Finally, Illinois is home to cutting-edge knowledge, technology and expertise. In central Illinois, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a world-class research university with several new "green" units including the Office of Sustainability [4], the Environmental Change Institute [7], and the Institute of Natural Resource Sustainability[6] which includes the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center [5]. Other institutions and enterprises in central Illinois such as the U.S. Passive House Institute [8] and Newell Instruments [9] in Urbana and SmartSpark Energy Systems [10] in Champaign are leading the way toward carbon-neutral and even carbon-negative residential homes and buildings. Other parts of Illinois also possess considerable intellectual, technological and community resources to move toward sustainability with too many in the Chicago area to mention and Chicago making a major commitment with its Climate Action Plan [17].

Join Us!

To become part of Transition Illinois and/or Transition Champaign County and lend a head, heart and hand to important effort involving conservation, relocalization of our economy and community building, go toTransitionIllinois.org and/or TransitionChampaignCounty.org to (a) sign up (you will need to answer a few questions to create your profile), (b) join one or more Groups of interest (click on the Groups tab to see them all) and (c) join in the conversation by sharing your comments, questions and concerns. Also feel free to list sustainability-related happenings under Events to share with others.

Transition Illinois.org and TransitionChampaignCounty.org provide valuable tools for us to get to know each other, share our knowledge, skills, & resources, and coordinate our transition efforts. In addition to Groups and Forums for discussion, the website allows us to share videos and photos, announce events, create blogs and chat. We will soon discover many people with similar interests and goals concerning sustainability in Illinois that would have otherwise never learned of each other's existence and activities.

TransitionChampaignCounty.org is presently much more developed than TransitionIllinois.org and the former could serve as a model for the latter as well as other counties and cities in Illinois wanting to launch their own Transition initiative and website. TransitionIllinois.org could use additional management and development assistance. No specialized computer skills are required. Contact Gary Cziko at g-cziko@illinois.edu if you are interested in helping out.

I look forward to having readers of the ASAP eNewsletter become involved these Transition initiatives. Both Illinois and Champaign County websites have Food groups that should be of special interest to those interested in developing sustainable food production in Illinois. Also please forward this invitation to anyone living in Illinois who you believe may be interested in participating (it can be found on the web at tilinvitation.notlong.com). Sustainably-minded individuals from outside Illinois are also invited to join if they wish to learn from our experiences or have solutions to offer the challenges we are facing in Illinois.

References

 [1] http://tinyurl.com/6p87na
 [2] http://www.horizonwind.com/projects/whatwevedone/twingroves
 [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html
 [4] http://sustainability.illinois.edu
 [5] http://www.istc.illinois.edu
 [6] http://research.illinois.edu/inrs
 [7] http://eci.illinois.edu
 [8] http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PHIUSHome.html
 [9] http://newellinstruments.com/
[10] http://www.smartsparkenergy.com/
[11] http://transitiontowns.org/
[12] http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionPrimer
[13] http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionHandbook
[14] http://tinyurl.com/5uft3t
[15] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGHrWPtCvg0
[16] http://prairierivers.org/rivers/preventing-water-pollution/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone/
[17] http://www.chicagoclimateaction.org