 It feels really important that you bring whatever pressure you can to get that organization to declare a climate and ecological emergency. It's very solutions focused, somebody once called it hope with its sleeves rolled up. Transition, there is a place for everybody in transition movement. What I love is that usually the people who tell me that the stuff that I do is naive are people who believe that endless economic growth is possible on a finite planet. That's only going to happen if that journey down feels like a move towards something utterly irresistible and delicious and irreplaceable and historic. We have a massive imagination deficiency, so we need to intentionally take the supplements to try and boost our imagination levels back up again. Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers, practitioners and activists to better understand the metabolism of our cities, or in other words, their resource use and pollution missions and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and on today's episode I will ask you to use your untapped superpower. A superpower that could help us against current ecological and societal crisis. A superpower that could increase our well-being by being more rooted and involved in our communities. A superpower that could shape future decarbonized, healthy and just societies. This superpower is imagination. And so in this episode I would ask to use your imagination to envision a world where all cities, towns and villages have joined and applied principles from the transition movement. What would our lives and the environment look like in this future? To think about these questions I'll discuss with none other than co-founder of the Transition Network and co-founder of Transition Town Totnes. He is a teacher of permaculture, an artist, a researcher, a podcaster, a brewery co-owner and author of many books including the Transition Handbook that has seen better days. And from what is to what if, unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. I'm talking of course of Rob Hopkins. But wait, there's more. Today I have not one but two guests. On the side of Rob is Noémie Gérald. She is a member and co-founder of the Swiss Transition Hub or Réseau Transition Swiss Romande, which supports many wonderful initiatives that we're going to discuss about today. She also traveled quite a lot from place to place to discover and transition personally but also transition the territories. She's a trainer, passionate about helping people and organization in their quest of transitioning. So I think these two perspectives will help us to understand how the transition movement was burst and also how it was implemented in different contexts. Just before kicking off I'd like to thank Muriel Remi that helped me organize this episode and also the University of Geneva for providing us this room. I would also make a small request to all of you listening. The Swiss Transition Hub is currently having an active crowdfunding campaign. So please help them achieve their objectives on training and supporting transition actions in Switzerland. If you can help them, I think it will make a big difference over here. With all that being said, welcome Rob, welcome Noémie. Hi. Hello. Lovely to be here. Very nice to have you both. I have this small, you know, fan moment. So I put this shirt only on special episodes. The last time I put it was with Kate Reo, so it is a special day today. It's a fine shirt. Beautiful. And that's a prestigious moment to wear it. Okay, so what I'd like to do is to start with some small transitions, personal transitions, and how it helped you be involved in the transition movement. It will make sense a bit better when I explain. So I'll make a short live trajectory of you both, and then please let me know how and why you took some decisions. So let's start with you, Rob. If I speedrun your life, you studied arts, left travel in Asia, a friend of yours got you into permaculture. You studied environmental quality and resource management, taught permaculture, constructed cob houses. After a tragic fire, you moved to Totnes. You co-founded Transition Town Totnes. You co-founded Transition Network. You did a PhD that not a lot of people know on localization and resilience at the local level, the case of Transition Town Totnes. You wrote books and now are a serial social entrepreneur. And all of this might seem logical when I read them in that order. But I guess for you it wasn't at all logical and there was a lot of fuzzy moments. Yeah, when I did that PhD, shortly afterwards Plymouth University got in touch and they said, well, we'd like to invite you to come in and talk to our students and tell them about your career path. I was like, are you joking? No one wants to do that. I think the thing that runs through them all is a commitment to choosing what made me really curious and what I was really passionate about rather than what was ever going to make us any money. So there was a lot of times during that of living with very, very little money and bringing kids up with very, very little and living very, very simply. But with a really firm kind of a commitment that this is what we want to do and this is the direction we're going to move in. So I guess there's always, for me, I've always been, since I was about 13, been really inspired by that kind of do-it-yourself culture that came out of punk, which was a big influence for me. And so I've always been really motivated by, I'm just going to do this. Let's try this and see what happens. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. But actually it's always been those things that you feel really nervous about. Oh, really? Should we really? Often turn out to be the richest sort of fruit in terms of experience. And yeah, I guess this curiosity is the term that might define you better as both. I mean, you're still a researcher even if you don't say, I mean, even if you don't present yourself as a researcher, I guess this curiosity underneath is perhaps the underlying thread, as you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, I feel like, yeah, I did the PhD, which was kind of a formal piece of research through university. I don't do any other work in that regard, but I think that I'm always researching because I'm endlessly curious and endlessly hungry. That's why I do the podcast I do, because if I just ring up certain people and say, hi, can you speak to me? They'd be like, who are you? If I ring them up and say, hi, could you be on my podcast? Then you actually get to meet some incredible people. So I'm always reading, always looking around for ideas, always looking for new things. It's just, yeah, I'm a curious person. Yeah, it resonates when you talk about the podcast. Yeah, it's a good excuse, and you could ring Kate Rayworth. Hey, Kate, she's going for a drink. Well, actually, yeah. I owe her a kite surfing lesson I have to admit. That was my commitment to her. Noemi, if I do the same for you, I think that, so from what I gathered, you studied anthropology, and then you were a bit disappointed from anthropology because they didn't offer you keys to actually transition stuff on the ground and change some living conditions. And then you, at the same time, somehow heard, I think, climatic pieces of information and that got you a bit worried or scared. And then at the same time, you did a bunch of training certifications about non-formal education and group facilitation, and then you discovered the transition movement, if I understand correctly, in 2012 or something like that. But then you were committed to the transition network both in Brussels and now created this transition hub over here. So was the path a clear one or also there is an underlying thread underneath all of that? Thank you. Very interesting. I would say that the line is humans and how humans adapt to what stress them. So my starting point was more humans than climate. It was a generation where