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===Transkript einer DorfUni Veranstaltung vom 19.5.===

mit Sonix https://my.sonix.ai/recordings/VvMmkwYv

(RobHopkins Vorstellung durch David Steinwender). ( Über Rob Hopkins in der Wikipedia) Er ist weltweit bekannt als Gesicht der Transition Bewegung. Kommt ursprünglich aus der Permakulturbewegung. In Kinsale / Irland hat er im rahmen zweijährigen Vollzeitkurs für Permakultur 2005 mit seinen Studenten auf Grundlage der Peak Oil These einen Verbrauchsreduktionsplan erstellt, den der Stadtrat ratifizierte - und damit die Grundlage für die Idee der Transition Towns gelegt. und er ist ein Jahr später nach England, nach Totnes gegangen, und hat dort dieselbe idee erfolgreich umgesetzt. Er war in Totnes auch auch Mitberünder einer Brauerei, die in Gemeinschaftseigentum ist. Von Totnes breitete sich die Transitiobn Town bewegung zunächst in England und dann auch in vielen hundert Städten und Dörfern auf der ganzen Welt aus. er ist bekannt als Autor und Sprecher....


00:19 We all know that we are living in the time of the climate emergency, that this is the time when we are seeing change happen really, really rapidly. And the science tells us that we need to be cutting our emissions by maybe seven or eight percent every year. And the changes we've seen with Corona virus on the landing of airplanes and our use and people staying at home has led to about about five and a half percent cuts in emissions every year. So we recognize that this is a huge, huge challenge. But if if we're going to have any chance of staying below one and a half degrees, then the changes we need to make are enormous.

01:04 And as Naomi Klein says, there are no nonradical solutions left. And for me, this is a challenge of imagination. And I just wrote a book last year which is about imagination and the importance of cultivating that as activists. (Because) This is the only graph I will show you. By the way, don't worry. But I show you this for the story - because at the moment we stand at the top of this enormous mountain of carbon and pollution and resource and urgently - with the utmost urgency - we need to get to the downward half of this graph. And my belief is that we will only do that if we are able to tell the stories about the place on the other half of this graph that are so delicious and so wonderful that they create a deep, deep longing in people for that future.

02:05 [[Gelb] My work is mostly about trying to create longing for a low carbon future. It means that the work we are doing is as much work of storytelling as of anything else. As the poet and mystic Rilke once said "The future must enter into you a long time before it happens".] So I feel like how we bring a different vision of the future to life is fundamentally im[portant.Ton verschluckt] As activists, we often present people with terrifying images of a future where we are up to here in water and everything is everything is horrible. How might it be if actually we told stories of how it might be if we did everything we could possibly do. There is an artist called James Macci (??) , who draws the future. And this is his drawing of a city and maybe 20 years in the future where biodiversity is is everywhere where the city has been repurposed for biodiversity.

03:21 This is how he imagines a future where our streets are full of food being grown and our children walk to school through food being grown. When at the moment we give so much of our urban space to cars and when we take away that space we need new ideas for what we do there. Two thirds of the surface area of Los Angeles is dedicated to cars that could grow an awful lot of food. So so for me, how we how we create a vision not of utopia, but of a future where we did everything we could do. It's really, really important.

04:06 What I want to share with you this morning is a model that emerged from the research in the book. It tries to answer the question, how might we set out to expand our collective imagination? The imagination is something which should be like this. It's a muscle that should like this. But increasingly in our culture, it is like this ... because we are failing to create the conditions that the imagination needs. [[Gelb]So, you know, I fear that we have created a perfect storm that is causing our imagination to contract at the very time it needs to be expanding.]

04:49 So I want to share with you these four things. And for each of them, I will tell stories and bring them to life with examples from the transition movements.

The first one is space. You all know the inside is going to have a brief that the time when you are imaginative is when you have space. Your best ideas don't come to you when you are sitting in front of your headline or in a in an office with somebody saying "ideas, ideas". Albert Einstein said his best ideas came to him when he was riding his bicycle in a forest. And we all need space in order to be imaginative. So as movements, as organizations, we must design space into our meetings, into our projects, into how we function as organizations rather than always being obsessively focused on the task.

05:53 This is a project we created in my town where people would meet with their neighbors in groups of six to 10 and they would discuss energy and water and they would make changes. And on average, they cut their carbon footprint by about one and a half tons per year. But the main thing that people experienced was space. space to get to know their neighbors, space to connect, space to feel like they are part of a community. We often in the transition movement use open space, a technique to bring large groups of people together for self organizing conversations, which are the conversations.... And when I was researching the book, I wanted to find places where people were making space for play. Play is essential to the imagination. But we have kind of removed it from our public life. They went to visit a street where they were bringing play back into the street. It was beautiful. And they they they closed the streets. The children come. The children play. And you could see the space that had been created. In my town, we created a festival of street games where we closed the square. And children played games. Again, we we intentionally made a space for play and imagination. And that is a very rare thing these days. This is a Dutch game called [Speker.......] Wonderful. And this girl could play this game for about ten minutes, and with with fantastic concentration.

7:46 Our second one is place. We need places that provide a platform for the active imagination. Places we go and we think differently about what is possible. This is a transition group in London who on Saturday and Sunday, went to their high street with beautiful apple trees, with flowers and put them along the street so that the street was transformed into a pop up orchard. And they had conversations with people about trees in the city and all of those trees then went home and found a place. They created a new patchwork orchard in their neighborhoods.

Places like Prinzessinengarten in Berlin are wonderful as a place that enable you to think differently about what the future could be. This is where urban agriculture is just completely normal. You know that these places are so important.

In Houston, Texas there is a man called Jason Roberts, the man here at the front. He runs a project called Better Block. They take urban places that nobody loves. Then they they redesigned those spaces. Then they make offsite things to transform it and they arrive at night and then they make it into something different. In the morning, people walk past and the place is different. So, for example, this is this is a place that nobody loves. One night Better Block came and the next day they had turned it into this. I love the idea that we can feed the imagination by creating pop up tomorrows. If people a taste of how things could be different, it always needs to do big things like that.

