What are the tangible, practical impacts of global regenerative movements?

Throughout my twenty months researching regenerative businesses, I have encountered many pro-regenerative movements.

Each advocates ambitious changes to bring the world back from the brink of climate catastrophe.

But what tangible and practical impact, if any, do they deliver? Are they preaching to the converted or simply advocating change? What do they actually achieve?

Over the next few months, I shall attempt to position each regenerative organisation in terms of its area of focus, reach, and impact. I’ll write about the ones that, from my analysis, have the most profound consequences. I shall ignore protest movements. They make enough noise but, like Stop Oil, alienate ordinary people through their disruptive antics. They complain loudly but offer no practical solutions.

In Speak with One Voice, Co-Create Heaven on Earth — Part 1, I identified over fifty global influencer organisations or movements, excluding academia and political bodies like the UN. I find new ones almost daily, so I’m sure I have barely scratched the surface. These movements cover a range of focus areas outlined below. They point more or less in the same direction — humanity living equitably, harmoniously, and healthily within the nine interlinked planetary boundaries. These boundaries were identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre , led by Professor Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). As of September 2023, six of the nine have been breached, so the time for political debate is over.

While it is encouraging to find so many positive movements, few seem able to touch the hearts and minds of the average citizen. 

Why is that important?

In the article View of the Fourth Person,¹ Otto Scharmer and Eva Pomeroy state that the biggest problem facing us is not climate change, war, inequality, or the ‘proliferation of AI’ but a feeling at the individual level of complete powerlessness to do anything about it. Worse, the media does little to inform the public or counter misinformation peddled by vested corporate interests. Like extractive corporations, our politicians seldom look beyond their immediate survival. A kind of Stockholm syndrome paralyses our citizens. The media focuses on the current cost of living crisis as if climate change were yesterday’s news, mirroring the short-termism of politicians, financiers and corporate CEOs. Citizens are put off any further consideration of climate change or injustice by the negative disruptive antics of protest movements, which couldn’t do more to harm their causes. 

Until citizens wake up from their torpor and demand a regenerative future, politicians, corporations, financiers and the media will continue their opportunistic, self-serving, extractive ways.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. I will highlight the positive contributions the best (in my opinion) regenerative movements make today. We need vision and hope to pull us out of our slough of despond, not Puritanical brow-beating. Only then will citizens wake up and demand better, knowing it’s possible as their attention is drawn towards regenerative successes.

Transition Network — imagining and building a regenerative future

As luck would have it, I stumbled across one such regenerative movement — Transition Network , co-founded in 2007 by the irrepressible Rob Hopkins and colleagues. I was fortunate to discuss his viral regenerative community movement with him in a recent YouTube video.

Alison and Paul Morgan told me about the organisation’s catalytic impact. They were both original employees of the Handmade Bakery, a workers’ cooperative in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire (pronounced ‘Slouwit’).

Below is a snapshot of his organisation’s history and achievements.

Rob Hopkins is a force of nature with a fascinating background

I rifled through the Transition Network’s website in preparation for my discussion with Rob. I’ll touch on a few of the case stories that impressed me most. However, before getting into them, I was curious about his background and am glad I asked him about it.

He admitted to being an inattentive student at school but enjoyed art college once he’d left. In the early 1990s, he had the travelling bug and, unusually, spent three years in a Buddhist monastery in Tuscany. After a further two years travelling in India and Pakistan but failing to enter Tibet, he returned to Bristol in the UK and took a two-week Permaculture Design Course before completing one of the first sustainability degrees in the UK called Environmental Quality and Resource Management (EQRM). His interest in that had been ignited during his sojourn at the monastery. An extraordinary parallel with Dan and Johanna McTiernan, founders of the Handmade Bakery, who managed to enter Tibet and spend time at a Buddhist monastery. Rob would later get to know them well in 2007 through the local Transition Network.

In 1996, Rob, his wife, and two children moved to West Cork, Ireland, to put what he’d learned from his EQRM degree into practice. After a few years, Rob began to teach permaculture at the Kindle Further Education College. More than an advocate for permaculture, Rob got his hands dirty using natural materials to create one of the first straw bale houses in Ireland, including one featured on Irish National TV.

In 2005, the family returned to England and the Devonshire town of Totnes. Rob and a few like-minded friends wondered what they might do to create a community-led and bottom-up response to the climate emergency. They embarked on a local community project named Transition Town Totnes, which sparked such international interest that in March 2007, Transition Network was officially launched.

How Transition Network got its global footprint

The Transition Network now operates globally in over fifty countries. Its growth and geographical spread have happened organically. In the corporate world, such growth involves establishing satellite offices, replicating processes, and standardising methods, systems and hierarchies. That is not how the Transition Network spread.

