Transition Culture

7 May 2007

Transition Towns - Local Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change. An Interview: Part 1.

A month or so ago, Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle of the Ecological Options Network visited Totnes to do an interview with me about Transition Towns. We also wandered around Totnes in the rain (anyone remember rain?) and filmed bits in different places for a film they were making. Anyway, my memory of the interview we did was that it was quite brief, but they just sent me the transcript of it and it goes on and on! Here it is, it covers a lot of ground, and gives quite a nice overview of the Transition Towns idea and much else besides. Many thanks to Mary Beth and James for allowing me to reproduce it here.

An Interview with Rob Hopkins - Totnes, Devon, UK - February 28, 2007.

A young British activist tells how a movement he started is helping galvanize local citizens to use positive visioning and other innovative social processes to create energy descent plans for towns and cities across the UK to meet the challenges of climate disruption and dwindling oil and gas supplies. Above he points to the local clock tower that has become his group’s logo.

Rob Hopkins is the founder of Transition Town Totnes, the first transition town project in the UK, which has spawned a growing movement. He publishes www.transitionculture.org , a blog exploring how communities can prepare for climate change and peak oil. A teacher of Permaculture and practical sustainability for over 10 years, Hopkins has built with strawbales and cob, and is currently researching a PhD at Plymouth University on local transition issues and sustainability education. He has a particular passion for walnut trees.

Interviewed by Mary Beth Brangan & James Heddle Co-Directors of EON – The Ecological Options Network

Birth of an Idea Who’s Time Has Come

EON: Let’s begin with the backstory. How did you come to originate the Transition Town concept?

RH: Well, for the last 10 years I was living in Ireland, in the Southwest of Ireland and was very involved there in teaching permaculture and ecovillage development and natural building, a sort of very hands-on, solutions-based educational approach and involved in one of the first ecovillage developments. We got planning permission in Ireland to build the first new cob buildings built there for over 100 years. I also set up the first two-year full-time permaculture course in the world at a college in Kinsale, Ireland. In September 2004, the first day of term, somebody gave me a copy of a film named “ The End of Suburbia.� I didn’t have a DVD player, so I couldn’t watch it. So I thought, oh, I know, I’ll show it to the students on the first day of term.

And it turned out that just up the road was [petroleum expert] Colin Campbell. None of us had ever heard of him before, but a friend of mine who’d already seen “The End of Suburbia� said, ah, you should get in touch with Colin Campbell. He just lives up the road and he’s in the film.

So, not knowing who Colin Campbell was or not knowing anything about peak oil, I just rang him up and said hi, I wonder if you might come in and talk to my students. And he said certainly, certainly, certainly. So he came along and as of the first day of term, they had Colin Campbell and the End of Suburbia, so it was quite an impact already.

The Grandfather of Peak Oil

EON: Tell us more about who Campbell is and what he said.

RH: Colin Campbell is seen really as being the grandfather of peak oil. He’s the person who co-authored the first paper on peak oil in 1998. He’s the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He’s really the first person people go to find out about peak oil. He worked in the oil industry for 40 years; and what’s intriguing about him is, he’s one of the main proponents of the peak oil theory, but he’s also very much a product of the oil industry. And quite a few of those key people who are the people who are really putting forward the peak oil theory aren’t people who are sort of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists from down in the forests; they’re people who worked in the oil industry for 40 years and actually are sort of whistle blowers from within the industry, rather than people from the outside.

EON: For those who haven’t yet heard of it, explain what you mean by ‘peak oil.’

RH: [ Moves his hand in an up and down in a steep and narrow arc. ] Peak oil is very hard to describe without doing that. You see when everybody starts talking about peak oil, they do that. It will look like this probably. [ Moves his hand in a broader, more gradual arc. ]

But basically it’s the idea that the important point that matters isn’t the point when you use the last drop of oil; it’s the point when you use about half of it. Like in a car, for example, whether your tank is completely full or when you’ve got an eggcup worth of petrol left in it, it still runs exactly the same; whereas in economy, it’s that mid-way point where the slowdown begins.

