Transition Town Wellington have become well known locally for their work toward making our town more environmentally friendly and sustainable. From planting a forest garden on the 8.5 acre Fox's Field site, to improving conditions for wildlife, the environmental group have undertaken a number of projects.

As well as earning them praise locally, their ambitious project has been noticed more widely, with their Fox's Field venture being picked up by the Guardian newspaper in January. The Wellington Weekly spoke to Transition Town Wellington about their vision for the future.

Helen Gillingham, the treasurer for Transition Town Wellington helped form the group in 2008 after going to see a film about the Cuban Oil Crisis. She said: "I was there from the start. What appealed to me is it was the answer to everything I as moaning at like the fact we have such a throwaway society and we don’t speak to our neighbours anymore and why cant we fix things that are broken and why does our food fly from paces all over the world. I’ve been really concerned about climate change since I was about 17 18 and learning about it at school and wondering why nobody else was really paying attention to it when it seems to be a life or death situation."

The group are appealing for fresh volunteers as they look to expand their operations. Helen said: "We're carrying on with the projects we are doing, there’s not a lot of awful lot of more projects we can do without new leaders in the group. We’re not quite as big as some people think we are. We definitely need more volunteers, and people wanting to lead as well – there’s so much more we could do if we had more people. It would be good if everybody was involved doing something, we want to transition the whole town and get everybody onboard."

Asked about her vision for the future of Wellington, Helen said: "I think it would be a better public transport service, co-cars where you have electric cars that are shared as part of a club where people don’t have to own their own cars and they can be hired for a couple of hours. Growing vegetables and community spaces, Asda carpark used to be a market garden for instance.

"There are these great areas of concrete that would be transformed if they weren’t needed for cars. Solar panels on all the roofs, that big dream stuff.  For more people to grow their own veg, for their to be fruit trees around the corner from their house, the thought of how the future could look when you open your eyes and mind to what it could be like, if we were to work together more as a community – and we have a every good friendly community in Wellington – to have a society where we support local businesses and each other more.

"Until people realise the severity of the situation and that climate change is upon us and that if we don’t change our ways we're going to know about it soon. The thing about Transition Town is to make a vision of what the world could be like if we pulled our fingers and dealt with it now. 

"We could live in a really lovely world that has beautiful countryside, fresh gorgeous food that tastes a hell of a lot better, home cooking and all those things – the thought that the future doesn’t have to be rubbish, but if we don’t change it will be."

Helen has a message for those who weren't onboard with moving toward a carbon neutral future: "It is very difficult to convince people that don’t believe in climate change but the scientists are now 100% agreed apart from a few conspiracy theorists that it is happening.

"We’ve got to do something to make ourselves more resilient if we want to carry on having a comfortable life with all the food, amenities, activities and happiness that we enjoy at the moment. I think we’ll have more happiness if we didn’t put so much emphasis on consuming and working so hard to buy endless amounts of crap – we could have a better life if we focus more on our community and our town. We need to waste less."