Longing on a large scale is what makes history

Dear Professor Hopkins, dear All. Imagine a world where our communities are resilient, our environment sustainable, and our future brighter than ever before. Now, picture a visionary who has been at the forefront of striving to make this vision a reality. Our guest speaker for tonight's HCC talks is a true pioneer in the realm of environmental activism and community empowerment.

He doesn't offer quick fixes to complex problems. Instead, he presents us with a mindset, a powerful concept that has united change from the grassroots up. Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Towns movement, will be our guest tonight and share with us his transformative ideas on local resilience and sustainability.

Embarking us on a journey of reimagining our communities and our relationships with the planet. Far from wanting to be totally exhaustive here. Let me introduce our guest from tonight of tonight in a few words. After growing up in London and spending time in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery Tuscany, professor Hopkins completed an environmental quality and resource management degree from the University of the West of England, as well as a doctorate from Plymouth University.

He is also an Ashoka fellow and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namir. In the early two s, he confounded the transition network and the transition town tne, where he moved. He is the symbol of the transition movements now present in 50 countries.

In several places in France, he is also today a well renowned speaker, expert, blogger, and author on transition and on the impact that imagination can have on reshaping tomorrow, or should I say, today's world,

in a fast pass paced world where global issues can often seem overwhelming, professor Hopkins' message is a beacon of hope. It reminds us that change begins at home in our own communities and in the choices we make every single day. It emphasizes that collectively we have the power to create a future that is more sustainable, resilient, and fulfilling.

So get ready to be inspired, challenged. Motivated as Rob Hopkins takes our stage tonight to share his view and experience, let's open our minds to the possibilities of transition, the power of local action, and the potential for a brighter, more sustainable future. Please join me in welcoming Professor Rob Hopkins to the HC talk stage.

Good evening everybody. Lovely to see you all. , thank you for being here. Um, can you hear me okay at the back? All good. Brilliant. Good. So, , thank you for the introduction and I'm going to, , start off by giving a little bit of context, I guess, of why it is that I want to talk to you about the things that I want to talk to you about.

So this is, , , trying to just place where we are in a his. Historical context. So everything that we associate with human civilization from the building of the pyramids, the discovering of agriculture, , through to the paintings of vangogh was happened during this very, , stable period. Of climate change where CO2 concentrations never went above 280 parts per million.

, and within that, everything that we associate with humanity has flourished. We are now outside of that, we have broken free from that into completely new and uncharted waters. We have increased 1.2 degrees already on pre-industrial levels, and we have released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere already.

That weighs more than the sum total of everything that humanity has ever built, , in terms of that, that carbon. And that is starting to change the atmosphere. And we are on target to go beyond three degrees of warming, which is absolutely catastrophic. Recently the French Environment Minister announced a, a study to look at how France can adapt to four degrees of warming.

I can save you the bother. Of doing that. France cannot adapt to four degrees of warming. It is impossible already at 1.2 degrees. We see many, many catastrophic things happening around the world. So we need to get back into that rather than keeping going outside of it. We see the impacts already around the world.

The disastrous flooding in Libya yesterday, 20,000 people killed there. The fires in Maui, climate change is not something that will happen in the future. It's something that's happening now. And the, um, the impact, the people who are affected by that are the people who are least responsible for creating it.

The average citizen of Mali has a carbon footprint equivalent to the British average British kettle, and the average person in Nigeria has a carbon footprint equivalent to the average American fridge. , and actually the, it's the places where people are gonna be moving from who are least responsible for creating that.

So. This is the last graph I'm going to show you all evening. It's far too late in the day for too many graphs, but this is really important because even if we follow the Paris Agreement, which is already not ambitious enough. It means that by 2030 we need to 

have cut emissions by, , by 48%. That's huge. That's never happened before. And at the moment we see lots of governments around the world just taking slower and slower action and being like, well, they're not going very fast. Maybe we won't go very fast, rather than having a, a race to, to, to, to get there first. If, what I want to try and impress on you this evening is we can look at this and we can think, oh, that's very hard, or maybe we shouldn't bother.

I think it looks impossible. Or we can look at that and go. That could be the most exhilarating challenge, the most extraordinary time to live through. If we actually did that and we cut France's emissions by 48% by 2030, and we ended up in a place that was better than where we're starting from now, what would that be like?

What would that process look like? And recently the United Nations published a report. They said, any chance of staying below one and a half degrees is now finished unless we see what they called a rapid transformation of society. So this was how all the newspaper articles were, all the magazine covers.

1.5 is finished. Say goodbye to 1.5. I didn't see a single magazine cover or headline that said, why don't we do that rapid transformation of society thing. Wouldn't a rapid transformation of society be an exciting and thrilling thing to live through? So we forget about that part. All too often, I think, and the the Institute for the Future in America have this beautiful saying on their window, any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.

I think we have reached a point now in the climate emergency where we have fiddled about and procrastinated so long that really now any solutions that anyone proposes that don't initially seem at least a bit ridiculous, are not ambitious enough. I'm really here tonight to urge all of you in the work that you do, to be a lot more ridiculous.

If somebody says that's ridiculous, that you are able to go, yes, I know. Thank you very much. And you wear that like a badge of honor, rather than going, oh, really, sorry, I'll, I'll come up with something more sensible for you. You know, we need to be really bold and ambitious in terms of what we're doing and what we're proposing.

And a lot of my work is inspired by this t-shirt. I saw this young woman wearing at the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington in 2020. I've been to the future. We won. And it kind of gave me goosebumps when I first heard it in terms of how different is it gonna be if the activism that we do, the campaigning we do around climate change, is actually like that.

We don't just think we can. Trigger the sort of change we need, , by talking about collapse and extinction and how terrible everything's going to be. But rather we can bring a future alive that is delicious and extraordinary and something to run towards. And then we, we are able to, , you know, create the ways of, of making that happen.

So, , I'm going to start with, with doing a little exercise with you, if I may, , which, , first of all requires you, I think some of you do it already, but if you see me put my hand in my air, in the air, then you put your hand in the air and stop talking. Quick practice. Thank you very much. Very good. And , and the other thing is that you're gonna need to find a partner, ideally, somebody you didn't know when you came here today.

So we'll just take a quick minute for you to find who your partner's going to be. You need to be in a pair for this to work.

Okay. Everybody got their pair?

Okay, good. So, um, we are going to, , A HEC is very big on innovation and the importance of innovation. And so, , I've bought along with me this evening an amazing bit of innovation from the town where I live, which is that I live in a place where we have actually succeeded in creating the world's first actually functioning time machine.

Ooh. Thank you. Thank you very much. And, , and I've actually, we, ,, the big one, we can't, actually, I couldn't bring because after Brexit it's very hard to get an export license for time machines. But, , we have a small, , portable version that I've managed to bring along here with me today, which, which turns any room into, into a time machine.

