Season 4, Ep. - Fall in Love with the Future: Reclaiming Imagination in the Age of Collapse with Rob Hopkins

Written By Megan Lambert

What if your eco-anxiety, your grief about the climate, or your sense that the future feels canceled… are actually signs that your imagination is trying to wake up?

Rob Hopkins founded the Transition Towns movement and has spent decades asking one question: what if things could be otherwise? His books, “From What Is to What If” and “How to Fall in Love with the Future”, make the case that the imagination crisis is the climate crisis.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • Why imagination declined in the 1990s, and the neuroscience behind it

  • How chronic stress shrinks the hippocampus and steals your ability to envision a hopeful future

  • Why cultivating longing is more powerful than sharing more climate information

  • What "sensual futuring" means and how to make the future feel real in your body

  • How Afro Futurism, Solarpunk, and regenerative communities are already building the world we want

We also do a live guided time travel meditation to 2036 and the future we built by doing everything we possibly could.

Listen Now:

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0l9o6lBBH8pACMoHNLEkvV

Apple Podcasts -https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fall-in-love-with-the-future-reclaiming-imagination-in/id1498731180?i=1000757814775

Connect with Megan:

📲 @megandlambert

 🌐 https://www.megandlambert.com

💌 https://www.megandlambert.as.me/discovery-call

If you’re curious about my offerings, visit me at www.megandlambert.com.

If this episode moves you, please let me know by reaching out by email, Instagram DM (@megandlambert), or leaving a review!

Episode Resources:

Episode Transcript:

The cities of the future will have the cycling infrastructure of Utrecht, the superblocks of Barcelona, the car-free neighbourhoods of Freiburg, the new food infrastructure of Liège in Belgium, the commitment to taking space away from cars that we see in Paris right now, etc. etc. So the reason imagination is so important is because it gives us that capacity to see things as if they could be otherwise, which is a superpower that we need now more than we ever have, I think.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Eros & Earth where sensuality meets ecology. Today's guest is Rob Hopkins who founded the Transition Towns movement and he's a global leader in community resilience, localization, and grassroots climate solutions. This interview I found really hopeful around what can we actually do when it comes to climate change. We talk about regenerative communities, local economies,

the future and how collective action can help us address the meta crisis. So this podcast left me feeling really hopeful. I imagine it might for you too. If you're interested in sustainability, rewilding, climate action, systems change, this episode's for you. I hope you enjoy.

Okay, welcome Rob, welcome to Eros and Earth.

Hey Meg, lovely to see you.

Lovely to see you too. You recently spoke on this Masters of Systems Leadership program that I'm in. And you said many things that stuck with me. But one that you said that I really loved is, we need the future to feel like a party, not a protest. Tell us about that. Why is hope in the future so important?

Because I feel like we are living in a time where the future is being cancelled and the future is being commonised. We are living in a kind of a war on the imagination, I think. And for me, the context of the work that I do is very much around the climate and ecological emergency that we're in. know, we are already in a climate emergency. Climate change is not something that's going to happen in the future.

We are already in a warming world and the world has already increased by one and a half degrees from where we were before the Industrial Revolution started and we're currently on target for somewhere between three and four degrees. Even two degrees is absolutely catastrophic and one and a half degrees we can already see the impacts that's having around the world in terms of fires and floods. Every tenth of a degree that we warm pushes a hundred million people out of a kind of safe, liveable space.

So every fraction of a degree is really, really important. I guess what motivates me is that climate change demands that we reimagine everything. And climate change is really the result, I think, of a failure of the collective imagination. I would hate the human beings who I love in the main. And I think human civilization is a great thing, not a of a scourge on the earth. And I would hate for us to be a civilization that disappeared leaving an epitaph that said

Sorry, we couldn't think of anything else. You know, I think we're better than that. We're smarter than that. And we know how to do everything that we need to. But for me, it was a journey that started in about 2017 when I read a paper written by a researcher in the US called Kyung Hee Kim called the creativity crisis. She looked at a thing called the Torrance test for creative thinking, which is like a...

The closest thing we have to the sort of gold standard creativity test that's been done with big data sets of people. It's basically Megan, like if I said, okay, Megan, you have two minutes to tell me as many different alternative uses for this pen as possible. And you could say, it could be a thing for getting stuff out of your ears, or you could use it for, it could be like a toboggan for a mouse. I don't know you. So, and then they do that and they give people two minutes and then they count how many things they come up with. And then also how creative those things are. And they've done that test with big data sets of people in 30, 40 countries going back to the 1950s. So she looked at this data initially for the US and her conclusion was that imagination and IQ had risen together until the mid 90s, at which point IQ kept rising and imagination started to decline. when this was published, it made the front page of Newsweek magazine. It was a big story in the US and people said, what does this mean for economic growth? And what does this mean for Hollywood?

