What if we could uncancel the future? When Luigi Vitali interviewed me for Dust Magazine

[From Dust magazine: Original here]. Rob Hopkins, a pioneer in sustainability and community-driven change, believes that the future isn’t something we stumble upon—it’s something we actively create or fail at. At the heart of his work lies a question: what happens when we lose the ability to imagine a better world? For Hopkins, imagination is more than just creativity—it’s a survival tool essential for unlocking the sustainable, resilient, and equitable futures we are desperately in need of.

In his 2019 book, From What Is to What If, Hopkins tackles what he calls a crisis of imagination—a byproduct of individualism, consumer culture, and systems that keep us reactive and passive. Without imagination, he argues, we risk repeating the past, trapped in outdated structures that no longer serve us. Yet, Hopkins offers a way forward: by reviving our collective capacity to dream—through community action, art, and storytelling—we can reshape the trajectory of our world. His upcoming book, How to Fall in Love with the Future, out in 2025, further develops this vision.

As the founder of the Transition Movement, Hopkins demonstrates how imagination and community action can become a collective force for real change. The question isn’t whether we can imagine a better future—it’s whether we can afford not to.

DUST sat down with him to discuss his projects, how we can foster our imagination, and how, together, we can ‘uncancel the future’.

Luigi Vitali – At a time when discouragement feels inevitable, how can we keep alive the belief that a more sustainable and democratic future is still possible?

Rob Hopkins – This question is very much on my mind as I’m finishing my book, How to Fall in Love with the Future, which will be out next year. The reality is that in the 1960s, we had politicians who talked about the future in hopeful and optimistic ways. We had leaders like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, who spoke about the future with hope and vision. Student movements talked about imagination, asking, ‘What if?’ The French students even had that slogan, ‘Beneath the pavements, the beach’, which meant we see this, but beneath it, there could be something entirely different: freedom.

In the past 15–20 years, though, we’ve seen more centrist governments that don’t stand for much. David Graeber, a brilliant activist, once said that Obama carried himself as someone who really believed in something, but what was it exactly? What was the big, transformative story?

When centrist and left-leaning leaders talk about change but avoid real, fundamental shifts, they create a gap the far right often fills. The far right steps in, saying, “These leaders aren’t meeting your needs, but we can.” They portray the future as something to fear, promising strength and protection. The failure of progressive movements and parties to offer a compelling vision for the future has had dangerous consequences, and we’re now witnessing the fallout across the world.

For me, reclaiming the future as a place of hope is essential. The neuroscience around imagining the future is fascinating—memory and imagination use the same part of the brain, the hippocampus. When we imagine something new, our brain calls up related memories to build that vision. If I tell you, “You’re going to Finland,” your brain pulls together everything you know about Finland—maybe salted fish, mountains, rain—and constructs an image.

That’s why if someone only watches Fox News, it’s nearly impossible for them to imagine a low-carbon future—there’s no material to work with. We lose our ability to imagine. The idea of a positive future is disappearing from public discourse. So, it’s vital to offer something people can run towards. We’re in a climate emergency; the world is warming, and we’re losing time—every fraction of a degree matters immensely.

The Paris Agreement says wealthier nations must cut emissions by 48% by 2030—that’s 7% yearly. We’ll only get there if our stories are exciting enough to make people want that future.

L.V. – Except that with Trump becoming president again, we are now facing an anti-science administration that denies climate change and is likely to roll back climate policies. What does this mean for the progress made so far?

R.H. – Well, it’s clearly a massive disaster and a huge setback—there’s no way to sugarcoat that. At the same time, the previous administration laid crucial groundwork, and now solar and wind energies are cheaper than gas. This economic shift is reshaping the market, making fossil fuels less financially viable.

However, let’s consider that the U.S. accounts for 25% of global carbon emissions. We must focus even more on the remaining 75% with greater ambition and purpose. The rest of the world could push ahead, leaving the U.S. like an energy dinosaur. Those outside the U.S. need to redouble their efforts, and people within the U.S. need to get better at telling stories about the world they still could create. Talking about collapse and extinction alone doesn’t mobilise people in time. Filling the world with stories, dreams, music, and multisensory experiences of the future might inspire action far more effectively than disaster warnings. We’re up against leaders with no vision or imagination—Donald Trump is a prime example, consumed by personal fantasies but without any imagination. In today’s world, imagination has become our most essential tool.

