Author Archives: Rob Hopkins

This month our theme has been ‘Celebration’.  We have set out to explore 5 questions: Why do you celebrate? Why is celebration important? What are the ingredients of good celebration? What is the wider context for celebration? What is the personal context for celebration?  We started by addressing some of these questions, especially the third […]

One of the things I love most about working for the Transition Network is the cheerful disclaimer… “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. We truly don’t know if this will work. […]

Last year when I visited the US, Peter Lipman (Chair of Transition Network) and myself had supper with representatives from 3 large philanthropic organisations there.  At one point, Peter asked “so do you invest in coal?”  There was some discomfort around the table, and the reply was “no, coal is a terrible investment!” – the […]

When I was about 12 a friend of my sister came on holiday with my family. We were quite a typical family of three irritable siblings – when someone started singing or playing an instrument another child was guaranteed to tell them to “Shut up, that sounds horrible”.  We were continually fighting over whatever shifting […]

Like many Transition groups we have spawned different subgroups at different times to meet particular interests and concerns. The Energy group has been going for quite a while and what picked it up was putting in a bid for government Local Energy Assessment Funding. This brought out some new talented people, who have run businesses […]

 A couple of weeks ago, Transition Bristol held their Small Green Sunday event, to celebrate and reflect on all that they have achieved over the last seven years. Four members of the group have kindly shared their reflections on the day, and on what it felt like to come together to celebrate, beneath the bunting […]

Chris Johnstone works in the area of the psychology of resilience, sustainable happiness and is co-author, with Joanna Macy, of Active Hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. Chris appeared at both the Unleashing of Transition Town’s Totnes and Lewes, and has interacted with different Transition groups ever since. He’s also […]

Saturday 12th July saw the first pilot Transition Roadshow take place, the Transition Northwest Conference.  And if the four subsequent Roadshows are to prove anywhere near as good, then it represents a great new evolution in how to celebrate and support Transition at the local level.  The conference was held at the University of Cumbria […]

Transition Network’s Ben Brangwyn interviewed author, social entrepreneur, thinker, blogger and systems thinker, and also member of Bowen in Transition, Dave Pollard, while he was at Schumacher College recently for their Dark Mountain course.  Our month’s theme of Celebration ran through their discussion.  Dark Mountains aren’t really the kind of places many of us would choose as places to […]

Naomi Oreskes is a historian at science who teaches and does research at Harvard University.  She is the author, with Erik Conway, of the excellent The Merchants of Doubt: how a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming.  We caught up by Skype to talk climate scepticism, science and […]

It’s just as well I enjoy travelling on trains, as Germany is a long way from Totnes.  That enjoyment however does not extend to the train I’m writing this post from.  It’s the 40 minutes-delayed Koln to Brussels train, packed with people, and I’m in the carriage in which the air conditioning is broken, on […]

As someone who visits quite a lot of Transition groups, I see the same thing over and over.  People say “we don’t feel like we are making much of a difference, we’ve not done much”.  I then ask them to tell me the story of what they’ve done so far, and 20 minutes later people […]

Here’s a lovely piece by Ian Wild, a celebration of a project very close to my heart…  Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?  Around the turn of the millennium, my wife Belinda was invited […]

The Transition movement sometimes claims to be apolitical, but I think that politics can be defined as any issue in which there is a conflict of resources, and a decision to be made on how to allocate them. Although Transition isn’t party political, it’s a global social movement that seeks to create massive social and […]

This month our theme has been Transition and Politics.  Here we digest into bite-sized pieces the month’s output to make it easier for you to find what interests you.  We started with our editorial which asked “Is Transition political?”, whose conclusion could be summarised in the following paragraph: “The answer is yes.  Deeply.  It has […]

What would you say were the defining characteristics of Labour politics in relation to sustainability and climate change?  The challenges of protecting our natural environment and dealing with a changing climate are immense. When it comes to government, actions speak louder than words – and Labour has a good record on protecting our natural environment, […]

