Une ressource audio authentique : l’interview de Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins est un enseignant chercheur britannique, né en 1968. Il est l’initiateur du mouvement “villes en transition” [Transition movement]. Il est impliqué dans plusieurs expériences à grande échelle, en Irlande d’abord, puis à Totnes, dans le Devon, où il réside depuis 2005. Il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages sur la transition écologique. Il est apparu dans le film “Demain” (2015) réalisé par Cyril Dion et Mélanie Laurent.

L’interview a été réalisée par Valentin Locoge lors de la venue de Rob Hopkins à Val-de-Reuil (27) et Rouen (76) en mars 2024.

L’interview étant riche et les propos développés, les parties en gras peuvent être extraites du document et utilisées comme « citations » en fonction du niveau des élèves et des objectifs visés. La ressource a pour vocation à faire l’objet d’une compréhension orale.

[1] Can you introduce yourself and the transition movement ? [01:06]

“I’m Rob Hopkins. I am one of the founders of something which is called ‘The transition network’, which is a network of communities now in about 50 countries around the world and it started in about 2006. The founding idea was what if, when you look at the challenges of climate change and the ecological crisis that we have, what if we looked at the solutions that we could start as communities in the places that we are, not suggesting that that’s the only thing that we need, of course, we need governments and business and institutions to do everything they can, but there are things as communities that we can do much more quickly, and how do we help communities recognize there’s no cavalry coming riding to the rescue, this is about what we can do with the people that we have, the resources that we have, the passion that we have : what can we do where we live ? And so, it’s a network - as I said in fifty countries - of communities. Something once described it as “hope, with its sleeves rolled up,” which I rather like. So, it’s a mixture between imagining / visioning and practically doing stuff.”

[2] Could you present the work you do in Totnes, where you live ? [01:19]

“For people who don’t know, Totnes is a market town of about 9,000 people, between Plymouth and Exeter, which has a quite long history, I guess, of being quite a kind of experimental, kind of progressive kind of a place, so it was good fertile soil for this idea to land in. So in about 2006, we launched this idea of saying, what if we were a transition town ? What if we decided we weren’t gonna wait for government to do things, ‘cause that’s not gonna happen, that we decided, ok, let’s start here. So ‘Transition Totnes’ was the first transition project, there are now thousands of them around the world. There have been lots and lots of projects around food, local food, trying to access good sustainable food into the town, starting up amap projects around the town, planting nearly 600 now fruit trees, nut trees through the town to build some resilience in terms of food supply. There’s now a community energy company, which has installed lots of renewable energy projects in the town, that the community invests in. Sometimes people they come to Totnes imagining we are some kind of eco Shangri-La, and it’s still a town, it has problems, it has cars. A German man once came to Totnes and he was very cross and he said, ‘I came all this way to see Transition town Totnes and you still have cars.’”

[3] Is there a perfect scale to achieve a transition ? [00:51]

“The thing that was interesting when we started this movement, which was based on the idea of what can you do where you are with what you have, is the first maybe twenty or thirty town and places that signed up and decided that they were transition projects were roughly around the same size as Totnes, something about the size of a market town, where it feels like you can make stuff happen quite quickly. So even in London, where there are now fifty or something transition groups through London, they don’t try and do transition for all of London, cause I think your head would explode, they work at the neighborhood scale in that city. So the scale on which people do this varies from place to place, but it needs to be a scale that you feel you can have some kind of influence over I think.”

[4] Can you achieve a transition on the scale of a megalopolis like London ? Do big municipalities support such projects ? [02:17]