Neither of which I care about, but what I do care about is what does that mean for movements for climate justice, for the ecological emergency? Because if we can't imagine something other than business as usual, given how profoundly destructive business as usual is, then we're really, really in trouble. So first of all, I a book called From What Is To What If that was an exploration into what's the state of health of our collective imagination right now and why does that matter?

And then the new book, How to Fall in Love with the Future, was inspired when I saw a t-shirt that a young woman, activist was wearing on a Black Lives Matter protest in the US that said, I've been to the future. And it gave me massive goosebumps and it profoundly shifted how I did the work I was doing. think up until that point in the climate movement, the narratives were very much around collapse and extinction and all of that. And I just loved this sort of idea that we could

take more inspiration from Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism, be more playful, more theatrical, more fun. that maybe we might get to where we needed to get to faster because we know that what people call the information deficit model of like, well, the only reason people aren't doing anything is because they don't understand it. That doesn't work. That has failed and continues to be failing us. And so maybe we need a different approach. So for me, it's really the work I do now is about how do we

We have to get so much better at talking about the future in such a way that we give people things to run towards rather than just things to run screaming in the opposite direction from. know, it's a really, it feels increasingly profoundly important to me that we are able to capture and celebrate and express that. And the novelist Don DeLillo once said, on a large scale is what makes history.

Longing on the large scale is what makes history. That's so different from how most of us as activists do our activism. It's not about cultivation of longing. It's about giving people information. That doesn't work. So let's try something else.

That's such a great line. It's not about giving more information. It's about cultivating longing. And then we stuck with me. You said so many rich faves. One I to take is what happened to our creativity in the 90s? Why are we becoming less creative?

So firstly, I would tease apart the word creativity and the word imagination. So we often use the word creativity, innovation and imagination as if they mean the same thing. I don't think they do at all. Innovation is something that capitalism does to create marketable products. Creativity is very, very similar. Creativity is usually driven by the desire to produce something that can then be sold. Alessio Le Guin, one of the great guardians of our collective imagination.

Used to say the word creativity has been so debased and abused by capitalism that I can't touch it any longer. She said, but they can't have imagination. There was a thing I don't remember off the top of my head, but in from what is to what if I talked about how somebody looked at job adverts in New York over one week and something like 2000 of them asked look for innovation as a quality. 900 of them look for creativity and about four look for imagination. Imagination is much, much bolder.

Imagination dares to ask questions that shift the foundation of something. Imagination is mischievous and playful and bold and audacious, which is why it's usually profoundly distrusted by fascists. But they were right with creativity, but they hate imaginative people. Most dictators, the first thing you do is you round up the imaginative people, right? Because they're the people who'll point out that actually the emperor doesn't have any clothes on.

and who will actually name things as they are. So in Kyunghee Kim's paper that she published in 2010, she linked that parting of the ways in the 1990s to three things. She said it was due to the rise of screens in our lives, it was due to the rise of testing in schools, and it was due to the disappearance of what she calls like free unstructured play. That kind of play where kids spend the day going, what if this cardboard box was a submarine? What if this cardboard box was a palace?

What if it was a space rocket? Kids started doing a lot less of that around that time. But by the time I got to the end of doing the research for from what is to what if I felt there were a number of other things that accompanied that. kind of perfect storm of things. think firstly, we began then to see the erasure of imaginative subjects from our education system. We saw a devaluing of creative writing of English literature, theatre, all these sorts of things.

in which in private schools are considered essential to producing rounded people. They have very well resourced theatre departments. In state funded schools, those things were cut, cut, cut, cut. I think we also spend much less time in nature. All the great imaginative people in our culture, in our history, got a lot of that inspiration from being outside. Einstein said he got his best ideas when he rode his bicycle in the forest. I think as well, the thing with screens is it's not just about the presence of screens. Increasingly, it's about

the profoundly addictive nature of those screens that we are evolutionarily ill-equipped to resist. I was one of the ways that makes it resonate when I do talks with audiences is I asked them to imagine that they're in Arles in France in 1888 in Place La Martin in the yellow house and Vincent van Gogh comes in with this beautiful bunch of sunflowers he's got in the market and he arranges them on the table as the sunlight comes in through the window and he looks up the many things. I must just check my Instagram.

And I must just check my Facebook and my TikTok. And then two hours later, he's watching videos of skateboarders falling down stairs and can't remember why he even started watching videos of skateboarders falling down stairs. mean, whether we would have painted those paintings, sun-sour paintings that have just entranced and blown people away for over a hundred years now. You know, it's like actually when our attention, when we lose our attention spans, we are so much worse off and so much more as we are seeing now.