The idea of peak oil emerges from observing how oil fields work around the world, their lifespan, then magnifying that to nations and then to the whole world. All oil-producing nations follow a pattern where they peak in discovery and then about 30-40 years later they peak in production.

The world peaked in discovery in 1965 and a lot of experts think that we’re nearing the peak of production now. And why that matters is because all the way up towards this peak demand drives supplies, so the more we want the more we can have. Saudi Arabia can open the tap to produce more. We’ve built more and more of an industrial and societal infrastructure around this flow of cheap oil that has sustained everything.

Once we go over this point at the top of the oil production arc, then that changes around and supply dictates demand. We can only have as much as there is and, in effect, as Colin Campbell describes it, we’ve reached the end of the age of cheap oil.

It’s not that we’ve run out of oil, but the implications of running out of cheap oil when our entire economic system has been based on borrowing from the future, creating debt based on future generations being able to pay them. And actually that, in turn, has been based on a presumption that they will have the cheap oil to enable that to be the case. So recognizing that that scenario won’t work is a switching point of enormous significance.

Beyond the ‘End of Suburbia’ – Social Permaculture?

EON: And so how does the Transition Town concept fit into this whole picture?

RH: Well, the concept of transition towns originated with the work we did in Kinsale [Ireland] where, after we’d had this double whammy from Colin and the “End of Suburbia� and everyone was sort of reeling and thinking, my God, where did this come from!

I’ve been involved in environmental things for 15 years and I never caught the idea at all. I had this idea that one day in 2050 someone would put the last drop of oil into a car and it would be this gentle thing. But with the second-year students in the permaculture course, we started thinking about, well, what does this mean for the town of Kinsale. How is Kinsale going to adapt to this?

You know, we could just sit here, not do anything, let this unfold as a series of lurching crises; or we could actually try to pull together all the different aspects of the town and really, really look at this. Because if we’re able collectively to design a way through this using our intelligence, our ingenuity, our creativity, then there’s no reason why the future with less oil couldn’t be a preferable place to the present.

That’s really where the Transition Town concept originated as a very, very simple idea and still, at its heart, is the very simple idea that the future with less oil could be preferable to where we are now because if you look now in countries like India, there’s this process that’s going on to try to vilify the rural, vilify the simple, vilify the kind of pre-industrial, the local, and trying to really rubbish that. And it’s a process that happened when I was living in Ireland. It happened in Ireland in the Sixties and Seventies, all the old buildings being pulled down, the view that horses and carts were no good, and building supermarkets and so. And the same process happened here in the Forties and Fifties.

‘Backcasting’ from a Positive Future

So the idea emerged that actually the future with less oil could be preferable, but in doing that we really need to rediscover what was actually good about life before cheap oil. We had this whole process of vilifying that way of life; that’s been the case around the world. But actually part of this Transition Town process is looking back to what was good about this past lifestyle.

What we’ve been doing is a series of oral history to introduce old people and their memories from life in this town between the Thirties and the Fifties, when cheap oil really came in and really started to change things. And when you do that, you find out about how resilient people were in those days, how everybody had skills they could turn their hand to. Dig for victory gardens, I think it was called in the U.S., wasn’t it? That was possible in those days because everybody knew how to garden. They hadn’t been to gardening college but they knew by osmosis how to garden.

Nowadays, if you said to people here’s a spade, dig a hole, you’d have lots of people who could design the hole and lots of people who could constantly survey the hole and spec the hole up for you, put the hole digging out to tender, and they could insure the hole-digging process against public indemnity, all this kind of thing; but actually there’s be very few people who would actually dig.

So we’ve really moved away from being a sort of hands-on practical kind of society. So the Transition Towns process is really about trying to look to draw what was good about life without cheap oil, and also not to romanticize it but that there was a lot that we can learn from that. So we’re trying to apply the best of the old, the best of the new; but it’s really a process of us getting people to ask the right questions. I think it’s a very important part of it.

