Below is the transcript for Rob Hopkins: Making the Red Pill Taste Good.
Chris Martenson: Hello, and welcome to another PeakProsperity.com podcast. Of course, I am your host, Chris Martenson. Today we are speaking with Rob Hopkins, somebody I have spoken with before on the other end of the interview/interviewee cycle, and Rob is a true pioneer of the movement and adaptation to a post-Peak world. Rob leads a vibrant new movement of towns and communities, cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. He developed the concept of Transition initiatives with a couple of other gentlemen, communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation, take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future.
Now, while Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is really a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self sufficient way that is build upon resiliency, a concept that I am really familiar with and very much in support of. From his hometown in Totnes, UK, the original Transition town, it started there; he offers to help hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog transitionculture.org and through writings. So welcome, Rob; it is an honor to have you as our guest today and to speak to you again.
Rob Hopkins: Hi, Chris. Yeah, lovely to be talking to you again!
Chris Martenson: Great, so could you, for the people who may not have heard about Transition Towns, can you elaborate on the founding mission behind Transition Towns and what it is?
Rob Hopkins: Well, I guess it comes out of many of the same motivations that are of interest to those who would be listening to your podcast around economic contraction, around Peak Oil, and also around climate change. And sort of putting all of these issues together, our analysis was that actually what we lack enormously now is, as you say, resilience at the local level. You have got the ability to withstand shock, and Iain Dowie who used to manage the Crystal Palace football club in London here in the UK, he used to describe resilience as “bounce-back-ability.” And in Transition we take that idea of “bounce-back-ability,” but sort of add on to it and say actually the process of making the places that we live more bounce-back-able, if that is the word…
Chris Martenson: Uh huh.
Rob Hopkins: …could actually be the making of those places, and at the moment when the flight of global capital from communities such as this, means that we do not have very much to fall back on. Originally, it came out of an analysis around Peak Oil and the argument that when oil becomes very expensive, the price becomes very volatile, then the globalized way of doing everything becomes very, very fragile; very, very vulnerable. So to put back that kind of more localized economy, we argue, even something that you do just because it is just kind of a nice thing to do, it can actually within time inevitably become the economic mainstay of the places where we live.
We use this term of localization as economic development. But this is not about sort of localization as an idea that just hangs around on pin boards in whole food shops, this is around localization being the idea that underpins how we start as local economies to think about our future. So it meets more of our needs in terms of food, clothes, community-owned energy companies, setting up the infrastructure we are going to need but in such a way that it benefits our communities rather than all the money just pouring out through the holes. So it is very much about looking forward, it is very much about progress, very much about framing that in the context of the scenario that we are moving into and not sticking our heads in the sand. Not running around with a panicked look in our eyes, but looking at this as a one-off tremendous historical opportunity to rethink some basic assumptions.
Chris Martenson: And of the things that need rethinking, I guess something that was sort of an act of faith on a lot of communities’ part was that we all do whatever we do. We do our jobs and we spend our money and somehow it all balances out. But if you back up just a couple steps, if you are a family, you know that if you spend more than you earn, you are slowly getting poor. Similarly, I guess the analogy here is for a community — if you are importing more than you are exporting, whether that is liquid fuels or food or clothing or whatever those things happen to be, if that balance of trade is not in your favor, you are slowly eroding. And I guess as we look across this landscape where things have now, complexity has caught up with us.
It is a very complex environment to live in, and my view is that the communities that can grasp that, see the opportunity in that, can say how do we maintain control of the things we can? In some cases, that might be, if you do not have energy, if you can use less of it, that is the equivalent of importing less. So that starts to work in your favor. So this is really about knowing what our sources of wealth are, understanding them, understanding where we are hemorrhaging wealth, controlling that to the best we can. Then as we cast forward, I guess the idea would be some communities are going to fare better than others in large measure. How they approach this part of that story. Is that what you mean by economic development?
Rob Hopkins: Yeah. I mean, there is a tremendous opportunity for places to get ahead of the curve. You know, when you look at this through the eyes of Peak Oil as a challenge, and the contraction of the energy that underpins globalization is inevitably going to contract, and so the distances over which we are able to do things is going to get shorter. But actually to put in place infrastructure that you need in order to have a different approach, a more resilient approach, that does not happen overnight. I mean, we are talking a longer kind of process, so the sooner places get underway and get started with it, the better, I think.
I mean, in the UK every year, we export the same amount, about one and a half million kilos of potatoes, to Germany as we import from Germany, which really benefits nobody. I mean, if somebody gave me an English potato and a German potato, I think I would be pushed to tell the difference really, and who only really benefits is petrol companies and road-making companies and creating work for lorry drivers.
