The threat of climate change, dwindling oil supplies, and a twitchy global economy might appear to be vast global issues beyond our control, but the power to take them on lies at home – in our local communities.
That’s the premise of a grass-roots localisation movement that has grown around the world since it took off in the UK five years ago.
In those five years, founder of the “Transition movement” Rob Hopkins says it has not only produced countless local economic and ecological innovations, but also rekindled the sense of community all-too-often eroded over recent decades.
From setting up local currencies in London, creating a community-owned solar power station in Suffolk, to providing renewable local street-lamp gas in Worcestershire, and perfecting methods of draft-proofing Victorian buildings, each initiative is tailored to its own challenges and resources.
At the heart of the movement is the notion that cheap oil has created unsustainable and unhealthy economic anomalies that will collapse as oil supplies drop – the Peak Oil theory. According to the theory, the effects will begin to unleash not as oil supplies dry up, but as the peak production passes, leaving communities high and dry unless they have already made the “transition” to a stable localised economy, hence the name “Transition movement”.
Hopkins often uses the example of the exporting and importing of potatoes.
“Every year the UK exports 1.5 million kilos of potatoes to Germany, and every year the UK imports 1.5 kilos of potatoes from Germany. I’ve never been able to distinguish between a German potato and a British one. I’m sure Germany does nice potatoes but so does Devon. If we just kept those ourselves, there are all kinds of economic and social benefits there,” he explains.
Without the availability of cheap fuel in abundance, such a situation makes no economic sense, says Hopkins.
“It’s taken an enormous amount of cheap energy to live on a street and not know anyone who lives on the street – and I think we are all the worse for it.”
He says that their research suggests that a lot of places could ultimately supply up to about 80 per cent of food and building materials locally.
The movement has so far generated 950 registered Transition groups in 34 countries, although the UK still leads the pack. Hopkins says it is hard to translate this into total numbers of people involved. Membership of some Transition groups might number in the dozens, others in their hundreds, and events organised by Transition groups can number in the thousands and spill over into many other community initiatives and even activities of the local council.
Hopkins’ first book, published four years ago when the movement was in its infancy, sold 25,000 copies.
Last week Hopkins published his second book, called The Transition Companion, which charts the growth of the movement and the experiences accumulated over the last five years.
Read on TV personality and champion of sustainable living Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal
TV personality and champion of sustainable living Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes in the foreword to the book: “Rob argues that a Transition community never will, or should, look quite the same twice – and in that flexibility lies the strength of this movement.
“He makes the wholly convincing point that community strategies to tackle peak oil, climate change, and all the other pressing environmental issues that face us should emerge organically from the community itself, rather than being imposed from the top down.
“It’s a vital insight of the movement that this kind of bottom-up process is far more likely to result in real change that is rooted in local knowledge, creativity, and passion. It’s what gives Transition its enduring resonance and relevance.”
This expanding patchwork of different creative responses to the challenges of moving to localised economies is the heart of the movement says Hopkins. Sometimes the work of one Transition town can provide a blueprint for others, but there isn’t an overly prescriptive approach, precisely because every place is different.
Hopkins says that the movement doesn’t offer new groups a set of rigid solutions, but rather invites them to join the process of learning and answering challenges together. “We’ve always seen it and framed it as an experiment,” he says.
One such successful experiment was with the Transition movement in Lewes Suffolk. “They raised £350,000 in a share option to turn the roof of the local brewery into the nation’s first community-owned solar power station,” says Hopkins, adding that the brewery created a special beer, Harveys Sunshine Ale, in celebration.
In the town of Malvern, the local Transition initiative decided to tackle the street-lighting – composed of costly and inefficient listed gas-lamps – and made it more efficient and sustainable. They figured out how to improve the efficiency, running on 80 per cent less gas, and are now setting up the production of sustainable gas to power them.
But the secret to the success of so many Transition projects, and the draw to the public is not in their shining eco-credentials, or even economic viability, but their power to unite the community, says Hopkins.
“The thing that comes through in all of those projects is that the projects are almost secondary. They are the vehicle for bringing people together again,” says Hopkins.
