Transition Towns and Rob Hopkins

rociera — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:31:57 -0700

Hello to everybody from sunny Italy. No doubt you are all aware of the Transition movement and the rapid progress it has made in the UK (if you haven't got The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins - already in its third print since March - get it). Below are parts of a recent interview I did with Rob Hopkins that may interest you. We her at Torri Superiore ecolvillage are beginning the process of becoming a Transition Initiative and I recommend all in the re-localization movement to look in to it. It's so far proved a powerful and flexible model to get people engaged in the peak oil/climate change debate.....ciao
Simon

Rob:
There are some very interesting things happening in terms of regional authorities who are starting to look to support Transition projects on a regional scale[look at what Somerset council just did - http://transitionculture.org/2008/07/28/something-wonderful-just-happened-in-somerset/]. We are seeing town councils getting very involved and supporting their local Transition Initiative. I think that some of the more enlightened politicians out there are very aware of the challenges that peak oil and climate change present but what they lack is a mandate for the things that need to be done. A lot of the things that they need to do are electorally potentially quite unpopular. We are looking at carbon rationing. We are looking at the kind of responses that are actually going to be effective. When they[politicians] plan for the future they always start out by drawing a graph of economic growth which goes up as it moves to the right and even the British government has said a couple of weeks ago weeks ago that - at a time when oil is at nearly $140 a barrel- their forecasts are that oil will cost $65 a barrel in 2010 and $67 a barrel in 2020. So what transition projects can do is create a ground swell and a mandate which can enable those local authorities to do what they really need to do.

Me- You mentioned resilience there. Resilience is a key concept in transition towns. Can you explain how it applies to community’s their surrounding bio-region?

The way that we use resilience is the way it is used in the study of ecology. It refers to the ability of an ecosystem or a component of an ecosystem to withstand shock from the outside. So if a forest has a fire or if a disease goes through an ecosystem then it is able to adapt and respond and flex and not just fall to bits and crumble to dust. In the UK during the 1940s – 50s we had a much more resilient economy. We had a strong local food culture, we had a lot of businesses owned by local people, and so if supplies stopped coming in from the outside we could provide the bulk of what we needed. Now we have really dismantled that. The supermarkets only have about a days’ worth of food in them at any one time. The local food supplies which did feed everybody have been really devalued and rubbished and largely dismantled. So the concept of resilience is – and I think that peak oil is a very useful lens to look at this through – is how do we rebuild that resilience. It’s not about being self-sufficient, its about being self reliant. It’s about making communities more modular so that they can supply their core needs but they are all still linked into each other. But they are linked to each other as self reliant individuals rather than co-dependent or mutually dependant. Because shock can sweep through a system like that much quicker than it can through a modular system.

Me - With your permaculture background, the transition movement has been heavily influenced by permaculture thinking. What other movements have influenced transition towns?

Rob - The thing that really struck me was that with the work of David Holmgren, who is the co-founder of permaculture, he wrote a book a couple of years ago which put permaculture back in the context of oil depletion. He argued that Permaculture was the design tool for a post oil society. The design principles in there would underpin how we would do things. It is quite the most brilliant book. But when I read that and got my head around the scale of what peak oil meant and then you look at where the permaculture movement is and it’s still a very small movement. I think as much as anything that the Transition movement is kind of a Trojan horse within which the permaculture principles can be passed on to people. Permaculture is something which is very hard to explain in a snappy sentence without getting out a flip chart and drawing pictures of chickens and greenhouses whereas transition is much, much easier to explain. Although it is underpinned with all those principles, they are implicit rather than explicit.

Me - Transition initiatives are based on 4 key assumptions, the third of which is ‘that we have to act collectively, and we have to act now’. You just mentioned the increasing price of food, with the ever increasing price of oil and flood of ever worse environmental news, are you hopeful that we can in fact act fast enough?

Rob - That’s a kind of ‘am I an optimist or a pessimist?’ question really, which always strikes me as a bit of a redundant question, because all of us flip 100’s of times everyday. There’s a guy called Tom Atley in America who talks about the importance of focusing on possibilities instead of probabilities. We can focus on probabilities, things like what is the % chance of such and such a climate at such and such a time. But looking at possibilities is a shift in thinking, we can look at all the things we can create by this time. One can invest so much emotional energy in ‘are we going to make it or not?’ but it doesn’t actually help ones work at all.
I have no idea. I do this work, and other people all over the world do this work because it feels like the right thing to do at this time. And actually, even if it doesn’t work, I would like to be able to visit my grandchildren and tell them that I did everything that I could. I think that’s something other people would like to say also. I think if we are going to get through it – and I don’t for a moment think that Transition is the only tool or way that we will manage that – I think that any approach that does get us through it will have a lot of the ingredients that we have been developing. We are only going to get through it if we can deal with the sense of powerlessness which is created by the way that a lot of the information is presented. People have to feel that this is the most amazing historical opportunity do to something really quite extraordinary and I think that’s what we are trying to cultivate.

Me-Do you see the momentum of the Transition movement in the UK spreading as quickly in continental Europe and the States?

Rob - Yes. I think what’s really important is that basically what we have developed is a simple set of tools, simple principles, and then it is something that then has to bend down to that cultural context in its own way. It’s not a prescriptive kind of thing saying that you have to do this and you have to do that. What’s really important is that it is translated so it doesn’t feel like it’s something which has been imported from somewhere else. We are doing a German translation of the transition primer, and a French one and an Italian one coming I think. We are trying to get as many different language translations of the primer done and out into the world and make it so that it develops the flavor of where it is. In that context there is no reason it can’t go anywhere really, although it does tend to be something which is more appropriate to developed nations because in developing nations (although I hate those 2 terms) - in places like India and China, a lot of the drive is to stop the erosion of what resilience remains and to revalue that, in the face of the incredible push towards the free market model. Whereas here it’s more about starting to put resilience back again. One thing we are looking at is to set up a system of twinning between transition projects here and transition projects in the developing world so it also starts to send a message back of ‘don’t throw all that away’, to say that it is really precious and valuable.

Torri Superiore

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Transition Towns and Rob Hopkins