This is a project that started in San Francisco. Now happens all around the world called Parking Day, which was begun by a group of artists saying where can we find affordable space to exhibit our work? And somebody said, well, if you buy a ticket for a car parking space, there is no law that says you must put a car in it. If you have paid for a ticket, you can do whatever you like. So so one day a year, people buy tickets for parking spaces and do different things. So they might do yoga in those spaces. They turn them into places for people to play games, some big phase and libraries. Someone got married in one. Once people do what it is, I don't really know. But it's people taking space to help people to think about the future in different ways.

10:51 In the permaculture movement we take places that nobody loves. We turn them into a food forest. And sometimes a place can be a whole town, a whole city that can help to think differently. This is an amazing place in France called Ungersheim on the border with with with Switzerland, which is a transition village where you can see how food and energy and economics and building are all tied together. It's it's the most phenomenal place. They have really great food projects. The story of what they are creating in Ungersheim has spread all across France and has inspired many, many people. So the idea of single settlements that tell a new story is also really precious.

11:49 Practices. How can we use practices to change what we think is possible to to unlock our imagination? And I was when I started to research the book, I went to Dundee in Scotland to visit a project called Art Angel. And this is Rosalie Summerton who runs Stop Projects. Angel works with people with mental ill health, stress, anxiety by using art. They say when you walk through the door here, you're not a patient. You're not a client. You are an artist who is preparing work for an exhibition. And every year they put on an exhibition in the big gallery in the city. And I've met so many people where I could see how their imagination, which had been destroyed, was beginning to was beginning to grow back again. And every year at Art Angel, they do an evaluation to see how well they are doing. And they don't give people a big form with lots of questions. They give them a piece of paper with two outlines of a human body on like a gingerbread man. And they say, fill the first one to show how you felt before you came here. And the second to show how you feel now you've been coming here. And it was very moving to look through these. .I'll just show you one, which I think needs no explanation.

13:27 I think for me, if we are able to harness the imagination in addressing the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis and the social crisis as well, this is what that transition will feel like. If we are successful, this is what this journey will feel like, I think. So there are many places in our edge in education where people are saying we have to change our education system so that we produce young people who are very, very imaginative In the moment imagination is being pushed out of our education system, but it's so, so important. And one of the great practices for me that we developed in the transition movement for the imagination is called Transition Town Anywhere.

14:20 [[Gelb] It was developed together with Encounter's Arts, who are amazing arts organization. So you get two, three, four hundred people in a big space. You invite people to imagine that they are stepping forward in time. They are stepping from 2020 to 2030 - to a 2030 that is not paradise, but a 2030 where everything we could have done was done. And then you invite people to think, 'what am I doing in this world? What is my role here? What do I do? ' And then to find other people who share their interests. And then you you build physically this new world with cardboard and bamboo sticks and string and pens and sticky tape. And 300 adults build a world that they completely believe in. And they inhabit a trade. And they celebrate. They grieve. They connect. It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever been part of. To be with that many adults lost in play. When we did this recently, these two young men built the public transport system for Transition Town Anywhere. They tell you everything about this, what the tickets looked like, what the seats were made of, where it went. Everything about it. Because in their imagination, they had completely created this future. To repeat the real key quote I said at the beginning, the future must enter into you a long time before it happens.]

16:09 And when people ask me how I know this works: this is me in 2012. And I worked with some people to create a project called the Yeast Collective, which was a brewery and a bakery and a mill in the same space. And we spent the day playing this mill. I could tell you what all the beers were called, how our training program worked, everything about it. The following year in my town, we started a brewery. And last year we converted that brewery to being a 100 percent community owned business. And we raised a hundred and eighty thousand pounds from local people. We now have 270 owners. And when people said, but, Rob, how do you know this will work? I said, I know this will work because I played it. I absolutely know this will work because I played it - and using the practices that allow us to play a low carbon sustainable future is really, really powerful work.

17:07 This is James Mechai who made those drawings I showed you earlier, sometimes in his city in Leeds. He goes out to the street like this with a with a an easel and a big piece of paper. And he draws what's in front of him. And then when people walk past, he says, excuse me, could you tell me how you think this place will look in the future? Then he adds that into his drawing. He says, you just need a really simple sketch and then people's ideas begin to begin to arrive.

17:55 This man is called Per Gronkwist. He works for the Swedish government. His his job description, his job title is chief storyteller. His job description is to bring to life the day to day realities of living in a low carbon future. Every organization, every university everywhere needs a chief storyteller. We all need to cultivate the skills of bringing to life the day to day realities of living in a low carbon future. It's essential, I would suggest.

18;35 I wanted to just share a couple of stories from the transition movement. One of the key practices is the ability to ask good "what if" questions. How do we ask a good What-If question? And this is an example from London. So in ''Tooting'# in South London, they have they have nowhere that is like a town square or a village green, a place for people to meet. There is one place that it could be. Which is here, which is a bus turning circle every day. It is full of buses and waiting to be called to go somewhere else. So one day, Transition Town Tooting organized an event called The Tooting Twirl, where they took that space. It made all the buses go away and they filled that space with flowers and people and music. They put real grass down onto the roads. There was music and carnival and coffee and colors and flowersrs. People spent the day living as though that space was already a village green. It was really powerful thing to see. I got to sit with my feet on the green green grass of tooting. And I noticed during the day that the conversation changed from if this is our if this were our village green to when this is our village green. Somewhere deep underneath, the lights of permission started to shift. People started to look at this wall, which normally nobody looked at, and they would say, when this is our village green, what story about ourselves we want to paint on this wall? Those conversations were only made possible because they had a great what if question.

20:45 In Liège in Belgium,the transition group six years ago formulated a What-If question. They said, what if the generation's time, The majority of food eaten in Liege came from the land closest to the edge. They call the project the food belt central element to the food belt, and they'd run a big event. They invited everyone who cared about food in the city. And they asked this What-If question. I then returned to LA age four years later. In that time, they created 21 new cooperatives. They raised five million euros of investment from local people. They started a farm to vineyards, a brewery, a shop, the center of the city. They now have four shops in the center of the city. They have a local currency. They have a delivery business. It's phenomenal. They made like a basket for ideas. And when I met the mayor of Liege, he said eight years ago, we said we wanted to be a smart city. Now we want to be a transition city. This is the story of our city. But it started with the people and it started with a brilliant What-If question. And the mayor said to me, our role is just to remove any obstacles and blockages to this growing. So there I could really see the power of a great what if.