Read on He gives the example of a local initiative in his own town involving 500 houses
He gives the example of a local initiative in his own town involving 500 houses working towards reducing their energy emissions, which he says brought neighbours together who had never spoken before. While they did reduce their emissions, it wasn’t the thing everyone talked about.
“No one says, ‘It’s so great, I’ve cut my carbon emissions by 1.3 tonnes’. What people are excited about is ’I now know Sandra over the road and Dave down the end'.
“When we started out in 2005, we saw it as an environmental process, but increasingly I really think of it as being a cultural process and about how you shift a culture of a place or community so that it’s best prepared for uncertainty.”
He says people don’t join the movement because they necessarily buy into the Peak Oil argument or worry about climate change; the movement is multi-faceted, he says, offering a solution to a clutch of issues.
“People feel massive change is going on all around. They feel that they don’t really have much influence over those things, they feel increasingly isolated from the other people around them. Even if Peak Oil isn’t an issue or it doesn’t excite you, or you don’t believe in climate change or something like that, then it isn’t a barrier.”
With the growth of the movement has come a change in social make-up of the groups. Some of the vanguard Transition towns such as Stroud and Totnes appear to represent more the alternative sandal-toting, organic cafe brigade. But while Hopkins concedes the movement in the earlier stages perhaps attracted more from the “alternative” towns and communities, he says that increasingly it is changing.
“Sometimes they are the kind of people who might be more likely to set up the local Rotary Club, or some kind of business groups. Certainly here in Totnes when our focus shifted to the idea of economic development, and social development, a whole new tranche of people came in.”
The focus on the economy since the global crash in 2008 has strengthened the work of the movement around the social and economic aspect of localisation, according to Hopkins.
“That’s one of the things Transition will really be judged on – the degree to which it is able to create local employment, local livelihoods.”
While smaller towns like Totnes might seem more obvious candidates for Transition, the cities haven’t been left behind.
Read on Some things are easier to achieve in the cities
Some things are easier to achieve in the cities, some things easier in smaller towns, says Hopkins.
“The way it works in cities is at the neighbourhood scale – there are about 40 Transition groups across London.”
He says the lack of land in cities makes some things much harder to do, but other things like local currencies tend to do better in the cities.
“The Brixton pound is the most exciting alternative currency. They’ve just launched a new system where you can pay with your phone.”
The movement might be generating a sense of community that was once all too common a few decades ago, but it isn’t harking back to the local communities and economies of the past.
“There is no way that you can go back even if you wanted to,” says Hopkins. “What we do challenge is the notion of the chronological snobbery – that idea that everything before now was rubbish and we are the best it’s ever been in every regard. But we don’t romanticise some kind of past where postmen were nice to everyone and everyone had roses growing over their doors.”
Hopkins says that we have to be open to the possibilities that people in the past had wisdom and insight we can learn from.
He cites the case of the first sail-powered commercial freight operator, which set sail from the British port of Brixham in October.
“A lot of people would see it as ‘going back’ but actually it is an incredibly skilful, brilliant way of moving stuff around. Because of the high price of fuel and the recession, all the diesel freight is having to go 30 per cent slower. The fuel they use on cargo ships is so filthy they aren’t allowed to use it on land. Then you kind of think – well, actually, which is the most important to go forward with?”
Local councils themselves cannot start up a Transition project or gain some kind of Transition status. The Transition movement remains a grass-roots campaign that must be initiated by regular people. But local Transition projects are encouraged to work with councils and other community organisations.
There are many examples of councils supporting Transition initiatives, says Hopkins.
“Bristol council were the first town to produce a Peak Oil Plan for the city, which was done with Transition Bristol and then led on to a local food plan for Bristol. Nottingham council passed a Peak Oil resolution working with Transition Nottingham, which has underpinned a lot of what they’ve done since.”
But the Transition movement was never created to rely on the actions of local councils, rather as a way to bypass governments and authorities dragging their heels on climate change and sustainability.
“If we wait for the governments, it‘ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time,” says Hopkins.