So the first thing I need to teach you is the sound A time machine makes this is very important. So it's like this, but with you all joining in as well. So it's like, hmm, hmm. I don't think that's going to break the time barrier, really. I just, one more time. Thank you. So I'm going to ask if you might, , make yourself comfortable and close your eyes and in a minute we're gonna turn it on and we're gonna travel together.

To 2030. And the 2030 that we're going to travel to isn't utopia. It's also not dystopia. It's the result of us having done everything we could possibly have done during those, , seven years. So it's the future that you long for, that you really, really want to see happen. , and when we do, when we travel there, we're just gonna sit for a minute or so in silence and just take a walk around and do it using all of your senses.

What does it smell like and feel like, and taste like and look like? Okay. So let's turn our time machine on and we're gonna go to 2030. Mm.

Okay, thank you. I'm just going to ask if you might now turn to your partner and we'll just take a minute or so just to share with your partner. What did you see? What did you feel? What did you hear? How was that?

Thank you. Thank you. Be lovely. If maybe there was one or two people who maybe had an impression that you'd like to share something that you saw, something that you wanted to share with people.

Don't be shy.

Yes.

Oh, hang on. There's a microphone on its way to you. Thank you. Um, and it's, , always, , quite fresh, even in summer, thanks to all the trees and everything. And, um, there is. New cars almost only like ambulances or those very important vehicles and that's all. And people are like more friendly and like to share things.

Can be food, it can be materials, I dunno. And , yes. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anyone else? One more.

Okay, so thank you. That's an exercise that I do, , with 10 people in workshops or with one and a half thousand people one time in a, in a event in Brussels. And for me, it's a really important thing that we do. As Bell Hooks, the writer said, what we cannot imagine cannot come into being. We have to be able to really allow ourselves to imagine that world, , rather than just focusing on what's going wrong all the time.

And you might have thought when I said that we had created a time machine in my town that I was joking. , but actually, oh, I'll show you that in a second. So. Often we, people talk about utopias all the time and just imagining perfect worlds off in the future. I'm not really interested in that. I'm much more interested in that thing of, well, what could it be like in 2030 if we are on the right place to where, towards where we need to get to?

What would that feel like to live in a France that is on that journey with ambition and purpose and determination, not interested in something that happens, , way off in the future? So I mentioned our time travel program. This is myself and my colleague, , with, , near our time machine, , on one of our journeys to 2030.

And, , we often go there in our time machine to go and , to go and, oh, I better just turn this off. Hang on. Otherwise dinosaurs start appearing and all sorts of stuff. Um, , so we've often to travel to 2030 to go and see what that world would actually be like. And I wanna share with you a recent adventure, a recent journey that we took to that 2030 to bring it alive for you in your imagination.

So you might like to think of me as the kind of Marco Polo of climate change, you know, telling you a story of a great adventure that we've been on. So we started in Paris, here in this street, just a pretty normal street, and we set the controls on the time machine for 2030. And then a couple of minutes later when we stepped out, that street looked like this.

Within that short period of time, there had been this big rethink and repu, and like you said, the air. Now smells so much better, , and so much quieter and more and more agreeable place to be. And my friends, the bicycle rush hours of 2030 are the most extraordinary thing because we realized that for every million pounds we spent building good cycling infrastructure, we would save 38 million euros.

, on the, on our health bill. It was an investment in health and wellbeing, and the amount of bicycles was just glorious. And now, you might remember these signs from 2030 for cars in 20, in 2023 for cars by 2030. We have them for bicycles. For some reason they're written in Dutch, , in Paris. I'm not quite sure why nobody wanted to tell me about that.

Something had happened in 2026, , I think, anyway, , so then now all these amazing, , places underground for storing bicycles. , and it made me think back to 2023. The kind of cycling infrastructure people were building in Britain. , and I saw this in the summer of 2023. And if any of you're cyclists and you can explain what you're supposed to actually do with that, , I would be really amazed at the most completely useless piece of cycling infrastructure, , imaginable.

There would been in 2024, it turned out that many of the worst banks had collapsed. And unlike 2020, unlike 2008, where we bailed out the banks this time, we bought the banks into national ownership and used their power to drive a shift in ownership much more towards communities. This is a place we visited that back in 2023, was a bank and now had been repurposed as a place for lots of different social enterprises and cooperatives, a whole new economy emerging.

And upstairs they had turned it into cooperative housing for 300 people, growing food on the roofs. And this thing of, as communities, we own more things is something that we saw everywhere that we went. , the way that we build houses has really changed. We now build much more, more in 2030 using local materials, building very ecological, very energy efficient buildings, but using mostly local materials.

These houses are built using straw and local timber and clay. They're incredibly energy efficient, affordable for people to build, and they're all owned by the people who live in those places. We saw everywhere that we went. People closing their streets to cars, taking back space from cars. The people in the street were very proud to show us a picture of what their street had looked like back in 2023.

, and it now looked like this. And everywhere that we went, we saw this. One of the most beautiful hope giving things that we saw was the removal of concrete and tarmac. Because we learned during those really hot summers of 2022 and 2023 that when you get above 34, 35 degrees, concrete and tarmac kill people.

And we needed to get it out of our cities. So cities now feel much softer. One of the great generators of new work and employment in our cities is the removal of hard surfaces. Now there are many neighborhoods and communities that are being designed so that there is just no space for cars. You don't need a car.

This is a place that we went to visit beautiful, , , very energy efficient houses, renewable energy, uh , but designed in such a way that it was all for bicycles, for children. You see 3-year-old children riding bicycles. Not something you saw very often in 2023. And, , this is a place, , where, where you see they did have one car there.

I think they just kept that as a kind of museum piece maybe. But I mentioned that we went to 2030 in order to make recordings because our thinking is if you could travel to 2030 and you could record what it sounded like, and then you could bring those recordings back to 2023 and play them to people, that could be one of the things that really inspires change and people to do things.

So I have a recording that I've bought for you, which is an actual recording from 2030. Ooh, thank you. Yeah, so you might like to, this is a recording of Paris in 2030 with no cars, with trams, bicycles, children playing in the streets. It lasts about a minute. You might like to just close your eyes and imagine that you are in the Paris of 2030

or not. 'cause it doesn't work. Ah, okay. Nevermind. Maybe. Does that work?

No. Oh, well, you'll have to imagine that on your way home. It's very good when you do hear it. Um, so we visited a school that had been, , this was a school that had been designed by the kids in the school. The architect had worked with the kids for a year. They threw a very creative process to get the children to design the kinda school they wanted.

Turns out when you allow children to design their own school, it looks like this, the education system has really changed by 2030. It's much more based on, , problem solving, on creativity, on imagination, , on democracy. And , this is the school that they designed using lots of ecological materials. And it turns out that when children design their own school, they design a school that has a rainforest in the middle.