L.V. – You founded the Transition Town movement, a grassroots project focusing on self-sufficiency, localised food and energy systems, and community resilience. How can we implement this theme of local resilience today, particularly to address the escalating impacts of climate change or other possible crises?

R.H. – Resilience is multifaceted. One approach is defensive: when countries like Spain face devastating floods, resilience often means building defences against flooding. However, resilience can also mean identifying vulnerabilities as an opportunity to reimagine systems.

For instance, in the U.S., some places have reintroduced beavers, which naturally engineer the landscape to manage water. Unlike rigid concrete dams, beaver dams are permeable, holding water in ways that allow it to soak into the ground, raising water tables and creating landscapes more resilient to fires. Beavers are now called ‘nature’s firefighters’ because their work keeps the soil moist and reduces wildfire risks.

In terms of food resilience, my town learned during a lorry driver strike that supermarkets only hold about three days’ worth of food. Without deliveries, there’s no backup. Fifty or sixty years ago, towns were surrounded by farms that supplied local markets, but now we’re entirely dependent on fragile global supply chains.

A brilliant example of resilience is the Liège Food Belt in Belgium, initiated by Transition Liège in 2014. With local investment, they’re reinventing the city’s food system, creating jobs, and supplying schools. Renewable energy is another area where resilience is evolving. Across Europe, communities are trying to drive renewable energy cooperatives, though they often face regulatory barriers.

For me, resilience isn’t just about preventing harm; it’s about opening up new opportunities for food, energy, transport, and ecology. Visiting landscapes transformed by beavers or seeing the new food systems in places like Liège gives you goosebumps. Local and national governments often view resilience in defensive terms, but we need an imaginative, opportunity-driven version of resilience that creates new community possibilities. These initiatives prove there is an alternative. Despite political leaders claiming otherwise, I’ve seen it firsthand—it works and makes people healthier, happier, and more connected.

L.V. – More solutions are available than we’re often willing to recognise. Can we say that our short-sightedness and struggle to address today’s challenges stem from a lack of an articulated vision for our present, our future, and our role within it?

R.H. – Absolutely, our struggle to address today’s challenges stems from this. It’s essential to create a counter-narrative to the overwhelming tide of dystopian visions surrounding us. So many TV series and movies focus on the end of the world and humanity’s collapse. What excites me is a growing movement among storytellers, screenwriters, and creators finding new ways to present the world we could still create. They’re crafting stories that inspire a sense of possibility and excitement about a positive future.

L.V. – You mention that climate change is primarily a ‘failure of imagination’. This idea can extend to conflicts, political challenges, and many large-scale issues we face today—even the lack of inspiration in our current culture. Despite having all the tools at our disposal, we seem to struggle with imagination, and it feels like this issue is not emphasised enough.

R.H. – Oh, that’s a big theme. I explored this in-depth in my book, From What Is to What If. There are several factors. For one, play mainly disappears from children’s lives compared to 30 or 40 years ago. Streets used to be full of kids playing, and schools made more time for it. Now, there’s less time for play, and most of it happens indoors, often involving screens. Free play taught kids problem-solving, conflict management, and creativity. Today, we carry addictive devices that undermine our attention spans, a vital part of our imagination.

We also spend less time in nature, a key source of inspiration for many imaginative minds throughout history. As societies grow more unequal, the mental conditions for imagination suffer. In the UK, for instance, our education system has largely stripped away imagination. Many schools have no funding for the arts or creative writing. In many advanced countries, education systems don’t really value imagination, democratic methods, or critical thinking.

Combine this with the effects of social media, which dulls our minds, and you can see how we end up in dangerous situations. There are many reasons, but our collective imagination is shrinking.

L.V. – You’ve used some great expressions—like ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’ to describe the anxiety that stifles our collective imagination under social and economic pressures and ‘a campus for the hippocampus’ to convey the need to nurture and revive our imagination. Could you explain more about what you mean by this last one?

