Local Food: How To Make It Happen In Your Community

So you buy your vegetables as locally as possible, eat organic and seasonal food where you can, and are perhaps even coming to grips with managing an allotment. However, as the scale of the recession and rising fuel prices start to be keenly felt, you may be wondering what else you can do? Local Food offers an inspiring yet practical guide to what can be achieved if you get together with the people on your street, the people in your village, town or city. It is an exploration of the potential power of working collaboratively. Drawing on the practical experience of Transition initiatives and other community initiatives around the world, this guide powerfully shows how by working together the results can be far greater than the sum of their parts. Local food guides, Community Supported Agriculture schemes, community gardens, even the creation of local currencies to support local food production, are all explored here, with all the information you will need to get started. An explosion of activity at community level is urgently needed, and this book is the ideal place to start.

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He has many years' experience in education, teaching permaculture and natural building, and set up the first two-year full-time permaculture course in the world, at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland, as well as coordinating  the first eco-village development in Ireland to be granted planning permission.

He is author of The Transition Handbook: from oil dependence to local resilience and The Transition Companion: making your community more resilient in uncertain times, and co-author of Local Food: how to make it happen in your community (all published by Green Books / Transition Books); also Transition in Action: Totnes and District 2030: an Energy Descent Plan (co-author), Woodlands for West Cork! and Energy Descent Pathways.

The Transition Handbook has been published in seven other languages to date, and was voted the fifth most popular book taken on holiday by MPs during the summer of 2008. Rob publishes www.transitionculture.org, which has been voted ‘the fourth best green blog in the UK’. He is the winner of the 2008 Schumacher Award, is an Ashoka Fellow and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, served as a Soil Association Trustee for three years, and was named by the Independent as one of the UK’s top 100 environmentalists. He is the winner of the 2009 Observer Ethical Award in the Grassroots Campaigner category, and in December 2009 was voted the Energy Saving Trust / Guardian’s ‘Green Community Hero’. He lectures and writes widely on peak oil and Transition, and has recently completed a PhD on Transition and Resilience at Plymouth University.

Central to The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion is the concept of ‘resilience’, which refers to the ability of a community to withstand external shocks and stresses. Rob argues that just cutting carbon emissions is insufficient: we need to rebuild the ability of our communities to provide for their core needs, and doing so will create huge opportunities for local economic regeneration. His books are about hope and optimism, and their untapped potential for engaging people in repairing their communities, their towns and cities, and, ultimately, their planet. The Transition Companion expands on the ideas in the Handbook, combining practical advice on starting and maintaining a Transition initiative with inspiring stories about groups across the world who are putting these ideas into practice.

Rob regularly features as a keynote speaker, and has participated at the following events: Community Land Trust Conference; WWF (talk to the various teams); Sustainable Consumption and Production Conference; Dorset Schools Eco-Summit; Eco-Build Summit; Prince’s Foundation Annual Conference at St James’s Palace; Skype presentation to the Nova Scotia Planning Directors Association (NSPDA) Conference; Skype presentation for the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) conference.

He lives in Devon with his wife and four children. He has particular passions for cob building and walnut trees, and is staggered by the rate at which the Transition concept has spread.