So many schools now have a rainforest in the middle. , and education is much more rooted in the times that we are in. Agriculture had to profoundly change because it was became very clear in those summers of 2022 and 2023 that agriculture couldn't just imagine that it was always gonna have access to as much water as it needed.

We saw the biodiversity going down and down and down, and so agriculture changed to include a lot more trees to keep the water in the soil. A lot more covering of the ground, a lot more biodiversity. The things that we eat has really diversified, so the rural landscape looks much more, 

much more varied now, , than it did before. We also developed the humility. To recognize that beavers are the most, um, , far better hydrological engineers than we are. And so on all of , up areas of land, the high areas of land where flooding would come from, , back in the early 2020s. We just let that land to beavers and they redesigned those landscapes to store huge amounts of water, which hugely increased the biodiversity, , and transformed the landscapes and, and meant that we don't see flooding anymore because the landscapes have changed.

And all around our coasts, we've re, we've in a process of putting back the kelp forests, which lock up huge amounts of carbon, creates a lot of jobs now for coastal communities, , and also provide us with a lot of nutrition and medicines and substitutes for plastics And democracy is something that we do as a much more regular practice.

Citizens assemblies are used at a national scale, a local scale, a city scale for making decisions in a way that's much, much, , much better than what we did before and universities. Have completely transformed themselves. Every course now in every university is taught through the lens of the climate and ecological emergency.

And, , so all around ,, the lawn has disappeared, , into food gardens. Everybody now learns to grow food and every time universities need new buildings, they're built using local and ecological materials, , in such a way that the students are involved in all the different stages. This is a classroom we visited where they've used one and a half thousand old tires, , for the back wall that would otherwise have been thrown away.

The food system has really shifted. This is a place that we went to where they had, , where the municipality created a food garden here, which produces 80% of all the food for the local schools. And this model has now spread all across France to everywhere. Sodexo went out of business in 2026 because we didn't need them anymore because we had a better model for people to use.

, and it also led to a whole culture change around food in terms of how people bought food, , and health indices began to rise very quickly across the country and. And this model, which started in Lige, the Lige food belt where the city built a food belt around itself, , creating many new food businesses, spread very fast as well, communities investing in building a new food economy already by 2023 in Lige.

This was the model the municipality was using to redesign its food system, how it procured food for all of its different organizations. This is now the model absolutely everywhere. And people back in 2023, people said, yes, but it's too difficult and how are we gonna do? Like if we have to do air source heat pumps to heat buildings, how will we do that for apartments?

It's not possible. Actually, what we found during those seven years was that it unlocked a huge amount of ingenuity, innovation, creativity, replacing chimneys on houses with, with heat pumps, different kind of really creative solutions because we found, like we did through COVID, that when you recognize something is an emergency, things change very quickly and people can be very, very inventive.

Now we generate most of our electricity from renewables and more than half of that is in community ownership. So it's a being a big shift in terms of decentralizing energy, , and how that happens. So to bring us back a moment to 2023, I think the important point to make is that all of those things.

Already exist. We are not waiting for some magical , invention. The street at the beginning is in Amsterdam. The city with the bicycles is trekked. , , bank re repurposed is in Switzerland. The buildings made of straw are in Leeds, the crazy school built by the kids in Madrid and so on. All of these things already exist.

As William Gibson says, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So when we look back from 2030 to 2023, what did we do that made this possible? How did, what were the things in 23 20 20, , say that. What were the things in 2023 that were already happening that made that future possible?

I think the first thing was that big organizations, big institutions, decided to take really bold steps. This is a, a, a school, , a college in Denmark, which recently just completely clad every surface of that building with solar panels to generate way more energy than they're actually going to use. You know, we need to be taking these kind of big, , bold steps.

Why not every university campus, all across France actually sets out to grow more food than is consumed on the campus. It would create work, it would boost biodiversity. It would make university an incredible place to visit, and we would feel much more connected, , to the natural world. If we went there.

We should be building all new buildings should be being built. Without any cement because 9% of carbon dioxide, 9% of climate change is caused by the use of of, of cement. This is an amazing building at the University of East of Anglia, the University of East Anglia built using local materials and traditional ways of building.

This is on the walls. This is thatch like you see on very old roofs, , in Ian places, but they use it on the walls to make super insulated panels. Keeping those traditional skills alive in a very new context, in a building that uses local materials in really innovative and really healthy ways. We should be making sure that all new buildings built by universities and different institutions are built with those kind of principles, , in mind.

It's a project that I'm involved with in my town. Which I've been involved with for a long time, where the community is trying to become the developer of this site. This is an old milk factory. The last big employer in our town closed in 2007, and we have been campaigning ever since for the community to become the developer.

And in a town of 9,000 people, we ran a consultation that more than 4,000 people contributed ideas to. It was a real invitation to the collective imagination of that place, to, to, to do whatever it wanted. With that place. We've now, these, these are some of the designs, , and, but what's most important is the model that underpins it, because the models really helped to dictate the future we're going to create.

So this is how conventional development happens. A private developer, they find a site, they borrow some money from the bank, they design something that will maximize their profit, they sell it, and then they move on. And then the community, all that wealth is extracted and there's very little benefit. In our model, what happens is be because it's in community ownership.

As a community, it means that we can access money from a much wider range of sources, from pension funds, different places. We then design something the community needs that it will own forever, and that's designed to generate money for community activities. Then after 30 years when you've paid back the money that you've borrowed, that scheme is generating two, 3 million pounds every year for the community to decide what it wants to do with.

It's a deeply transformative thing in my town. I keep saying to people, imagine if someone had done that 30 years ago. How different would our approach be to climate change, to the housing crisis, to COVID if we had that sort of power in our hands? So the models really, really matter underneath what we're doing.

I think another thing that happened in 2023 was that people started to really change the kind of activism that they did to bring the future into the activism that they did. This is, , extinction Rebellion in 2019 on Waterloo Bridge, normally full of cars. , my wife is very involved with Extinction Rebellion.

She's been arrested seven times. , I'm very proud of her. She's much braver than me. , but for two weeks they took over this bridge and they turned it into a forest, and people who crossed this bridge when it was full of cars stopped and said, oh. Why can't it always be like this? It's what I call a pop-up tomorrow.

You take the future that you dreamed of when you closed your eyes and you give it form that people can see and interact with and experience. And I've met four people who went here and gave up their jobs as a result and who now work in climate because of having that experience. So I think our activism needs to become less about what we need to stop less about, um, extinction and collapse, and more about creating examples of what's possible.