Transition Town Totnes

When you look at a town like Totnes, all the plans that the local government draw up, local development plans, community development plans, they’re all based on the assumption that climate change won’t happen for a significant, an ignorable amount of time. The oil prices will always remain cheap, that this sort of household economy will continue. All of those assumptions are really highly questionable, and this Transition Town process I really like to think of as being a catalyst - that you come into a town as a catalyst for getting people to think about this impending transition process. Ask the right questions.

On the front of our flyer there’s just the question “Can you imagine Totnes beyond oil?� And that’s really the question this process is asking. We don’t claim to come in with all the answers. Maybe for some of the questions, there aren’t such answers. I think it’s about coming in with the question rather than breezing in with lots of experts who design everything for everybody. It’s really a question of unleashing the collective genius of the community around you to engage in addressing this hugely important question.

The Transition Town Process

EON: What’s the process like? Is this where you meet with officials and get them to make the plans or are these people outside of any kind of government structure or bureaucratic structure thinking for themselves?

RH: Well, the process of doing a Transition Town is one of trying to engage all the different sectors. I think people like Lester Brown talk about the challenge that peak oil presents is requiring a response like a wartime mobilization. The Hirsch Report talks about a crash program. The scale of what we have to do is something we’ve never ever done before.

As environmentalists, I think the tools that we’ve had up to this point are inadequate. We’ve never managed to have mainstreaming engagement on very much really, so we’re really looking at new ways of doing it. And when we start in a town, really the first stage is awareness raising - trying to get people switched on to the idea of peak oil, oil depletion.

For me, I think peak oil is a much more powerful tool for engaging people in thinking about these issues than climate change because with peak oil, as Richard Heinberg puts it, “People are more instinctively interested in what’s going into their car rather than what’s coming out of the exhaust pipe.� It’s a fuel-in problem rather than an emissions-out problem.

Peak Oil as ‘Evolutionary Driver’

Peak oil is very powerful because it’s like putting a mirror up to a community and saying, where’s the resilience gone in this community? Where is this community’s ability to withstand shocks? Particularly when we look back to the Thirties and Forties, we see that actually we had resilience, we had a vibrant local economy, we had local food, and we had local agriculture.

Here in Totnes for example, we had a man called George Heath who had a market garden right in the center of the town of Totnes, a series of glass houses running down the south-facing slope. On the other side of the street, he has a shop on the high street. He took the scrapings from the manure of the cattle market that was held next to him every Thursday. He composted that and then it came out the perfect post-carbon, zero food model. When he dies in 1980, it’s now a car park, the biggest car park in Totnes.

So you don’t have to go back very far. Besides, I suppose the first stage of doing the Transition Town process is the awareness rising, which here we did for about a year of talks, film showings, networking with existing groups, trying to do talks with as many diverse groups as possible. And then I like to think about it as being…do you know those toy volcanoes that children have where you put vinegar and bicarbonate soda in and then they froth up all over the table and stain the carpet and those things?… it’s a bit like that. You spend your first year putting that information in until you build up this pressure, and after a year there was really this energy behind doing something.

And then that’s when we have an evening that we call the official unleashing of Transition Town Totnes, which is designed to be the evening that historically people would look back to and say, that was the evening when it all started. We had 400 people came along. The mayor of Totnes introduced it, and it was a very, very powerful and dynamic evening. And that really has created a lot of momentum that has driven us forward ever since. But, I think it’s really important that the momentum, the drive for this, comes from individuals, rather than from local authorities; but what you’re creating is something, which then interfaces with local authorities in a way that few things have in the past.

I imagine in the U.S., but I know in the UK, there’s this real sort of split in government between who those think that communities don’t care, they’re apathetic, they can’t be bothered, and communities who think the government doesn’t care. And there’s very little dynamic interface between the two. And there are various initiatives that have tried to do that, but I think the transition town model really tries to focus the mind on the question that local authorities can’t ask, in a sense. Local authorities - particularly the ones who need to be elected every year - for them to say we’re actually planning for the end of cheap oil and for relocalization, that’s a scary leap for them to make. Whereas, if you’ve got the voice coming up which has really thought it through and is developing plans at the local level for how that’s going to work, I think you have a really dynamic interface.

EON: What is the size of Totnes, what the size is the village in Ireland where you started, and how does the scale of the location matter?

