Summary Southeast of Berlin and near the Polish border lies the region of Lausitz, one of Europe’s largest brown coal fields that supplies the coal for Europe’s third most polluting industrial plant: Vattenfall’s Jänschwalde power plant. [1] The industry turns ever-greater parts of the landscape into open pits and devours one village after another. Most…
Ungersheim, a former mining town in the Alsace region, has successfully implemented a local socio-ecological transition strategy. Their success was based on the town autonomously designing its transition pathway, instead of following French government guidelines.[1] As the mayor, François Mensch, tells us, there are three dimensions to Ungersheim’s autonomy. The first two obvious dimensions are…
In 2003, Machynlleth, a small town in central Wales with 2,200 inhabitants and a small tourism industry, erected Wales’ first community-owned wind turbine. The path there was stony and only crowned by success thanks to the commitment of long-term volunteers.
Background The project Retenergie developed in the region of Piedmont in 2007. A group of friends and activists from various ecology movements decided to initiate a project and jointly invest in a set of PV panels. At first they called this project simply Solare Collettivo, solar collective. The commercial PV project “adopt one kilowatt hour” …