So sometimes we need cities where we need to create economic stories where anything feels possible, like in the city of Preston, where their economic model is to say we have to use the hospitals, the schools, the universities, the money they spend to circulate in this economy much more.

22:46 But the last thing that I want to share with you is pact's. [[Gelb] We have space and we have places and we have practices ... the missing, and most important thing is PACTS. How do we meet the imagination halfway? Everybody on this call will have experienced a time when you are invited to a consultation, you take your brilliant ideas and you write them on a Post-it note. You stick them on the wall and then you go home and they put all the Post-it notes into the rubbish and they just carry on doing what they were going to do anyway. And if if we are to invite the imagination, we have to respect it and meet it in the middle.]
This is a museum in Derby which is being redesigned by the community and rebuilt by the community. And in the middle of the museum, they made a workshop. So all the new furniture, everything is being built by local volunteers. And they are rebuilding the museum now. And they have created a whole new process for large construction projects, which maximises the capacity of local people to connect and be involved in that process.

The woman with the microphone here is Gabriela Gomez Mons. She worked for the mayor of Mexico City. And she created in that administration what was conceived of as being a ministry of imagination, which sounds like something in a Harry Potter book. In Mexico City it exists - and their work is to protect the imaginative life of the city, create the conditions for the imagination of that city to flourish.

In Bologna, in Italy, the municipality created a civic imagination office.... Works by using open space and visioning. All across the city with local people. But then the really important bit is when the communities think of a brilliant idea. The municipalities say, how do we make that happen? Let's make a pact. We can offer this, this, this and this. And you can offer that. And that's good. Okay, let's make a pact. Good. And in the last five years, they've made 500 pacts in Bologna from let's make a small garden, to let's take this empty office block and turn it into a school to train young people as classical musicians. So pacts is fundamentally important that we that we meet the imagination in the middle. And every organization should be committing to that kind of an approach. And I'm going to go through and just because I'm finishing up now to say no, I will. I will tell you that.

25:47 I feel like, you know, sometimes when people hear me talking and they say, well, this all sounds very nice. But in the real world, this kind of thing would never work. Privilege that I have in the transition movement is that I get to go and visit so many places where this stuff is happening is moving and accelerating very fast. When we look at what a post COVID 19 world will look like, there is so much that we need to reimagine that we need to rebuild, that we need to bring fresh thinking to this. And and the imagination is going to be fundamental.

So I just want to close by telling you this story from France. I went to last year visit a town called Mouans Sartuox, which is half an hour inland from Nice and in Mouans Sartuox, the government in France, passed a law to say all food in schools should be 20 percent of food and schools should be organic. And in Mouans Sartuox, they said, well, if 20 percent is better than zero percent, why are we stopping at 20 percent? So they decided all the food should be 100 percent organic and that they would grow as much of it as possible on land in the town. So the municipality bought land, which was due to be covered in houses, and they turned it into a into a market garden. I visited there and it was beautiful and it was alive with biodiversity and bees and flowers. And they grew 70 percent of all the food for the schools. And when I went there, I thought, here we have a solution to the climate crisis, to the biodiversity crisis, to the social crisis, which is a win win, win, win, win, win, win ... scenario. It's good for mental health, public health, the local economy, biodiversity, skills training, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, this is this is the kind of solutions that we need, I think.
(Hintergrundgeräusche)
That's my my offering to this wonderful online event. Think we need to be thinking about spaces in place, practices, empowerment. And so thank you so much for your attention. Just to close. If you if you want to find out any more about the work that I do. So, Rob Hopkins.net. You will find all of the interviews that I did for the book are available there. If you want to find out about the transition movement, have a look at the transition sites. And I also just started a new podcast series called From What If to What Next? Which might interest you, too. Thank you so much for your attention. And I look forward to the rest of the rest of this morning.





Ok, but I think I head over now to our others because They have questions to Rob

And so I just want to say thank you. He's done with the movement. I have to say thank you. Bundle up the week I've been in this movement to change, it's perceived that this idea is really happening.

Permaculture dragon dreaming, all the transition culture and all the ideas, everything that has now come together.

It really touched me and I wanted to say thank you.

Is there any connection between those activities except you telling those stories? Do they know about each other and exchange each other?

So. Yes, many of those stories have emerged from the transition town movement.

So they would know about each other because a lot of my work is around storytelling.

So I listen for stories and I share stories through the network. And certainly in the UK, the word transition tends to be used to refer to the transition movement and the transition model that we developed and that we use. But in France, because the because of a film called Tomorrow that was very popular in France, the word tends to refer to a wider body of of kind of action and activism, I suppose.

So that the last story I told about four months up to in in France that would think of itself as transition, but it doesn't have a connection to the transition movement, I suppose. But most of those stories have come through the transition movement.

Thank you.

Ok. There are a lot of questions coming in through the check. So one user and unfortunately people did not put their name and location.

Yes, yes, yes.

There are one user is asking about is amazed by the idea of chief storyteller and is wondering whether Rob or someone else knows how this job was created in Sweden, if it exists somewhere else, and if there is a discourse about this in policy. And also, of course, big cheers and thanks.

I don't know, I if there was an article that I read about it, which maybe when we when we move on to the next speakers, I will find that article I like and posted into the charts. It was it was a post that was created by the Swedish government. But I don't know what the process was that led them to that. OK.

Other than that, I read it and I thought, that's genius.

Ok, next question. It really relates to this question. I would be interested in your question if it is better.

It should be political or citizens measures and activities applied in order to initiate this transition project. What should be the role of politics in the movement?

