RealEyes recently had the privilege of bringing together the founders of two global, groundbreaking sustainability movements: Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Network and Karl Henrik Robert, founder of The Natural Step.
With the assistance of Ashoka the two came together alongside Davie Philip of Transition Ireland and John, Daragh and Michael of RealEyes. With everyone’s eye on a brilliant opportunity to have two global heavyweights spark off each other there was heavy expectation in the room.
We were curious and excited about the possibilities of bringing together the top down aspects of The Natural Step, together with the very grass roots, bottom up approach of Transition.
Karl Henrik described the journey TNS has been on throughout the last 25 years, from concept to scientific consensus with peer review and scientific research adding layers of rigour and understanding to the work. The public facing side of the work has seen the scientific principles being made simple, digestible, and applicable to just about any community, company, organisation around the world. Thousands have adopted the insights.
Karl Henrik introduced Rob to a programme called Real Change: cutting edge research into hugely complex issues around energy, conflict, regeneration, industrial chemicals and lots of others.
Rob, fresh from his TED talk on Transition told us of the emergence of the transition movement. Transition organises at grass roots, mobilising energised people to take responsibility for their own futures and those of the communities they live in. Communities are bound together by the desire to tackle the twin issues of peak oil and climate change. Rob was inspired to start the transition movement partly by the experiences of The Natural Step and its work in Sweden, as described in the Natural Step for Communities book written by Torbjorn Lahti and Sarah James. That same book inspired John and Michael to set up RealEyes. We’ll do a book review on it in the near future, in the meantime we like this one by Post Carbon Cities.
Both initiatives challenge leadership to adopt a real understanding of how the word works, the issues and challenges that we are all facing within that and then to redesign society to reflect those challenges. TNS takes on the leaders, the business leaders and the political leaders and educates and challenges them to move to a new reality and to empower their staff, suppliers, customers, residents, rate payers to move with them. Transition harnesses the energy of the community and gives them the tools to do stuff, to be less passive and more proactive.
It could be that in Ireland where both the Natural Step and Transition Towns are growing and becoming more prominent that the two global movements meet together for the first time – with a twin top down and bottom up project involving Local Authorities; communities, businesses, and politicians. Imagine – it could be beautiful. Give us your ideas and insights on a marriage made in heaven.