“It’s a similar pattern that we see in Paris, for example, so there’s quite a few transition groups in different neighborhoods in Paris, but there’s no such thing as ‘Transition Paris’. So in London, there is a ‘Transition London,’ but it exists only as a network, by which all those groups share their ideas and invite each other to things and collaboratively put on events and stuff like that.
But the beauty of it, I think, is that when you work at that neighborhood scale, it means you can come up with ideas and projects that the city government would never think of, and would never do. But you do it with an energy and a momentum that can build quite quickly, and ideas can become very infectious.
You know, in the city of Liège, in Belgium, they started this project in 2014 called ‘The Liège Food Belt’ - La ceinture alimentaire liégeoise -, and they started that just as a citizens project around a table in a room with five or six people. (That project is now…) For the first three or four years, the municipality thought they were crazy, and then, the municipality were like, actually this is amazing, how can we help ? What can we do ? And now, the municipality has invested millions of euros in a food logistics’ hub on the side of the city. It’s the model that the municipality is using to change how they procure food for schools, universities, hospitals, and it spread to six other cities in Belgium, and into France as well.
I always say to people, when you have an idea like that, you never know where it’s gonna go. You never know who it’s going to influence and inspire and change, so that moment when you sit around the table and you go, ‘Should we do it ? Yeah, let’s do it’, there’s so much power in that idea. Sometimes it might not work, it’s not the end of the world, but when it does work, ideas like what they’re doing in Liège can be deeply transformative I think.
And so, when you look across transition groups around the world, sometimes you have transition groups doing amazing things with absolutely no support from or input from their local authority at all, other places…I go to some places where the local authorities say, we love transition, it’s fantastic, it’s what we wanna do, but we don’t have any transition groups in our city, how do we get people to start them ? The best is obviously in the middle like you see in Liège where a community is doing stuff, the municipality is supporting, and that dynamic is really exciting.”

[5] Ecology seems to be a controversial subject these days… [02:54]

“Net zero is nowhere near ambitious enough. Net zero is a political target, it’s not a scientific target, it’s not consistent with the science we get from climate scientists about the urgency of the situation and what we need to do. I was at a conference in Brussels recently and a guy called Leo Van Broeck, he was speaking and he said, ‘in order to save everything, we have to change everything,’ and that’s really where it comes down to for me.
So what is being portrayed at the moment like, oh wow, you know, there’s a popular backlash against even the most basic sort of green measures, that’s…, we have to look a lot closer at that backlash. Where is that backlash actually coming from ?
These movements that are purporting to be farmers, who are resisting any kind of agro-ecological changes…and so when you look, certainly in the UK, when we look at these organizations who are pushing back against net zero, they often are funded by oil and gas interests and sectors ; social media is being weaponized and harnessed to push those ideas.
So I think we need politicians who are prepared to stand up and call that stuff out. I think we need more politicians who come out fighting on that.
In the last fifty years in the UK, or since the Beatles split up, or since I was born, whichever way you want to look at it, we’ve destroyed seventy percent of the creatures that we share the world with, seventy percent ! Like people say ‘we’ve lost these species.’ We haven’t lost these species, we have exterminated those species through how we use the land. Really, do we want to be going til there’s none left at all ?
So I think what we need is politicians who bring a maturity to that, who are happy to defend the science, and the bit that’s always missing, is actually we have to say, but you know what ? if we do, we aren’t doing all of this just because we have to, we’re doing this because there is the most extraordinarily improved world lying ahead of us if we do this. And to embrace that, to kind of fall, and get people to fall in love with the idea of what a net zero - beyond net zero - world would be like…Mental health would be so much better, physical health would be so much better. We have one of the key drivers for the rising dementia in our population is air pollution from vehicles, in our cities.
So I think we need to be pushing back against that stuff, but we don’t push back against…but we push pack against it with vision, with stories, with something that is…with a way of talking about the future that is deeply seductive. People have to long for a better future and a better world. I think we need less politicians who talk about policy and more politicians who are storytellers.”

[6] Is there a place for art and beauty in this transition ? [01:58]

“The novelist Don DeLillo in his book Underworld, he wrote, “Longing on a large scale is what makes History.” And so for me, what I think a lot of environmental activists forget is that power about longing. We assume that we’re going to somehow inspire people to great acts of change just by talking about collapse and extinction. Doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked. We can categorically say now, that doesn’t work, can we have a change of tactics, please ?
Longing is, longing is like you think you’re sixteen, your first love, your first kiss, or it’s like in Alice in Wonderland, when, in the book Alice in Wonderland she’s…when she grows really big and then she looks - she’s on her hands and knees -, and she’s looking through this tunnel, and she can see this beautiful, beautiful garden, and she wants to get into that garden, but she’s too big, but she so wants to get into that garden, that’s what longing is. So in French, longing is often interpreted as desire, but then with lots of superlatives put in front, really really very very strong desire, and so on, and so on…Unless the way that we talk about this future creates a new north star for people, it’s just never gonna happen.
The work that we need to do is about the cultivation of longing. Who are the people in our culture who cultivate longing ? Is it climate scientists ? I don’t think so. Is it environmental activists ? Not really. Is it engineers ? No…it’s artists, it’s storytellers, it’s screenwriters, it’s poets, it’s playwrights, it’s novelists, street artists, Banksy…cultivate longing in the most exquisite ways, and so we cannot do this without artists. We have to make these changes seductive. And that requires art.”