Go?

easy prey for fascists and easy prey for people who want to do terrible things. think also, and perhaps most importantly, the thing that I learned researching that book was that the part of the brain where your imagination comes from, your hippocampus, is where your memory and your imagination both fire from, right? Because in many ways, if you are remembering the past or imagining the future, it's identical neural pathways that kick in. It's the same process that happens in the brain.

for both of those things. If Megan, you'd never been to Italy before and I said, Megan, I'm gonna take you to Italy next week, then your brain would send a message to your memory and say, send up the file with Italy written on it. And your imagination would get that file and assemble all the bits in it to make a picture of what Italy was gonna be like, right? But the thing about hippocampus is it's the part of the brain that is most vulnerable to cortisol. So when we are stressed, in trauma, in anxiety,

hippocampus can shrink by up to 20 percent. And when that happens, we lose that ability to see the future in positive and hopeful ways, and we get stuck in the present, stuck in the past. think really over since that time, we have increasingly found ourselves in a cortisol economy. And so many people are now in a state of precariousness, not knowing how they're going to get to the end of the week, never mind thinking about the end of the world.

And so I think that the cortisol washes over all of that and is profoundly damaging. if we want to create the book then really is about how do you create the conditions for the return of the imagination at scale? Because at the moment we're doing the complete opposite of that.

Wow, beautifully said. And I'm a child of the 90s. I grew up in the 90s. And I grew up very much with what you're describing, standardized testing, not very many art classes, this feeling that imagination was something that was an indulgence. And it's something as an adult now, and I have two little kids, two and four, that I'm working on bringing back into our home, like whimsy, imagination, play. And we just made a big spiderweb out of yarn in our living room. Something like that. How do you bring imagination back and why is it important? Why is it important right now?

I think you start bringing it back by recognizing that it matters, that it really matters. That actually, you you're talking about children between the age of two and four. One of the people I interviewed for the book was called Dr. Marjorie Taylor, and she spent the last 30 years doing research with three to five year olds, evaluating the potency of their imagination. And she said, I have seen no decline.

in the last 30 years. But something happens then when kids are five or six. And I think that thing is called school. Yeah. I think also when you read in the book, I also look at some examples of the research around what happens when children grow up and aren't allowed to play. I mean, I think, you know, we're looking in the US at the moment at what happens when you're governed by someone who wasn't allowed to play as a child. You know, there was a there was

play, that sort of free unstructured play is how we learn to cooperate, how we learn to compromise, how we learn to make decisions with other people. It's hugely, hugely valuable and important. There was a school shooting in Texas in the 1960s and a researcher who then interviewed the guy who did that and then lots of other people who were responsible for kind of mass shootings. And one of the things they had in common was that they hadn't been allowed to play as children.

Play is a kind of a natural, think, in children and in adults, is actually a natural expression of everything else being in balance. But if the rest of what's around is healthy, then our imaginations flourish. I think, you you're right, like creating, was saying, when I go, when I see people who are raising children in a house where everything is clean and tidy and everything is always hoovered and everything is always put away at the end of every day and everything is spotless, it's like,

My kids grew up in the forest and with sticks and things they built that stayed up for days and things living, spending the night, living and sleeping in things they built out of cardboard boxes. you know, it's like that is the most precious thing we can offer our children is a kind of a messy, joyful childhood where we get down on our knees and play with them and don't worry about everything having to be put back exactly as it was at the end of the day.

That's so bad. And read them stories. Read them stories. Read them lots and lots and lots of stories. And I think it's one of the most profoundly important things that we can do right now. The world, you know, with all these debates about, what's AI going to do? What's AI going to change? How do we bring up young people skilled for a world with that? Read them stories. The world's going to need creative people. AI can't do that. And when it does, it's rubbish.

You know, we need people who are brilliant and creative and who can reimagine everything. And that's the most precious thing. John Dewey, who was an educationalist and a philosopher, his definition of imagination was that it's the ability to see things as if they could be otherwise. And we're seeing the rise of kind of totalitarian governments who function on a premise that there is no alternative. know, neoliberal economics, neoliberal capitalism is based, as Margaret Thatcher said,

on this idea that there is no alternative. This is the only way we can possibly do it. And there's such a dangerous, pernicious, nonsense myth. In How to Fall in Love in the Future, I have a chapter which is about how we need to get rid of the word impossible and replace it with the words not yet. Because all the things we're told are impossible, you can't move, it's impossible to move away from growth as a measure of progress. It's impossible to move away from fossil fuels at speed. It's impossible.

to redesign an economy so that it's based around building equality and an economy that's fair. All those things were told are impossible are the things that our survival depends upon. And there are living breathing examples of those things all over the place. And so I share lots and lots of those stories. The cities of the future will have the cycling infrastructure of Utrecht, the super blocks of Barcelona, the car free neighborhoods of Freiburg, the...

than the new food infrastructure of Liège in Belgium, the commitment to taking space away from cars that we see in Paris right now, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the reason imagination is so important is because it gives us that capacity to see things as if they could be otherwise, which is a superpower that we need now more than we ever have, I think.

