Launch of Local Currency, Image by Mike Grenville

“Our starting point is that we’re all in this situation together – that’s how we’re able to capture the imagination of so many different kinds of people.” -Rob Hopkins

The Transition Network, founded in 2005, is an international community-led response to global warming and declining oil reserves. It continues to grow exponentially: more than 200 cities, towns and villages around the world have adopted the Transition principles. The movement is committed to adopting self-sufficient solutions to prepare communities to withstand the impact of, and thrive in a world transformed by an event known as “peak oil,” when demand for cheap energy outstrips supply, fundamentally altering the global economy and the way we live.

The Transition concept first emerged from an ecological design course taught by Rob Hopkins at a college in Ireland. “Transition” is centered on the idea of building resilience to crisis by “unlocking the collective genius of the community,” in Hopkins words.

The first Transition Town developed in 2006 in Totnes, England, where local residents, led by Hopkins, joined together to grow more local food in community gardens, plan more pedestrian- and bike-friendly streets, lower their energy use, and even create their own local currency to encourage spending and investment in the local economy.

Since then, Transition Initiatives have sprouted up all over the world from Japan to New Zealand and includes at least 20 in the United States. In Bristol, England, residents organized the distribution of hundreds of fruit trees and organized workshops to help people grow produce in their own backyards. Residents of Ann Arbor, MI organized a “Reskilling Festival” to teach people everything from keeping their own chickens to canning and darning socks. In Geelong, a city in the state of Victoria, Australia, residents have negotiated discounts on solar power equipment by buying bulk.

The Transition movement is purposefully decentralized, with each community taking autonomous action but linked to each other through conferences and an online wiki where ideas are exchanged. Individuals send out “pulses of ideas,” which communities then adapt for their own purposes. “The process as has been about devolving decision making to the most local level possible,” Hopkins has said.

Hopkins credits the Transition movement’s fast-spreading appeal to its purposeful disavowal of doomsday environmentalism in favor of an ethos powered by creative and collective response to a future that has already arrived. “Transition doesn’t start out against things,” he has said. “Our starting point is that we’re all in this situation together – that’s how we’re able to capture the imagination of so many different kinds of people.”

Rob Hopkins

Founding Member
Transition Network
Totnes, Devon, England