I had the feeling I had to choose between nature, environment or humans and social justice. So I think, yeah, understanding humans is really what triggered me and excites me. And today I really like what I'm doing because I can witness each day what's the alternative that people are building, their collective intelligence and how much they are willing to save their life in this emergency. Yeah, can you imagine? Also, I think in terms of academia, I don't think there was something back in the day, right? That enabled to have social justice and climate issues or environmental issues and the human, let's say, what is the human well-being and all of that. I think this connection is new to us as, let's say, the academic world, whereas in reality that's the goal, right? How do we achieve these three pillars at the same time? So yeah, sometimes I would like to go back in studies and find an answer to that, but yeah. Now that we intimately know you both, I want to help everyone listening to start off from the same foundation. So let's start with some definitions, if you will. Perhaps you can define what is a transition town and what is the transition movement and if you can give us some figures or numbers or something else. Okay, so we define the transition movement as being a movement of communities who are reimagining and rebuilding the world. And it's a model that started, as you mentioned, in Totnes, which is the town where I still live about 16 years ago, and it's now spread to 50 countries around the world, thousands of initiatives. It's always very hard to put an exact number on it because they come, they go. There's ones you don't even hear about, but there's lots of them and there's 26 countries that have what we call a national hub, like the Réseau Transition, Switzerland-Montier, but they're the same in 25 other countries. Yeah, so it's basically a kind of a, it's a model for people who are concerned about the world and what's happening in it and the climate emergency, the ecological emergency. It's a model for the people who say, so what can we do about it here? What can we do here? We're not going to, if we don't just sit and wait for someone else, there's no cavalry, obviously, coming right into the rescue. What if we were the cavalry, what could we do? It's like a self-organizing experiment. It's like an enormous piece of action learning research that's taking place all over the world in individual communities. It looks like people come together, they particularly, I guess, look at food, energy, local economy, through a lens of quite practical, okay, what are we going to do? They start building a new economy in that place, mobilizing people, supporting each other, working together. So it's very solutions focused. Somebody once called it hope with its sleeves rolled up, which I rather like. So it has, but it also has that imagination piece of holding those kind of community what-if spaces where people can come together and imagine what comes after this because something needs to, yeah. And when do we call a town a transition town? I remember one time in France, in Totnes, we had this group who came who were like French dignitaries from some local council somewhere, who came on like a fact-finding mission to Totnes and we were all sitting down and they said, so this process of declaring Totnes a transition town. Is there a label that's looking there? Yeah, so they were like, so how did that work? How did you get all the permissions, all the different people on board to call it a transition town? I said, we didn't. We just very audaciously said this is now a transition town because it's not a statement of having reached a destination. It's a statement of intent. So it's something that you need a handful of people in a town to come together. The kind of certification is quite like touch. It's not like becoming organic or something. It's like if you feel you're a transition town and you're doing transition kind of stuff, then our role is not to endlessly analyse and vet what you're doing. It's to support you and to give you tools and resources and to see what you need. And indeed from the very beginning, I mean there was some very practical tips about how to become a transition town. I mean that was the whole point I guess is it was helping others to follow the path, right? Yeah, I mean in the transition handbook, which is the book you have there which was 2008, there was a guy called Luigi Rossi who was an academic researcher who did I think one of the best bits of research about the transition movement. He published it in a book called Everything Gardens and he came to Totnes and he basically lived there for a year and went to everything. He'd be putting out the chairs, he'd be washing up the tea cups at the end of the sessions. He was amazing. And in his book, the bit that really struck me, because I mean I'm so immersed in the movement, it's not often I read a book about transition where I'm going, ooh, something new. His book was full of it. And at one point he said the most interesting thing about transition isn't the transition movement as a kind of a thing that academics can put under a microscope and look at. He said it's the transition moving. It's the way in which it over that time has changed and evolved and adapted. So the transition handbook, when in the bit about how to do transition, it includes what we call, at the time, we called the 12 steps of transition because people are saying, what are you doing? I say, I don't know, we're doing a bit of this and then I guess we do a little bit of that and then at the end we're kind of aiming to do a bit of that. Oh, there's 12 of them. And because in the book we were comparing our oil, like talking about oil addictions, quite nice, 12 steps addiction. Then about three years after that book we then went back out to all the transition groups and said, what are you actually doing? And they would say, well, we did step four and then step seven and then some other stuff completely. And then back to realize we hadn't done step one and nobody was going one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So we started then to map out all the things they were doing and inspired by a book called a pattern language by Christopher Alexander which I think is the great work of genius of the 20th century and the works of Captain Beefheart. And we then started to say instead, well, actually, transition is like a pattern language. It's like a larder full of ingredients and you assemble them in your own way. And each of those ingredients is a different thing. We've seen transition groups doing the works. And they kind of come in blocks because there are some you do at the beginning, some you do after that, some you do at the end, some we don't know, we're just speculating about them yet. And that was a book called The Transition Companion which I think was never translated into French but I think was one of the best things we did. But then every book then like the power of just doing stuff and now the essential guide to doing transition, they're all based on then going back to the movement, seeing what they're doing and learning from it. So it's that moving, and then the transition network then became a holocratic organization that's shifting governance, the work that we're doing now around really trying to practice good kind of intersectional thinking and action and good inclusive practice, so that stuff feels like it's really part of that same journey. And it's the way it changes that's more fascinating to me than what it is or was. Just before looking at what is the operation of a transition town and hub, in your PhD you did a critical analysis of transition talkness. Were some critical elements that you saw by observing this? Was there some elements that you understood in a different way by having another pair of glasses? Or what were the learnings and then you said did it help you to change anything or was it more