'Transition Town' is an initiative that has arisen from peak oil and climate change concerns.
In a nutshell, it is change at a community level, a transition away from oil dependency to alternative fuels, but more than that too.
So far in New Zealand, just a handful of towns are taking the idea seriously. Campbell Live went to one - Raglan.
Welcome to Solscape, motel accommodation in Raglan. What makes it different is the way it is powered.
"This section is off the grid, and we've installed solar systems and renewable means to operate," says Phil McCabe. He is changing his accommodation business into one that does not rely entirely on oil.
"A stream is what we use for water, and we heat through solar, minimising our impact and being aware of what we leave behind."
At a public meeting a year ago, Mr McCabe put forward the idea that Raglan should minimise its oil dependency. It fuelled genuine change.
So when will the price of oil get too high, and when it does, how will you fill up your car, warm your house or provide food for the table? In Raglan they are not waiting to find out – they are finding their own renewable energies.
Raglan is only one of 100 transition towns in the world, and one of seven in New Zealand.
The movement was founded in Britain three years ago by environmentalist aiming to help communities cope with challenges of climate change and peak oil.
"A lot of people are so used to getting food from the supermarket and they not aware of where its comes from, how to grow it, how far it's come and our food supply is actually quite precarious," says gardener Liz Stanway. "With these big shocks to financial systems or oil supply, our supermarkets would probably run out of food in two days."
Ms Stanway believes in the transition town concept, and is working to change the way people think about food.
And her gardens do not just provide food - they also provide an education for people wanting to learn how to feed themselves from the land.
"We've got to look at other methods of growing food, and we've got to look at not bringing it from such far away places," she says.
Which leads us to transport. Just how does a remote town like Raglan do without imported fuels?
Waste educator Simon Thompson is finding alternatives for the road.
"We're a round planet," he says. "If you step back a little bit, the kind of concept that we can keep stepping back into another place each time we soil our nest in the last one is over, so a lot of these products are also peaking. Silver, nickel, a lot of the things we take for granted."
And then there is the question of waste.
The town rubbish dump is now a recycling station turning over $1 million a year.
"One of our aims is to be using these materials locally," says Mr Thompson. "Xtreme Waste has captured and cleaned these streams of materials and that's something we can do here."
So that is food production, transport and waste. Then there is building construction.
Paul Peterson has been working on affordable and renewable housing. The idea is to create houses using less energy, less toxic materials with simpler eco designs.
Being good to the planet does not mean the designs have to be 'hippy'.
"We're using modern concepts and modern tech to assist that," says Mr Peterson. "We have a lot of earth build homes, and the council and inspectors are coming up to speed with the tech and some have travelled to learn about the technologies of earth build hosing."
Everyone involved in the Raglan project is aware self-sustainability won't come overnight. Change will be slow, but that is why they are called a transition town.