We need to create opportunities for people to come together in their organizations, their universities, their communities, to really reimagine those places. The imagination needs space. If you don't create space for it. It can never happen and we can't reimagine anything. This is in Bologna where the municipality created something called a civic imagination office as a, as a tool for bringing people together to reimagine the city.

And the really smart bit is that when they came up with a good idea, the municipality would say, that's a good idea. Let's make that happen. We can offer this and this and this. Let's work together. And they've made 500 pacts. Now, between the people of the city and the municipality, if we invite people to be imaginative, we need to meet that imagination, , in the middle.

And sometimes we need to be really creative and playful and dare I say, a bit ridiculous. So what should be happening everywhere is that the government should be printing money to turn everybody's house into a power station and to insulate everybody's homes. That's not happening. So, um. So these are some friends of mine who live in London.

, she's a, an, , amazing printmaker and artist. He's a filmmaker. They decided, well, if the government aren't going to do it, we'll do it. So they raised a hundred thousand pounds by sleeping on their roof. In December, they run a kind of a crowdfunding thing where basically people paid them money to come in, come back inside, and then they printed, they, this, this was a project, they call it Power Station, and they printed these amazing, beautiful bank notes, which aren't really a local currency.

They're like a, a limited edition artworks. , the I. And then they raised more money with that and they're now slowly working their way down the street, putting solar panels on each of the houses. So there's a huge amount that we can do in the places where we live if we want to be playful and creative, , and make, get things happening in that way.

This is a place I went to recently, , in, in a city where they turned a big public space into what they call , forest of imagination as a place for people to really think about the future in very different ways, combining arts. And in Camden, in London, which is where Amy Winehouse, , lived, they, they've, they're the first council to create a, um.

Citizens Assembly on Climate Change. They're the first to declare a climate emergency. And then they recently, , created this thing called Think and Do, which is a, a, a big community imagining space. I think we need to be creating these spaces for people to come together and reimagine things. Otherwise we just carry on doing exactly the same.

And, , one of the things that came from this was, , a training called, , imagination Activist Training. So now lots of people who work in that local authority are doing this imagination activist activism training to bring into that organization that imaginative muscle, that ability, that willingness to be ridiculous, that capacity to ask what if questions.

We need to be getting this into everywhere, into every organization because we have to create the space in which we can rethink and reimagine everything. And, and, , so I mentioned before about the music, the recordings that we make. This is a lot of the work that I do. I was been involved in the transition movement for about 15 or 16 years.

The last couple of years I've been doing more of this work around imagination and playfulness. And, , so I go and make these recordings of, of, , like the one I would've played you if it had worked. And , and then with those recordings, this guy, Mr. Kit, who's an amazing electronic music artist, makes these ambient music pieces using those field recordings.

And his brief is that they should cultivate a nostalgia for the future. , and I love these diff different ways that we can help people access that stuff. So that's, I think my half an hour. And if you wanna find out anything else about what I do, that's the website that I do. I do a podcast, I do a few different things.

And I really look forward to your questions and the conversations that we're gonna have. And thank you for time traveling with me. Thank you.

Well, thank you first and foremost for your presentation. , we are now going to move on to a few questions to get a better grasp of your thinking, if that's okay with you. Of course. So, um, when we think about transition towns, and you mentioned that in your presentation, it often feels like a utopia. , for instance, Christiana in Denmark, , was supposed to be a revolutionary concept, but it has difficulties reaching the, like being the ambition of being a self-sufficient town that it had at the beginning.

Um, what do you think can be done to transform this idea of a utopia into a tangible reality? Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't feel like what we're trying to do in transition is, is a utopian project, really. , and I think, you know, there are projects, I mean, Christiania, Chris, Chris Christiania, how'd you say?

I think it's Christiano Chris. Anyway, that place in Denmark, they, I think that they started very much as a kind of anti-establishment, , kind of anarchist community sort of project. And when we started doing transition, there were movements like the Eco Village movement where there are lots of eco village projects, , around the world, which are kind of, which are great in the, in that they act like laboratories for how the future could be.

But the problem with them often is that they, um, they tend to be people who are like-minded, , kind of getting together to do something together. And always felt to me like actually a much more interesting challenge is how do we do this just in the places where we all live? On the streets where we live with the people that we live with is a much more, rather than imagining we need to gather around us.

People who are just like us. Actually, it's much more useful to, the transition movement really came from saying, well, how do we bring the principles of permaculture design and sustainable thinking, but make them really understandable in a way that you can go neighborhood by neighborhood, by neighborhood, and then in then you're kind of working.

You don't encounter that sort of, , I think with somewhere like Christiania they, that they created a very sort of, we are against the state, we're against the establishment. They created that dynamic. Whereas the transition movement is more like, what can we do in this place with the people that we have, the people who love this place, the people who are passionate about this place with their time, the love that they have, what could we actually create?

So it's, it's more, and also I'm, it's really important to say, I'm not for a moment saying that everything that needs to happen to get us from where we are. In 2023 to where we need to by 2030 is gonna come from communities. I wouldn't wanna put that kind of pressure, , on them. And also, I also wouldn't want to let business, academia, government, whoever else off the hook.

'cause we all need to, everybody has a big, big role to play in this, but it always felt like there was a really important part that communities could do that nobody else was doing. They could move faster without permission and they could unlock things. And that's the bit that I think communities do.

That's really important. Okay. So we've got that. It was very much community based, but how do you believe it could go global? How do you see it spreading? Because like the issue with it being very local, individual based almost is that it's. Yeah, it's, it might limit itself. So I think ,, the way that the transition model works is that people, , self-organize.

We don't sit like some Coca-Cola franchise in some office somewhere and go, now we will. Do transition in, in Venezuela and we'll open a head office in Venezuela or something. It doesn't work like that. It's that people hear about it. They, they, they find the materials, they get excited about it and they just get started with it.

It's very audacious, I think, in that kind of a way. And, um, so if you look at a city like London, there is no transition London, because if you tried to do transition London, your head would explode, I think. But actually what happens is that you have transition in 50 different neighborhoods across London working in a kind of identifiable neighborhood that has a name and an identity.

And then, and then those groups share and network with each other. So for me, you know, people will often say, yeah, but the community scale is too small. You can't do anything really impactful. You know, when you look at the story that I told about Lige, that started with five people in 2014 sitting around a table saying, so should we do it then?

Yeah, let's try it. Let's do it and see what happens. And then actually already four years later, they had raised 5 million euros of investment from local people into the creation of 27 cooperatives. Now they're, now, they're the model that the municipality is using to reimagine its procurement system completely.

And it's spread to six other cities. So for me, that's a really beautiful example of what we can do at the community scale is we can start projects that tell stories that spread, and it's the stories that are the bit that's really infectious. And do you think it's going fast enough? Like there's like a sense of urgency almost.

