What Can A Small Town In England Teach Us About Resilience?

Transcript

GUY RAZ, HOST:

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. On the show today, Finite, ideas about preserving what we've got, what's left on planet Earth and how to make sure we don't lose it. So in Southwest England, there's a tiny hamlet called Totnes that looks exactly like you would expect a tiny hamlet in Southwest England...

ROB HOPKINS: It looks like...

RAZ: ...To look.

HOPKINS: ...The center of the town has a very beautiful kind of high street with lots of Elizabethan buildings - slate hung, tall, narrow, very kind of higgledy-piggledy - beautiful colonnades where the billings come out over the street with pillars holding up the buildings and...

RAZ: Yeah.

HOPKINS: ...A market square and a river running through the town.

RAZ: You know, like we've got these like restaurants in America called like Ye Olde England.

HOPKINS: (Laughter).

RAZ: Is it like that kind of thing?

HOPKINS: Yeah, yeah, kind of.

RAZ: So that's Totnes

HOPKINS: Totnes, yeah.

RAZ: But thanks to Rob Hopkins, an environmental activist who lives there...

HOPKINS: I am there now.

RAZ: ...There's something that makes Totnes slightly different than other quaint villages in England.

HOPKINS: Yeah. Particularly when the sun's shining like it is today. It's not always like this.

RAZ: What makes Totnes special is that the people there are planning for a future where we start to run out of the thing that's made our modern world possible. Rob actually held up a bottle of it when he took the TED stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

HOPKINS: This is a liter of oil. This bottle of oil, distilled over 100 million years of geological time, ancient sunlight, contains energy equivalent to about five weeks hard, human manual labor. We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials, medicine, modern clothing, laptops, a whole range of different things. It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable historically. We've based the design of our settlements, our business models, our transport plans, even the idea of economic growth, some would argue, on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity. Yet when we take a step back and look over the span of history at what we might call the petroleum interval, it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material and then based a whole way of life around it. But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability. And it's increasingly clear that we aren't going to be able to rely on the fact that we're going to have this at our disposal forever.

RAZ: So before we get back to what makes Totnes different, here's the reality we all face. Over the past decade, humans have figured out new ways to extract oil from the earth, and it means we have more of it than we've ever had before. And that's made us increasingly complacent about the need to find alternative energy solutions even though we know that sooner or later, oil will run its course and that until it does, burning that oil for our cars and factories and planes is making climate change worse.

HOPKINS: Because every year we've had more - slightly more of it, you know? My parents' parents' generation had less of it than my parents had. My generation had more than their generation have had. Of course it's been remarkable. It's enabled us to do things that our grandparents could never ever have dreamed of. But the same time, when you then come up against a challenge that says if you carry on using fossil fuels in this kind of a way, you take humanity out of that bound within which human civilization emerged and flourished and did everything that we associate with being human.

RAZ: Which is why it's no coincidence, Rob says, that so many of the stories we tell about a world without oil are stories about a world without humanity like "WALL-E," sorting out trash on a human-less planet.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WALL-E")

BEN BURTT: (As WALL-E) Whoa.

RAZ: Our other post-apocalyptic stories...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MAD MAX")

TOM HARDY: (As Max Rockatansky) In this wasteland...

RAZ: ...Like "Mad Max"

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MAD MAX")

HARDY: (As Max Rockatansky) ...I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead.

HOPKINS: What always intrigues me as well is how as a society, we find it very easy to produce stuff like "Mad Max" or all these films about society unraveling and everybody eating each other and, you know, killer zombie robot diseases on the loose - whatever it is. But where are the stories about how, as a society, we came together, we responded with creativity, with compassion, with ingenuity to design a way through this to a safe place at the end?

RAZ: OK, aside from the fact that that would make a really boring movie, it does nonetheless sound like a nice way to build a community, which brings us back to Totnes, that small town in the U.K. where Rob lives. And what happened was that a couple years ago, Rob and a bunch of people there looked around and they realized that almost everything they bought or consumed depended on oil. So they started to ask questions.

HOPKINS: Do you need to use it to drive salads from one end of the country to the other? You know, do we need business models where chain food businesses that assume that you should be able to walk into one of their restaurants anywhere in the country and the burgers and the salad taste exactly the same any time of year? Yes, maybe use it for antibiotics, for medicine, for those things that you need, but you don't extract it in Saudi Arabia, process it, refine it in where ever - in Yemen - take it to China, make it into a cheap plastic toy that you then send to the U.S., and it breaks within a week and ends up in landfill.

RAZ: So to be clear, Rob is not suggesting that towns like Totnes build a big fence and never let anything in or out or that, you know, Totnes will be making laptop computers and frying pans anytime soon. But the idea is that towns like Totnes, or anywhere really, could do a lot more to take advantage of their local resources.

HOPKINS: So just putting in place new gardens in the town. We have a garden chair scheme that brings together people who want to grow food with people who have a garden that they're too busy or too elderly to use. So it's like a dating agency matching people up together like that. The last six years we've been planting productive trees. It always puzzled me that in the last 40 years, we've perfected the art of designing completely useless urban landscapes. So we've planted now about 300 fruit and nut trees throughout the town in parks and some little unloved corners. We have things that promote cycling. We have a local currency called the Totnes pound which incentivizes people to support local businesses and reconnects them with the local economy of the town.

RAZ: So you can only spend that money in Totnes?

HOPKINS: Yeah. So if you go to the next town, it has no value at all. But in the town, it's accepted by 80 or 90 traders now. And the notes are much more beautiful than sterling, I think, any day.

RAZ: So if you were to take this model into the future, you know, this model that uses less oil and is better for the planet, what does that future look like?

HOPKINS: So when economists talk about this idea, the multiplier effect - so if I go shopping in a local shop and I spend a dollar in local businesses - in a local independent business, that leads to $2.5 worth of economic benefit to my community. If I shop in a supermarket, it leads to $1.40's worth of economic activity. So for me, what it looks like is an economy based on that idea.

RAZ: And yes, designing communities around local resources is not necessarily a new idea, but it is a relatively simple one - an idea that is easily replicated anywhere

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

HOPKINS: So the question I like to leave you with really is for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive, how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions while also building resilience? Personally, I feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil. I've been astonishingly lucky - we've been astonishingly lucky. But let us honor what it has bought us and move forward from this point because if we cling to it and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices, the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable. And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us and that the oil age has done for us, we are able to then begin the creation of a more - of a world which is more resilient, more nourishing and in which we find ourselves fitter, more skilled and more connected to each other. Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

RAZ: Rob Hopkins, his group is called Transition Network. You can find out more about what they're doing at transitionnetwork .org. And you can see Rob's full talk at ted.com. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.