My Town in Transition: Rob Hopkins at TEDxExeter

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. Through speaking, teaching, and writing, he has introduced the idea of making the places we live more resilient, robust, and imaginative in increasingly uncertain times through intentional effort at the community level. The Transition Town movement, which Rob originally started in Totnes, England, has now spread to hundreds of towns across thirty-four countries.

Hello, I want to tell you a story which pulls together

a lot of what we've heard already

and looks at what that might look like

in the context of one place.

And it's a story which I think

can change the world.

It's a story which already is

changing the world.

It's the story of my town of Totnes in Devon.

A town of about 8,500 people,

midway between Exeter and Plymouth.

But before I can tell you the story

I really want to tell you about Totnes,

I have to get another one out of the way first.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Totnes was once referred to as the "Capital of New Age Chic"

That's "chic" not "sheep".

The idea of a "Capital of New Age Sheep" is too horrible to imagine.

The Western Morning News, the local paper,

in an article which I'll be coming back to later,

once referred to the average resident of Totnes

as a "sandle wearing, crystal gazing, soap carver

subsisting entirely on brown rice and organic parsnips".

(Laughter)

And Matt Harvey, our local poet, says that

when you've lived there too long

your body starts to secrete a hormone

called "Totnesterone" where your male --

where your masculine and feminine come

into perfect balance with each other.

(Laughter) (Applause)

But I think it is really important that we move

beyond the stereotypes of the town

into another story that is happening there,

which I think is really, really important.

Totnes has a much higher than the national average number of families

depending on part time work rather than full time work,

has 50% more families living below £20,000 a year

than the national average, very high house prices,

and has seen most of its industry, most of its employment

shut down over the last 15-20 years.

The bacon factory, the milk factory, the art college,

to a point where the local businessman and historian,

Walter King talks about whether what we're seeing is

"the long slow death of Totnes

as a living working town, gathering pace".

And it's that story, that context that I really want to talk about.

My roll in this, I suppose, started in 2005,

when a friend and myself started showing some films

about peak oil, about the idea that we are reaching

the end of the age of cheap energy

and all that that has made possible.

We're entering a time of increasingly volatile energy prices

and that what we need to do with focus, determination,

optimism and a sense of possibility

is design a way that we're going to get away from that.

Same in terms of addressing climate change.

This is the very first talk that I gave in the town

and it's a story that has started to build from that point.

Because ultimately there is no cavalry coming to the rescue

of places like Totnes, of most places where you live.

The current economic situation,

these kind of issues around peak oil and climate change

what we really need to do, I would argue,

is to harness, engage the collective genius

of the people around us and focus on these challenges,

seeing them as an enormous opportunity

to be more brilliant than we've ever been,

to do something which is really, really historic.

What I want is to show you a very short little animation

from the film that we've just released called "In Transition 2.0"

which hopefully captures, rather creatively, how transition approaches

making change happen on the ground.

(Video): You can think of the economy of the place

that you live as being like a big bucket.

And into that bucket go pensions, wages, grants and so on.

But at the moment things like supermarkets,

paying our electricity bills, internet, shopping

are all drilling holes into that bucket that means

that our accumulated wealth and its potential

are just draining away.

And everywhere that there's a leak, in that bucket,

is a potential local livelyhood, potential local business,

or training opportunity for young people.

So things like supporting community energy companies,

supporting local food where it's available

and boosting that where it isn't

and using local currencies are all very skillful ways

of plugging the leaks in that bucket.

Rob Hopkins: So from quite early on of doing Transition Town Totnes,

as it started to be known, we had a big event called

"The Unleashing" which was our launch event

and then very quickly projects started going.

People were excited, they were inspired,

they wanted to see things happen where they were.

There were projects like the nut tree planting scheme

where we wanted to plant productive trees through out the town.

There are now 250 planted, looked after by people

who were close to them.

A lot of local businesses pay to have them planted.

And we had our first harvest of almonds

from a park in town last autumn.

The Totnes pound local currency scheme, specifically designed

not to fit out through those holes in the bucket.

Because if you take them anywhere else they're not worth anything.

You can't use local currency, you can't put it in offshore banking accounts.

They are not very useful in the Cayman Islands!

A local food directory so people can identify and support local food businesses.

A co-housing group looking to build affordable

co-housing for people as part of a local development.

Awareness raising things like Open Eco-Homes,

open Edible Gardens where people can go and visit

other people's places where they are already doing that stuff

and learn from it.

The Garden Share scheme where people who have a garden

that they are too elderly or too busy to use,

are matched up with people who want to grow food

and don't have anywhere to grow it.

And that's been going really, really well.

In 2009, when this had been going for about 3 years,

we did a survey and we found that 75% of people in the town

had heard of what we were doing,

62% of the people agreed with it and thought it was a good idea,

and about 30-33% of people had some kind

of engagement with it at some point.

But stories started to reach us of how it was being

picked up in other places. And my favorite was

the daughter of a woman who was very active

in the local churches went on holiday to Canada,

on a canoeing holiday.