So, I mean, I, I would say of course it's not going fast enough. You know, during that time, since 2006 when we started the transition movement, 30% of all the CO2 ever released by humanity has been released during that time. You know, we, , because we are up against. Incredibly powerful forces who are infinitely more resourced than community groups are.

You know, it's, it's one of the things that is most frustrating when you work in a movement like transition is you can see its potential. You can see what community groups with the right tools, who are well organized and who are working together with their local government can achieve and they can achieve incredible things, but they generally achieve them with almost no money run by volunteers who were exhausted and who were busy doing other things.

You know, I was, transition Network was part of the, um, the eus Climate Pact that was published, , about three or four years ago. Transition Network was one of the parties who helped to write one of the opinions on that. And we said very clearly, you can't deliver the Climate Pact unless you involve communities and you can't expect the communities to do that work.

On a Wednesday evening after they've put the kids to bed, you know, this has to be properly resourced. And a project like the project I showed in my town for me is the kind of level of ambition we need to be looking at. Communities should be becoming their own developers, their own energy companies, their own food systems.

That's the level of ambition that we need, and we need , kind of investment and government support to enable that to happen. Um, you also insist a lot on the importance of imagination to design tomorrow's transition. How do you reconcile, um, imagination, desire and dreams with the gloomy status quo and the reality of slow change?

So, , I take a huge amount of inspiration. Most of the work that I do around imagination is really inspired particularly by, , a whole group of. , black women activists in the United States who are doing a lot of work around imagination, , and the power of imagination. And one, , there's a, , Prison abolition movement in the United States, which is an extraordinary movement, which is, which is obviously about , abolition of the prison industrial complex and how that then opens up all these questions about, okay, well, if we didn't have prisons, we'd have to think about education very differently and housing very differently and healthcare very differently.

Yeah. Okay. Keep going. You know? And so, , the woman, there's a woman called Mariame Kaba, who's one of the great activists in that movement who wrote a book called We Do This Till We Free Us, which I really recommend. And in that book she said, we must imagine while we build, always both. So I would never for a moment say we just need to sit around imagining all the time.

But at the same time, if, if, if all we do is just do stuff and we don't take the space and the time to sit back and really look at, well, where are we going? What's the vision? And try to keep everybody going with, with a vision, we are never really gonna get anywhere. There's a woman, um, who I met who called, , Gabriela Gomez Mon, who worked for the mayor of Mexico City, where she created in his administration something that was conceived of as being a ministry of imagination, which sounds like something from a Harry Potter book, but actually in Mexico City, that's what they created.

And when I spoke to her, she said, you know, people say, oh, imagination is, is just a nice thing to have. But she said, imagination is not a luxury. And I put that in my, I put that in the last book that our imagination is not a luxury. And for Christmas, my mom made me a t-shirt with imagination is not a luxury written on it.

And it feels like a really important thing to bear in mind. This is not something that's just a nice to have. It's, it's, it's, it's integral it to us being vibrant, alive, creative human beings. I think. So according to civil rights and sustainable developments go, go hand in hand or is, is it just that the thought process is the same or are they connected?

I mean the, it's why whenever you go on big climate demonstrations, people say, what do we want? Climate justice? Because it's not just about tackling climate change. We could create a very low carbon future, which is a horrible, horrible place to be. , and we see, you know, with the rise of au authoritarian governments, that we could end up in a place where that's really bad.

So it's what I try and do, and what I tried to do here was to say, actually, we need to look at all of this. All of this together. It's about how we grow food, how we practice democracy, how we, how we work together, the economic ownership models that underpin all of this stuff. All of this really, really needs to be looked at together.

I think because this should, climate change is really a once every 400 year opportunity to reimagine civilization. And what, what are we here for? There's a guy called Indie Johar. Phenomenal. Runs an organization called Dark Matter Labs. He said, actually, we should be talking about the great peace that we're building towards the great peace we are in a time when we are at war with each other.

We are at war with nature, and we're putting the whole survival of, of everything at risk. And we need to be talking about this shift that needs to happen as being a great piece. And I think it's like, that's why, you know, for me. It gives us the opportunity to put right all the other things. Climate change is just a symptom of a system that is broken and completely outta balance and, and, and has all the wrong ideas underpinning it.

And this is the opportunity to rethink that. Okay. And, , one last question from, from us, , if you may, , what would be your advice to us, especially business students, to be actors of this transition in an effective and remarkable way?

So I would say. You are among the most amazing,  bright, brilliant, , young business mindsin the country. And, , 10 years ago, I would imagine, or five years ago, even a lot of young people come to HEC and your kind of purpose, your dream is to say, um, I want to either go into a very, very well paid position, or I want to create a business that does so well that maybe I can retire before I'm 40 or something like that.

I think, I think we really need to change the motivation at this point. The motivation needs to be, I want to be able to sit down with my grandchildren and for them to be able to say, yeah, thank you. That was amazing. You were brilliant. You know, we, we, this is, you know, I'm not, I'm not a business person. I don't have that much of a business brain, but this.

This transition, this shift is gonna need everybody. And it's, if we get it right, this should be in 10 years time. The transition here should be by far the biggest generator of new jobs in this country. There is so much that needs to happen. We have to completely reimagine the food system. We have to reimagine the energy system.

We need to decentralize how the energy system works. It's like, it's like rebuilding Europe after the war on a bigger scale. You know? It's huge. And that will require brilliant people who also are working. I think with a, with a, I mean, obviously, you know, there's, there's good livelihoods to be made.

There's successful businesses to be made, but maybe with a different motivation around being of service to this time and bringing those skills that you learn here. And also being, being the kind of, um. , being the people who can, who can inspire and bring everybody else alongside, you know, be brilliant and bold and ridiculous and, and and visionary and create stuff on the ground that is gonna have a real impact for people, I think.

And yeah. Do you think that being like brilliant and bold and ridiculous, do you think that implies for students like us who will enter the job market soon, um, to actually go along with the system and kind of work with what's in place or completely take an alternative route and go for something completely different and accept the fact that it's not working?

The, like the system's not working the way it exists as of now, I think, I think that very much depends on, on, on you. It's a, it's a very personal question for everybody. I think there are some people who can, who can go into those big organizations and who can. Keep your vision and your integrity and you can be one of those people inside that organization who identifies allies and who together.

You try and shift and you push that organization and we absolutely need people who are in those organizations doing that. At the same time, I think we also need people, , that, that for some people, that's just too much. You can't live with that sort of discrepancy. Of having a set of values like this and being asked to do that, in which case then step outside and bring the amazing skills that you accumulate in this place into creating something else.

And also, I would say as somebody who does a lot of work with community groups all across Europe, you know, this is often people who are working, they don't have a background in business and marketing and business planning, and they're trying to create really ambitious projects. Get alongside those people and offer a bit of your time to support them, to really up , ambition of what they're doing and the, and the expertise of what they're doing.