I love that, the imagination to see how it could be ever as because so much of the climate movement is urgent and important and it is, but it can feel scary and overwhelming sometimes. And this feels like a really interesting take on the climate movement that might, my hope, it might bring more people in.

I mean, also, I think it's important to say, and you know, I always say to people, if you aren't regularly terrified about climate change, you're not paying attention right now. You know, I'm what I'm not advocating is that we all walk around going, yeah, isn't it great? You know, it's like, actually, this needs to be underpinned by a very, by by an understanding of where we're at, which is really not great. And

This is no, we are no longer in a position which is, we avoid climate change? We are in climate change now. This is really about damage, to what extent we can do damage limitation and then over a longer period of time start to hopefully reverse that process. Rebecca Solnit, who is one of the great writers and thinkers of our time, I think right now, she says, hope is not a lottery ticket that we sip touching on the sofa. Hope is an axe we use to break down doors. You for me,

This approach, this imagination work is not saying we all just need to sit around looking at the stars and dreaming. You know, one of my great, great heroes is a woman in the US called Maryam Kaba, who is a prison abolition activist. wrote a book called We Do This Till We Free Us, which is one of the great works of kind political imagination. I think it's brilliant. And she says in that book, we must imagine while we build, always both.

But if we just do stuff, if we just do the building stuff without a vision, a North Star underpinning it, a narrative, a way of talking about the future that brings it alive in a way that's thrilling to people, then lot of our doing work is kind of pointless and we're never going to engage that sort of longing at scale that Don DeLilo talked about earlier on.

I love that. Active hope.

I hear. the kind of the hope that's based in our own agency. You know, I live in a town called Totnes where I've lived for 20 years. It's where the transition movement started. We've been involved in doing transition here for most of that time. Part of my hope comes from I can walk around in this town and I can see things that have changed because we decided we wanted to, we were going to do something about it. And when I go off and I travel around, I never fly. So I just

get to travel the distances that I can travel by train. So I travel all across Europe and see community led initiatives, sustainability initiatives all across Europe. And my hope comes from the fact that I've seen those things and I've met those people and I've spoken to them and I've seen those things. I've touched them and smelt them and interact with them and feel them and felt them. And a lot of people don't know those stories. So for me, it's about a kind of a, I feel like at the moment.

You know, the way that the far right is working now around the world is to paint terrifying pictures of the future, which are often absolute nonsense and bear no relation to reality at all. You know, like saying London is a lawless city and it's the most dangerous city in the world. Actually, it's currently has the lowest crime rate has ever had in history and is one of the safest cities in the world. But they like to paint these terrifying visions and then position themselves as the strong men with men who protect you.

from this thing. If at the same time, progressive people who actually understand climate science, because remember climate science is not a question of belief, it's a question of whether you understand it or not. If as well those people are just painting terrifying visions of the future, then people like rabbits stuck between two sets of headlights. Where are you supposed to go? You've got terrifying vision A, terrifying vision B. We just get paralysed and go into fight or flight mode.

We need to talk about the future in a way that people can fall in love with it. And because that as well, that question about how do we cultivate longing at scale, for me then as someone who's been a climate activist for many, many years, comes with a realization that we're not very good at that. The people in our culture who are brilliant at cultivating longing, climate activists are very far down that list. Climate scientists are even further down that list. The people who are good at it, are poets and musicians and street artists and people like Banksy and people who write scripts for Netflix. We cannot do this without those people. This work now is really an appeal to those people to say, bring your longing generating superpowers in as part of this because we can't do it without you.

And then I love that. It makes me think, how do we activate longing at scale? Like, how do we touch? When I'm just thinking about myself and some things that have touched my longing lately are, you on Instagram, I see people like making sourdough with their kids and like planting their own herb gardens and picking fruits and then eating them right off their trees. And that touches something. I I'm like, I want that for me and for my family. How do we do that at scale? How do we help people? Patched me into a longing.

Well, I think we have to recognize, first of all, that all the big social movements and shifts that have happened in history begin with the storytelling. know, if Martin Luther King had stood up in the 60s and said, I have a nightmare, people would have gone, see you later. Thanks very much. Yeah, good luck with that. The story that I always, but actually the thing that we have to remember about the civil rights movement, right, is that often in climate activist circles, when we're looking for lessons from the civil rights movement,

We tend to reduce it down to, well, should we be more like Martin Luther King or more like Malcolm X? Malcolm X was more radical and he pushed the sense of what was socially acceptable, moved the Overton window to the point where Martin Luther King, who was previously seen as dangerously radical, became seen as like the mainstream voice of the civil rights movement. So then you have this, well, should we be more like Extinction Rebellion? Just stop oil.

