Rob Hopkins is the originator of the Transition Town concept, which promotes community-driven responses to peak oil that focus on cooperative effort to meet basic needs as sustainably and close to home as possible. In just a few years, his work inspired an international movement of hundreds of communities and thousands of people pursuing Transition initiatives. A teacher of permaculture and natural building techniques, Rob is co-founder of the Transition Network, and author of The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience (2008), and The Transition Companion (2011). He was the winner of the 2008 Schumacher Award, is an Ashoka Fellow, served 3 years as a Trustee of the Soil Association, and was named by the Independent as one of the UK’s top 100 environmentalists.
Articles / Blogs
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Divest! – Then What?
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...
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Is Transition political?
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...
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What would a Transition hospital look like?
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...
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Michael Shuman: “I would say that we are winning”
We last spoke to Michael Shuman just over three years ago. He is author of several books on local economic development, the most recent being Local Dollars, Local Sense. He is an attorney, an economist, and his current job...
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The Catalytic Effect of Community-led Action
One of the most fascinating recent studies into the impact of Transition was Local Communities Leading the Way to a Low Carbon Society, a report published by AEIDL (Association Européenne pour l’Information sur le Développement Local. It looks at Transition,...
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Holmgren’s ‘Crash on Demand’: be careful what you wish for
It is a rare occurence that I disagree with David Holmgren. One of my heroes, and the co-founder of permaculture, I generally find his intellect formidable, his insights on permaculture revelatory, and his take on the wider patterns and...
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Doria Robinson on scaling up community resilience in the shadow of Chevron
When I was in the US in October I met Doria Robinson, Executive Director of Urban Tilth. Urban Tilth is a non-profit urban agriculture organisation in Richmond, California, in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. I was blown...
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10 Years After “The Party’s Over”: an interview with Richard Heinberg
While running the risk of sounding like a Hello! Magazine reporter, I must introduce this post by saying that while in the US recently, I joined Richard Heinberg and his wife Janet in their beautiful permaculture garden in Santa...
Reports
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Climate After Growth
This provocative paper makes a convincing case for why the environmental community must embrace post-growth economics and community resilience in their efforts to address the climate crisis.
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RESILIENCE: What Can Communities Do?
Community matters when we are looking for responses to peak oil and climate change because of the power that emerges from working together and creating meaningful change through shared action. In a world where social capital and a sense of connection to community are in decline, it is the taking of practical action
Books
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The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises
John Kaufmann, Daniel Lerch, Bill Sheehan, Anthony Perl, William Rees, Tom Whipple, Stephanie Mills, Peter Whybrow, Michael Shuman, David Orr, Cindy Parker, Chris Martenson, Brian Schwartz, Richard Gilbert, Warren Karlenzig, Wes Jackson, David Hughes, Rob Hopkins, David Fridley, Gloria Flora, Joshua Farley, Hillary Brown, Michael Bomford, Asher Miller, Zenobia Barlow, Sandra Postel, Richard Heinberg, Erika Allen, Bill Ryerson