Kinsale Transition Town is our community response to peak oil and climate change. We have a few projects on the go, including a community garden and a land train, serving locals and visitors.
We have been awarded a €9,000 grant from West Cork Development Partnership to carry out a feasibility study for a community anaerobic digester! This means we can collect waste from businesses, residents and farms around the town, and convert it into heat and electricity to be sold back to the ESB grid, or used in the immediate area for heating and providing the best compost money can buy!We hope it will be a landmark project to show how it is possible to take good care of the ‘creation’ we are blessed with, and even to make more of it than we were given, by virtue of the friendships, partnerships, and working together that it will provide.
Many community groups are involved, including churchgoers. Hopefully, our Christianity will show through in the way we share the responsibility of using the grant money wisely.Another project we hope to contribute to is the joining up of a proposed sewage treatment plant and the proposed next door community leisure centre. Research suggests we could easily, and cost effectively, divert the heat/energy from the sewage to the leisure facility.
So much of what we can achieve as communities comes down to people, and our relationships with each other. How many times in the Bible are we told, there is nothing impressive about working well with those we like; but rather the true test is to engage with, and learn to work with those we are nervous or fearful of, often because we are swayed by the prejudices of others.
So, an anaerobic digester would be great, but the bigger prize i
s a community that lives and works together, and more and more appreciate the gift of God’s creation.
~ Alan Clayton, Kinsale Transition Town www.transitiontownkinsale.org