Rob Hopkins

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 […]

Today’s episode of From What If to What Next is about care. Care has been very much on our minds of recent. COVID has highlighted how vitally important care is and yet how undervalued it is. It is so often seen as being the domain of women, and around the world it is often either underpaid, or unpaid work. As the populations of the Global North live longer and longer, and as young people are unable to afford, often, to leave home, it tends to often fall to women to care for both the younger and the older generations simultaneously, what is sometimes called the ‘Sandwich Generation’.

You are in for such a treat. This is one of the most thought-provoking and inspiring episodes of this podcast yet. It was my huge honour to be joined by Yumna Hussen and Lottie Cooke to discuss what a reimagined education system would be like. Honestly, spending an hour in the company of these two remarkable young people, so articulate and well informed, was just a joy.

As many cities begin to actively take steps away from the dominance of cars, we are asking what might it be like if that had already happened? What might it be like to live in a city in which more travel now takes place on food or on two wheels? And how are electric vehicles transforming that? It’s a brilliant discussion with two amazing guests.

It is said that just before a tsunami hits, everything falls unnaturally silent. And that then, when the water arrives, it arrives not as a Hokusai-style foam-crested wave, but as a steady, unstoppable and relentless wall of water. It’s around midday on Friday in the centre of Glasgow, and it has fallen similarly, weirdly silent, […]

Here are some conversations I had with people at COP26 in Glasgow on my third day here, either whilst, or shortly after, being kettled by the police for over 2 hours on St Vincent’s Street! I hope you enjoy it. In this podcast you will hear from Dorothy Grace Guerrero, Head of Policy at Global […]