Well, I think for me, part of the role of politics you can see in the story and Lee is that that's the role of politics, is to support and enable citizens to take imaginative action. We need national politics to create the narrative and the framework

And as extinction rebellion say, we need them to tell the truth. About the situation and the urgency and the scale of change required, and they need to create enabling frameworks which enable communities to act in a way that is resourced in a way that recognizes that you can only do so much with volunteers and which is based on the principles of resilience and the need to make local economies more resilient. So my sense is that we have to take the police current political know. I don't claim to know how to do this, okay.

But whether we have to take the current political Top-Down model and turn it the other way around so that the role of each level is to make sure that the level beneath it has everything that it needs in order to act. And then so on. So so fundamentally, the role of government is to empower citizens to take the action that they need in the most imaginative way possible. And it's a reason why in the book I argue that we need to create a National Imagination Act, a piece of legislation that enshrines our rights to an imaginative life.

I think this is a way to to turn things around. Has a name.

I think it was called Subsidiary City RTA. Yeah. And I think it's it's an old concept that needs to be totally revitalized in the West for localisation.

And actually, the next question, again, relates to what you have just mentioned. The question from a third question that I have here is. What's the balance of people in transition towns in regard to paid and unpaid labor? Do the people who are who are active? Do they have enough income or are they sufficiently supplied with everything they need? That is that is the question that came in Germany.

That's a very good and very important question, because so many of the projects that we see in the transition movement are done by volunteers.

And the reality is that when you begin, you have no resource and you are driven by the momentum and enthusiasm of volunteers. If this is to be sustainable, if this is to be resilient, we have to recognize that we need to conceive and imagine these projects in such a way that we don't expect everybody to always be volunteers. Sometimes people will say, ah, but the transition movements and the environmental movement is all white middle class people. Which which is not true, but is sometimes true. And I think unless we are able to create paid jobs for people, then that will often remain the case. And I went to America 10 years ago. I met an extraordinary woman working in Richmond, California, very poor neighborhood. And I said we did a we did a talk together.

And I said, you know, unless we are able to create work for people, then these will always remain unrepresentative movements. And she said, it's so good to hear you say that.

She said if this is a revolution that depends on volunteers, then I can't be part of it and nor can anybody else who lives here.

So we have a big strand's in our work in the transition movements that we call the Ricoh Aname Project, which is to say, how do we think like entrepreneurs when we are imagining a project? How do we imagine it's in the way an entrepreneur might imagine it? So, for example, I mentioned the brewery, that that brewery now employs six people. And so I always try to think of the projects not with an expectation that people will volunteer on it for 20 years, but that it will be able to become work for people. And this is a fundamentally important shifts. I think that we have to be making if we want to create a new economy, that new economy means that people will need to be able to survive and thrive and pay their mortgage. And, you know, all of that sort of thing. So so that feels a really fundamentally important thing to me.

Ok. There are more questions. One question was about movies. Of course there is tomorrow.

Is there other movies that can get people interested? What are your favorite movies are up. Let's get people to start.



Well, there's a film that you can find on YouTube? called In Transition 2.0, which is a really good introduction to transition. There's the film that I mentioned, a French film called Keskin at Homes or What Are We Waiting For? Which is the story of Unger's Haim, which is the town I mentioned.

How did those two. Those are two starters. I think I think tomorrow is also fabulous.

Another question.

When will we reach critical mass? When will we. When do you think? When do you see critical mass? Reached by the process with talking.

I think I think in some aspects we have already reached critical mass. I think the beautiful thing about tipping points is that you only ever see them in the rearview mirror. You only you only see them afterwards. And. I I feel like one of the most important things right now is that we in these movements, that we allow ourselves to believe that this is the tipping point, that when we hit.

But we are that we are now at the tipping point.

We have to keep up because it allows us to believe that.

I worry sometimes that in the movements, I worry sometimes that in the movements that we have created, that we build into the DNA of those movements, a narrative that says that it's too late and that we can't do it and that it's not possible. And all the great social change movements fundamentally believed that that change was possible. And so for me, I always when I give big talks, I invite people to imagine what it would feel like if in hindsight, they knew that this time right now was the tipping point. We were living through this time of the most extraordinary possibility and transformation. And and it feels like a very powerful way to look at the world to me.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thinking about another USA day movement extinction, the rebellion also started to activate people for the critical mass. But unfortunately, a lot of people now going on the streets to protest against the Cortona measure. What now?

Well, I, I, I think we I think. You know, social media has a has a way of. Amplifying things and making them look much bigger than they were, you know, in London, there was the big demonstration against the Corona virus measures on Saturday.

It was about 100 people.

You know, the one it's it's not very many people.

I think we have we should have seen a car like Corona virus.

It is actually as having been one of the most extraordinary acts of mutual solidarity, of love, of of care that we have ever witnessed.

And just because a few idiots amplified on social media doesn't make it a social movement in the way that extinction rebellion ends and the climate movement is Axel.

Ok. I wish your works in God's ear, as we say. Of course, sir, we have a lot of turnout on the streets. We have 10000 people in Stuttgart already.

And this is the speak. Distrust, distrust and authority. And I think also the unwillingness to take responsibility to yourself. But we cannot we cannot finish this conflict right now. But it would be very interesting to to follow up. So I would Emily, now, because the time is very much at last. I would really now we have a second round of discussion afterwards. I would really now stop with the last question. What would you recommend as a first step for someone sitting by themselves at the dining table right now and just their transition training and the work? That I think is the question that I should answer. OK.

What I would say that there is a there is a transition hub for the German speaking. So Austria, Germany and Switzerland, there is a truncheon network and they they run transition training. And they they do a lot of work around transition. So I would say they would be the first the first ports of call to find out more about what's available.

Actually, we are in Austria. The Austrian hub is beginning an Austrian transition training. So really a. Now that that is happening now, I would like now to do hand back to David and David is sitting at the Lifestream botheration place, the central place, and he will take over the moderation and get.....