of a distanciation to understand the phenomenon? One of the things that I really wanted to do with it was I was really fascinated in this concept of resilience indicators. How would you know that your place was becoming more resilient? To cut a long story short basically, I read all the literature where people said it's really difficult. And then I tried to do it. You should do more research to find that out. My finding was it's really complicated and I suggested some things and pointed to where they were and other people had done them. I think what was useful was that it kind of gave me the opportunity to do some... I was, as a typical permaculturist, trying to do multiple functions where you do one thing in the aim that it's doing various functions. It gave me the opportunity to do bits of research which were really useful for transition in talkness at that time. So I did a whole load of oral history interviews which were fascinating about what life was like in that place before there was cheap oil. I did a big survey which gave us some really useful data about the understanding and support for transition in the town. We did a piece of research called Contotnes Feed Itself which was a mapping of the land around the town and how it could be used. So all of that stuff I think was really, really useful. The nice thing about it was that... I remember my supervisor saying most PhDs are only read by three people. Four people, maybe if you've got two people it's coming into your Viva. And actually it got downloaded it got downloaded thousands of times and loads of people read it. There are always exceptions. Naomi, I'd like to help me understand what it is to be actively involved in a transition hub. You've seen two of them so you know exactly how all of this works. So how did your involvement start and then what were you doing then what is it to create one hub what is the process in these three years now to create an entire new hub? Thank you. I remember, I don't know if it's Rob but maybe saying that transition there is a place for everybody in transition movement and that everybody is very welcome to bring their skills, their competencies or their wish for creativity and finding solutions. So I came to the Belgian hub and I said to them I'm a trainer in community work and what can I do to support you? So that was the start and also the start was the governance so I was very interested by the shared governance and also the positive... Sociocracy, holocracy and all of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Holacracy and also the positive vision I was tired of direct action and kind of pessimistic and tough direct action and the last thing was discovering the inner transition so I could be an activist and also taking care of myself, the group where I was involved and also reflecting with my relationship with the others than humans so I was like, wow, that's very new and interesting so I'm involved there I think the first step is to connect with the other hubs in the world and ask them how they did it so then you got lots of support and you got the support from Transition Network that, yeah, tell you first... Step one and step two. Fine your way but the first thing is not to be alone and to find people that are really involved in initiatives or experimentation of transition in their family in their job, in their collective and then talk together is there already... how do you say... like a relay a relay from Transition Network is that existing or not and then you start to see what's there and who would like to be involved with you and then what's step one? I don't know to be also a bit crazy because it asks a lot of... yeah, it asks a lot of courage and also... you don't know where it will go but what you know is that the demand is big people are calling you to make a workshop conference, to ask you advices from all around the place from a lot of different topics so you realize that expertise on experience is really needed so then you start to share those trainings that are shared around the world like launch, how to start a dynamic or how to work in a group that is resilient and sustainable and you start delivering those things and you see that it has an impact for the groups so it gives you energy and excitement and also you can also find some funding and then slowly you start that enterprise that association so that's the first step and then I think it's asking for help it's really important also for the local movement already there we had great support from local NGO here and people that really trust in that new paradigm paradigm, yeah so it's the story of a companionship I think and so it was you perhaps with some other people and just knocking on doors looking at initiatives and documenting that and then trying to in a permaculture way develop links between all of them and make them more than the sum of them yeah, as someone said we should do a map but then it already exists an international map but the Swiss map was not so active so then we propose to a lot of initiatives to login into that map then we created a transition day that's a place where all the transition people initiatives can meet it's the 16th of October in Marge so we are hosted by Marge in transition and from there there is also a lot of nice demand and also proposals and then we jump on that and we surf on that and then we design also what we propose to the other people that are active so slowly we are doing that and then of course trainings because trainings is really important for the initiatives and it's the roots of the movement yeah, we are going to come back to the trainings in just a bit so we talked about the definition but perhaps there are also some concepts that are core within the transition movement which is either resilience localization where we need to act locally and I guess over here you also mentioned that is in between peak oil on the one hand climate change on the other why these concepts you think were the important ones to boil down to actually a transition movement I mean we don't really like in the transition handbook and in the beginning peak oil was definitely one of the sort of narratives at the time we don't really focus on that so much now because I think it's clear that the overwhelming imperative is to leave oil in the ground not that it's it's that we can't wait for a peak in a gradual decline in production we just got to stop using the stuff really really fast so but that was I guess the founding idea I remember I went to a talk by a guy called Aubrey Mayer who is a violinist and also had come up with this model that was called contraction and convergence was basically if you you know the global north is kind of really really high up in terms of its consumption and it needs to come way way way down and the global to a line that the global south is currently beneath and can come up to so it's the idea that there is a kind of an equitable sustainable point at which we need to get to and that the global north needs to make that journey down and I remember sitting watching him giving this talk and thinking okay that's that's only going to happen if it if that journey down feels like a move towards something utterly irresistible and delicious and irreplaceable and historic if it feels like you are being dragged away from something irreplaceable like a child who's had too many sweets and who you're taking home from a birthday party that they really want to stay at it's never going to work that's the bit that we have to figure out and it's the bit that I've seen much much less work on you know a lot of the work is about the nuts and bolts and the carbon and the strategies for the cars and stuff how do you cultivate the longing for that to happen the desire because unless we unless we really long for it it's never going to happen and then that's where that's the work of imagination and storytelling and music and poetry and creativity and all those things