RH: Well, the question goes to the replicability of this model on different scales. Its one that we’re still exploring really. I mean, Kinsale was about 2,800 people. Totnes is about 7,000-8,000. My sense is that this process works on a scale over which you have a sphere of influence. So London, for example, is too big. On a small village scale it would work, although if you have too few people I would imagine it’s hard to generate sufficient energy behind doing it.

Transition Town Concept Spreads

What’s happening now is that inspired by the Transition Town Totnes model, we now have eight or nine different Transition Towns around the country, some of which are small villages, some of which are cities. So we really have models over the whole spectrum, so it’s intriguing to see how they do it.

My sense is that in urban areas you’re looking at working on the neighborhood scale. The city I grew up in, Bristol, in the Southwest of England, like a lot of other cities is basically historically a collection of villages that have merged together, that very much have those distinctive elements to them with their own identity. And so I think the idea is you work at that scale so you have transition, Clifton, transition wherever, or different parts of the town, and then you have a transition city Bristol body, whose role is to support, train, and resource those difference initiatives and try and inspire them. I think it seems to work perfectly.

With Totnes, it’s historically a market town and I think those market towns work very, very well because they’re of a scale where they have a hinterland which is quite defined, you know the villages which would historically have brought their produce into the market towns. That sets a sort of a region for it. I mean, it is still an evolving part of this, but I think my gut sense is that it has to work on a scale that you can conceive of, a scale that you can get your head around where you can appreciate how big it is. And if it starts to get too big, you break it down into its parts. Really I think it’s something people will just get a feel for wherever they are.

EON: Are you talking about urban agriculture? In Havana people have started raising a large percentage of their vegetables now in the city.

RH: Yes. Well, I think the whole question of urban agriculture is going to really, really play a huge, huge part in the future here, and it’s really a luxury of the age of cheap oil that we’ve been able to put food production off miles away in tidy little sheds where we don’t have to see it in our urban landscapes, which are completely devoid of anything edible.

You know, one of the things that always really struck me is over the last 20, 30 years, if you go to new developments like business parks and out of town shopping places, that we’ve developed this way of landscaping where we’ve bred plants specifically to be completely useless, low maintenance ground cover shrubs. What is the point of a low maintenance ground cover shrub, flowering cherry trees that just make flowers and no cherries. You know, we’ve got so far away from common sense, it’s terrifying.

The Nut Tree Solution

One of the things we’re doing in Totnes is launching a project that we call Totnes, The Nut Tree Capital of Britain, where we want to plant walnut trees throughout the town and really put in place an infrastructure of productivity throughout the town. You know, why is it that we have a townscape that is full of trees and you can’t eat from any of them? What’s the point of that? You know, we could actually plant walnut trees, sweet chestnuts which produce as much carbohydrate and protein per acre as barley and wheat and so on. And they lock up carbon and they’re beautiful and things can live in them and so on, but we put those in through the town as an infrastructure that’s there on our doorstep.

EON: Has this been adopted and embraced officially?

RH: In Kinsale, the Energy Descent Action Plan we did was adopted by the town council. It was unanimously voted for by the town council, which was quite amazing, and then it won a big environmental award in Ireland that year as well.

Here in Totnes, the process has had a lot of support from various members of the town council and the local authority. In fact, next week I’m doing a talk to the town council on their invitation and part of that is to invite them to pass a motion officially endorsing the objectives of Transition Town Totnes. The mayor has been very supportive; she spoke at our opening. She’s also going to be planting some walnut trees with us in the middle of Totnes in a couple of weeks. So, yeah, there is a lot of interest from people.

What we want to do is to take what was called the Totnes Community Plan, which was developed over a period of time, and take that as the framework to develop into an energy descent plan, because it drops the word “sustainability� but it really doesn’t understand what it means. And actually it would give us, in terms of increasing Totnes’s resilience, it does nothing at all, but it has a lot of recognition. If we can get an energy descent plan in its place, but using the same format, we’ll be kind of harnessing a lot of the power that is within the local authority.

Part Two continues tomorrow. (I told you it was long…)