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Hopkins#cite_note-3

Transkript einer DorfUni Veranstaltung vom 19.5.

mit Sonix https://my.sonix.ai/recordings/VvMmkwYv ˧

(RobHopkins Vorstellung durch David Steinwender). ( Über Rob Hopkins in der Wikipedia) Er ist weltweit bekannt als Gesicht der Transition Bewegung. Kommt ursprünglich aus der Permakulturbewegung. In Kinsale / Irland hat er im rahmen zweijährigen Vollzeitkurs für Permakultur 2005 mit seinen Studenten auf Grundlage der Peak Oil These einen Verbrauchsreduktionsplan erstellt, den der Stadtrat ratifizierte - und damit die Grundlage für die Idee der Transition Towns gelegt. und er ist ein Jahr später nach England, nach Totnes gegangen, und hat dort dieselbe idee erfolgreich umgesetzt. Er war in Totnes auch auch Mitberünder einer Brauerei, die in Gemeinschaftseigentum ist. Von Totnes breitete sich die Transitiobn Town bewegung zunächst in England und dann auch in vielen hundert Städten und Dörfern auf der ganzen Welt aus. er ist bekannt als Autor und Sprecher.... ˧

00:19 We all know that we are living in the time of the climate emergency, that this is the time when we are seeing change happen really, really rapidly. And the science tells us that we need to be cutting our emissions by maybe seven or eight percent every year. And the changes we've seen with Corona virus on the landing of airplanes and our use and people staying at home has led to about about five and a half percent cuts in emissions every year. So we recognize that this is a huge, huge challenge. But if if we're going to have any chance of staying below one and a half degrees, then the changes we need to make are enormous. ˧

01:04 And as Naomi Klein says, there are no nonradical solutions left. And for me, this is a challenge of imagination. And I just wrote a book last year which is about imagination and the importance of cultivating that as activists. (Because) This is the only graph I will show you. By the way, don't worry. But I show you this for the story - because at the moment we stand at the top of this enormous mountain of carbon and pollution and resource and urgently - with the utmost urgency - we need to get to the downward half of this graph. And my belief is that we will only do that if we are able to tell the stories about the place on the other half of this graph that are so delicious and so wonderful that they create a deep, deep longing in people for that future. ˧

02:05 My work is mostly about trying to create longing for a low carbon future. It means that the work we are doing is as much work of storytelling as of anything else. As the poet and mystic Rilke once said "The future must enter into you a long time before it happens". So I feel like how we bring a different vision of the future to life is fundamentally im[portant.Ton verschluckt] As activists, we often present people with terrifying images of a future where we are up to here in water and everything is everything is horrible. How might it be if actually we told stories of how it might be if we did everything we could possibly do. There is an artist called James Macci (??) , who draws the future. And this is his drawing of a city and maybe 20 years in the future where biodiversity is is everywhere where the city has been repurposed for biodiversity. ˧

03:21 This is how he imagines a future where our streets are full of food being grown and our children walk to school through food being grown. When at the moment we give so much of our urban space to cars and when we take away that space we need new ideas for what we do there. Two thirds of the surface area of Los Angeles is dedicated to cars that could grow an awful lot of food. So so for me, how we how we create a vision not of utopia, but of a future where we did everything we could do. It's really, really important. ˧

04:06 What I want to share with you this morning is a model that emerged from the research in the book. It tries to answer the question, how might we set out to expand our collective imagination? The imagination is something which should be like this. It's a muscle that should like this. But increasingly in our culture, it is like this ... because we are failing to create the conditions that the imagination needs. So, you know, I fear that we have created a perfect storm that is causing our imagination to contract at the very time it needs to be expanding. ˧

04:49 So I want to share with you these four things. And for each of them, I will tell stories and bring them to life with examples from the transition movements.
The first one is space. You all know the inside is going to have a brief that the time when you are imaginative is when you have space. Your best ideas don't come to you when you are sitting in front of your headline or in a in an office with somebody saying "ideas, ideas". Albert Einstein said his best ideas came to him when he was riding his bicycle in a forest. And we all need space in order to be imaginative. So as movements, as organizations, we must design space into our meetings, into our projects, into how we function as organizations rather than always being obsessively focused on the task. ˧

05:53 This is a project we created in my town where people would meet with their neighbors in groups of six to 10 and they would discuss energy and water and they would make changes. And on average, they cut their carbon footprint by about one and a half tons per year. But the main thing that people experienced was space. space to get to know their neighbors, space to connect, space to feel like they are part of a community. We often in the transition movement use open space, a technique to bring large groups of people together for self organizing conversations, which are the conversations.... And when I was researching the book, I wanted to find places where people were making space for play. Play is essential to the imagination. But we have kind of removed it from our public life. They went to visit a street where they were bringing play back into the street. It was beautiful. And they they they closed the streets. The children come. The children play. And you could see the space that had been created. In my town, we created a festival of street games where we closed the square. And children played games. Again, we we intentionally made a space for play and imagination. And that is a very rare thing these days. This is a Dutch game called [Speker.......] Wonderful. And this girl could play this game for about ten minutes, and with with fantastic concentration. ˧

7:46 Our second one is place. We need places that provide a platform for the active imagination. Places we go and we think differently about what is possible. This is a transition group in London who on Saturday and Sunday, went to their high street with beautiful apple trees, with flowers and put them along the street so that the street was transformed into a pop up orchard. And they had conversations with people about trees in the city and all of those trees then went home and found a place. They created a new patchwork orchard in their neighborhoods.
Places like Prinzessinengarten in Berlin are wonderful as a place that enable you to think differently about what the future could be. This is where urban agriculture is just completely normal. You know that these places are so important.
In Houston, Texas there is a man called Jason Roberts, the man here at the front. He runs a project called Better Block. They take urban places that nobody loves. Then they they redesigned those spaces. Then they make offsite things to transform it and they arrive at night and then they make it into something different. In the morning, people walk past and the place is different. So, for example, this is this is a place that nobody loves. One night Better Block came and the next day they had turned it into this. I love the idea that we can feed the imagination by creating pop up tomorrows. If people a taste of how things could be different, it always needs to do big things like that.
This is a project that started in San Francisco. Now happens all around the world called Parking Day, which was begun by a group of artists saying where can we find affordable space to exhibit our work? And somebody said, well, if you buy a ticket for a car parking space, there is no law that says you must put a car in it. If you have paid for a ticket, you can do whatever you like. So so one day a year, people buy tickets for parking spaces and do different things. So they might do yoga in those spaces. They turn them into places for people to play games, some big phase and libraries. Someone got married in one. Once people do what it is, I don't really know. But it's people taking space to help people to think about the future in different ways. ˧