Yeah. But it's, it's, we can be playing an active role and being of service to this change in many, many different settings, I think. Well, thank you. , we'll now be having a few questions coming from the audience. So if you just raise your hand and you'll be handed a microphone.

Perhaps while the microphone is arriving. Rob, I'll just ask a question that was sent in online, um, from, , , Alice Moroney in Switzerland. I'll, I'll leave to the end. Um, her position, her question is, , my question is on the impact in awareness around fast fashion. On the one hand, there is a focus on the negative effects of this industry.

Nearly its profits and markets continue to expand. In other words, we seem to want more and faster. How do you tackle such a situation? , thank you. Thank you for the question. Um, I think it's pretty clear that.

We need to move away from being a, an, an economy that's based on stuff and the consumption of stuff to being, , to being an economy that's based on creativity and experiences and, and collectiveness, collectivity, and, um. The average person in Sweden consumes 27 tons of stuff every year, and the global average is 1.5 tons.

You know, we in the global North Live way, way, way beyond our means, and I think fast fashion is one of the worst manifestations of that, this kind of throwaway, , culture. And there's some really exciting stuff I think happening, , in the world of fashion around reuse and re and, and, , you know, finding ways of repurposing clothes.

Most of the pr young people that I know in the UK don't really buy new clothes very often. They, but they, they buy secondhand clothes and wear them with other things and swap them, and there's a new. Kind of culture around, around fashion, I think emerging with young people about creating your own style with things that you find, things that you have.

And that feels kind of more exciting to me. You know, we can't carry on having an economy, which is just in raw materials, in make something and then just throw it away. It's, it's been absolutely catastrophic and it can't continue. And so to create a more circular economy in fashion is one thing. But also I think we need to really be looking at reusing and repurposing what we have in, in very different ways.

Yeah. And that was a question from Alice who, , is the external innovation and alliances manager at Philip Morris. I didn't want to her position to taint your answer. Next question. Thank you. Okay. , thank you very much. Um, I would like to, I would like to, um, talk about the point of making the change global.

And as far as I understand you correctly. You think that communities, um, kind of like live the story of change and then the story of change spreads around the world and other communities are adapting it kind of like by themselves. Um, where do you see , drivers for that and maybe how can we leverage that?

Um, I think , drivers for it come from, uh. From stories, you know, there's a woman called Wita, Isha in the US who's a kind of Afrofuturist, , science fiction writer who says, all organizing is science fiction. All activism is around science fiction and stories. And so what we try and do in the transition movement, my, my role for years has really been to be a storyteller, is to listen out, to be watching this movement, this network all the time, looking for the really interesting stories like the one I mentioned in Liege.

But there are thousands and thousands of others. And then to share those stories in different ways through films, through podcasts, through blogs, through whatever it is. 'cause it's the stories that are, the things that, that really spreads and make people think how we could do that. Yeah, that sounds we, I think we could probably manage that.

So one of the beautiful things when you build a network like we have in transition is that when one place comes up with a good idea, that idea can spread and replicate very quickly. Other places go, we'll do that, and you make that available and, and, and these things really, really spread. So one we, we've seen in, in the UK for example, we, we three years ago got funding from the national lottery to create a, a national transition support organization for just England and Wales.

And we get like three, we get a, a quarter of a million pounds every year. We distribute as grants to those organizations. And the most they can apply for is 10,000 pounds. Communities do amazing things with 10,000 pounds. And there's all kinds of projects that then we go back to them and say, what did you do?

And we collect their stories to inspire people to do different things. If we could give them a hundred thousand pounds, if we give them a million pounds. It could be really extraordinary. You know, we are, we are up against oil and gas companies with budgets in like, if something, like somebody said that basically oil and gas companies have made the equivalent of 20 million pounds a day from the day of, from Jesus' birth every day, 20 million.

You know, we aren't, and we can't even begin to imagine what that would be like. So we need to find the ways to, to raise the finance ourselves. I mentioned Lige, they raised five, raised 5 million euros. That project that they're are community energy projects in the UK that have raised 15, 16 million pounds.

So for me, the thing that I always say to community groups is they need to think a bit more like you. They need to bring, be bringing in an entrepreneur's way of thinking to what they're doing. Because if we are just gonna end up trying to do change on the scale that we need with volunteer groups who meet once every month in the pub, , and everybody's volunteers, then you are probably gonna end up with pretty much exclusively middle class white movements because they're the people who have a bit of spare time.

They have the kind of skills and the confidence to think that they can do things. This has to be something that creates jobs for people. And like I said, in 10 years time, this should be the biggest creator of new jobs. And so we, we run a project in the transition network called Recon. And Recon is about supporting communities to think more entrepreneurially to, rather than just designing a project and think, oh, it'll always be run by volunteers.

Actually, if you think about it differently, this could create six jobs for people. You know, in, in my town we started a brewery and employed 12 people. You know, that's the kind of thing we need to be doing, rather than saying, let's do a volunteer beer making project. Actually no, let's get serious about this and start creating work for people.

So we need you as much really. Thanks. So before the next question from the audience, um, there's an online question from Marco in Paris. He asks, do you think that the sustainability movements in Europe will help developing countries that are looking to grow, but which usually are offered solutions that come with increased Caribbean emissions?

Yes, I do. Absolutely. Because I think that one of the, we we, I was teaching in a class here today and we had that same question. Um, the Global North has. Yeah, I, I, I was talking about how I, I found out recently, you probably already knew this, but I found out recently about how after the war, when the Marshall Plan was created, where the United States, , , paid to rebuild Europe, one of the conditions of that was that European countries would agree to, to, to say that 60% of programs shown on television and films shown in cinemas were American films.

Because it gave them the opportunity to basically export the American Dream and the American consumerist model to, to audiences, , all across Europe. It was very, very smart piece of, of, of story, , of story management, , in a sense. So my sense is that actually the, at the moment, one of the reasons why in many, , parts of the world, there is this pursuit of this particular concept of what constitutes progress and what constitutes development is because that's the model that the Global North is exporting, , and pushing.

Whereas actually, if what we can do here is to create a different model and model a different approach and show that actually. We are flourishing and, and, and having a, a much better way of doing things by taking a very different approach. That's a very, very powerful way of doing it. If we can build better food systems, , that build more resilience and we're doing that in solidarity with places in the global south to build their own food sovereignty, protect small farmers, protecting indigenous people and so on, you know, it's about alternatives to development rather than development.

And , and I think that one of the ways that we start that is by modeling a very different story of what makes progress here.

Um, thank you so much for being with us tonight. I had a question 'cause I found myself quite surprised to hear you talk about, you know, new transportation ways, new way to imagine the future, , to construct buildings, but not a word on meat. I was quite surprised not to hear about that. Yeah, thank you.