Should we or should we be more moderate? And that's often where that debate gets stuck, right? But what people often forget is that also in the civil rights movement at that time, you had the Black Panthers who were running school meals programs, free school meals programs, who were setting up free schools, who were running ambulances in neighborhoods where no one else would. They were building like community-based mutual aid networks without waiting for anyone's permission. They were just getting on with it. And you also had this incredible

black utopian tradition with people like Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, George Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic, Son Ra, people who were looking forward and filling the future with stories and narrative, people who grew up, black people who grew up loving science fiction, but all those science fictions about films about the future had no black people in them and going, well, hang on a minute, we seem to have been erased from the past. Are we going to be erased from the future as well? We're not having that.

And so you had this beautiful flowering of this kind of black utopian tradition. And I feel like when we're looking now at movements for change, I'm not for a moment saying we shouldn't have the sort of more direct action kind of protest culture. We shouldn't be having demonstrations, but I think as well what we need to be doing is bringing in, making space for what I call a positive futurism movement, which has the color and the artistry and the beauty of Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism.

and is about stories and creating kind of what I call pop-up tomorrows, which is like there's an artist in Holland who created this project called Bosque, where he got a thousand really big trees in big pops on wheels. And then for four weeks, he had 4,000 volunteers who volunteered to be part of this thing. And you could, with three or four people, you could move these trees around on these wheels.

So for four weeks, four or five weeks, they took a forest for a walk around the city. So you could see what this place that you walk through every day, there was normally just a cold windswept public plaza. What would that feel like if it was full of trees? But you could have that experience, like they reached through into the future and pulled that through into the present. So for me, if we want to bring imagination back at scale in our own lives and

collectively because it's kind of where it's most important. The first thing is that we have to recognise that the imagination needs space. If we just carry on, if we're an organisation that's set up to do something, we will always carry on doing that thing unless we intentionally create space to start doing things differently. Like you're doing with your kids, it's like actually we need to make space. We're not to just dash around being busy all the time. We need to make space every day.

for creative unstructured imaginative play. Let the kids lead it. Let the kids imagination really flourish. Bring them things, give them toys that could be anything. When I was a kid, what I wanted most when it never happened was for my parents to fill the garage with lots of really big cardboard boxes like the ones you get washing machines in. And so that I could assemble them into a kind of like loads of tunnels and bases and on that. the story, there's a story that I tell in...

in from what is to what if about this horrific thing that came out, I can't remember when it was, about 10 years ago, it was called Hello Barbie. I think I did have one, but I got rid of it. So Hello Barbie was the world's first Wi-Fi enabled doll, which was a Barbie that had conversations with your child, drawing from a 284 page script that Mattel had written.

And then it recorded your child's responses and used them to build a marketing profile of your child that had then sold to other companies. Can you imagine anything absolutely horrific? And there was an amazing campaign that was that started in the US that was called Hell No Barbie. And and it was fabulous. And I interviewed the guy who ran that campaign and he said this toy is an attack on your child's imagination.

because it can't be anything else, right? All it can be is Barbie having a conversation and an absolutely inane conversation at that. let's talk about fashion. You know, I actually bought one, a Hello Barbie, because I wanted to be able to have conversations with it on my talks on stage and to ask it questions. But what happened was the campaign by Hell No Barbie hit their profits so much that they discontinued it. And so you couldn't actually use that anymore. In Germany,

The German government, there was a different version, a thing in Germany called Hello Kayla that was the same idea, this kind of smart doll. And the German government classified it as illegal espionage apparatus and said that any parent who put batteries in it could be prosecuted. know, the kind of play that we give our children is really, important. That it's like coming back to that thing I said at the beginning. Here's a pen. What could this pen be? know, if we produce kids who just go, that it's a pen, Rob. We're really in trouble. We need kids to go, yeah, it could be, and then it could be, and then it could be, and then could be, and then you could, and then, you know, and that's very much a kind of, I mean, to a certain extent for a while, kids will do that anyway. more that we can foster that, the better. And the more that we can support that as they move through school, when that imagination will become more more imperiled and kind of under attack, the more that we can fill their life with theatre and art and all those sorts of things I think is a real real service to them.

I love that. It reminds me that we're all born with this imagination, like you were saying, and then somewhere along the way our culture, we forget it, but then there's an opportunity to remember it and reactivate it, especially in service of the collective. And one of my favorite phrases I heard from you that really stuck out to me was sensual futuring. Yeah. Like you were saying with the trees, like being able to touch, taste and feel a different world. Where did you get that?

That's a term that came from a wonderful activist in the US called Wasima Labich, who lives in Berlin. She does work that she calls Muslim Futures, working with Muslim women in Berlin, for whom who experience a lot of racism in their daily life and for whom it's very hard to think of the future in hopeful, positive ways. so she does workshops with women there about

the future and different and she wrote this beautiful article which listeners can find online called on sensual featuring and on sensual featuring was saying that when you do that kind of work you need you need in as many ways as possible to to help people to feel safe and comfortable and so she does a lot of work with she brings in smells like mood which are very which feel very like which smell like home.

to a lot of Muslim women, or she brings in fabrics, or she brings in foods, or she brings in things that kind of connects them and helps them feel safe. So the poet Rilke used to say, the future must enter into you a long time before it happens. The future must enter into you a long time before it happens. And so there's an activity that I do when I run workshops, which is where I give everybody an empty cup, and I say, okay, you've got 15 minutes.

