Rob Hopkins

It was a quote by my late friend and mentor David Fleming that tipped me over into thinking that writing a book about imagination was something I needed to do. In ‘Lean Logic’, he wrote “if the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination”. There was something about that sentence that got under my skin.

The first review of ‘From What Is to What If’ is in! It is from Jeremy Williams over at The Earthbound Report’ [original here]. The book goes on sale on October 17th, and many thanks to Jeremy for his review. 

Here is a date for your diary. On Sunday October 20th, Transition Network, together with Chelsea Green Publishing, will be hosting an event at Battersea Arts Centre in two parts. We will invite you to step into an imagined future to collectively vision, playfully build and then physically inhabit a 3D vision of a Zero Carbon 2030. It’s an event that will stay with you for a long time. 

One of the very best books I read while researching ‘From What Is to What If’ was ‘Free to Learn’ by Peter Gray. Peter is an evolutionary psychologist who taught for 30 years at Boston College as a Professor. He is now retired from teaching but still does research on children’s learning and children’s development.  […]

Last week I wrote an article called ‘What If Friday September 20th 2019 was the Day the World Tipped?’. It was a piece, inspired by my visit to the Global Strike for Climate in Westminster, that dared to imagine how it might be if that day, and the strikes all over the world, actually proved to be the moment that we could come to look back on as the day we entered a new era of urgency, impact and possibility. While it received a lot of praise, the comments section at Resilience.org took great glee in tearing it to pieces.

On July 13th in Totnes, an event was held which brought together local Transition, XR and other local groups to ask how best to respond to local government ‘climate emergency’ declarations. Here is my write-up of the day on the day, on its learnings, and how you might run your own. It felt to me […]

Liz Canning has just produced a remarkable film called ‘Motherload’, one of the most beautiful ‘What If’ films I have ever seen, one that offers a visceral taste of what that world would be like. The film was crowdfunded, crowdsourced and is currently being ‘crowd-distributed’. It is the result of 8 years work, and I love it dearly. Let me tell you more.

What would It feel like to live through an era-defining, seismic social, cultural and economic transition? A tipping point beyond which nothing felt the same and everything felt possible? Clearly such things don’t come along very often, indeed they are pretty rare. So rare in fact that we usually don’t allow ourselves to believe that they are possible. But they are. And we are in one right now. And it’s amazing. Let me explain.

Did you watch the BBC’s ‘Years and Years’? Well, here’s the antidote. What if, over the next 11 years, a previously unimaginable transformation were to take place, sparked by Extinction Rebellion’s non-violent direct action and by the student strikes of 2019/20, the subsequent election of a government committed to deep transformation, the reorienting of capital and business, the huge mobilisation of communities and social movements across the country and elsewhere, and the intentional creation of the conditions in which the imagination can flourish?

It was a real privilege recently to be interviewed for the excellent Utopia Dispatch podcast. Here’s how its producers describe themselves: “Utopia Dispatch is the podcast talking to people with thinking big ideas and taking radical action, to figure out what a better world might look like. Follow us as we embark on our journey into humanity’s possible brighter futures”. Their chat with me opens their second season, and we had a far reaching discussion and touched on many of the topics covered in ‘From What Is to What If’.