Actually, usually. It is funny because I do this presentation quite a lot. There's always some bits that I put in and some bits I leave, I kind of remix, , depending on the thing. So normally what I have a thing is, is that I say, and actually by 2030 we eat 80% less meat. And the amazing thing is that nobody even noticed that it was a transition that happened and that nobody really even noticed.

It really wasn't a big deal. , a bit like how we now in by 2030 we fly about 80% less than we used to back in 2023. But the thing with the meat Yeah. Is for me, I, I find it extraordinary. I dunno how it is here, but certainly in the uk I think ,, the growth of, um, plant-based milks in the last five years has been just extraordinary way ahead of what anybody could have predicted, , and anticipated.

So, yeah, for me, obviously, and I, I should have, thank you for the reminder. I should have mentioned it, but absolutely that would've, that would be a huge and really vital part of it. And, , ,, um. The deescalation and dismantling of intensive animal agriculture is one of the most fundamental elements of this transition.

Being able to work, it's one of the, it's one of the main things that all of you can do if you're really serious about having a role to play, is to massively scale back, , the meat and, and dairy that you consume. Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. Back to our online, , audiences. The, , microphone travels here in, , the, , Leon in Berlin asks, how can we prepare people to, um, to, to create, , this imagination and anticipation?

What are the conditions to help them to develop their creativity? In other words, that's a very good question from one of the most creative cities, , in Europe. Thank you. Um,

so I, um. When I just finished writing the book from What is To What if I had somebody who was renting a room in my house and who was studying at Schumacher College, which is very close to where I live, and he read the manuscript of the book and he used it as the basis for the, for the dissertation that he wrote, and he created something.

Well, we together, we created something called The Imagination Sundial, which you'll find on my website, which is our attempt to identify the different elements. That allow us to really boost the imagination at the speed required. And there were four things, and I've come to think we need to add a fifth.

So the first one is space, that the imagination needs space. Um, and , in any organization that's set up in a particular way, it will just continue doing what it's always done unless you intentionally create. , well facilitated space for people to stop and to rethink. So in any organization that's fundamentally important in our own lives as well.

Alba Einstein always said he got his best ideas when he rode his bicycle through the forest. , you know, we need to make that kind of space. We all carry around in our pockets, these highly addictive devices that eat that space when otherwise we might have just wandered around and, and, and thought of some ideas.

So space is really important. Place I think is really, is, is another one, which is the idea that we need to create places like I showed you, the Extinction Rebellion pop up tomorrow on, on the bridge there. We need to create places that where people can go. See and experience and feel a very different kind of future.

We need practices, things that we do together that allow us to exercise that imagination and we need pacts like I talked about in Bologna, where we facilitate those things and then we meet the imagination in the middle. The fifth one I think is time and time travel, and a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment is around, so I bought my little time machine along with me here today is around time travel as a as, as an activist's tool.

And like I say, many of, there's some amazing organization. There's an amazing woman in Philadelphia in. Pence, , what's the code? , anyway, in, in a city in the United States who, , runs a project called Black Quantum Futurism, which is this beautiful way of using time travel as a radical tool for getting people to reimagine the places where they live, creating what they call, um, community futures hubs and gathering people's oral futures as well as their oral histories.

And I think there that there's, there's a beautiful example there in the work that they're doing, but it's something that has to be very intentional. We have to create the space for that kind of thing to happen.

I was just wondering, how do you deal with people who simply don't care about climate change or building a community together, a more resilient community? How do you deal with that and how do you keep such optimism with you that, , and the energy that you bring us today and tonight and every day? Thank you.

, um, I, I wonder if, is there anybody here who understands climate change science, who has ever had a conversation with somebody who doesn't believe in climate change, where they've managed to convince them that they're, that they're wrong? Yeah. Me neither. I think I, I did once on Twitter, I engaged someone on Twitter for about three days and managed to convince him to go and read a book about climate change.

But that was the only time. My sense is that we all, we, we are all very busy, right? And we all have a certain amount of time for our friends, a certain amount of time for our family, for our studies. We have a certain amount of time that we can dedicate. To, to, to, to making change happen. My sense is that that time and that energy is much, much better spent finding the people around you who are excited like you are about making change happen and then do, and then just getting on and doing something with those people.

You don't need to convince people. Certainly trying to convince people who are, who are our very near family, that they're wrong about climate change is a very good way to make lots of conflicts that last for a long, long time. It's much better to find the people who are excited and create something with them, and actually what you find then is that when you create something really exciting and visible that is having an impact, that then people start to understand.

What you are talking about because we've become social media and the lots of very, , insidious forces that use social media for this have convinced everybody. It's everything gets so polarized. You know, people who believe in climate change and people who don't believe in climate change and they get further and further apart from each other.

And I think we need to be creating the projects. I was. The way I like to think about doing transition in my, in my own community is that it's like if you want to build a new coral reef in the sea, you don't farm coral and then go and stick it in the sea. You put stuff into the sea that the coral will just form around.

So often they throw loads of old cars in, in a particular pattern, and then the coral will then form around it. I feel like we need to be creating those sorts of things in our communities that have lots of kind of surface area to it. So in my town, the Transition town project there, there's a food group that does all kinds of different projects.

They have a project where they just grow food in the street and anyone can take it and anyone can come along and help to plant it. They have a tree planting project where they plant, , heavily cropping nut trees throughout the different unloved corners of the town. They have a, they have a project where they go and collect surplus food from a local organic food business, and they distribute it to low income households.

There's loads of different ways into that. You don't have to believe in climate change. You don't have to be in any particular political persuasion. You might just be someone who likes to plant trees and you go along and you plant trees. So the more we can create that sort of surface area and texture to what we're doing, then the more we can include people.

And that always feels like a much better approach than getting into conflicts with people. Find the people who are excited and create something with them. It is a question that's, , vaguely linked, , in some ways. And we're gonna travel, , this time without any carbon footprints to Islam, about Pakistan from where Harun sends this in.

Thanks to the trans, , transition network. You've gone from local to global. 50 countries, that's a quarter of the United Nations. Um, and back, I mean, how are those p politicians at the top who arguably can accelerate your agenda, responding? Perhaps you meet them from time to time to, to discuss these issues.

, thank you. Um, not very often. , I, who I don't, I, I, I tend to work with, certainly in the context of the uk, which is a car crash politically, , I've kind of given up on the idea that that change of the scale that we need will come from national politics because it's become so compromised and, and, um, affected by lobbyists and so on.

I think that. The change that we're gonna see happening will come from city administrations, local administrations, regional administrations, local business communities, educational establishments working together. And when I see the most exciting examples that I see, those are the kind of coalitions that happen in transition.

