Rob Hopkins

I made it to Glasgow, a surreal moment in history I felt called to witness. I’ll post a few things while I’m here, but to start with, here are a few conversations I had yesterday whilst landing and starting to get my bearings. Here I talk to veteran activist and author Bill McKibben, to community supported organiser Jacob Johns, to Anthony Diaz of the Newark Water Coalition and to Leila Salazar-López, Executive Director of Amazon Watch. Enjoy.

In a few days I head up to Glasgow for COP26. I have no formal role, indeed I don’t know why I’m going there really, and I can only be there for the first week, but I feel drawn to being there. I feel like history is calling me to be there, just as it did when I went to Paris for COP21 in 2015, which felt like an extraordinary time to be there, a moment in history that had to be tasted.

Usually our brand new podcasts are, initially at least, released only to subscribers, but today we make an important exception. This episode, Episode 39, is being released just 6 days before the beginning of COP26, the vitally important climate summit happening in Glasgow. The world’s governments will be coming together for 2 weeks to, hopefully, reach some kind of binding agreement that might give the world at least a fighting chance of preventing runaway climate change. There’s one problem though…

This episode is absolutely one of my favourites so far. What is the experience among communities of colour of striving to sustain an imaginative life in the context of a wider culture that is often hostile to it? Is there such a thing as a distinctly black imagination, and if so, how does it differ from what we might think of as a ‘white imagination’?

“Mostly we have the opinion leaders of the world either saying it’s going to be more of the same, but perhaps more competition between governments around the world, or it’s time for the rich to escape Earth entirely and go to space. So it feels like we are in the midst of a crisis of imagination on the sort of level of political leadership and economic leadership”.

I had the huge honour on Thursday morning to spent over two hours with the amazing architect and artist Luc Schuiten. Luc is an architect who designs extraordinary ecological buildings and who also has become very well known, mostly in the French-speaking world, for his incredible images showing what an ecological, regenerative future could look […]

This is such an incredible episode. One of those ones I had to go off and sit under a tree afterwards to absorb. Today we talk about gender. I grew up in a society that thought in terms of two genders, you were male or you were female. This was accompanied by expectations that men behaved in ways that were ‘masculine’, and women in ways seen as being ‘feminine’… If you were someone who didn’t identify as either, or someone who challenged society’s expectations of what being masculine or feminine meant, it was a bleak time. And in many cultures, far bleaker still, indeed very dangerous.

Episode Thirty. Wow. Whoever thought we’d get this far? Thank you so much for your support in making that possible. We have a delicious episode to mark this moment. We are joined today by Farzana Khan and by Looby Macnamara to explore ‘What if the revolution was well facilitated?’ It’s a beautiful exploration of why good facilitation is such an important element of changemaking. We hope you love this, our 30th episode. Bring on the next 30!

I thought you might enjoy this. Just over a week ago, as part of the brilliant Atmos for Totnes campaign, in support of the Atmos Totnes project, the legendary Brian Eno worked with the campaign to create an incredible lightshow onto the buildings that the UK’s most ambitious community-led development project has been locked out […]

If you had a Time Machine, which year would you set the dial to? This episode is about time travel. More specifically, it is about using imaginary time travel, or futurism, or deep dreaming, or whatever you want to call it, in our activism. Why is it so powerful to invite people to imagine the future? What does it do to us to step into an imaginary future? And what tips of the trade can help us to really bring it alive for people?