that help to bring that alive because because otherwise it doesn't happen so it's why I guess it's partly why there's a kind of a spirit that runs through the transition Hamburg and all the stuff that we've done since which is trying to bring in that element of playfulness and creativity and you know which sometimes people go oh you're very very optimistic it's like it's not so much which oversimplifies it it's more that I think just talking about the collapse and extinction all the time doesn't cultivate longing that actually this should feel like the most exhilarating thing to be part of because if we get it right or I was trying to remind people is if we were to actually do what the climate scientists tell us we have to do in the next 10 years which is not net zero by 2050 it's like pretty much genuine zero by 2030 if we actually did that what an extraordinary time to have lived through when we imagined and then designed and created and created that sort of I would call it a revolution of the imagination we've reimagined education food, energy, transport everything what an incredible time to be alive so I think it's really important to to speak to that part of people I was saying talks you know like if we imagine we're going to make the change we need to do with it feeling like a long walk home in the rain on a cold Thursday in November we're kidding ourselves this should be the best party in town and I guess that's part of the spirit and then now what I try and do with a lot of the work I do around imagination is trying to find those ways to to try and help people to imagine what it would be like to be in that future so every talk I do we do this time travel exercise where people imagine they're travelling through time in the podcast that I do we do the same thing with the guests we've done kind of bits of animation working with animators to try and bring that to life I'm currently doing a music project working with an amazing kind of ambient electronic artist where I go and record things that exist now so we call it field recordings from the future so I go to a project I record it I speak to them as if it's 2030 and this is just now how it is everywhere what was it like when you think back to 2022 and everyone thought you were completely mad and I record what it sounds like and then he builds these tracks that are this really kind of immersive so I'm always looking for those ways to help to bring it alive for people but yeah you hit the nail on the head because I mean that's specifically what I'm doing and looking for option A option B I'm really trying to focus on measuring stuff and then try to propose policies that are not sexy to anyone even to myself and then you propose stuff and you're like okay the logical stuff if A comes in and B comes out okay you take out B and then re-inject it and all of that but sure I mean technically that's the ideal politically it's not even done so there is something else right and that's why I enjoy the title of this book that is if I'm doing the what is you're saying the what if yeah and so over there the idea is to help us well build this desirable future and and feel have like a superhero cape on us and say like we changed things and thanks to us the future is going to be what we want and feel a part of not this well unfortunately this generation that has wrecked most of the things but the generation that has repaired the generation that feels also responsible for healing some of the the bad things that we have done so yeah I mean I can imagine that a lot of people tell you that this is a bit optimistic or sometimes a bit naive but I don't see how we're going to be compelled to move because we're I mean most of us feel a bit of anxiety in terms of what do I do now what is step A what what can I do in my life what I love is that usually the people who tell me stuff that I do is naive are people who believe that endless economic growth is possible on a finite on a finite planet which always seems like the most absurdly naive thing I've ever heard really yeah I mean it's I know people who are scientists who are doing very sort of you know the more the less glamorous kind of side of figuring this out but actually it's when they often there's some really interesting kind of collaborations now happening between those kind of people and people who do illustrations for graphic novelists there's a guy called James Mackay who's at the University of Leeds whose work I often show in my talks the man who draws the future he does graphic novels set in 2035 or something in the future absolutely beautiful there are scientists who are working with musicians there was a woman I met in Arles last week who's an illustrator who works with biologists who are measuring the biodiversity in the Loire River and she goes out with them and she brings their work to life through painting and drawing you know I think there's more and more of this now scientists working with musicians to help bring their work there was a guy who was working for this field recordings from the future is that I went into I went to visit a project called Permafungi in Brussels growing mushrooms in underground there and just so atmospheric the sounds in that place underground it's amazing so then I put out on Twitter saying does anybody know because when you're actually obviously when you're with mushrooms they don't do very much they don't make any noise so I was like put out a thing is anybody getting recordings of mushrooms making recordings of mushrooms putting electrodes in mushrooms and recording putting it through synthesizers and this crazy kind of mushroom music you know it's like all of that stuff to help really make science accessible and interesting for us as well because we're bored as well as academics nobody's sure the reality is that we want to be part of the change we want to be part of the future as well and I think the discussion is okay what are our needs what do we really need to to live to to thrive and all of that okay we need to reduce all of our emissions but to do what and it's that what that is not frequently asked like what makes us happy what makes us live what makes us lead meaningful lives I mean one of the things that happened quite early on in transition was from very early we were getting loads of academics I wanted to do research on transition I want to research this I want to research that here's my questionnaire could you distribute this to all the transition groups in the country and pour them to death and take up all of that really precious time that they already don't have to do the work that they're doing that you want to measure and it became quite clear that there was for a lot of academia then there was this very kind of extractive mindset you know I want to do some research so I can produce a paper they would come they would take up loads of your time you fill out all their questionnaires two years later you'd get this piece of research that was completely incomprehensible I mean I've been asked to read academic papers on transition I invented this I can't understand a word they're talking about I don't know what it means so we created the transition research guide which was a thing for kind of a set of instructions for academics who want to work alongside transition make sure what you're going to do is going to be useful to them how is what you're doing actually going to help them advance what they're doing in the ideal world like Luigi Roussi did you get alongside them you join in, you participate you work with them in advance about what would be useful as research you produce some research that will open doors for them that might make funding more possible that would help improve a case for them to the local government so it needs to be a service to transition that makes it sound a bit like it shouldn't be critical of it which of course it should be but it needs to kind of get alongside it and get its hands dirty a bit rather