We, we use this term, , the power to convene. Which is that one of the things that, that transition groups can do is they can get together in the same room, a bunch of people who would normally never sit in a, in, in a room together. And we can use that power to bring those people together to get the kind of conversations happening that we need to happen.

So, , so that's, that, that's my sort of sense. I don't get, I, I, I get lots of invitations in my own work. I basically go where the invitations take me, and the invitations tend to come from, , city governments, regional governments, local governments, businesses, communities. And that's where I go and that's where I see the energy.

I don't often get invited into the national seats of power, not yet. Anyway.

Um, good evening, , Mr. Hopkins. , thank you for your talk today. Today. , I wanted to ask you a question about, , I wanted to ask your take on the food system that you say we should reform. , but if we switch, as you said, , 80%  more,,, less meat, , to a more plant-baseddiet, , we should, , consequently eat more since, , we need the same amount of calories to function as human beings.

And then, um, we would need more surface area. , and, , even given our, , intensive production, we would need more surface area to produce all of the vegetables that we consume today. , and given that, um, , locally, , produced vegetables, um, and local, um, farms are less productive than, , intensive, , production.

, given that there's no chemicals involved or anything, how can we hope to answer the need? The demand for vegetables, for food, , in France, , but also, , for countries in Africa that we take care of. We, , bring food to Africa, to other countries. How can we expect to take care of, , the food demand in the world?

Yeah, thank you. I, I mean, I think ,, , first thing I would say is that I, I dunno what the figure is for, for France, but I know in the UK 40% of what's grown on farms is wasted and, and, and doesn't actually get to feeding people. It either gets wasted on the farm or it gets wasted during the whole process.

So there's, so there's a huge amount that we can, that we can do in terms of stopping that, I think. And I, but I would question your figure about the eating a, a vegetable. A, a more, , plant-based diet means we'd need more land because actually we, there's a huge amount of land that is used to grow the food that is given to the animals.

Huge, , amounts of soy, , corn, , that are grown as animal feed. And my understanding of it from what I've read is that actually if we move from a meat-based diet to, to a vegetarian, vegan diet, we use much, much, much less land, , for the than than we do to produce meat. There's a, a, a guy called George mBio who's a, who's a, a journalist and an activist in the uk who's just written a book called Regenesis, which is about, , moving, , , towards a, a, a more plant-based kind of approach.

And, and I'm sure says we need much, much, much less land. Also, the other thing is that growing vegetables and growing more plant-based, if, if, if we grow. Corn and soyer and feed them to animals is much less efficient than if we just eat it ourselves. , so there's, and then also ,, we don't have all the problems with methane.

The kind of industrial animal production is hugely environmentally destructive in terms of pollution and nitrates, , and methane, , emissions, as well as just suffering on, on an enormous scale. So I, I dunno where, what the figures that you're saying come from. But my understanding is that if we move to a much more plant-based diet, we would need a lot less land actually, and less, , water and so on.

Um, and my sense has always been that, that we need to be moving towards a more resilient food system here. And it's not to say that France is gonna be able to produce all of its own food. But every step it takes towards that creates more resilience to shocks, , creates more food security, creates more jobs for people.

But that same process needs to be happening in parallel in the global south where often the food systems there have been, , where small farmers have been cleared off the land to create a very much an export driven kind of a model. So we need to be looking towards a food system that is much more plant-based, much more local, much more resilient, but doing that in solidarity with, with people all over the world.

Hello, professor. Thank you so much for  your speech today. , I have a question oncircular economy. Yeah. , what are your thoughts on it? Is it a boon or a Bain? Because nowadays we see that a lot of  corporate structures and, , it's gaining more popularity.Everybody's more involved in, , circular economy.

Is that giving a loophole for a lot of corporate structures to take advantage of? Or is it going in the direction that we need to? Because somewhere I feel like, , everybody is giving a statement of, okay, this can be recycled, so let us produce as much as we can. It's fine, because at the end of the day, this is again, going to be used into another product.

So what are your thoughts on it? Yeah, thank you. I, I think there's a lot of, um, I mean, obviously a circular economy is better than a, a linear economy. So it's, it's a kind of, it's an, it's an improvement of sorts. Um, for me, the approach has always been rather than. So as, as, as a, as a permaculture teacher, I was, I taught permaculture for a long time, which if you dunno what permaculture is, it's a really great thing to study, , alongside your studies here.

And it's, it's a, it's a design system for how to design sustainable systems that takes nature as its model. And, , it was started by a guy called Bill Mollison, who, who spent a lot of time in the rainforests in Tasmania. And he said, when you go to a rainforest, you never see anybody weeding a rainforest.

You never see anybody putting fertilizer in a rainforest. You never see anybody watering the trees because what you have is a completely self-regulating system that works because of the network of relationships between all those different things and the cycles of water and nutrients that happen. And in the transition movement, , we always take that as the model for how we try and do local economies, that the idea of a local economy is to make sure that money circulates as many times as possible before it leaves.

So that was something that was when, when we de designed some of the local currency projects in the uk, there are 82 different local currency projects here in France. Now the idea of that is that you have money that has a value. But only in that place. So if you take, which is the local currency in the Grand Avenue region, and you bring it to Paris, it's just a piece of paper.

But in Grand Avenue, it's, it's a local currency, so it stays locally and circulates. And there are cities now, , like the city of Preston in the uk who are taking this concept as, as the economic model for the city. Our role as the municipality for the city is to put in place the infrastructure. That means that money will circulate as many times as it can before it leaves.

So we create cooperatives rather than allowing a company like Sodexo to run the laundry and the food supplies for our local hospital will create a co-op. To do both of those things so that money will stay locally and circulate and make sure that they use local suppliers, and you start to create that.

That feels much more interesting to me. It's more like a sort of micro circular economy rather than just a big circle of businesses doing that with each other. You take that down into, into the economy and how money is transferred around within that economy. The other thing I would say is that, is that I, for me, a model that is much more useful is Kate Raworth donor economics model.

Does anybody here, you come across Don Economics.

No. Yes, some of you have heard of it. It should absolutely be something that is taught here because it's such a beautifully simple model, which says any business, any operation, can't push out into the, into the nine planetary boundaries that we know. , climate change being one of those. And we can't push into the middle, which is the social, the social foundation.

So we have to pay people a living wage, we have to have good rights for people, and it identifies the kind of sweet spot within which we need to operate, which is a circular economy, but it's also an economy that has different elements. And what I love seeing in workshops I've done on donut economics is when you identify that sweet spot, one of the things I learned about the imagination is the imagination loves limits.

When you put limits around it, people are so much more imaginative and playful. So for me, the circular economy should be like kind of micro circular economy in that way. Okay. Thank you very much. I think we'll conclude here. Thank you Professor Hopkins for coming here and thank you everyone for welcoming Professor Hopkins.

Thank you.