She was out in the middle of one of the great lakes

canoeing along, middle of nowhere, sees another canoe

thinks "I'll be sociable, I'll paddle over and say hello."

Paddles over and gets chatting "Where are you from?"

"Oh, I'm from Totnes in Devon."

"Oh, Transition Town Totnes."

And it's amazing how that story has rippled out.

But very quickly we needed to put some foundations under this.

This was something that was starting to grow very very quickly.

A lot of interest both within the place and from outside

people coming along and saying "What do you do?"

"What are you doing? How does that work?"

So Transition Town Totnes was setup

as an organization to offer project support.

It's a 'Do-ocracy', the people who make the decisions

are the people who are doing stuff.

It employs one and a half posts at the moment,

and has brought, we recon, about a million pounds

into the town over the last five years,

and has rapidly become one of the pillars

of local culture, I think.

And when we started doing transition,

I always imagined it was an environmental thing.

Really more and more I see it as being a cultural thing.

How do you change the story of the place where you are?

And within that there's the whole process of

"We can start lots of different projects, but what

does it look like if we start to see them all together,

if we can create a vision, if we can create a story

that the people in the place can start to resonate with,

it starts to make sense."

And we've done 2 things that have been really

sort of strategic pieces around design.

One of them was the Energy Descent Action Plan

which you can find online which involved many

hundreds of people in trying to tell the vision of

what the place could be like if we take Peak Oil, climate change,

our economic situation as a huge opportunity to be brilliant.

And the other one is called Economic Blueprint

that we're doing at the moment which is

actually now the local council's Economic Blueprint.

What's exciting with that is that for the first time that I'm aware of

it's starting to map the potential of the local economy.

What passes through it and how can we start to cycle that more locally

if we can start to plug some of the leaks?

So one of the initial findings for example is

every year the area spends £30 million on food.

£20 million of that goes out through just 2 supermarkets.

If we could start to shift just 10% of that spend to local food,

we brought £2 million pounds into our local economy.

We haven't had to get government grants in,

we haven't had to invite big companies in.

We got £2 million pounds in our economy

for creating skills, trainings, new livelyhoods, new enterprises.

That feels like, to me, like a really big, really important idea of our time.

And one of the projects we did a couple of years ago,

which I think is really, really interesting,

this is us after starting an organization focused

on community responses to Peak Oil and climate change.

It's this thing called "Transition Streets".

Transition streets is based on the idea that maybe change

sticks better if you get together with your neighbors

and it works on a street by street level.

So you get out on your street, you knock on the doors

you get between 6 and 10 people/households together,

and you agree to meet seven times in each other's houses.

You look at water one week.

You look at energy another week.

You look at food another week.

You make pledges at the end of each session

about what you are going to do.

And on average each household that gets involved

cuts their carbon by about 1.3 tonnes,

saves themselves about £600.

Five hundred households have done this now.

That becomes a very significant reduction towards the town's emissions.

But when I meet people in the street who've done it

they don't say "Oh, it's great Rob, we did Transition Street,

we saved 1.3 tonnes of carbon,

we're feeling really pleased with ourselves, so great,

we really feel we're doing our bit."

What they say is: "It's great, I now know Sandra

over the road, Dave over the road,

you know I've been doing this, I didn't know him, he's such an interesting guy,

he does this and he knows all of this and he is showing me how to do that."

And all that social side of it is what comes to the fore.

When we asked people in a report at the end

that pulls together all the learnings from it

"Why did you get involved in transition streets?"

The key answer was "because I wanted to know my neighbors better."

And when we asked them,

"What were the key benefits you feel that

you got out of being involved in that?"

and we turned it into one of those clever word cloud things,

Community, neighbours, getting to know.

Climate change doesn't even register.

Peak, tiny little word bottom right hand corner,

left hand corner, I can't remember which way around here.

Which for me is really really fascinating

that maybe in terms of making change happen

there's a different way of doing it which is about

something which is kind of infectious and sort of viral

and fun and contagious in that way.

I'm using lots of disease analogies,

but I'm trying not to, they seem to be coming to my mind the quickest.

And what we're really focusing on now increasingly

is about how do we make a new economy a reality in the town?

If the cavalry aren't coming how do we do that?

What does it look like if we start to put that in place?

So things are now happening like the Totnes Renewable

Energy Society, which now has 500 members

and is about to put in for planning for 2 wind turbines

on the edge of the town.

Transition Tours, which is about turning the many people

who come to Totnes to find out about transition to put on

a really good experience for them in such a way

that also means we kind of drown in it.

Transition Homes, which is a development looking to build

20 affordable houses, but using predominately local materials.

Because in the same way that when we talk about food

localizing food, brings more money cycling through our economy,

exactly the same thing works for building materials.

We're seeing businesses starting to emerge

through the kind of culture that's been created of saying

"We need new enterprises for this. Who's up for that?"