than just swooping in from an ivory tower and just extracting and flying off again yeah I feel what you say so we talked I think one of the big roles you mentioned in Noemi before was is also about the training and so we need to change mindsets and we need to also have different theoretical tools and also practices in order to grasp this concept and to apply some of its principles so you have trained in different forms of training or how to give workshops and how to give these type of tools to people and to organizations so how can we help people in organizations in certain steps that you help them or take them by the hand and what do you do with them to accompany them in this transition movement I think the first thing is to be gentle with ourselves and to accept that we can relearn things that we can relearn the way we live or also believe in what makes us happy so the training is also about how can I say point of view and what was given to us, what was the culture we were raising and how can we decolonize ourselves and it's not easy and let's talk about the fact that it's not easy what you mean decreasing in our group, in our family what's also the feeling we have linked to that so the trainings we propose is a mixture of what we call head but we are not giving so much space to head in research and academic in the moment and then also the hands, what can we do and then the heart, the emotions the feelings, that beautiful energy that usually in our society in the movement is seen like something not so important or like that's something that is private or like individual so we work a lot about linking that and it's the same for imagination taking power what I see in those trainings is really like to say to people listen let's take us seriously, we have that power and of course the power around us doesn't take those intelligence seriously but what you feel and what you develop is very powerful so that's really often what amaze me when I do trainings with few people or big groups is that people are really touched by the fact that they are allowed to dream big they are allowed to make experience they are allowed to ask for more so that's what I like in twin trainings what's interesting is that we all want to be kids again and we all want to use our muscle of imaginations but we are also very shy, afraid we haven't been told to use it anymore as well so I was hearing today about Cyril Dion who did this movie Demain and the transition movement was one of the big pieces of the movie and he was mentioning how films should also be part of this transition about showing within movies what a future would be like for instance that the protagonist is with a different gender direction for a different, for a place without cars for instance what would it be without saying that this is a decarbonized future that we want but just in the background have something that we feed each other from the ground or in a city or not having cars within a city in the background not seeing, not hearing any more cars I think we are lacking these images in our heads and I think that's how you start even in this book and apparently these are examples, you just made a collage of different examples right? Yeah that's right, it is a kind of six page walkthrough of what the future could be like and actually as a promotional thing for the book we made a little video people, if you put Rob Hopkins2030 on YouTube as a video of me walking through the world saying here's this and here's that and basically it's just photos I've taken in different places that we did with a green screen I feel like I think William Gibson said something like the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed and so it's like all the different stuff that we need already exists somewhere we just need to sort of piece it together and share those stories but it's that, I mean I was with Cyril last week in Al, I interviewed him for an episode of the podcast that I did and we were talking about this and the stories that we see are so so so important, he told me a story I had not heard before actually which was about how after the war when the Marshall Plan was in place and the US were giving billions of dollars to Europe to rebuild itself there was a particular guy and I remember his name whose job was he was part of negotiating that but part of the deal was that 60% of films shown in cinemas had to be American films because it meant that they then had control of those narratives around consumer culture and glitzy, you need a car and this, that and the other that then they could be supplying and it's always that, a really interesting question for me, where are the stories the stories that people are telling now because so much of what you see I was on holiday a couple of weeks ago with my family in Brittany and I spent a very depressing 20 minutes in a bar watching they had the TV on showing rap videos oh my god, it's all like the big cars and the clothes and everything like this total the bling, the gold, the diamonds everything it's like, oh no there's reinforcing, reinforcing even when you watch the football, the adverts around the side have fossil fuels and holiday companies and coke and stuff and coke and all the crap so that idea that we should just be every time you turn on to watch an exciting detective drama or a nice romantic program or something and then you'll be walking through streets in the city full of nut trees and vegetable gardens so the best example I can always think of where people say, but where's a film that already exists is Wallace and Gromit and The Curse of the Wear Rabbit if you know that film it's one of the Wallace and Gromit it's like an English animation done with like, Plastocene people and it's set in his village where all the houses are kind of terrorist houses and everyone's growing vegetables and there's not very many cars and everyone rides bicycles but that's not the story but that's just the world going on in the background and we need I did a presentation recently at a conference organised by Ubisoft in Paris one of the biggest computer games company I did have to tell them at the beginning of the conference that the last time I played any computer game with any degree of dedication was Pac-Man which rather sort of made me fairly useless to the conference but we were talking, you know there's a game called Assassin's Creed where this assassin runs around in a city and they did a thing a few years ago where they worked with historians to create the most accurate version of what they thought Ancient Egypt would have been like you're running through the market you're running through the fields and it's an amazing thing saying you should be doing that with this low carbon future and do it with places that people know in localised, decarbonised Paris and kill people are rough and if you want to kill people but maybe the game is designed in such a way where after killing a couple of people you're wracked with conscience I have to grow things to purge my soul I need to become a craft brewer in an abandoned car park beneath Brussels and the course offers you training in different things but it's like we need to make this stuff normal that's the thing and the cultural flows and the cultural narratives the other direction are so powerful we're up against massive PR companies like marketing companies who know our psychology better than we do and now with the internet makes them ten times more powerful than they were before they can try and sell you things while you're in the bath because you pronounce the soap your phone heard you drop in a soap you need more soap it's quite terrifying the connected soap the connected soap smart soap indeed I'm looking forward to the movies of Cyril I'm wondering as well there are some times of imagination at the end of your book you talk about the year 68 about May 68 in France about Prague 68 about California 68 about so many countries in the world that there