Actually, the process is closing the loop, consuming more of what is produced locally, and retaking those markets is not just good from the perspective of using less fossil fuel and creating less carbon emissions. It is also really good in terms of our being more connected to the place around us, to being part of an agricultural community, using fresher foods that are in season and all those kinds of things.
So sometimes things are presented, things that we need to do are presented as being some kind of a retreat, but I think that when we talk about resilience, we are not just talking about community resilience, we are talking about personal resilience, ecological resilience, all of those things go hand in hand if we get it right. I mean it is important, as well, if we say the concept of resilience does not necessarily, is not necessarily a good thing. You could imagine a resilient community that is not so good in terms of social justice and community ownership and that kind of thing. So it is really important from day one [that] we get those things right and models we put in place are based on good models that are going to be sustainable in the longer term.
Chris Martenson: And how would you define sustainable in the longer term?
Rob Hopkins: Well, in such a way that they are not going to be hemorrhaging money from the place and they are not going to be perpetuating and deepening social inequality. Rather, they are going to be about bringing that community together. So if, for example, you design a local food system, which is all based around some kind of futile approach where it is all owned by one family and everybody else kind of works for that family. We may be getting organic potatoes, but we are not necessarily building the kind of social cohesion and more equity than actually we are going to need for that to be sustainable.
Chris Martenson: Right, so if we default into letting circumstances prescribe that to us, we might be back to the future as it were, back to a feudal state last seen in the late 1800’s or something.
Rob Hopkins: Yeah, well, people write about the idea of localization, you know, they talk about what academics call reflexive and un-reflexive localization, which can just mean, you know, a really good healthy form and a really dreadful form. We can look back through history at some pretty dire versions of localization, which may have been more resilient then they were today, but they were repressively patriarchal, hieratical, and so on and so on. So I think at this stage now when we are starting the process of laying out what we want to be moving towards, it is really important that we do that and set those foundations in place properly at this stage, I think.
Chris Martenson: So your view is that if sufficient resources, willpower, and energy exist at this stage to make that transition smoothly or relatively smoothly… Where do you stand on that?
Rob Hopkins: I do not know for sure, I do not think anybody knows for sure. But my hope is, yes, that there would be the resources to do that, but we need to be skillful about it. You know, one of the things that some Transition groups do is what we call an “energy descent action plan,” because Transition usually has its roots in permaculture, which is a design system.
We argue there needs to be element of planning on what we are going to do as collectively coming together, thinking about what we want to do, and actually moving towards it. This is not something that will come around by accident, and I think that is one of the things that distinguishes Transition from previous kinds of environmental community processes, in that it is very ambitious and it starts out with the kind of smaller things that we are all familiar with local green groups doing, like growing vegetables and digging up lawns and swapping this that and the other, but it is very ambitious in terms of where it is going. And in the book that I have just finished which will be coming out in October, The Transition Companion, that is one of the things that really distinguishes it.
It starts out with the smaller projects, but it says this is a collective design process [and] that you need to be thinking about this process as intentional localization and then starting to move towards it. The aim is that you will start creating your own banks, your own energy companies, your own food systems that are based from the outset on those good principles.
Chris Martenson: So, then, this Transition Companion, I guess, improves the state of the arts and learnings that have been wrapped into what has happened since the original Transition book. What else can you tell us; what is new in this book and what can we look forward to there?
Rob Hopkins: Well, this is totally new, it is a totally new book, and basically the Transition Handbook, which came out in 2008, said what would it look like if there was something a bit like this, did something like this, and it was very early on in the whole process. There were maybe 20 or 30 Transition initiatives when it was written, and there were some projects along the way, but it was kind of a speculative vision of what the kind of movement that felt most appropriate for the time would look like. So over the time that has gone on since, we have gone from those 20 initiatives up to many hundreds of them in 35 countries now around the world. I often think of Transition as being like a huge social experiment in that we had a very simple model, a very simple set of tools and principles, that have gone out all around the world. People have tried them out, experimented with them in setting as diverse as favelas in Sao Paulo, cities in the US, villages in England, and all different parts of London, and so on and so on.
What I tried to do in this book is to pull back in what seemed to be the learnings from that. What has been people’s experience? What is working and what is not working? Where do we find ourselves; what are the stories people are telling about their successes and about their failures? It is a very honest book, a very straightforward book, and it pulls together Transitions of different models.