10:51 In the permaculture movement we take places that nobody loves. We turn them into a food forest. And sometimes a place can be a whole town, a whole city that can help to think differently. This is an amazing place in France called Ungersheim on the border with with with Switzerland, which is a transition village where you can see how food and energy and economics and building are all tied together. It's it's the most phenomenal place. They have really great food projects. The story of what they are creating in Ungersheim has spread all across France and has inspired many, many people. So the idea of single settlements that tell a new story is also really precious. ˧

11:49 Practices. How can we use practices to change what we think is possible to to unlock our imagination? And I was when I started to research the book, I went to Dundee in Scotland to visit a project called Art Angel. And this is Rosalie Summerton who runs Stop Projects. Angel works with people with mental ill health, stress, anxiety by using art. They say when you walk through the door here, you're not a patient. You're not a client. You are an artist who is preparing work for an exhibition. And every year they put on an exhibition in the big gallery in the city. And I've met so many people where I could see how their imagination, which had been destroyed, was beginning to was beginning to grow back again. And every year at Art Angel, they do an evaluation to see how well they are doing. And they don't give people a big form with lots of questions. They give them a piece of paper with two outlines of a human body on like a gingerbread man. And they say, fill the first one to show how you felt before you came here. And the second to show how you feel now you've been coming here. And it was very moving to look through these. .I'll just show you one, which I think needs no explanation. ˧

13:27 I think for me, if we are able to harness the imagination in addressing the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis and the social crisis as well, this is what that transition will feel like. If we are successful, this is what this journey will feel like, I think. So there are many places in our edge in education where people are saying we have to change our education system so that we produce young people who are very, very imaginative In the moment imagination is being pushed out of our education system, but it's so, so important. And one of the great practices for me that we developed in the transition movement for the imagination is called Transition Town Anywhere. ˧

14:20 It was developed together with Encounter's Arts, who are amazing arts organization. So you get two, three, four hundred people in a big space. You invite people to imagine that they are stepping forward in time. They are stepping from 2020 to 2030 - to a 2030 that is not paradise, but a 2030 where everything we could have done was done. And then you invite people to think, 'what am I doing in this world? What is my role here? What do I do? ' And then to find other people who share their interests. And then you you build physically this new world with cardboard and bamboo sticks and string and pens and sticky tape. And 300 adults build a world that they completely believe in. And they inhabit a trade. And they celebrate. They grieve. They connect. It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever been part of. To be with that many adults lost in play. When we did this recently, these two young men built the public transport system for Transition Town Anywhere. They tell you everything about this, what the tickets looked like, what the seats were made of, where it went. Everything about it. Because in their imagination, they had completely created this future. To repeat the real key quote I said at the beginning, the future must enter into you a long time before it happens. ˧

16:09 And when people ask me how I know this works: this is me in 2012. And I worked with some people to create a project called the Yeast Collective, which was a brewery and a bakery and a mill in the same space. And we spent the day playing this mill. I could tell you what all the beers were called, how our training program worked, everything about it. The following year in my town, we started a brewery. And last year we converted that brewery to being a 100 percent community owned business. And we raised a hundred and eighty thousand pounds from local people. We now have 270 owners. And when people said, but, Rob, how do you know this will work? I said, I know this will work because I played it. I absolutely know this will work because I played it - and using the practices that allow us to play a low carbon sustainable future is really, really powerful work. ˧

17:07 This is James Mechai who made those drawings I showed you earlier, sometimes in his city in Leeds. He goes out to the street like this with a with a an easel and a big piece of paper. And he draws what's in front of him. And then when people walk past, he says, excuse me, could you tell me how you think this place will look in the future? Then he adds that into his drawing. He says, you just need a really simple sketch and then people's ideas begin to begin to arrive. ˧

17:55 This man is called Per Gronkwist. He works for the Swedish government. His his job description, his job title is chief storyteller. His job description is to bring to life the day to day realities of living in a low carbon future. Every organization, every university everywhere needs a chief storyteller. We all need to cultivate the skills of bringing to life the day to day realities of living in a low carbon future. It's essential, I would suggest. ˧

18;35 I wanted to just share a couple of stories from the transition movement. One of the key practices is the ability to ask good "what if" questions. How do we ask a good What-If question? And this is an example from London. So in ''Tooting'# in South London, they have they have nowhere that is like a town square or a village green, a place for people to meet. There is one place that it could be. Which is here, which is a bus turning circle every day. It is full of buses and waiting to be called to go somewhere else. So one day, Transition Town Tooting organized an event called The Tooting Twirl, where they took that space. It made all the buses go away and they filled that space with flowers and people and music. They put real grass down onto the roads. There was music and carnival and coffee and colors and flowersrs. People spent the day living as though that space was already a village green. It was really powerful thing to see. I got to sit with my feet on the green green grass of tooting. And I noticed during the day that the conversation changed from if this is our if this were our village green to when this is our village green. Somewhere deep underneath, the lights of permission started to shift. People started to look at this wall, which normally nobody looked at, and they would say, when this is our village green, what story about ourselves we want to paint on this wall? Those conversations were only made possible because they had a great what if question. ˧

20:45 In Liège in Belgium,the transition group six years ago formulated a What-If question. They said, what if the generation's time, The majority of food eaten in Liege came from the land closest to the edge. They call the project the food belt central element to the food belt, and they'd run a big event. They invited everyone who cared about food in the city. And they asked this What-If question. I then returned to LA age four years later. In that time, they created 21 new cooperatives. They raised five million euros of investment from local people. They started a farm to vineyards, a brewery, a shop, the center of the city. They now have four shops in the center of the city. They have a local currency. They have a delivery business. It's phenomenal. They made like a basket for ideas. And when I met the mayor of Liege, he said eight years ago, we said we wanted to be a smart city. Now we want to be a transition city. This is the story of our city. But it started with the people and it started with a brilliant What-If question. And the mayor said to me, our role is just to remove any obstacles and blockages to this growing. So there I could really see the power of a great what if.
So sometimes we need cities where we need to create economic stories where anything feels possible, like in the city of Preston, where their economic model is to say we have to use the hospitals, the schools, the universities, the money they spend to circulate in this economy much more. ˧