was actual change that happened in Paris it was nice and wonderful and some creative movements one of the things was giving power to imagination and being realistic asking the impossible demanding the impossible so Paris was the cute one because there wasn't deaths involved in other places there were actual deaths sure sure they had cooler sunglasses in Paris it's funny because my mum lived through Paris 68 and Prague 68 and I called her yesterday to ask her how was it what was this feeling of living in 68 it's funny because it was a mix between chaos like you didn't know what things were happening and where there was new slogans every day there was new political directions every day everything was in can you say boiling boiling and at the same time you felt that well they were hearing demands and they were doing stuff accordingly unfortunately well in France and many other places when the demands or some of them were met so I'm wondering how do we reenact or redevelop this year 68 what do we do in order to is it already there did we in 2020 lived this during the pandemic or the year before with the climate strikes or do we do we need to somehow make this once again like 2022 be the new 68 so who wants to I feel like I'm living in that time especially when I read the feminist magazine and also decolonializing the movement of the colonial and when I see all those people in the street and the young people like I can witness a culture that surprise me and that's really I'm very excited and proud to live your life in this time so for me it's really a revolution when I see that I was born in the 80s and the time of my parents and now I'm like wow it's so cool so I can wait to be in 20 years and see what the stories will be about us yeah I mean I feel very similar that actually I think it's very easy to have a lot of hindsight and kind of revisionism about 68 I kind of grew up I guess in a sort of my earliest politics was kind of anarchist politics and I read so many books about May 68 it was always a real source of inspiration I feel like the way I understand what happened in 68 was that the students came out and what they were trying to do was to get the workers to come out and that actually that didn't quite happen on the scale that they wanted it to happen so I feel like actually at the moment in that bit between we're in the bit where we now have a massive climate movement around the world Extinction Rebellion Fridays for Future My God Fridays for Future incredible it's faded a bit now which I think is really also really dangerous because those first Fridays for Future were so exhilarating I took my kids on three of them they made me cry every time phenomenal the wit and the humour and the passion and the smartness of those kids the guts of those kids and the way they learned as well I remember the first one it was all a bit chaotic and shambolic by the third one they had it down and those people who were saying they should be in school learning stuff I'm like are you joking do you know how much they're learning being on this thing they're learning how to work together how to speak to how to work with the police they're learning how to argue to make their arguments was phenomenal so we've had Fridays for Future Extinction Rebellion we've isolated Britain whatever is called Renovate Suisse or something Renovate Switzerland so there's all these different movements at the same time you've also had Black Lives Matter massive but what it hasn't done is Me Too what they haven't done and then also in the UK the women's movement that emerged after Sarah Everard was killed by a serving member of the Metropolitan Police and how the police dealt with that there's a whole generation of young people who have had it with the police particularly in London and the way the police have behaved but what hasn't happened is the workers and the working class coming out in support working together we're going to see that this winter there's a movement called Enough is Enough which is starting in the UK which is a really inspiring coming together of trade unions church groups I think we'll be seeing a general strike in the UK this winter it's going to be awful 25% of families in the UK won't be able to afford to heat their homes we're going to it's going to create a legacy of intergenerational ill health going forward it's awful and so I think that maybe maybe this is where we get to the 1968 point but hopefully it will be able to achieve what 1968 failed to do because it'll be able to mobilise the working classes people have just had enough of it at this point it's awful and also another example yesterday we were meeting a young guy who is developing a brewery and we were asking him can you live your life with that and he said I'm earning 1000 franc per month I have a vegetable garden and I'm learning to live with poverty and to explore that concept I have a good family that support me so I'm not scared and then I ask him but what do you think for all those people that are trying those experiences to reply to climate emergency what will happen and we will discovering that we will also be pissed off and that we will join those movement like Gilles Lejeune in France and that yeah we will be part of that because today it's one of the priorities that we can move from volunteer and also tiredness from holding that on our shoulders like activists and yeah we will also develop strategy to be heard like the others friends of us are proposing or renovate Switzerland and so on so let's see what the initiatives will do and what will be created yeah I think as well like one of the things when I was in France recently in fact from talking to Cyril that a lot of people talk about the generation de ma in France that generation of kids who were 16, 17, 18 when they saw that film and I met because I was in Paris when it was first released and I went to five or six screenings because I was speaking at them every audience was at least half young people and they would come up at the end to talk to me afterwards and they would be saying we love this so much and I would say well why why do you like it so much after the Bataclan attacks in Paris and they said because this is our story after those attacks we were like well what's our story what's France for what are we doing, what's this all about and now we have our story this is our identity and now those that generation have gone through university have gone through whatever they're doing and they're kind of coming out into the world and this is their North Star this is what their expectation of what they want to be creating is and it's really interesting to see the different directions that goes into Yeah it's quite overwhelming teaching right now because you have well students that were born in 2000s more or less and they're overwhelmingly more active than you and you're trying to keep up with what their ideas, their innovation their imagination, their passion and you're just trying to keep up and you're guilty that you're not able to provide as much as they're doing so I hope that this well form of guilt will also be liberating to actually act and be feel that you need to to be part of this movement else you're going to be on the bad side of history somehow if you don't act and they're so smart like I had, we did an episode of my podcast about what if young people reimagined the education system and we had a young number two 18 year old people, a young Muslim girl from Birmingham called Yumna and a non-binary young person from London oh my God, me and Ben who were presenting it were like God when I was 18 I could barely string a sentence together and it's so articulate on gender and race and just amazing for me in this work that I do about imagination actually the place where I get the most inspiration around all of this work at the moment is young black women writers in America Adrienne Marie Brown Walidah Imerisha Maryam Kaba all these people who's work