R.H. – The term ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’ was actually coined by Lise van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist in the U.S., to describe how we already psychologically feel the impacts of climate collapse, even though we’re not entirely there yet. I talked about finding a “campus for the hippocampus” in a book where I discuss a piece of research called The Creativity Crisis, published in 2010 in the U.S. This study analysed data from the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking—a major creativity test that’s been given to 20–30 people a year since the 1950s. The findings showed that imagination and IQ rose together until the mid-‘90s; after that, IQ kept rising, but imagination began to decline. Remember that memory and imagination both depend on the hippocampus. But when we’re stressed or in trauma, our bodies release cortisol—the ‘stress hormone’—which can shrink the hippocampus by up to 20%, limiting our ability to imagine.

Cortisol helps us respond to immediate threats by triggering a quick fight-or-flight reaction. We’ve been living in what I call a ‘cortisol economy’ for years, where chronic stress narrows our vision of the future. As societies grow unequal and people’s lives become more precarious, cortisol floods our systems. The hippocampus shrinks, and it’s no coincidence that the future has nearly vanished from public discourse—except as something to fear.

This led me to wonder: if our collective and individual hippocampus are shrinking, what would it look like to reverse that? Could we strengthen the hippocampus, like a muscle, through exercise? What would it feel like to be part of that growth process?

In the book, I describe a visit to a project called Art Angel in Dundee, which supports people with mental health issues, burnout, stress, and trauma through art. When you walk through their door, you’re not a patient or client—you’re an artist preparing work for an exhibition. I spoke to one man there who had worked in local government for 30 years before experiencing severe burnout. You could see people beginning to come back to life. Many told me that before Art Angel, they couldn’t see the future. Now, they could.

This experience highlighted some of the conditions we need to rebuild our imagination. In the book, I propose the idea of a National Imagination Act, which would address the factors that stifle imagination and create conditions to nurture it.

L.V. – Many people today misunderstand the priority; our focus should be less on innovation and more on imagination. What you emphasise is that imagination is something very distinct from innovation or creativity.

R.H. – These terms are often used interchangeably, but they’re actually very different. Creativity is about generating ideas that capitalism can use, while innovation transforms them into practical, functioning things. But imagination instead goes deeper—it’s more unruly and more challenging. It questions core assumptions.

Ursula Le Guin once said that capitalism has degraded the word ‘creativity’ to the point that she could no longer use it, but “imagination—they cannot have that.” Neoliberal, growth-driven economics today doesn’t need innovation or self-feeding creativity. It requires reimagining because it’s pushing us toward a cliff at breakneck speed, endangering everything on the planet. Right now, we don’t need more innovation or creativity as much as we need imagination—the unpredictable, revolutionary impulse that questions everything, that asks ‘why?’ and ‘what if?’ That’s why imagination is essential today, more than ever.

L.V. – And indeed, asking ‘what if?’ seems central to your creative process. Did it ever translate into a political program?

R.H. – Not in this sense, but let me tell you this. I did 100 episodes of a podcast called From What If to What Next, each based on a different ‘what if’ question, and for each episode, we’d do a bonus segment where I’d invite the two guests to imagine they were Ministers in a fictional ‘Ministry of Imagination’. They’d each choose three policies that would quickly advance whatever topic we’d discussed. For example, if the episode was about universal basic income, I’d ask them to pick three policies to make it happen.

When I wrapped up the podcast, I had a collection of around 600 policies. So when I saw an article saying that 2024 would see the largest number of global elections ever, realising that many of those elections were happening with manifestos nearly devoid of imagination, I thought we could do something with those 600 ideas. We turned them into a booklet called The Ministry of Imagination Manifesto, which you can download for free on my website, robhopkins.net.

Reading it, you won’t agree with every policy, but it stretches your imagination. It triggers that inner ‘why not?’ voice. You read an idea and think, “Actually, we could do that, couldn’t we?” I think that’s essential because we’re locked into this idea that, while we face an existential climate crisis, governments are focused on expanding airports and roads—small, incremental steps. The manifesto gathers all these bold ideas in one place, showing that, yes, we could take these significant steps.

The manifesto’s goal, and everything I do, is to stretch people’s imagination, like pulling a focaccia dough, so we don’t get stuck in ‘what is’ and can move towards ‘what if’.

L.V. – But how do you think this movement is having an impact on politics?

