Kitchener-Waterloo (Transition KW)

TransitionKW and the Transition Towns movement believe in vibrant cities where local living is made easy.  It should be easy in a transition town to walk to local businesses to shop for local products and foods.  We believe that easy access to mass-transit systems, walking and bike paths is key to building more sustainable and resilient communities.  Furthermore it should be possible to grow...

A few weeks ago I attended a public lecture at the University of Waterloo titled “Where did all the oil come from?” by Professor Maurice B. Dusseault and Stephen G. Evans, Faculty Members of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science. I do not want to go into details, but although the explanation for the formation of oil was excellent, the lecture was a kind of disappointing as regards to...

Last Wednesday evening, we gathered in the REEP House again for our monthly movie night, designed to help us have the tools necessary to create change in our community. We watched Dirt! The Movie, which brought us around the world to discover why dirt is important, what’s associated with that word, and how it helps us. Jon, the facilitator for this event,  asked us to think about all the...

TransitionKW is announcing that we have received grant funding from the Region of Waterloo for our proposal to create a climate change adaptation toolkit for individuals and communities. These are the questions we’re hoping to answer through this project: What will climate change do to energy, infrastructure, food, water and the economy of our region? What will we need to do to prepare for...

My parents love the outdoors. You would think that right from childhood I had the same feeling. The truth is I distinctly remember several occasions growing up when I chose my computer over nature. Solving the mystery of where Carmen Sandiego could be travelling seemed more interesting than exploring the outdoors myself. In hopes of instilling some appreciation in me my parents took me on camping...

OCCUPY LOVE How to turn the ecological and economic crises into a love story. More than 80 people gathered at the Grand River Unitarian Congregation on Monday night to watch the World’s Greatest Love Story. The film Occupy Love is the third in philosopher/filmmaker Velcro Ripper’s trilogy. TransitionKW and Sacred Secular Society hosted this pre-screening prior to the movie opening in...

Hi there, TransitionKW has been busy organizing this spring’s Tools for Change movie series. These movie nights have been a lot of fun; the films have been both informative and inspiring, and the group discussions that follow speak to the huge stores of knowledge and enthusiasm that exist right here in the KW community. The films in this next set include Dirt!, Home, and Dive. A poster with...

Last night, TransitionKW hosted a screening of The Economics of Happiness at the REEP House. If you weren’t able to make it out, check out the trailer below. The film itself is fantastic, chalk full of great talking-head snippets of the world’s greatest thinkers and movers in the environmental and progressive economics space. In short, the film unpacks the notion that wealth equates...

My family and I just moved to KW this past January.  We wanted to move closer to family and my wife got a new job, so we left the warmth of the American South for the much colder North.  However, we arrived to a much more vibrant local food economy than what we experienced in our southern clime.  Thus it has been with great enthusiasm that we have embraced winter foods and cooking local with much...

A classical example of cognitive dissonance is the experiment carried out by Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959. They took a group of persons –subjects- and they were asked to work on a very dull and monotonous task. After finishing their task, a small group of these subjects was asked to talk with another subject and try to convince this person that the task was, actually, very interesting. As a...