Rob Hopkins

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.

Sorry, I thought I had posted this at the time! This episode was released just 6 days before the beginning of COP26. The world’s governments came together for 2 weeks to try and, as it turned out, largely fail to reach some kind of binding agreement that might give the world at least a fighting chance of preventing runaway climate change.

Anthea Lawson, author of ‘The Entangled Activist’, recently tweeted “Am noticing there’s lots of people that Extinction Rebellion woke up to taking action on climate who are currently marking time, looking for the next thing. A bit like where you hop about waving hands to the quieter bit of a tune, waiting for the beat to drop and everyone will LET RIP”. In this blog I want to offer some thoughts on what that might look like, but from a perhaps unexpected direction, an obscure jazz artist who died almost 30 years ago, Sun Ra.

Everywhere, where you live included, has a patchwork of organisations of different sizes who are doing business and making things happen in a way that is not solely about the generation of profit, but about serving a larger social purpose. They might be called social enterprises, or socially-trading organisations, or all sorts of other things.

The decline of insect populations around the world has been nothing short of terrifying. Last year I visited a school in an intensive wine-producing region in France, and suggested to the kids that they might build an insect hotel, only to be told by the head teacher “we don’t have any insects here”. It has stayed with me ever since. So in today’s episode, we are exploring how it would feel to live through a time when insect population, and biodiversity in general, bounced back? If we did everything we possibly could to create the conditions for that? How incredible would that be?

Oh wow, you’re in for a treat. In this episode we bring together Anthea Lawson, author of the fabulous new book ‘The Entangled Activist‘ and Alastair McIntosh, author of ‘Soul and Soil‘ and ‘Riders on the Storm‘. I usually try to constrain the conversations we have here to around 45 minutes, but this one was […]