22:46 But the last thing that I want to share with you is pact's. We have space and we have places and we have practices ... the missing, and most important thing is PACTS. How do we meet the imagination halfway? Everybody on this call will have experienced a time when you are invited to a consultation, you take your brilliant ideas and you write them on a Post-it note. You stick them on the wall and then you go home and they put all the Post-it notes into the rubbish and they just carry on doing what they were going to do anyway. And if if we are to invite the imagination, we have to respect it and meet it in the middle.
This is a museum in Derby which is being redesigned by the community and rebuilt by the community. And in the middle of the museum, they made a workshop. So all the new furniture, everything is being built by local volunteers. And they are rebuilding the museum now. And they have created a whole new process for large construction projects, which maximises the capacity of local people to connect and be involved in that process.
The woman with the microphone here is Gabriela Gomez Mons. She worked for the mayor of Mexico City. And she created in that administration what was conceived of as being a ministry of imagination, which sounds like something in a Harry Potter book. In Mexico City it exists - and their work is to protect the imaginative life of the city, create the conditions for the imagination of that city to flourish.
In Bologna, in Italy, the municipality created a civic imagination office.... Works by using open space and visioning. All across the city with local people. But then the really important bit is when the communities think of a brilliant idea. The municipalities say, how do we make that happen? Let's make a pact. We can offer this, this, this and this. And you can offer that. And that's good. Okay, let's make a pact. Good. And in the last five years, they've made 500 pacts in Bologna from let's make a small garden, to let's take this empty office block and turn it into a school to train young people as classical musicians. So pacts is fundamentally important that we that we meet the imagination in the middle. And every organization should be committing to that kind of an approach. And I'm going to go through and just because I'm finishing up now to say no, I will. I will tell you that. ˧

25:47 I feel like, you know, sometimes when people hear me talking and they say, well, this all sounds very nice. But in the real world, this kind of thing would never work. Privilege that I have in the transition movement is that I get to go and visit so many places where this stuff is happening is moving and accelerating very fast. When we look at what a post COVID 19 world will look like, there is so much that we need to reimagine that we need to rebuild, that we need to bring fresh thinking to this. And and the imagination is going to be fundamental.
So I just want to close by telling you this story from France. I went to last year visit a town called Mouans Sartuox, which is half an hour inland from Nice and in Mouans Sartuox, the government in France, passed a law to say all food in schools should be 20 percent of food and schools should be organic. And in Mouans Sartuox, they said, well, if 20 percent is better than zero percent, why are we stopping at 20 percent? So they decided all the food should be 100 percent organic and that they would grow as much of it as possible on land in the town. So the municipality bought land, which was due to be covered in houses, and they turned it into a into a market garden. I visited there and it was beautiful and it was alive with biodiversity and bees and flowers. And they grew 70 percent of all the food for the schools. And when I went there, I thought, here we have a solution to the climate crisis, to the biodiversity crisis, to the social crisis, which is a win win, win, win, win, win, win ... scenario. It's good for mental health, public health, the local economy, biodiversity, skills training, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, this is this is the kind of solutions that we need, I think.
(Hintergrundgeräusche) That's my my offering to this wonderful online event. Think we need to be thinking about spaces in place, practices, empowerment. And so thank you so much for your attention. Just to close. If you if you want to find out any more about the work that I do. So, Rob Hopkins.net. You will find all of the interviews that I did for the book are available there. If you want to find out about the transition movement, have a look at the transition sites. And I also just started a new podcast series called From What If to What Next? Which might interest you, too. Thank you so much for your attention. And I look forward to the rest of the rest of this morning. ˧


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Ok, but I think I head over now to our others because They have questions to Rob ˧

And so I just want to say thank you. He's done with the movement. I have to say thank you. Bundle up the week I've been in this movement to change, it's perceived that this idea is really happening. ˧

Permaculture dragon dreaming, all the transition culture and all the ideas, everything that has now come together. ˧

It really touched me and I wanted to say thank you. ˧

Is there any connection between those activities except you telling those stories? Do they know about each other and exchange each other? ˧

So. Yes, many of those stories have emerged from the transition town movement. ˧

So they would know about each other because a lot of my work is around storytelling. ˧

So I listen for stories and I share stories through the network. And certainly in the UK, the word transition tends to be used to refer to the transition movement and the transition model that we developed and that we use. But in France, because the because of a film called Tomorrow that was very popular in France, the word tends to refer to a wider body of of kind of action and activism, I suppose. ˧

So that the last story I told about four months up to in in France that would think of itself as transition, but it doesn't have a connection to the transition movement, I suppose. But most of those stories have come through the transition movement. ˧

Thank you. ˧

Ok. There are a lot of questions coming in through the check. So one user and unfortunately people did not put their name and location. ˧

Yes, yes, yes. ˧

There are one user is asking about is amazed by the idea of chief storyteller and is wondering whether Rob or someone else knows how this job was created in Sweden, if it exists somewhere else, and if there is a discourse about this in policy. And also, of course, big cheers and thanks. ˧

I don't know, I if there was an article that I read about it, which maybe when we when we move on to the next speakers, I will find that article I like and posted into the charts. It was it was a post that was created by the Swedish government. But I don't know what the process was that led them to that. OK. ˧

Other than that, I read it and I thought, that's genius. ˧

Ok, next question. It really relates to this question. I would be interested in your question if it is better. ˧

It should be political or citizens measures and activities applied in order to initiate this transition project. What should be the role of politics in the movement? ˧

Well, I think for me, part of the role of politics you can see in the story and Lee is that that's the role of politics, is to support and enable citizens to take imaginative action. We need national politics to create the narrative and the framework ˧