on imagination is just phenomenal the prison abolition movement the border abolition movement the massive massive what if questions what if there were no prisons no there's a question that's so so exciting and incredible because then you're just like what does that mean for education what does that mean for policy what does that mean for housing for justice what does that mean for how we process and manage trauma in our society and name trauma and work with trauma so much more incredible so there are some phenomenal people out there yeah now that you said that let's go back to the task of today did we have a task? yes so we have to imagine a word where all cities towns and villages have internalized and applied the principles of the transition movement so you will now need to guide us through this word and describe it a bit and tell us what it feels like who wants to go first people are telling beautiful stories about today and the past and how much it's a pleasure to share the street to share the job also they are doing so they are really beautiful stories yeah I think one of the yeah maybe we'll play we'll play vision tennis go ahead Rob we can take it in turns yeah yeah yeah I think one of the things that has really happened is that the relationship between cities and the rural areas has been reimagined so the connection that defined them a hundred years ago has been reestablished so the land around cities is largely dedicated to supplying those cities and it's meant that there has been a process whereby cities have have allowed themselves to breathe a little bit so it meant that in order for that new system of a much much more diversified landscape around our cities a mixture of rewilding a mixture of a much more diversified landscapes we no longer just see these massive fields growing one single thing there's agroforestry integrated into it there's it's a form of agriculture that needs more people because farm sciences has got smaller again so it means that more people are living in the countryside so when you spend time in rural areas you hear more people you hear more diversity you hear more insects you hear more birds you also hear more people you hear the communities that are there and that movement of people into rural areas has really revitalized those spaces but it's also meant that cities were able to open up some spaces within themselves particularly in kind of poor neighborhoods to bring that that wildness and diversity back into the cities back into those spaces so our cities now feel like the air is cleaner they've got more space to breathe what's the magazine sans transition what was there an article that talks about this on this okay I want to read this one yeah thank you so you know this is some of these issues are explored in an issue of sans transition magazine called the nature in the city nature in the city the nature en ville the previous episode was called relations villes nature Mike we might find some common that relationship is so broken down at the moment and I think as well one of the things with the rewilding side of it has been the reintroduction of beavers into a lot of the landscape has meant that it's reintroduced ecological engineer has reintroduced kind of magical landscapes so we now really are starting to fall in love with the seeing that process of rewilding happening and see the world restoring itself any more bits yeah for me it's also the inner nature like to trust in our intuition and to trust in that intelligence we have in relationship with the other than humans and the elements and to trust it like a motor to positive change really I see a lot of people are ashamed or they excuse themselves because they feel things or they feel that they are threat as you said at the start and in this future people are really proud of that and it's common it's not marginalised anymore I think as well one of the big changes that we've seen in the cities has been the disappearance of the car which was something that really gained pace during Covid and then just accelerated so Berlin has now closed all the centres of the cities to cars and there's more and more stuff Paris is now if you came to Paris in the early 2000s if you saw a cyclist you wanted to take them home and wrap them in cotton wool now there's just so many of them it's amazing and by 2030 2035 I think cars will be quite rare in cities and what that has done is it's freed up an enormous amount of space and so there's been a huge one of the most lucrative livelihoods businesses that people have created is the taking up and getting rid of tarmac and the replacing of it with kind of a growing absorbent sort of forested landscapes many streets in our cities now feel more like a forest than a street in fact our cities become there's so many trees now in our cities there are parts of the city where it feels more like a forest with some things in and the dawn chorus in our cities is now extraordinary and mental health has improved hugely because one of the other things that we did was we started to realise that it didn't make any sense to have a mental health strategy and a housing strategy and a biodiversity strategy and a job creation strategy and a healthy eating strategy that they were all the same strategy that actually you don't get mental health you get it because people's housing is shit and they're terrified of losing their housing and that they're really stressed and they're anxious because their work is terrible and everything is so precarious and so we realised that we needed to address all of this stuff together it's the thing that the main thing you notice when you walk around is that people walk slower they look at each other much more and people that kind of almost sort of hysterical urgency that people had in 2022 you don't really see very often now and also the people have time not only for work but to grow food to share food to as Rob said, reskilling themselves and really like not to put that on Sunday afternoon between two laundry but that really they have support I don't know how maybe they receive like a fund to really invest time in transition that's really very nice and people are relaxed and happy to do that like Satish Kumar he said you should work only four hours per day not more and so you have the time to it depends on your work and maybe that's part of your work it's not two different things that's what happens just the last thing I would say is I feel like it's a world that has really learned during that time to to celebrate and be really delighted about its diversity so it's a future that I think one of the big shifts that happened was that as the in 2022 there were the floods in Pakistan 30 million people displaced and it led to a real kind of a soul searching in the global north about up until that point there had been this really growing narrative particularly from the right that was saying we have to close our borders close our borders and the other industrial complex was massive and brutalising and violent and terrible and there was a lot of soul searching about the morality of closing your borders for the nations who are responsible for the vast majority of historical carbon emissions to close their borders to a country that's responsible for just 1% of carbon emissions in its whole history was just seen as not being supported on any kind of scale so there was a lot of them thinking about okay rather than just saying we're going to close our borders and given that the climate emergency is going to be happening everywhere and we run a very real risk of having climate refugees from Spain within the next 10 years Australia so there was a much more thinking about a different approach to that working with people of different genders the whole approach around seeing diversity as something to be celebrated rather than something to be feared and kind of legislated out of existence there was a big shift that happened as well we could do this for hours