Rob Hopkins

It’s exciting then to be able to announce that this week I actually managed a spectacular feat of time travel to visit the future they dream of in that exercise, immersing myself in its magic and its deliciousness, with all my senses. It was incredible and life-affirming. And all I had to do was buy a train ticket to Freiburg in Germany.

It’s time to introduce you to a rather exciting new project I’m doing. Here is a conversation with the wonderful Kit Wilmans Fegradoe, who makes music as Mr Kit, about a new project we’re working on called ‘Field Recordings from the Future’.

Kids have almost entirely vanished from our streets. Retreating indoors in the face of the car’s domination of our city spaces, and a perception of the lack of safety, kids are all too often starved of play. ‘No ball games here’ signs. Horrible noises only audible to teenagers to chase them away from sitting near certain buildings.  The privatisation of public space. Cities are increasingly being designed around the needs of adults and capital rather than kids. So what might we do about it?

What if we were to implement every solution that we already know exists in order to tackle the climate crisis the sense of urgency that an emergency should inspire? After the damp squib of COP26, it’s a vitally important question. Can we do it? Is there still time? And most importantly, what would it feel like to live in a time when that was actually happening, when all around us, all hands were applied to this most momentous of tasks?

Although not planned as some kind of ‘Christmas Special’, that’s kind of what this episode is, so hopefully it will give you the opportunity to treat your imagination to something very special over the festive season. This episode will introduce you to Flora Collingwood-Norris and to Orsola de Castro, cofounder and Global Creative Director of […]

This article was written as a speech for the event called ‘21 Years of Permaculture at Kinsale College‘ on May 28th 2022, a celebration of “21 years of permaculture, practical sustainability and environmental living”.  I’d like to tell you a story. It’s a 21st birthday story, but it’s a lot more than that. It is […]

If you enjoyed the ‘What Next Summit’ last year, this year we’re going one better! The Together We Can summit starts May 11th, and it’s going to be amazing. So many great sessions, incredible guests, awe-inspiring workshops, really, it’s going to be the online event of 2022. And it’s free … You will need to […]

But what would it actually feel like to live through a revolution of the imagination? It’s a question that leads us to our question for today’s episode – what if we are standing on the cusp of an Imagination Age? It was a question inspired by this article I read that one of our guests had written about the second guest.

Welcome to Episode 41 of ‘From What If to What Next’. Powerful psychology is used to convince us, often subliminally, that we want and need things we previously never knew even existed. This is especially dangerous at a time when we need to urgently cut consumption of high carbon-generating products and lifestyle choices. It is […]

I’m not going to say much about this episode, other than that it’s incredible. We are exploring Afrofuturism, which has been variously described as “speculative fiction from the African diaspora”, “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” and “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation”. It has so much to teach us about imagination and how to keep What If questions alive over time. You will also hear the story of the Zambian Space Programme (a new one on me) which is just amazing.