19 May The Transition Movement
“Hope with its sleeves rolled up.”
THE BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT
When Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement, returned from the south of Ireland where he taught permaculture at a college for ten years, he decided to start an experiment. In 2005, together with a group of friends in Totnes, they explored what they could do as ordinary people living in ordinary places, relying solely on the resources and people around them.
With large-scale environmental destruction and global climate change becoming of increasing concern, Hopkins and his friends were not prepared to wait for government action. On the phone to me one day, he said: “If we wait for the government it will be too late, if we try to do it on our own it will be too little, and if we work together with the people around us it might just be enough, and it might just be in time.”
This thinking is what led to the birth of the Transition Movement in 2006 – a movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world.
Hopkins believes these two parts – reimagine and rebuild – are extremely important because the movement can’t function unless both are active. Reimagining, for example, is important because it creates spaces for people to meet, consider the challenges and question, based on the opportunities available, how to act. Rebuilding, on the other hand, is vital because if we just sit around and imagine things all day that’s no use to anybody. It’s extremely practical.
These acts range from small things like planting trees or building community gardens, to bigger things like entire cities reimagining their food systems. Hopkins told me someone once called it “hope with its sleeves rolled up.”
Hopkins had always been interested in politics and radical ideas in youth, but not so much in the environment. This changed when he was twenty and visited a place called the Hunza Valley in Pakistan. The people were “the happiest he had ever come across.”
He described seeing an intact and incredibly resilient food economy in the mountains, set up on terraces. It got him thinking about what it would be like to live in a place like that. This experience set him off learning about permaculture, reading everything he could and completing a degree in sustainability. “It kind of took over my life and Transition was kind of an evolution from that.”
He moved back to the UK and set up Transition Towns Totnes, based very much around empowering and supporting people to do things. Word spread and it quickly grew into a larger network of Transition Towns (TT) called Transition Network, a charity which supports the spread of TT around the world, producing films, materials, books and other resources for those wishing to start their own.
“It’s always been an experiment,” he said. “Nobody knows how to do this but if enough people in enough places are trying to figure it out and share what they learn then maybe we will.”
He quickly discovered that the art of good storytelling is fundamental in bringing ideas to life. It’s what some researchers call “creating memories of the future” – brining alive a multi-sensory vision of what the future could be like by talking about it explicitly. It’s a powerful way to work with people because, as Hopkins said, “many people feel so lost and so starved of any sense of where to go from here. They find it hard to imagine anything other than business as usual.” In this sense, they open up spaces for those discussions and turn those imaginings into action. “They start to manifest in the world now how the future could be, without waiting for anyone’s permission, on small scales or on large.”
Another important realisation was that to sustain momentum over periods and extend these projects to the wider world, the movement needs to think like entrepreneurs. He likened it to the cooperative movement which he says, “grew because twenty years after it was created, it provided thousands of jobs for people.” In terms of how we build new economies for the future, “Transition certainly needs to do the same.”
THE TRANSITION
Hilary Jennings is a resident and co-creator of Transition Towns Tooting in London. Ten years ago, after returning from a Transition course in Totnes, a friend of hers decided to set something up in Tooting and Jennings quickly jumped on board.
At the time, environmental awareness was not as widespread as today and so the main focus was finding people in the area who were also concerned. Following the guidance provided by the Transition Network, a group of residents met regularly and began to build from there.
For eight years they have run a community garden, teaching people how to grow food and inviting schools to do short courses. They also run an annual food festival which celebrates locally grown and cooked food. On March 01, Transition Towns Tooting hosted a Community Garden Seed and Plant Swap, a public event to get Tooting ready for the growing season.
Becky Howarth, one of the residents who coordinates the garden, radiates enthusiasm as she speaks about the movement: “It is like a colourful thread which weaved through many people in communities across the UK, creating an incredibly rich and strong fabric. It somehow connects a multitude of people through common values – sustainability, connectivity and a love for the prefix ‘re’,” she told me. “It represents an important alternative to a world of divisions and climate catastrophe.”
She tells me about the community garden which has been fantastically run over the past nine years – “it’s creative, inclusive, very community-centric, improves the livelihoods of many people and has sustainability at its core. Why wouldn’t you want to be involved in something like that?” And she’s right. Why wouldn’t we?
The community also run film screenings and host all kinds of awareness-raising events. There’s a regular repair cafe which is connected with an international movement of fixing called Restart. They also work with a refugee group locally and do loads of projects in schools.
The kind of projects found in each Transition group varies significantly as they often reflect where they are based. Local food in Tooting, for example, looks very different from the kind of stuff you’d find in a small rural town elsewhere.
“I think anyone who says there’s only one approach that’s going to solve climate change is wrong, it needs everything at every level. It needs government policy, it needs individuals, it needs professionals, industry needs to do things differently, and one of those elements is that people need to do things differently at a local scale,” said Jennings.
She describes the movement as a “grassroots approach to sustainability,” making a change in the way you live. They connect people by building community networks and experiment with a range of responses that can be replicated in different places around the world, a kind of “experimentation network” that shows how things can be done.
“I think there’s an overall sense of hopelessness but when people see small changes locally that are noticeable, some go ‘ok I can see how that change might happen’ and so they contribute to the overall change we need.”