It is really about the idea of Transition not being something as a prescriptive model [where] you start with this and then you do this and then you must do this before you think about doing this. It is more thinking about it as like a series of ingredients, a collection of ingredients that people assemble in their own way. So it is like making a cake and everybody will make a cake in a different way. There are certain steps that you have to do; you cannot just chuck the butter in the flour in a bowl and put it straight in the oven and hope for a cake. You have to go through certain stages, but within that, you very much are free to arrange things how you like. So it draws together these ingredients, these tools, which are things that we have seen, where a Transition group has come up with a problem or a challenge and has come up with a solution that we have seen replicated enough times to have some kind of faith it is going to work.
I think it is a very, very rich in stories and photos from around the world. And their posters, their artwork, their stories, their experiences, and pulling all that together into something that is very, very flexible but very effective. So yeah, it has been a very deeply collaborative process, creating it, as well, you know, putting up drafts and getting people to comment on them, and I am really thrilled of it.
Chris Martenson: I think that is a fabulous approach, because you are in a very complex environment and it is going to shift in very complex ways. I am going to say unpredictable ways; local mileage will vary. There are local different sources of wealth and assets and liabilities, all of which need to be accounted for. So the idea is that there is a perfect recipe which everybody wants, but it really seems not to be something that we should really be seeking at this stage. Rather there is this idea that this is going to be an incredible period of discovery and creativity and inquiry into how things are shifting. So it is fabulous that you are collecting that. If we could go to both sides of that tale set, you know, what has been working and what has not been working so far?
Rob Hopkins: I think the things that have been working have been [that] there are some very exciting projects starting to emerge in terms of community energy companies. There is fantastic community engagement stuff that people have been doing. There are some really beautiful stories of projects of people identifying a problem and applying that sort of creative Transition thinking that is playful and fun and coming up with some really good solutions. So certainly that process of gathering stories has been really, really heartening, I think. I think the degree to which I started out the book, thinking okay, so where is Transition going now? Where does this feel appropriate to me that this book argues that it should move? And one of those things was around enterprise, was around not waiting for government or large corporations to start putting in place the business models that we need now.
It is really time for us to get on with it, make it viable, and stop moaning around that actually nobody is doing anything. When actually we could be doing stuff if we were able to step our game up and get the right people together and start putting these things in place. But what was really interesting then was going out and looking around at what Transition groups are doing and finding that there were actually loads of those things emerging already. You know, what they call social enterprise — businesses that are setup with a larger remit rather than just making profits for the owner, but actually having a wider social benefit devoted to the community around it.
I am finding all sorts of things, from vegetable-box distribution schemes, local food-growing schemes, very, very ambitious community energy organizations, community shops, community pubs, community breweries, these kinds of things. They were not my idea; they were already out there, so it was really exciting to see that. I think some of the things that really do not work very well, the thing that came through time and again was the importance of setting groups up properly from the beginning. But actually sometimes we all come together with this great enthusiasm, and inspired by works such as yours or the end scene of the End of Suburbia, or wherever that momentum comes from, I am thinking, my God, we need to do something here.
But then we are so driven and so compelled and so infused that actually we just, you know, think all that stuff about getting a group set up properly so that everybody knows what everyone is doing. You know, how you are going to communicate properly. All that stuff, you think, we are in too much of a rush for that, we will do that later; we are just going to do stuff.
And actually, the initiatives who we have seen that had difficulties have been the ones where they have not gotten those group processes in place. Then there are all disagreements, and then those groups fall apart. I mean a very, very small percentage, actually, but one of the key learnings really has been the importance of getting all that group stuff done from the beginning.
Chris Martenson: Right. So it is clear, some people, when they first look into this landscape, and this happened to me, it is easy to come away with a fair degree of urgency. So I imagine that somebody who is sitting in Europe today and is looking at the relative levels of paralysis and attempts to fix the economic system and things are not working, could look into that situation with some degree of alarm and conclude that perhaps change was coming quickly. How does one balance that tension between the desire to act and the desire to set things up properly? How does one navigate that space?
Rob Hopkins: Well, what we are argue in the Transition Companion is that there are very simple tools and approaches which can be woven into the first few meetings of a group like that. Which just means that from then, on everybody knows where they are at and everybody knows what is happening and the whole thing moves forward much, much more smoothly and with much less risk of difficulty. Designing in a commitment to good communication and that sort of stuff makes a big, big difference, and we have seen that time and again.
