Organic Transitions offers way to survive and thrive in turbulent times

The Organic Consumers Association is offering a new grassroots campaign called Organic Transitions. It’s designed to mobilize consumers and local communities to begin planning and carrying out transition strategies to help people survive and thrive in the turbulent times ahead.
 
Using this new model, organic food and farming will provide a healthy cornerstone for a new, more localized, and sustainable green economy, according Ronnie Cummins, national director of the association.

“We don’t have to wait for Washington bureaucrats or corporate marketers to tell us what to do,” said Cummins in his article “Organic Transitions: Beyond the Gloom and Doom of Economic Depression, Climate Change, and Peak Oil” on Organic Consumers Association.com.

The effort will begin with citizens organizing Organic Transitions committees and campaigns in local areas, he said. Local organic food buying clubs will be contacted and house parties and study and action circles offered.

Cummins said the timing is vital:

We still have a strategic window of opportunity to take back control over our political, cultural, and economic institutions; to create millions of urban and rural green jobs; to transform our educational systems; and to make a smooth transition from fossil fuels, climate chaos, and resource wars to a renewable, peaceful, solar-based agriculture and economy.

I agree with Cummins that we need to green and relocalize our economy and our politics.

Recently I blogged about “What Consumers Need to Do to Help Themselves During the Great Recession.”

I wrote:

What’s needed, I think, is for consumers to join together and help each other in these recessionary times. Consumers, as a player in the economy along with businesses and the government, can have power in the marketplace. However, they seldom organize and act on their own behalf. Consumers more often identify with the interests of the company or group they work for rather than their consumer interests.

Organic Transitions is a great way for citizens to come together to help formulate a new economic model so that we can survive and thrive in tough economic times.

For more information about Organic Transitions, see the Organic Consumers Association Web site.

Copyright 2009, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist