Rob Hopkins: “If it doesn’t create jobs, the transition will remain a hobby for the middle class”

The French-speaking public discovered his outspokenness and his smiling face with rectangular glasses in the documentary tomorrow (Mélanie Laurent and Cyril Dion, 2015). In Totnes, a town of 7000 inhabitants in Devon, where he teaches permaculture, Rob Hopkins launched in 2006 a search for energy and food autonomy. Its know-how comes from a long experience. Born in 1968, Rob Hopkins lived for a year in a Buddhist monastery in Tuscany in the mid-1980s, then this father of four boys moved to Ireland with his family, where he set up an eco- village and bought a farm. In the 2000s, he began to teach permaculture and became aware of the urgency of the ecological crisis. The local and community level remains, in its sense, the most relevant for bringing about changes in infrastructure and behavior. He also pleads for rethinking the education system and leaving more room for the imagination (What if… we freed our imagination to create the future we want?, Actes Sud, 2020). Transition Network, which he launched in Totnes in 2007, now has 1,400 member initiatives in 50 countries. In Switzerland, he will notably visit initiatives in Lausanne, Yverdon-les-Bains, Frick (AG) and Genevawhere he will participate in the Alternatiba Léman festival.