Peter MacFadyen is a founder of Sustainable Frome (a Transition initiative) and Director of Frome’s new Renewable Energy Co-op.  He has worked with Comic Relief for 20 years, and was part of a group of Independents who, as Independents for Frome, ran for the town council and got in, a tale documented in his new […]

The second in our short series of interviews with representatives of different political parties is Greg Barker, Minister of State at the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC).  He is also Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle.  He has been very involved in the community energy field, and has visited a number of Transition […]

When I came across a set of principles for creating a peaceful society that has been working for over a thousand years I got really interested in what they were, and to what extent they were relevant to Transition. Their first principle turns our society inside out – instead of family and home life organising […]

One of the most delightful things about Transition is time spent with those who are making it happen in such a wide diversity of communities.  The top up of inspiration and new ideas as to what’s possible that I get from such visits is vital stuff.  I was recently in Liege in Belgium for a […]

Alan Simpson describes himself as a “recovering politician”.  He was Labour MP for Nottingham South for 18 years until he stood down because, as he puts it, “I was becoming obsessed with small-picture politics and I thought maybe I just needed to get out and try to influence it from outside”.  He is also, to […]

Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.  Her first degree was in Agricultural Science, which, combined with her Australian heritage, means, as she put it, that she’s “the only British political leader who knows how to shear a sheep”.  We caught up with her on Skype, and started by […]

I was recently sent a really interesting paper by Philip Barnes of the University of Delaware called The political economy of localization in the Transition movement.  I was keen to publish it here, but it’s in moderation to be published, so I couldn’t.  Instead, I wrote to Philip and asked if he might be able to summarise […]

So, picture the scene.  There I was, standing on a Totnes street corner with a film crew from Germany with whom I had been spending the afternoon filming a piece about the new Totnes Pound and local food strategies.  We were taking a break from filming when a woman came up and asked them what […]

Something remarkable is happening in Frome, a story that offers many useful insights for increasing the impact of Transition and reimagining how it relates to local politics.  Peter MacFadyen is author of Flatpack Democracy and very recently became the Mayor of Frome.  Previously he worked for Comic Relief as a development consultant, and is also […]

Criticising Transition for being explicitly apolitical, and for not engaging in the political system in the conventional way feels, to me, like criticising a spoon for not being very good at cutting bread.  Transition is a tool designed for a specific purpose.  But with the rise of UKIP, the National Front, the Golden Dawn, and […]

One of the following quotes comes from the Transition movement.  The other 3 come from public health professionals.  Can you tell which is which?  A: “A sustainable system protects and improves health within environmental and social resources now and for future generations. This means reducing carbon emissions, minimising waste and pollution, building resilience to climate change and […]

Our theme this month has been ‘Transition and Health’, and it’s been fascinating.  We’ve been reflecting on where Transition and public health overlap and the benefits all round that could be gained by forging a more explicit link between the two.  Here also is our rather stylish new Digest graphic, click on it and it […]

David Pencheon is a public health doctor and Director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit.  His interest is, as he puts it, in “promoting health in the best sense of that phrase, rather than just as a large illness treating machine”. He is one of the people behind the NHS Sustainable Development Strategy, and one […]

Mark Dooris is Professor of Health and Sustainability at the University of Central Lancashire. A lot of his work is about managing the delivery of programmes related to public health, wellbeing and sustainability.  We started by asking him “would it be fair to describe you as somebody who is trying to bring Transition thinking into […]

Is Transition good for a community’s health?  Janet Richardson is Professor of Health Services Research at Plymouth University in the School of Health and Human Sciences and is the first person to do a Health Impact Assessment of a Transition initiative.  In 2011 she did a “rapid” Assessment for Transition Town Totnes.  What did it […]

