A meeting to understand what transition towns are and what is meant by resilience applied to local communities took place on Thursday 13 March at the conference centre of the Fondazione Cariplo, in Milan. The protagonist of the "lecture" was Rob Hopkins, a former permaculture teacher and founder, in 2006, of the Transition Network movement. The first transition town experiment was carried out in Totnes, a small community in Devon, in the United Kingdom.

Since then, the movement has grown, spreading to the United States, Japan, New Zealand and reaching Italy as well, with groups in more than thirty municipalities, mainly in the province of Bologna. We asked him a few questions to understand the meaning of certain terms such as resilience, which could become the next "keywords" for those working in sustainability.

Read also: Città di transizione: costruiamo insieme comunità resilienti

What needs gave rise to the transition towns movement, and how did it come about?
I was a permaculture teacher for a long time. I used to tell people how to grow their own food, build houses using local materials, save energy. I tried to offer practical solutions to those who wanted to change their lives while respecting the environment. Then, when in 2004 I discovered the issue of climate change and peak oil, I tried to think about what more I could do by drawing on my experience as a permaculture teacher and my knowledge of sustainable design to create new solutions. The transition came as a historic opportunity to rebuild local communities from the ground up, rethink the local economy, bring people together and make them more aware by harnessing their creativity. That was the starting point. I then decided to move to Totnes (in Devon, England), where I still live today, and with a group of local people I began an experiment, thinking about how that community could respond to the challenges of the climate.

Which were the first communities to choose to adopt and support the movement?
The first experiments began in market towns — medieval boroughs that had acquired the right to host a market — particularly in Bristol. The city council decided to fully embrace the project, creating Transition Bristol in 2007. But the concept of transition also took hold quickly in London. There is no overarching project like Bristol's, but over the years more than 50 groups focused on transition have emerged. The first was born in the London borough of Brixton, where a daily market is held.

Recently the Transition Network has arrived in Italy too
Yes, it is called Transition Italia, and there are several groups working to train communities interested in embarking on a path towards resilience — adapting to change by adopting lifestyles in harmony with the ecosystem. Last year I was in Ferrara, where I saw that they have started doing fantastic work. Meanwhile, one of the first groups in Italy was established in Monteveglio, in the province of Bologna.

Can the transition towns manifesto be adopted only by small communities, or can it work for large cities too?
When we started in Totnes, which has around 8,500 inhabitants, people said it worked there because it is a small community, whereas in large cities it would be more difficult. In reality, the 50 groups in London are doing great work — even better than Totnes. So the transition can be undertaken both in market towns and in large cities. It is something that can adapt to very different contexts; there are even universities that have joined the movement.

Robert Falkner, an expert in international relations and global governance at the London School of Economics, argues that the time has come to tackle climate change with a building blocks approach — making many small regional and local agreements while waiting for states to reach an international accord. Can it be argued that the idea of transition also follows this path: creating small groups of citizens who want to change without waiting for institutions?
The scale of the climate change issue is enormous. It has no precedent in human history. If we want to keep global warming within 2 degrees, there is only one possibility: we must cut CO2 emissions by 10 per cent a year in industrialised countries. And we need to start immediately. This is something that has never been done before. To do it, we need to build next-generation energy plants that take seven or eight years to come into operation. So the only way to reach peak emissions as soon as possible and then begin to reduce them is to work on demand. We need to reduce demand. But in the collective imagination, this is synonymous with a worsening quality of life — as if we had to go back to the 1930s, something terrible.

So the Transition Network and local communities play a fundamental role.
Absolutely — they take this negative idea and replace it with a positive story. They don't have to wait for anyone's funding. They don't need anyone's permission. They aren't trapped within organisations where everyone is afraid of taking risks. All they need is an idea and to put it into practice. And that, in my view, is how you change things, how you change the story: by taking ownership of it and making change happen. Recently the British government developed the Energy Community Strategy. It's the first time a strategy for local communities in the United Kingdom has been drawn up in collaboration with the Transition Network. Many of the case studies used in drafting the report concern transition towns. For the first time at a national level, the potential of local initiatives has been seen first-hand, and how they can influence the political sphere. I would never say that local initiatives are the only thing we need, but they are the starting point — they are where you can begin to change things within a broader, global context.

Is it possible that natural resilience is better, faster than scientists predict following a natural disaster? For instance, it seems the Danube river is recovering more quickly than expected after the red mud spill at Ajka, in Hungary, in 2010.
Nature can indeed be highly resilient. It manages to bounce back from fires or to respond effectively to natural disasters, but climate change is something different. Everything I have read on the subject seems to point in the opposite direction, because as temperatures rise, ice melts and gives way to water, which in turn absorbs more heat. It is like a vicious circle. I read James Lovelock's book on the Gaia hypothesis, which argues that the planet is capable of self-regulating as if it were a living organism. I would love for the Earth to be able to behave that way in relation to climate change too, but I see no evidence pointing in that direction. This is a crisis for which we alone are responsible, and the only way to resolve it is to rethink our actions and their impact on the Earth.