This is after we've done an activity where we imagine the future and discuss it with other people and draw it and capture it. I say, okay, human beings can remember 10,000 smells and we can attach memories and emotions to each one of those different smells. It's one of the most powerful things that we have, but we usually use it for the past or the present. But what if you could capture what the future smells like? So I send them out.

And they go out and I asked them to make in that cup a cocktail of smells that smell like the future that they imagined. And they have to give it a good name because all good cocktails have good names, right? So they go out and then they come back with this thing in a cup. And then we have a cocktail party where literally I play music. I set out the chairs so they're kind of crammed into a small space like as if they were in a small apartment in Paris invited to cocktail party.

And I say, this is not a party where you want to just hang out with one other person and just talk about your cocktail for 10 minutes. You want to work the room. You want to get around and smell as many of these as you possibly can. I do that with like 80, 90 people in a workshop and it's just fantastic. And you go around and you smell more and more and more of these. And the more you smell of them, feels like the future starts to kind of get into your bones. It starts to sort of get in, get into you. And that's what we need to be doing. You know, I love doing activities where

Mm.

At the end, people can say, when I was in the future, you know, that feels really exciting to me. There's also a brilliant activity developed by my friend and colleague, Ruth Bentovim called Town Anywhere, where, she calls being an exercise in rehearsing the future. So you bring together between 30 and 400 people in a big space and you, you, you time travel to the future. You imagine you're in the future. Then you think, well, what am I doing in that future? What's my role here? And then.

And then you literally build that future with string and sticky tape and pens. It's this like big, with big like cardboard boxes, like kids should be playing with, but we do it as adults. And people build like local banks, food businesses, energy projects, wellbeing centers. And then you spend three hours in that world that you've created, trading in it and celebrating in it grieving in it and meeting people in it. And it's one of the most magical and incredible things. And I've met so many people who

the thing they played when they did Town Anyway, they then went on to do because they knew it would work because they played it. So it's like that idea that we need to playback into the activism that we do. It feels really, really precious and important to me.

I love that. I remember you talking about that workshop and just feeling like, wow, I would love to do that exercise. And I've been thinking since then, what does the future smell like to me? It smells to me like damp earth and frond japonis and incense here.

Yeah, and it's so amazing how different they all are when you do that exercise.

Yay. I can imagine also different in different places. What I smell here would probably be really different than if I were in California.

Yeah, so there's also an activity that I do when I ask people to capture what that future looked like for them, where we do that using collage. And I asked the organizers to collect a big pile of old magazines, and then people can go through them and cut things out and make a collage of what they imagined the future would look like. And I did it once in Paris, I ran a workshop there, and the organizers came up with a pile this big of old copies of Vogue magazine.

It's quite hard to create a low carbon, more equal, just future when all the adverts are for expensive watches, perfumes and completely unaffordable dresses and expensive holidays. And whereas if you were doing that and you just had a big pile of back issues of Permaculture magazine, that's quite a lot easier. So it means so the kind of observation I would share with people is actually the materials you have to work with are really, important. And if you just watch Fox News all day,

It's really hard to imagine a low carbon future because to go back to the story I said earlier about Italy and assembling a picture of what Italy might look like, if you've never ever heard anything about Italy at all, it's really hard for you to imagine that. And so one of the most important thing you were saying, well, what can we do to feed the imagination? think one of the most important things is people need the stories of ways of doing things differently because we don't find them on TV. We don't find them in the newspapers.

But everywhere those things are happening and the more that we can fill, there was a film that came out in France in 2015 called Demain, which means tomorrow, which I know quite a lot about because I was in it. And so I was there when it came out. So I went to lots of screenings of it. And it was basically a film that flipped the narrative for environmental films on its head. Normally, they would be 98 % about how enormous the problem is. And then two minutes on the end that would say,

hey, maybe we could drive a bit slower and change our light bulbs, like in a sort of inconvenient truth or films like that. This film flipped that the other way around. They got through the problem in about a minute and a half. And then it was just them going around the world looking for solutions to food, to energy, to education, to waste. And it was a phenomenon in the French speaking world. It showed in mainstream cinemas for six months and was full every night. It showed in boardrooms, it showed in universities, it showed in schools. I'm still like 11 years later.

That fair bit of my work comes from Invitations to France because I'm the guy out of that film. But what that film did was it just filled people's, the cupboards of people's memory with stories of what's possible. People now talk about the young people who grew up watching that film as generation demand. They grew up knowing that it didn't have to be like this because they'd seen in demand all the alternative different ways that it could be.