During my discussion with Rob, he told me about a meeting with a group of investors who like to support social entrepreneurs. They invited him to meet them in London. After Rob’s presentation, one remarked, ‘So what you’ve done is create a very powerful brand and give it away to people all over the world for free. Over which you have no control! ’ ‘That nails it, ‘ Rob responded. 

The investors did not understand. The organisation is not about making money. Its purpose is to change the world positively, community by community.

The mycelial approach

Between 2020 and 2022, the small team at the heart of the organisation audited the movement’s progress and impact across the network, now running at over a thousand Transition Groups. The word ‘mycelial’ cropped up in the report and perfectly described the organic nature of the organisation’s growth. German forester Peter Wohlleben gathered scientific evidence to prove that trees in a forest communicate with each other and share nutrients through the underground mycelium network created by fungus and mushrooms, which he called the ‘woodwide web’.

Each ‘node’ in Transition Network acts independently. They may draw on ideas from other nodes, but they are self-governing. Help from the centre comes from guidance and knowledge-sharing, not prescription. It’s based on shared values and a willingness to imagine a regenerative future within, for and by the local community.

Successful regenerative transitions, according to Transition Network, thrive because the three elements of the head, heart and hands are in balance:

• The Head means acting on accurate information and evidence to prime the collective intelligence and imagination.
• The Heart filled with compassion and empathy is highly sensitive to relationships — ecocentric, not egocentric.
• The Hands means acting and converting the collective vision into practical improvement projects.

Envisioning at the community level roots each project in context, boosting its relevance and attracting participation from locals. There is no centre to mandate a one-size-fits-all solution. Relevant examples from other communities help to nourish the imagination and vision. That is the mycelial power of the network — making connections with different communities, sharing ideas and knowledge, and fostering resilient societies from the ground up. As Rob said in the interview, this is a reversal of top-down control, where governments serve communities with a visceral sense of what is needed at the local level.

It reminds me of the difference between traditional business leadership, which is focused entirely on the company and profits, and servant leadership, which seeks to purposefully empower the front line in the interest of employees and customers. The image below shows how this upending of current democracy might work, converting powerlessness into purposeful and powerful democracy. It’s a mindset shift in governance and purpose.

Transition Network catalyses regenerative community projects

Transition Network has developed a considerable body of practical knowledge, culled from thousands of successful community projects. An Essential Guide to Transition is available from the website in seventeen languages to help communities get started. Seven ingredients are outlined in the guide. These cover topics like collaboration, healthy group dynamics, networks and partnerships. However, perhaps the most vital thing is to create a vision by imagining the future. Rob Hopkins wrote a book dedicated to this — From What Is To What If, subtitled: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. In the book, he looks forward positively and imagines the world in 2030, having surmounted the obstacles to carbon net zero, biodiversity loss and food insecurity. It’s not a fantasy, as he peppers the book with regenerative examples that exist today.

His focus on the power of imagination reminded me of Otto Scharmer and his Theory U² transformation method. Theory U is a transformation process that helps groups tap into their imagination, surrender their egos and raise their levels of consciousness to sense the future that could and ‘wants’ to emerge. I mentioned this to Rob in our discussion, and coincidentally, he’d met Otto two years earlier in Paris at the ChangeNOW! Conference.

Beyond philosophy, imagination, and vision, let us now turn to an outstanding community project that the Transition Network Organisation catalysed in Japan.

Fifteen Years of ‘Transition Japan’ inspired by the inherent power and soul of the community

In 2007, Hide Enomoto from Japan and three friends with whom he’d studied permaculture attended the ‘Be The Change’ event in London. Rob Hopkins extolled the virtues of his then, fledgling Transition Network movement and encouraged people to join. Hide and his friends had been living in the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland since 2005. In 1998, the UN-Habitat Best Practice recognised it as a model for holistic and sustainable living, addressing the four Cs: climate, connectivity, community, and character.

The following year, Rob came to Findhorn to address the Positive Energy conference.

After the event, Hide and his three friends felt inspired to start a Transition Network when they returned to Japan. To prepare themselves, they attended a Transition training workshop.

This spawned three Transition projects. Hide started a movement in Fujino in June 2008. His friend, Shunro Yoshida, started another in Hayama, also in the Kanazawa Prefecture. A third friend, Paul Shepherd, started one in Koganei, a suburb of Tokyo.

To my mind, the Fujino story exemplifies the power of community-led projects.