Those projects that are really, really thriving just gave that stuff a little bit of space at the beginning to allow it to really bed in, and now they are off doing quite extraordinary things. Because that sense of urgency that drives people to think about this, and you only — and this sounds very dramatic — so you only get one chance of doing this.
But actually, if a Transition group comes together and then you all fall out with each other, then it takes awhile, maybe, for other people to come in and say, well, let’s pick this up and keep it moving forward. So it is really good to just get it going from the start, because it is really extraordinary when you see what those groups can do when they have got the right foundations in place.
Chris Martenson: Fantastic. So speaking on this a little bit, where do you see us on the Peak Oil timeline now versus when you first started?
Rob Hopkins: Well, when we first started, nobody knew at all what we were talking about. Peak Oil was something that rarely made it into the media. It was a fairly obscure sort of backwater, I guess, and it was only through meeting Colin Campbell and spending time with Colin Campbell that you actually were able to get some really rich kind of information about it at that stage, and somebody who was very compelling in terms of arguing that. Now four, five, six years later, it is pretty much in mainstream kind of recognition, I think; it has moved very, very quickly, and remarkable how that has happened, I think.
I think obviously the economic unleveling that has begun means we are in a very, very different kind of landscape. I mean, I think it is interesting, you know, because Transition is underpinned by those three things. Peak Oil and climate change and our economic issues. Actually, each of those issues kind of pulse at different times. I think in Peak Oil, from Colin when I first met him, he was talking about that idea of a bumpy platter, you know, if not, you just go up to a neat little peak and then you are going to start plummeting down the other side. You bump along the top for a while, but you are going up and down and up and down. But actually on the downward sides of those, which is what we are on now, people really stopped caring about environmental things, because the pressure on the money in their pocket becomes too intense.
Climate change, Peak Oil, these things are not such an issue, but as soon as you get back into anything resembling economic growth or any kind of an activity, these issues become very much more to the floor. So I think we are in a very interesting sort of… We are pulsing backwards and forwards between being interested in those issues and being absolutely in a blind panic about the financial things. We are very much, I find it at a local level, focused on where is the economic activity going to come from. And when I look around at the local council here, our local businesses and organizations, they are still focused on the idea that when we get back to growth in two or three years, we are going to do this, that, and the other. We are going to do all these buildings, we are going to do all this, that, and the other, and whenever I give talks, I always start out by saying okay, for the next hour we are not going to use the term when we get back to growth, okay, we are going to park it out the door and we are going to cut a space in this room where we can talk as though that is not the case. Because actually the people that work in local government, business, and so on, they do not really get to sit in that space very often, but that is really, really important.
So for me, I mean, I am not a Peak Oil expert, I am not an economic expert, [but] I am sufficiently convinced that those two things are enormously compelling pressing challenges that are not going anywhere, rather than becoming more pressing challenges. So my focus is really what do we do on the ground about it, but that is my observation. We tend to sort of waver between thinking maybe it will get all right again so we can worry about Peak Oil and climate change or be really despondent about the fact that it is all going down the tubes, in which case we forget those issues. But what is beautiful about the concept of resilience is that it draws in all those things, that it is about resilience to climate change, about being resilient to Peak Oil, it is about being resilient economically, and that is a kind of steady stream that you can ride through all of those things. It is a common language and a common focus that whether people are worrying about Peak Oil or whether they are worrying about the coins in their pocket, it is still something very steady and very constant.
Chris Martenson: Yeah, and those things probably to some degree will always be with us. Economic concerns have been in people’s minds since the dawn of time, practically. When we came under the current system we are on — and that is really the framework that I bring to this, is the idea that this system we have is just fundamentally changing — let me be more specific, it cannot continue in this way and in the manner it had been going. That is really hard to get to; it is a very emotional subject. It touches on beliefs for a lot of people, like faith and technology, or belief in human spirit, or your creativity, or you have to be optimist. Whatever the belief structures happen to be, and this is the interesting period of time I find us in, is that now there is more, and more, and more compelling evidence, whichever one of those spheres that you mentioned.
You want to look at whether it is in the environmental sphere, or whether it happens to be in the economic sphere, or you want to look in the energy sphere; it does not matter. Or all three. But you can peek in there and say, wow, there is enough evidence here to suggest that the prudent thing to do would be to prepare as if we are not going back to normal, we are not going back to growth. That the ways in which we have become accustomed to things working is now shifting right before our very eyes. Certainly anybody that is in economics, the debt markets do not work like they used to and we have got about three years of proof of that and we probably have a few more in front of us.