So that feels to me like one of the most precious, precious gifts that we can give to our imagination is to find those stories. There are certain people, know, all of us these days have a social media feed set up which comes straight into our brain from wherever it comes from. Most of the time, it's just heartbreaking, traumatizing, horrific news from all around the world. And, you know, I'm not saying we should stick our head in the sand and pretend that isn't happening, but we need to also be making space for bringing in

Stories like the magazine like Positive News that does that. There's a magazine from out of made in Amsterdam called Imagine Five that does that. There are social media feeds that give stories of good things that are happening. We need to make space for that stuff too.

Absolutely. And I love the called out Imagine 5. I work with them as well.

brilliant, yeah, it's a fabulous publication.

It is, it is. Recently I was reading all these climate books and they were all non-fiction and I started feeling really heavy. And then I looked at them like, where can I learn about hopeful versions of the future? And I discovered there's a whole genre, solar punk. I had no idea. There's a whole genre of fictional stories about how we could live in the future and I felt really inspired by that.

Yeah, there's a few. So there's solar punk. There's also something called hope punk, which is kind of interesting. There's what people call CLIFI, which is like stories about climate. So there's a book by Kim Stanley Robinson called A Ministry for the Future, which is his attempt to tell the story of how we found a way through this crisis. It's brilliant. There's also what people call a through topian storytelling.

which has been pushed by my friend, Amanda Scott, which is this idea that we don't need utopian stories because they're too far away and too kind of perfect to really be that useful. We don't need dystopian stories. We've got quite enough of those. Thank you very much. But through utopian stories and the stories that start now that are allowed somebody who started something and then met someone else and how it tipped and how it built and how it led to something that was transformative scale.

And she's just written a book called Any Human Power, which is a beautiful, beautiful example of that. And there's a number of other people who are writing those kind of things. I'd also just say, you when you said, you you read the books and you started feeling really heavy, I think it's also really important that we learn to sit in that place as well, you know, and as Joanna Macy says, and as the Good Grief Network talk about, you know, we also need the tools to sit.

with the grief of this. Because sometimes people talk about eco-anxiety and eco-grief as if it's something pathological and some sort of a problem. It shows that you have a heart and that you give a shit and that you're paying attention to what's going on around you. It's the people who don't experience that, think, that the people that we really need to worry about. It's really important that we're informed and you can't read and integrate and understand climate science without.

moments when it feels heartbreaking and terrifying, but we can't let, know, for me, I feel like I'm a father, I have four sons, right? And, you know, as parents, this sense that we are seeing spreading around the world, of kind of apathy around climate, that's not a natural thing. It has cost oil and gas companies billions and billions and billions of dollars and some

very, very smart people and psychologists and marketing people to create that. know, we have just before Covid, we had those extraordinary Fridays for Future Marches where kids around the world filled the streets and I took my kids to all of those that happened near where I lived and that made me cry every time. They were just beautiful. But then they've all had this lived experience now that they tried and nothing changed and nobody listened. And so what's the point?

We have to learn to be able to sit with that and to work with other people. Joanna Macy has lots of really great tools and practices for doing that. But if we get stuck there, it's kind of paralyzing. And if we imagine that that's going to be an approach that's going to engage people at scale, then I think we're really kidding ourselves. But I think it's really important that actually, you know, in terms of climate change, we all need to have

of dark night of the soul where we really understand this and the implications of this. That's something to embrace I think, not to shy away from. thank you for doing that.Yeah, thank you. One of my favorite things about Joanna Macy's work is that it's a collective grieving. It's not, because the thing with eco-anxiety is it's so personal, right? It's one person has eco-anxiety, this one person has to figure it out rather than like, we're coming together to feel and grieve and then find solutions together.

Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, it was very interesting to me that when the first time Trump was elected, I had so many people saying, so what are we going to do about it? Second time he was elected, it was much more, what can I do about it? like, the first thing you can do is to recognize that this isn't about I, this is about we. know, this all of this stuff is like, you know, it's like, yes, it's good if we each have individual vigorous imaginations. But the collective imagination is what is why this matters.

Our collective ability to ask what if and to reimagine things and to challenge things is really what's the most important thing here I think.

Well, in the spirit of collective imagining, I would love to go into the time machine with you. And would you be willing to anyone listening to you for them to join us in a time machine? Of course.

I think I have my time machine here somewhere actually. my bedroom's falling apart. Yeah, this is the time machine that was built by our quantum scientists here in Tuckness. This is a very, very powerful piece of quantum technology you can probably see there, which actually this was the one that was designed to allow us to create time travel experiences online. because it can turn any space into a time machine. I would invite people who are listening to close their eyes.

and to imagine that they can really feel the ground underneath their feet, to take a breath, and to imagine that you are being lifted out from 2026, from this time that stretches ahead into the future, that we are breaking free of the bonds that hold us to the present, and we're traveling forward in time, through 2027, 2028.