“What is the change we want to see in the world, and how will that change happen?” These were the two rather intimidating questions we posed ourselves at the recent Transition Network Awaydays – our twice-yearly retreat for staff and board members. This post shares one piece of the our wide ranging exploration of theories […]

Here is the latest blog I have written for The Guardian’s Live Better Challenge section: EcoBricks and education: how plastic bottle rubbish is helping build schools It began in Guatemala, and now a South African town is using recycling bottles as building material as part of an inspirational and regenerative campaign against rubbish Take a […]

Kerry Lane (see right) is a Transitioner and Social Reporter, and in this post, she shares her thoughts on Transition and health, inspired by her recent move to the countryside.  Living out in the countryside gives you an interesting alternative perspective on health, you really are faced with an entirely different situation to urbanites. A lot […]

I used to sometimes see an apple, damson or plum tree in a garden, laden with fruit which, with time, would end up rotting on the ground as the householders didn’t manage to make use of this beautiful harvest. I sometimes wondered about asking if the owner wouldn’t mind me gathering some of the crop, […]

We are delighted to announce that we are now inviting applications to host one of four Regional Transition Roadshows to be held between October 2014 and March 2015.  This is an offer only open to UK Transition initiatives, and we are really hoping for a good geographical spread across the country.  We are holding the […]

One of the most fascinating things I read recently was The Lancet’s Manifesto for Planetary Health (printed in full at the end of this post).  For one of the most august and respected medical journals to argue that “the idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous human illusion”, to call for “a new vision of cooperative […]

So the European and local elections are over, and once again it looks like a result underpinned by low turnout and a general lack of interest, especially from young people.  Parties seemed to be falling over themselves to say how much they love communities and want to give them more powers.  It’s the UKIP manifesto […]

Crystal Palace Transition Town’s market is celebrating its first birthday.  The market has been a huge success since its inception, with local paper the Croydon Advertiser reporting “Extremely strong winds caused havoc among stallholders at Crystal Palace food market on Saturday.  But despite forcing three traders to pack up and go home, the bad weather […]

Angela Raffle is a founder member of Transition Bristol and a public health worker in the city.  She was one of the people that produced the Bristol Peak Oil Report. But her experience was that because the government says that fossil fuel depletion isn’t a concern, the NHS finds it very hard to act on the […]

We are grateful to Rivka Kushner, Chris Buse, Blake Poland and Rebecca Hasdell for the following, which came in just slightly too late for our month on impact but which we’re posting anyway.  The Transition Emerging Study: Examining the Trajectory of the Transition Movement in Canada looks at the work underway to understand Transition in […]

When people talk about ‘green jobs’ the health and care sector is not often on the list. We often think first about green technologies, renewable energy production, retrofitting and food and it was no different when we first sat down to plan the Economic Blueprint work in Totnes. When we agreed the key sectors that […]

Sarah Timmins is a qualified adult nurse who is now doing a postgraduate qualification to become a health visitor.  She recently started the blog ‘UK Nurse Against Climate Change‘ which she describes as “my own private journey into a year, and hopefully much longer, of trying to raise awareness of climate change and its devastating […]

Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic and author. His last two books were Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change and more recently a book published last year on geoengineering called Earthmasters: the dawn of the age of climate engineering.  It is both a chilling and a fascinating read, an insight […]

Health care is a very important issue to Transition Brasilandia, especially because in a low income community such as ours, many diseases appear frequently.  To help with the prevention and awareness raising about taking care of your health, the event is promoted by 5 Basic Health Units of the Territory and now 30 partners from […]

Our theme for May is ‘Transition and Health’. This month we’ll be looking at how public health professionals are already responding to challenges of climate change and resource depletion and at how a more Transition-inspired approach might help to deepen that.  We’ll be talking to nurses and doctors, to those responsible for sustainability within the National […]

William Blake famously wrote:  “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour”. I’d like, in this post, to invite you to imagine the local Circular Economy.  In a glass of stout.   For anyone who doesn’t know, […]