We recently held a thing called the

"Local Entrepreneur's Forum", where we brought

together people with business ideas into town

about 40 people had great ideas for different

enterprises with local potential investors and mentors

to really try and kick start what this new economy could

look like. So we have a micro brewery project

which is in the offing.

Kitchen table, which is really about catering,

but trying to catlayze lots of other things

around local food as well.

So it's looking for businesses which have

a number of criteria. Really they are about:

promoting local resilience,

that they are low carbon,

that they are not just purely for personal profit,

that they are working within natural limits,

promoting localization and

that they are about bringing assets into the local community.

I am really glad I remembered all 6 of those,

because lots of people have talked about their anxiety

dreams in advance. My anxiety dream, before TED

was that De La Soul came around to my house

to stay for the night. '80s rap trio

and I couldn't find enough bedding for them.

(Laughter)

And so the fact that I remembered all of those is great.

I've got through, I've broken through that barrier.

That's fantastic. (Laughter)

And when I was preparing this talk

I asked various people what were their highlights

of being around this process for the last 5 or 6 years?

One person said it was the event at the end

of Transition streets, where we showed a film called

"Start something together", which you can find

on YouTube, which documented that process.

And all the people from all the different Transition streets

came together to the town hall and had a big celebration.

And she said that she was almost

moved to tears by the energy that that had created.

Another friend of mine who reorganized the Husting's

event in the run up to the election were he invited all

the local candidates and rather than just have them

sitting there answering questions we talked about this,

about the kind of economy we wanted to

create for the place. And then asked them

"Well how are you going to support that?"

"How are you going to help that come into being?"

My person highlight was this headline

from the Western Morning News.

(Laughter)

Lead editorial note, no less, which contained this sentence:

"In an interesting twist to the climate change debate,

communities and individuals, once seen as quaintly

idosyncratic for their way out views have now become

mainstream and may yet provide some of the answers

to the biggest questions we all face”.

(Applause)

One day a German guy came, about 2 years ago,

into the office of Transition Town Totne.

He said: “I have come all the

way from Germany to see the famous Transition Town

Totnes and you still have cars!”

(Laughter)

Well, you might like to temper your expectations a little bit.

But it’s really interesting to reflect over the last 5 years

about how this has spread. And the best kind of analogy

that I can come up with is like mycorrhiza, an incredibly

fine fungus, one of the main things which gives forests

their resilience, it gives soil their resilience.

If I had an inch cube of mycorrhiza-rich soil here

it would contain 10 miles of mycorrhiza.

And what it does, it’s like a neural network between

all the different parts of it that enable it to spread

excess nutrients around, communicate risk,

communicate disease or threats to it and so on.

It’s an extraordinary thing.

In a sense Transition is a bit like inoculating a community

with something like that in that it runs and so our German

friend who came he was looking for all the fruits, but a lot

of what it does, it runs under the surface, it fruits where

you expect, but it also fruits where you don’t expect.

Research that we did showed that for example when

Transition Streets had only just started, it hadn’t had any

publicity or anything, we did a focus group completely on

the other side of town and a woman talked about the

first place where we had a parler going on and said

”it’s great over there, it’s like the the wall, they’re like a village,

they have street parties and everything.”

That sense had started to percolate through.

One local councilor I talked to said:

“The best thing Transition Town Totnes has done is bring people together.”

If it had just been something that happened in Totnes,

that wouldn’t really have been that much use,

but actually what happened is something has germinated there,

has spread and spread and spread.

There are now Transition initiatives in 34 countries,

thousands of initiatives places taking all of this in their own context,

whether it be Brazil or Barcelona, Bologna or Brixton,

and using it to create their own banks,

their own energy companies, their own food systems and so on.

It’s an exhilarating thing to see and observe the spread of.

It’s a story which is able to bring 300 people

in the town out about 2 weeks ago down

onto the former derelict industrial site in the town

for a big photograph to launch a campaign

about bringing this site, which used to employ

163 people back into community ownership

to develop it as a catalyst for a Transition economy

for the town, what we call the Atmos project.

It’s a story which is really about communities seeing

community resilience as where their economic future lies.

And Jay Tompt who works with us, wrote a beautiful blog

about it which contained this sentence I wanted to read to you:

“There is plenty to keep us and our children busy

for a long time to come, the important thing is that we’ve begun.

We know that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,

so we’re just doing it, we don’t need the cavalry, we’re already here”.

(Applause)

So this has really been a process about ordinary people

and a process that has dirt under its fingernails,

and has seen the opportunity this time around,

it’s a really exhilarating thing to be part of.

I just want to finish with one of my favourite quotes

which is from my children’s favorite story book

which is ‘Comet in Moominland’,

written in 1946 by Tove Jansson.

It was a funny little part which

I think captures what the essence of Transition

more than any academic paper on the subject

I ever heard or I've ever written about it.

“It was a funny little path winding here and there,

dashing off in different directions, sometimes even

tying a knot in itself from sheer joy. You don’t get

tired of a path like that and I’m not sure that it

doesn’t get you home quicker in the end.”

Thank you very much.

(Applause)