The first Transition town, Fujino, captures the imagination of the whole country

The movement in Fujino, with a population of 10,000, now has ten working groups focused on different projects. The following three illustrate the enhanced resilience brought to the community:

• Solar energy — the Fujino Electric Company.
• Yorozu, a local currency based on the LETS (Local Exchange Trading System).
• The Forest Club, to maintain the surrounding forest’s health, which had deteriorated due to the failing logging industry.

Fujino Electric Company, a post-3/11 beacon of light and hope

After the triple disaster of 11th March 2011, the Tōhoku Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster changed the conversation from worrying about energy supply to how to create increased community resilience. 

Traditionally, power supplies came from large national energy companies.

The idea of the Fujino Electric Company emerged from a Transition working group, Fujino Denryoku (electric power), led by Hide. Frequent blackouts following 3/11 convinced inhabitants of the need for greater self-sufficiency. Initially, solar electricity was generated for the lighting, amplifiers and speakers at a local festival. The project team shared their expertise in other blackout-affected areas. Relaying photovoltaic panels and batteries proved easy so that a distributed energy network was created. Soon, power was extended to light the homes of residents and provide free charging stations for electric vehicles.

Monthly, ‘Solar Power System Workshops’, were held to transfer knowledge and help others beyond Fujino to replicate energy self-sufficiency. A campaign titled: An Energy Shift Starting at Home³ proved successful, and soon, broadcast and print media amplified the community story, making the Fujino Electric Company famous throughout Japan. It now provides power for many residents and charging stations for electric vehicles, increasing community resilience. As Hide expressed it:

‘Strength comes from the bonds and mutual trust between people.’

Creating connections through a novel local currency, Yorozu

One of the first Transition projects in Fujino, which had profound social consequences, was establishing a local currency called Yorozu. It was based on the local exchange trading system (LETS), a form of barter. Any goods or services can be offered and bought based on an agreed-upon unit of value. What people have to sell and what others seek are recorded in a community book, as are the exchanges. Some may have skills to offer, while others may have useful items that can be borrowed or bought. Around ten per cent of the Fujino community now use Yorozu. Hide observed that the surfacing of the community’s previously hidden resources has been a byproduct of the exchange system, resulting in new connections between people, their skills and knowledge and fostering greater community engagement and resilience.

The Forest Club — safely improving the health of the forest

Around eighty per cent of Fujino is forest. In the past, logging companies ensured the health of the forests to ensure a steady supply of wood. Since the decline of the logging industry, the health of the forests has deteriorated, and forestry skills have largely died out. The Forest Club was established to reverse this deterioration, but one of the challenges faced was how to thin out the forest safely and remove the older trees to allow the younger ones to flourish. Flooding and landslides were another issue that would only get worse through climate change. The forest canopy starved younger trees of light, preventing them from developing deep root systems to absorb heavy rains and prevent landslides.

However, chopping down trees heavily laden with sap is a dangerous job. The Forest Club came up with the idea of bark peeling thinning. By cutting the bark and peeling it near the base of the tree, within a year, the tree loses all its sap and eventually dies. No special skills or strength is required to peel the bark of cedar trees. After the tree has lost its sap, it becomes considerably lighter and easier to cut down, with minimum risk of injury. The Forest Club makes a family day from the bark-peeling, as even children can participate.

Transition Fujino continues to flourish, and Hide Enomoto has written a book about it. Translated from Japanese, the book perfectly sums up the value of Transition Network: “If we change, the community changes. If the community changes, the world changes.”

Transition Network Organisation has made a significant impact across the world.

The Transition Network’s website has many case stories like Transition Fujino. At almost 10,000 miles as the crow flies between Totnes and Fujino, this illustrates the expansive power of community and the impact of Transition Network.

In advance of COP 21, the organisation harvested twenty-one Transition stories.

When I embarked on my regenerative business research eighteen months ago, I did not realise just how vital communities are in combatting climate change and reinvigorating society. These regenerative wins do not make headlines in our newspapers or TV news programs; we only hear the negative stuff. I look forward to reading Rob’s next book when it is available, provisionally titled: ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future’. As the 2024 Olympics in Paris has just finished, I’ll leave the last few words to its Mayor, Anne Hidalgo:

“People like Rob Hopkins give us the courage to move forward. By setting an example, he shows us that we are right to place our hopes in a future in which men and women can act as stewards of their environment. The many stories in this book⁵ are evidence of the fact that for some people, this future has already become a reality.”

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Footnotes

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381092456_Fourth_Person_The_Knowing_of_the_Field
2. [https://mitxonline.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITxT+15.671.1x/]
3. [https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/transition-town-fujino-goes-for-local-energy-independence]
4. An Energy Shift Starting at Home: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOplAlBvMk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOplAlBvMk0)
5. [https://www.robhopkins.net/the-book/]