R.H. – The Transition Network did a fascinating report on how ideas spread. Unlike campaigns that rely on big budgets to drive specific political actions, our Transition idea spreads like mycelium. It’s an idea that inoculates a culture and then surfaces—sometimes in expected places, other times in unexpected ones. For instance, several municipalities in France, including Paris under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, have been inspired by Transition principles. Last year, for the first time in modern Parisian history, bicycle journeys outnumbered car journeys, thanks to new infrastructure.

In Grenoble, a city with a green administration now in its second term, they’re building apartment blocks entirely out of timber, sourced locally, to lock carbon into the buildings rather than emitting it through concrete production. In France, there are now 82 local currency projects inspired by Transition. After COVID, a municipality in Charleroi, Belgium, distributed 2 million euros in local currency to support the community’s economic recovery, ensuring that money stayed within the local economy.

As I mentioned before, the Transition Network established the Liège Food Belt to transform the local food system into a sustainable, resilient network. Here, farmers, consumers, and local authorities have collaborated to support small-scale, local food production, showing how communities can create food systems that are both eco-friendly and self-sufficient.

The truth is, we don’t need to invent anything new—everything we need already exists and is working somewhere. In Freiburg, Germany, I visited a car-free neighbourhood of 3,000 people. In Utrecht, I experienced Bicycle Rush Hour, where 40,000 people cycle into the city every morning. When I met the city’s senior engineer for cycling infrastructure, he told me their biggest issue now is having too many bicycles—a problem most cities would love to have.

L.V. – What advice would you give young people passionate about making a change?

R.H. – I believe the climate justice and sustainability movements need to become movements of longing. Longing is a powerful driver of change. For example, the journey to the Moon didn’t start with JFK; it began in 1865 with Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which inspired generations to dream of space travel. By the time Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon, we’d been there thousands of times in stories. Likewise, the first mobile phones resembled Star Trek devices because a generation grew up longing for that kind of technology.

For our climate future, storytellers, poets, musicians, and artists—the master cultivators of longing—can create an irresistible vision of what comes next. We need to work with them to craft stories of the future that are so compelling they become our North Star.

L.V. – Which comes down to the urge to nurture our imagination. Do you rely on practices or routines to keep your imagination engaged and inspired?

R.H. – In my workshops, we always kick off with an exercise where I tell everyone I’ve brought my time machine and we’re going to travel forward to 2030. I guide them to imagine a future where things have shifted—not a paradise or a utopia, but a world moving in the right direction. I ask them to close their eyes and explore: What would that future look like? I’ve done this with thousands of people, and afterwards, they consistently mention things like louder birdsong, fresher air, more greenery, and people looking relaxed and happy. No one ever talks about bigger IKEA or futuristic malls. I recently read about Elise Bolding, who did a similar exercise in U.S. prisons 25 years ago, and people shared almost the same visions. She speculated that no matter when you did this, people would likely describe a similar future—it’s what we collectively long for.

At the end of the exercise, I encourage people to make this a daily practice, like running or meditation. Imagining the future should become a regular habit because we’re already doing the opposite every day. We wake up, check our phones, and see headlines saying it’s too late, the world’s in chaos, and nobody cares. We put that information in our heads daily, and the future seems to shrink. But the more you practice this future exercise, the more vivid and detailed your vision becomes. People have come to my workshops multiple times to deepen their vision. It’s about genuinely immersing in it—envisioning, smelling, touching it; it’s about getting that vision into your bones and every cell of your body.

The poet Rilke once said, “The future must enter into you a long time before it happens.” That’s the work we need to do—make the future multisensory and let it become part of us so we can see it more clearly and work towards it with greater purpose.

L.V. – And by using our imagination, ‘What if’ we could uncancel the future?

R.H. – We’d be happier; we’d have a purpose. The air could feel fresher, and the grass greener. As one of my heroes, American prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, says in her book We Do This Til We Free Us: “We must imagine while we build, always both.” Simply imagining won’t change the world, but our work lacks direction and inspiration without it. That’s what the transition movement is about—dreaming of something better and making it real. It will require immense effort from many, but it’s our only viable path forward. If we succeed, the next 10, 15, or 20 years could be some of the most exhilarating times to live through as we reshape the world.

I envision a movement that fills the streets with visions of the future—‘pop-up tomorrows’, as I call them. We already know that teaching young people about climate change without hope leads to burnout and despair. We need something with a focus on action and possibility. We need a movement that shares stories of what’s possible, creating futures so exciting that people can’t help but want to make them happen.