And as extinction rebellion say, we need them to tell the truth. About the situation and the urgency and the scale of change required, and they need to create enabling frameworks which enable communities to act in a way that is resourced in a way that recognizes that you can only do so much with volunteers and which is based on the principles of resilience and the need to make local economies more resilient. So my sense is that we have to take the police current political know. I don't claim to know how to do this, okay. ˧

But whether we have to take the current political Top-Down model and turn it the other way around so that the role of each level is to make sure that the level beneath it has everything that it needs in order to act. And then so on. So so fundamentally, the role of government is to empower citizens to take the action that they need in the most imaginative way possible. And it's a reason why in the book I argue that we need to create a National Imagination Act, a piece of legislation that enshrines our rights to an imaginative life. ˧

I think this is a way to to turn things around. Has a name. ˧

I think it was called Subsidiary City RTA. Yeah. And I think it's it's an old concept that needs to be totally revitalized in the West for localisation. ˧

And actually, the next question, again, relates to what you have just mentioned. The question from a third question that I have here is. What's the balance of people in transition towns in regard to paid and unpaid labor? Do the people who are who are active? Do they have enough income or are they sufficiently supplied with everything they need? That is that is the question that came in Germany. ˧

That's a very good and very important question, because so many of the projects that we see in the transition movement are done by volunteers. ˧

And the reality is that when you begin, you have no resource and you are driven by the momentum and enthusiasm of volunteers. If this is to be sustainable, if this is to be resilient, we have to recognize that we need to conceive and imagine these projects in such a way that we don't expect everybody to always be volunteers. Sometimes people will say, ah, but the transition movements and the environmental movement is all white middle class people. Which which is not true, but is sometimes true. And I think unless we are able to create paid jobs for people, then that will often remain the case. And I went to America 10 years ago. I met an extraordinary woman working in Richmond, California, very poor neighborhood. And I said we did a we did a talk together. ˧

And I said, you know, unless we are able to create work for people, then these will always remain unrepresentative movements. And she said, it's so good to hear you say that. ˧

She said if this is a revolution that depends on volunteers, then I can't be part of it and nor can anybody else who lives here. ˧

So we have a big strand's in our work in the transition movements that we call the Ricoh Aname Project, which is to say, how do we think like entrepreneurs when we are imagining a project? How do we imagine it's in the way an entrepreneur might imagine it? So, for example, I mentioned the brewery, that that brewery now employs six people. And so I always try to think of the projects not with an expectation that people will volunteer on it for 20 years, but that it will be able to become work for people. And this is a fundamentally important shifts. I think that we have to be making if we want to create a new economy, that new economy means that people will need to be able to survive and thrive and pay their mortgage. And, you know, all of that sort of thing. So so that feels a really fundamentally important thing to me. ˧

Ok. There are more questions. One question was about movies. Of course there is tomorrow. ˧

Is there other movies that can get people interested? What are your favorite movies are up. Let's get people to start. ˧

Well, there's a film that you can find on YouTube? called In Transition 2.0, which is a really good introduction to transition. There's the film that I mentioned, a French film called Keskin at Homes or What Are We Waiting For? Which is the story of Unger's Haim, which is the town I mentioned. ˧

How did those two. Those are two starters. I think I think tomorrow is also fabulous. ˧

Another question. ˧

When will we reach critical mass? When will we. When do you think? When do you see critical mass? Reached by the process with talking. ˧

I think I think in some aspects we have already reached critical mass. I think the beautiful thing about tipping points is that you only ever see them in the rearview mirror. You only you only see them afterwards. And. I I feel like one of the most important things right now is that we in these movements, that we allow ourselves to believe that this is the tipping point, that when we hit. ˧

But we are that we are now at the tipping point. ˧

We have to keep up because it allows us to believe that. ˧

I worry sometimes that in the movements, I worry sometimes that in the movements that we have created, that we build into the DNA of those movements, a narrative that says that it's too late and that we can't do it and that it's not possible. And all the great social change movements fundamentally believed that that change was possible. And so for me, I always when I give big talks, I invite people to imagine what it would feel like if in hindsight, they knew that this time right now was the tipping point. We were living through this time of the most extraordinary possibility and transformation. And and it feels like a very powerful way to look at the world to me. ˧

Yeah. Thank you. ˧

Thinking about another USA day movement extinction, the rebellion also started to activate people for the critical mass. But unfortunately, a lot of people now going on the streets to protest against the Cortona measure. What now? ˧

Well, I, I, I think we I think. You know, social media has a has a way of. Amplifying things and making them look much bigger than they were, you know, in London, there was the big demonstration against the Corona virus measures on Saturday. ˧

It was about 100 people. ˧

You know, the one it's it's not very many people. ˧

I think we have we should have seen a car like Corona virus. ˧

It is actually as having been one of the most extraordinary acts of mutual solidarity, of love, of of care that we have ever witnessed. ˧

And just because a few idiots amplified on social media doesn't make it a social movement in the way that extinction rebellion ends and the climate movement is Axel. ˧

Ok. I wish your works in God's ear, as we say. Of course, sir, we have a lot of turnout on the streets. We have 10000 people in Stuttgart already. ˧

And this is the speak. Distrust, distrust and authority. And I think also the unwillingness to take responsibility to yourself. But we cannot we cannot finish this conflict right now. But it would be very interesting to to follow up. So I would Emily, now, because the time is very much at last. I would really now we have a second round of discussion afterwards. I would really now stop with the last question. What would you recommend as a first step for someone sitting by themselves at the dining table right now and just their transition training and the work? That I think is the question that I should answer. OK. ˧

What I would say that there is a there is a transition hub for the German speaking. So Austria, Germany and Switzerland, there is a truncheon network and they they run transition training. And they they do a lot of work around transition. So I would say they would be the first the first ports of call to find out more about what's available. ˧

Actually, we are in Austria. The Austrian hub is beginning an Austrian transition training. So really a. Now that that is happening now, I would like now to do hand back to David and David is sitting at the Lifestream botheration place, the central place, and he will take over the moderation and get..... ˧

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Hopkins#cite_note-3 ˧