Interview with Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement

The starting point of the transition movement five years ago was the climate crisis and the end of the era of cheap oil. Since then, crisis is followed by crisis.

Rob Hopkins: It has already been some time that people like the Irish geologist Colin Campbell and the American journalist Richard Heinberg have shown the relation between cheap energy, debts, and the culture of consumption. Today all these things come together as a ‘perfect storm’. We find ourselves at the top of the oil curve where we will bounce up and down for a little while longer before the curve plummets.

Because the economy cannot bear the high price it will fall, causing growth to accelerate a bit. But once the oil price rises again, we will hit a recession. In the meantime, the debt burden grows. Those three crises — climate change, peak oil (the point where half of the petroleum reserves have been pumped up and extraction becomes more difficult adw) and the economic crisis — announce themselves on their own rhythm. We’re at the end of a big party, and now we’re stuck with the mess.

Nevertheless, the only concern seems to be to move the machinery up a gear once again.

Rob Hopkins: Everyone keeps being stuck with these growth terms. When I give a presentation, I tell the public: “The next half hour for once we will not assume that the economy will grow.” But for people it is very difficult to acknowledge that. A financial expert predicted recently on the BBC that the whole store is tumbling down, that all stocks will soon be evaporated, and that the institutions we are looking at to save it all will have to watch it happen, helplessly.

The current crisis is, for a large part, the fault of the reckless behaviour of banks and governments. What the banking industry has done to common people is criminal. The persons responsible have to be taken to account for that. We have to confront them. But at the same time, we have to take the lead in the search for solutions. While governments claim that peak oil is not a problem and that within two years, we will once more get economic growth on a roll, we at the basis are considering the question: What if that is not the case? What are our plans for the future?

A central concept of yours is resilience. What exactly is that?

Rob Hopkins: Resilience works on different levels and runs through all those crises of global warming, peak oil, and economic recession. The beautiful thing is that it concerns something that we can take into our own hands. It is about the ability to withstand shocks. In the context of transition it means, in part, the relocalisation of parts of the economy. Supermarkets are completely dependent on a chain of supply that becomes ever more fragile. To reduce that dependency is to become more resilient. But it is also about the development of new competencies, job creation, breathing new life into your region. The motivation is not only driven by a threat, it is also an extraordinary opportunity to breathe new life in your environment.

What findings do surface after five years of the transition movement?

Rob Hopkins: At the end of October the second transition handbook got published. It looks back and gives lots of local examples. When we first started, no one knew what transition was, and even today it is still an experiment. In the first handbook we talked about the twelve steps a group must run through for it to function well, but we see that many do not follow that process. It is rather like cooking with the ingredients you find in your home. Every group finds its own way. You look at who the people in your environment are and what they are passionate about.

At some places, initiatives have sprung up that can make a real difference. For example, Transition Bath has started an energy project of the community. The group has budgeted €12.5 million to develop renewable energy in five years time. Every year the project will generate about €400,000, with which new transition projects can be created in the city. In Brixton, a city of one and a half million inhabitants, the transition group launched a Brixton-pound based on mobile telecommunications. Even in the favelas of São Paulo transition groups are active. That is really exciting.

Food production forms a spearhead of the transition movement. Vegetable gardens become every day more popular.

Rob Hopkins: A group can come up with the plan to build a windmill, but the completion can take at least five years. To develop an eco-village takes ten year. A vegetable garden is something very concrete to realise with a group and you can start with it tomorrow. You also get a quick result. Sometimes people get a real fright when they think of a future with sky-high oil prices. But if you look to projects of agriculture in the city, that future already looks a lot less frightening. It helps people to form an image of what such a low carbon society can look like.

How do such cute initiatives relate to the gravity of the problems? Don’t we need solutions on a higher level?

Rob Hopkins: We need localisation and resilience on all levels. National governments, local councils, and local groups have to set a clear objective for themselves. At the moment, however, we see that work on alternatives is mainly done by local groups — the establishment keeps begging for economic growth. The local level is where the exciting stuff is happening today.

At some locations this happens on a small scale, at others on a larger scale. When we started with transition in Totnes, I also saw it as a process concerning environmental awareness, but in reality it is a cultural process. It is about changing a culture and changing the stories people tell each other.

In Brazil, transition groups have trained people after the mudslides caused by heavy rainfall. New Zealand suffered the earthquake in Christchurch, and there too transition groups were involved intensely in the reconstruction. In Japan too, after Fukushima, transition groups were involved in what had to happen. Sometimes it seems as if you are only a small group and you don’t matter much, but you never know where the tipping point lies, and what impact you have. A different story inspires people, whereas for politicians it is very difficult to achieve that result.