My theory is that we are never going to see those return to what people knew for the past 20, 30, 40 years. So here we are, and the question then becomes, what are the sorts of things we do and we can do. And your approach has been to take it at the community level, communities being as large as cities, I suppose. But at that level rather than the state level, as it were, or even the global level, why is it that you started there?
Rob Hopkins: Because, well, firstly to say that we do not for a moment say that the local and the community level is the only level where any meaningful change can be effective. Obviously, we need national government, we need local government, we need business, and all these things are pulling together. But I guess for me it feels like the local will be the scale that will be the most viable. And James Kessler says the future will be inherently, intensely and inherently local, or something like that.
David Fleming, who was a brilliant economist here, he died last year, he used to say that localization stands best at the limits of practical possibility but it has the decisive argument in its favor and there will be no alternative. So we very much took that as the focus, because it felt like it was the part that was being neglected. It is the part that people are passionate about, they care about, and what you were saying there about debt and everything. My sense is that people will get this at different points, and if we imagine that everybody needs to get this before we can actually do anything meaningful, we are not going to do anything meaningful in time.
The idea with Transition is really that if we can get things in place that just make sense, don’t ram Peak Oil and climate change and economic models down people’s throats, but which become the things that are creating work for people. They become the things that people are proudest of because they are celebratory of the place and of the culture and so on. I start to see that here in Totnes, here in Devon where I am speaking to you from today, this was the first Transition town in the UK, and what we have seen I think originally when we started, the Transition I imagined, it was an environmental process. But increasingly I think of it as a cultural process in that it starts to become this story that the town tells about itself.
Now when they start to talk about its future, they talk about Transition. People come to visit the place because of Transition, and it increasingly becomes the thing that people are proud about and the story that it starts to tell about itself. You know, there are now some businesses that are emerging here that are, it is in the early days, but there are businesses emerging here, which are very much rooted in that, and lots more in the pipeline. Models like the Totnes Renewable Energy Society, which allows local people to invest in what will be two large wind turbines on the edge of Totnes, which will be owned by the community and for the benefit of the community. These kinds of things do not say that you have to believe in Peak Oil or climate change or the end of growth in order to be a part of it. They bring people on board because they are a celebration of the place, they feel fantastic. You would rather have your money in a local energy company that you know the people who run it. You are excited about its progress. You know other people that are a part of it, rather than just having them off in some distant shares in something that you have no control over.
I think we have only just really started to scratch the surface in terms of the potential power of this, I think. The localization as economic development is a really powerful idea, and you know in climate change there is a very famous climate wedges model that says well at the moment we are rising like this. What we need to be doing is come down like this, and so that would be made up of a number of wedges, electric cars, and so on and so on. I think that actually one of the big, big wedges of those could be intentional localization if we can get it right, and I think once we have kind of proved that concept in a few places, it will really start to motor and really start to accelerate very sharply.
We have here in Lewis, in Sussex, Transition Town Lewis recently set up a local energy company, that energy company just launched the UK’s first community-owned solar power station. They raised three hundred thousand pounds from local people to put the panels in the roof of a local brewery, and that brewery brews a special beer called Sunshine Ale to celebrate the launch. These kinds of thing are not about taking people back to something worse than today; they are a step forward, they are about building resilience, bringing people together, giving them the sense that anything is possible in such a way that everybody benefits.
Chris Martenson: Fantastic. The part about the narrative really caught me because stories shape our own lives. National or cultural stories shape destinies, and really, I think we have an old story running which may not be serving us any longer. A story of growth has been the one that I focus on, and because we have that story, we act in certain ways. You cannot possibly open the newspaper without hearing about a political or monetary leader talking about the necessity of returning to growth; it is just axiomatic. We do not even discuss why that is true; we just have to get back to growth, growth in jobs, growth in the economy, growth in something.
And obviously, if you just step back even one full step from that story, you understand that cannot be true forever. That there is, at some point, an end to that story, and I think we are there. And that is really the deep dis-ease that is being felt across the landscape by a lot of people, be they financially-, ecologically-, or energy-focused. They know that there is something shifting in the story, but it is, I find, almost impossible to shift away from a story without being able to shift towards a different story. So I am hearing in your description that Transition is offering a version, and people are seeing that and responding to it, and it really does not matter what lens they are peering through. In fact, they do not have to have any lens. You are saying that, if done correctly, people do not necessarily have to believe in it, look at, or understand anything about those three sorts of views or any other views that they can participate. Is that what you are finding?
Rob Hopkins: Yeah, I think it is like, I know Richard Heinberg once said about Transition that it feels more like a party than a prote