11 June 2008 - The South East’s Green MEP will be in Mayfield tomorrow (Thursday 12 June) to help launch a new branch of one of the UK’s most inspiring environmental movements.

Dr Caroline Lucas MEP, who sits on the European Parliament’s influential Environment Committee and was voted ‘Politician of the Year’ by the Observer in 2007, will tell visitors to the East Sussex Transition Towns launch in Mayfield of the urgent need to address the increasing cost and approaching scarcity of oil.

She commented: "The Transition Town network is the most exciting, most hopeful, and most inspirational green movement in Britain today. It is exciting because it’s a fast-growing, direct, bottom-up response to an oil crisis which is already affecting us all.

"The Transition Town project proposes meaningful solutions to three of the greatest challenges we face today - peak oil, food shortages and climate change. It doesn’t wait for government, politicians or corporations to act; it’s about people in their communities taking action now, and joining together to create an alternative vision of how society could be."

In the current system of globalised trade, food production is dangerously dependent upon oil. She will warn that only by consuming more locally sourced food and services, and improving support for domestic producers, can we decrease our reliance upon unsustainable fossil fuels.

At the Mayfield event, Dr Lucas will highlight the positive message of the Transition Town network, which works to wean communities off fossil fuels, at a time when oil production may have already peaked and regularly surpasses the $100-a-barrel mark.

She concluded: "Transition Towns demonstrates that the changes we urgently need to make in order to address peak oil and climate change are positive changes in themselves, allowing us not only to tackle the environmental crisis, but also to lead more fulfilling lives - through stronger local communities for example, better insulated homes, more vibrant local economies, more local production and consumption.

ENDS

Launch of Transition Town Mayfield

Thursday 12 June 2008, 7.30pm – 9pm

Memorial Hall, Mayfield, East Sussex TN20 6EH