I have been thinking this for days what about you what did you see I'd like to sleep at night and be tired and sleep like a rock every night because you've done something that well is needed right you need to dig a hole you need to put tomato plants you need to build a street for the community you need to go and educate the community if you're an educator and also all of your senses are all heightened so you smell and you smell a lot of different nuances when you eat something this tomato is plenty of taste it's not just this bland tomato plenty of water and all of this and this brings me back to when I was a kid in Greece you eat vegetables and you're happy to eat vegetables it's not this thing that you eat and nobody knows how to cook them everybody knows how to cook beautiful meals this is the moment of the day that everybody comes together and then after that it's well unfortunately it's still too hot because even if we stop all of this mess it's still going to be hot so we're all going to sleep for an hour or two I have some experience in that and then yeah probably we go out during the nights at seven or eight when it has cooled down a bit there are some trees so we are under the trees and it's fresh and we talk about okay what have you done today and what do you think we should do tomorrow and also start to plan all together about the future of our smaller place somehow thank you I don't know I really want to feel more things in life and sense or have my senses be used and not just be tired of responding to emails and be stressed I don't think I need that in my life I don't know that anybody needs that but yeah working four hours per day seems like a good way to go okay let's finish with a message eventually what message would you like to give to the people that listen and watch us go ahead well I think I think in this age of such shortened and damaged attention spans I congratulate them for getting this far yes I think that's kind of quite an achievement but they didn't think oh I'll just look at YouTube for a few minutes and get sucked into something else very impressive and rabbit hole of nonsense they managed to actually stay with us so thank you I guess I would my message would be that would be that wherever you are whatever organization you're working in or part of it feels really important that you bring whatever pressure you can to get that organization to declare a climate and ecological emergency the first demand of extinction rebellion was always tell the truth we need every organization to be telling the truth and then to be acting accordingly bit I'm a great believer that that means that the imagination needs space and at the moment like you said you know we're all so busy there's always more emails there's always more to do there's always another deadline there's always and then even if there isn't there's always like social media platforms that were quite happily just devour your time for hours scrolling through nonsense and we need to take some space back with the people around us to create these what if spaces to come together and to do some imagining about what we're going to do even in our own lives make a Sunday where you put your phone and your computer in a drawer and they stay there and you go for a walk and you swim in the lake and you look at the trees and you walk under the trees and you look up at the trees you do some drawing you do some poetry we need to give that part of ourselves some space it's one of the reasons I wrote that book was I had this you know I'm in Sylvia Plath or it's something beautiful about what I feel what I fear most is the death of the imagination you know that somewhere just out of our eyes shot this most precious of things like unspeakably precious thing which is the source of all the great things that humanity has ever created it's what distinguishes us as a species in sapiens he talks about we are a storytelling creature that's what distinguishes humanity from other creatures we tell stories but somehow we've allowed this society this set of conditions to come together which are mean that this imagination is kind of desiccating and blowing away in the wind and we need to put it back in the middle in our own lives as well what happens to a society that loses its imagination it's just it's kind of too that's what happens it's too terrifying for words so we have to put it we have in our own lives to say okay I need to it's like if you went to the doctor you got a vitamin D sufficiency oh I'll take some vitamin D then we have a massive imagination deficiency so we need to intentionally take the supplements to try and boost our imagination levels back up again but the beautiful thing about it is the imagination is what happens when we are in balance when we are healthy when we're in good mental health when we're surrounded by other people it's a kind of a manifestation of the rest of us being in balance and it feels great every talk we do we start getting the audience to do something imaginative the room fills with laughter bright eyes people connecting with each other that's why it's so so important so make some space in your life for it take your imagination supplements every night and every morning every night every morning Amy what do you think my message will be to to celebrate what you are already doing and what is happening all around you as I see a lot of people I think it's not enough it's not enough it's not enough and I realize that the more I celebrate what's going on and I see the beauty and I see also the power of life around me yeah that's like the more I put the lens of permaculture of transition of what if the more it comes to me and the more I'm powerful to go through this mess so yeah that will be my advice to celebrate yeah that's for me okay any books videos articles piece of music something that you would like to recommend before we finish hmm la belle verte you have a book of that woman what is the book economy anou Eva Sadoun I think I mean I mentioned it earlier but I think if people haven't read a pattern language by Christopher Alexander and Captain Beefheart and listen to Captain Beefheart and and also a book called emergent strategy by Adrienne Marie Brown and we do this till we free us which is Marianne about prison abolition which is one of the best books I've read for a long long time and everybody should listen to be my baby by the Ronettes at least once a week it should be on prescription aside from the supplement because we talked about longing earlier for me it is the record with the most longing it's just like the longing in that record is just heart breaking beautiful so yeah listen to that who yeah I would say I'm reading lots of feminist book in the moment one I really love is I don't know the author anymore but it's very inspiring for also yeah defending your rights and I'm reading Virginia Woolf and I'm learning a lot about the systemic domination and I have to say that those books really helped me to also interrogate the movement in transition and to see how in our team what are we doing, how it is how we replicating replicating those domination and so on so for me it's really I can root to you more titles but I'm really into that and for music I don't know I'm ashamed but I love the last album of Thromai it's very beautiful and it talks about very important things so yeah yes it's great well many thanks thanks so much for this wonderful discussion and thank you all for listening until the end because you've made it to the end once again if you like this episode and all of this discussion just share it around with friends, colleagues your family and tell us how you envision where a world where all territories have applied the transition movement principles perhaps we can get inspired by all of your comments so don't forget please contribute to the swiss transition hub crowdfunding campaign thanks everyone and see you in two weeks for another conversation thank you