[7] Could you present an art project that took place as part of a transition movement ? [01:12]

“There’s an artist that I work with in the UK called Ruth Bem-Tovin, who is a community arts practitioner, that’s her practice. She developed this extraordinary activity called ‘Town Anywhere’ where you bring together about three hundred people in a big space. You have a ribbon across the room, so everybody comes into the first little strip, you can’t go any further, you’re all squashed in here. And she says, ‘on the other side of this ribbon, is 2030. You have this empty room in front of you, this is 2030.’ It’s not a utopia, it’s not a dystopia, it’s the 2030 you long for, that you dream of, that is still possible if we did everything we could possibly do. And then they cut the ribbon, and then they step out into the room. And then they spend the day building that world they dreamed of, with cardboard and string and sticky tape and pens. They create this three-dimensional world with shops and energy companies, and then they trade in it, and it’s the most extraordinary thing, to be with three hundred adults playing in a world you’ve dreamed of, that you’ve built, is one of the most incredible things.”

[8] What advice can you give to a 2024 teenager ? [01:30]

“I think the first thing is that it’s really really important that you understand the bigger context of what’s happening in the world. Don’t run away from it, don’t hide away from it, you know. Inform yourself about climate change, about the ecological situation, but do it in a way where you also find the stories of what people are doing about it. Everywhere in the world, there are incredible stories of what people are doing in response to that crisis, that are really really inspiring.
Then I would say find some allies, find other people who care about it in the same way that you do, and do something with them, create something with them. Something however small. Find stories of what’s happening and feel like, feel… you know, you can either look at the situation and say, ‘oh, it’s terrible, it’s too much, we can’t do anything, it’s all too late.’ Or we can look at this and say, ‘what an incredible time to be alive, it’s not very often that you get to live in a time when you can re-imagine everything.’ Happens once every two or three hundred years, we’re in one of those times now.
You’re leaving school soon, coming into a world that is desperate for ideas and inspiration, and solutions. Be the person who brings that. Be the person who people will look back to and say, ‘god they were amazing.’”

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes

● La personne et la vie quotidienne (cycle 3)
● Sauver la planète, penser les futurs possibles (2nde)
● La création et le rapport aux arts (2nde)
● Le village, le quartier, la ville (2nde)
● Espace privé et espace public (cycle terminal)
● Art et pouvoir (cycle terminal)
● Fictions et réalités (cycle terminal)

Spécialités :
● LLCER - Imaginaire - utopies et dystopies / imagination créatrice et visionnaire
● LLCER - Arts et débat d’idées - l’art du débat

● LLCER-AMC - Représentations - Faire entendre sa voix / Représenter le monde et se représenter / Informer et s’informer
● LLCER-AMC - Environnements en mutation / De la protection de la nature à la transition écologique / Repenser la ville

Conclusion

L’article proposé s’inscrit dans une dynamique de projets culturels développée dans l’Académie de Normandie. Les ressources proposées par M. Locoge visent à initier l’exploration de nouveaux thèmes culturels au sein des classes grâce à l’utilisation de nouveaux documents, la variété des thématiques abordées permettant en effet d’enrichir la compétence culturelle des élèves.

Pour aller plus loin :
Site internet de Rob Hopkins, Imagination taking power : https://www.robhopkins.net/
Ses ouvrages traduits en français : https://www.actes-sud.fr/node/38993
Town Anywhere : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRvhY4S94ic
About Ruth Ben-Tovin : https://takeapart.org.uk/artists/ruth-ben-tovim