Rob Hopkins is founder of Transition Network, "an evolving exploration into the head, heart and hands of energy descent." He is considered the founder of the Transition movement, and TED: Ideas Worth Spreading called his work "a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel." Hopkins teaches permaculture and natural building, and established the first two-year full-time permaculture course in the world, at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland. He is author of several books, including Energy Descent Pathways and The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. His blog has been voted one of the top green blogs in the United Kingdom, and recently Hopkins was named by The Independent newspaper as one of the U.K.'s top 100 environmentalists. Hopkins lectures and writes widely on peak oil and Transition. He lives in Devon, England, and is a keen gardener.
So you're wrapping up your PhD thesis?
I'm finished! What I'm working on at the moment is the next edition of The Transition Handbook.
How many editions have you done so far of that book?
My book, The Transition Handbook, was published about three years ago. This [new] book is going to be called The Transition Companion, and it's kind of the sequel, so it's a completely rewritten book.
When will The Transition Companion come out? Will it be available through your website, TransitionCulture.org?
It will be out in September 2011, all being well. TransitionCulture.org is a place where you can buy all the Transition books; and you'll be able to get it from Amazon and in good, old-fashioned bookshops, as they say.
I noticed on your website that, for your new book, you've been seeking comments about Transition concepts and initiatives; you have a wiki-like concept developing, and you're getting comments from people around the world and incorporating them into the discussion.
Yes, that's very much how this new book has been done. People were invited to participate. I put drafts to all the different elements of the new book up on the website, and people picked them and wrote all over them, and that's really shaped what this book's going to be. So I had lots of people sending in their stories and their photos and posters, and all kinds of things.
How many places around the world now are in various stages of being part of your Transition Network?
In terms of formal Transition initiatives that have registered and gone through the process to say "we are Transition 'wherever,'" there's about 350 to 360. But in terms of informal Transition initiatives, we think there's that many again, and probably quite a few more than double that.
Wow. I talked with Carolyn Stayton, the Director of Transition U.S., who's based in California.
Okay! Yeah, yeah, yeah!
She has amazing energy. She was jazzed from a reskilling workshop they had just done in California. And she's amazingly positive. One thing that impresses me about what you're doing with Transition is your whole focus on the positive-the optimistic aspect to the changes that we need to make.
Yes, I think that's an integral part of it-the idea that you don't really get very far by telling everybody there isn't any hope. One of the things I do is "engaged optimism," and when that's applied in practice, it has been something really exciting to see.
Have you got a skill that you've developed in terms of this reskilling concept? Have you learned anything new?
Yeah, how to write books!
In terms of the practices and engagement of Transition-type concepts, you've been to the Findhorn ecovillage in Scotland, I take it?
Yes, a couple of times.
In terms of what Findhorn is doing: are they completely self-sufficient energy-wise? How are they operating? Are they completely powering themselves just on renewables?
They don't have their own grid, so what energy they are generating is fed into the National Grid. It doesn't come straight to them. And as far as I am aware, they don't have electric vehicles so they are still using liquid fuels for vehicles. But there was a survey done a while ago which said Findhorn had one of the lowest carbon footprints in Western Europe. And they do do a lot of amazing stuff there. It's an extraordinary place.
Is Findhorn one of the first places you knew about that tried to operate an entire village sustainably? Isn't it one of the first places in the West to try to do that kind of thing?
Yes, but I think there is something quite distinct from what they are doing and what Transition is all about. Because, in effect, Findhorn was a group of people that decided they wanted to kind of sidestep mainstream society and create a kind of parallel eco-village. And so Findhorn has been a kind of laboratory for [putting] sustainability in practice over a long time, so the people there have very good experience in growing food and sustainable building and treating wastewater, and all that kind of stuff.
But Findhorn is quite different in some ways from Transition, because Transition is really about starting the process where people already are. It's isn't about saying all the people can go off and find a piece of ground somewhere and build their own utopian eco-village. Transition is really about working where people are. So sometimes you have ecovillages who say "What we are doing is Transition," and there is a kind of interesting discussion there about that. Really, eco-villages like Findhorn have been-for a long time-a kind of laboratory for a lot of the things Transition is trying to embed in more mainstream settings with a great sense of urgency.
That makes perfect sense. I live in Upstate New York, which is an area where you kind of can separate yourself out and set up a private eco-village or a compound or something, but it's not practical in a lot of ways. There are so many people in so many areas where they need to Transition-they're not able to just pack up and go to the commune.
Yes, absolutely.
Is there anything you can say that would apply particularly to New York City?
At Transition Network, we always say we have cheerful disclaimer: We don't know if this works, we have no guarantee that this works, and really, Transition is an invitation to be part of an experiment on an historic scale with people all around the world who are trying to figure out what to do at this really crucial point in history. People all over are trying to figure out how to make the places we live more resilient and less vulnerable.
What that will look like in New York will look very different than the way it will look anywhere else. And increasingly it feels like the scale in places like New York is overwhelming. If someone asks, "How can we do Transition New York?" it's such a mind-boggingly vast kind of scale to work on, and most people would not even start.
In big-carbon-footprint nations, Transition seems to be working best on a neighborhood scale. So rather than looking at New York as one big city, it's more about looking at New York as thousands of neighborhoods with identifiable cultures, with identifiable boundaries, and with identifiable identities. That's the scale that you can at least start working at, and that's the scale you can gain traction a lot quicker. You can get things going on the ground with people when they can start to see it and start to be inspired by it and then maybe at some point down the line there would be many of them all across New York doing really interesting things and sharing all the things they are doing. And actually then a network called Transition New York might rise in order to support the work that all those neighborhood groups are doing. And that's certainly what's happened here in the U.K. After three or four years of Transition, there are now about 40 different Transition initiatives across London. And they have been talking about creating something called Transition London as a network so they can avoid reinventing the wheel and share their stories with each other.
Wow, that's amazing. I love your idea about Transitioning big cities neighborhood by neighborhood. It makes so much sense. It's interesting because within each borough of New York City, there are these little already distinct pockets where it could blossom in its own way.
Absolutely. In London they are doing some fantastic stuff. So The Transition Companion book will have lots of those stories all sprinkled all through it.
Paul McGinniss, "The Green Advocate," is a columnist for www.newyorkhousemagazine.com. You can read more about green building and the sustainability movement on his blog: www.thenewyorkgreenadvocate.blogspot.com. Paul is also active in the green real estate movement and works in New York as a real estate broker and green building and renovation consultant: www.paulemcginniss.com
Comments, Pingbacks:
No Comments/Pingbacks for this post yet...
This post has 12 feedbacks awaiting moderation...