2029 and these years that we're traveling through turned out to be, we didn't expect it in 2026, but they turned out to be times of the most phenomenal, profound, radical change. 2031, 2032, can feel those years passing by like wind on your face. And then 2035 and then we come...

down to land into 2036. And this is not just any 2036. Very important to remember there were many, different quantum threads that stretch into the future from 2026. This 2036 we're landing into is the one that resulted from us doing everything we possibly, possibly could have done. Those 10 years where people still tell great stories and sing great songs about the shift that happened during those 10 years. And then we're just, when we arrive, I'm gonna just...

step down here into the street here in 2036 as you land and join me here. Take a look around but explore this place using all of your senses. What does it smell like? What can you smell? How does it smell different to the world we left behind? What can you pick up? If you had the nose of a sommelier, what would you be picking up? What can you see? What can you hear? How does it sound different?

the world that you left behind? Are there things that you can pick out and distinguish that you couldn't hear in the world that we left? Have a look at the people who walking past you. What's the look on their eye? What's the look in their eyes? How is it different from the world that you left behind? What does this world that you are in now feel like on your skin? As you walk down the streets looking at the shops that you passed, what do you see for sale in those windows?

What do you see? What posters do you see in the windows? As you approach a big public square, what's happening in that square? What are people doing in that square? So remembering that at any time you can come back here, I'm going to invite you to step back into the time machine with me. Of course, you can pause this now and spend as long here as you like, but I'm going to invite you to get back into the time machine with me. We're going to travel back to where we came from.

So I'm just going to press the start button here as we head back through 2035, 2034, or 2033, 2032, 2031, 2030, 2029, 2028, 2027 as we circle round and come back here to land into 2026, bringing with us a recognition that that future is there. It's there, it's ahead of us.

and that we can use it like as a whirlpool that we throw in front of ourselves to draw ourselves towards it, to create a kind of sense of inevitability that we will get there. And 2026, we step back into the room of 2036.

Thank you, I loved that.

Well, no, the thing that I was going to say was, you know, I've done an exercise. I was working out the other day. I've done that or different variations of that over the last few years, I think with probably about 15,000 people across you. And what's so fascinating to me is that then when I bring them back and ask them to explain what they saw, how similar those responses are, no one ever says, Rob, we have a new Ikea. There's four times bigger than the one we used to have a lot of plastic just like single cups everywhere.

You know, people say it's greener, it's quieter, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a woman called Elise Bolding who in the early 90s was a Quaker and a peace activist. And she is the woman who created peace studies as an academic discipline. And she was doing a practice very, very similar to this in men's prisons in the US in the early 90s. And her conclusion, and she wrote up...

in a paper what they told her they had seen there. And her conclusion was, and it was identical to basically what people tell me now, she said, I think we have many more allies for the work ahead than we might think we do. You know, for me, this practice of stepping into the future, when we live in a world where the future is under attack, and the future is being cancelled and colonized, this should be a daily practice in the same way that running yoga, meditation are. And we should do this with our kids.

There's a woman who, I do a newsletter every month, which listeners, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to join me on this journey of kind of exploring these ideas, I do a newsletter every month called the Time Travelers Gazette, goes out the first of every month. And you can just go to my website, robhopkins.net, and put your email address in the email newsletter box, and you'll get it every month. And we do a feature there called Time Machine of the Month, where people send me time machines that they've made. And one woman sent me one, this thing where she,

gets where she does it with kids and she gets them to build it first using egg boxes and toilet rolls and cardboard and they build the time machine together and then they choose where it is they want to go. And a friend of mine who does this work in Copenhagen, his kids started in a new school and the kids and when they when he went to pick them up the first day the teacher said, are you the dad who builds time machines? Because the kids have been saying my dad's a time traveler and he builds time machines and so they built one in the the in the classroom.

where, so when the teacher was teaching kids about history and things, they would have this thing on the wall where had to put your hand on it and write the number of the year you're going to, and then that was how you access the future. And he used that to sort of take them to visit the dinosaurs rather than just tell them about dinosaurs.

So cool. I love that. And I can imagine, like, I want to tell you about my vision of the future. When I did that, I saw, I'm in Bali, I saw these like big green trees and walkable streets and people looking at each other in the eye, not looking at screens. And there was a slowness to it and lots of like recycling and secondhand shops and people were singing lots of music everywhere. And weaving in Bali, they,

used to traditionally weave with banana leaves and they were teaching the little kids how to weave.

Beautiful. No low data centers then.

No, that's not considering.

And it's so interesting that like how different that is from what people from what Silicon Valley like to present people as being the future, know, no one ever saw all that stuff about Google glasses and self driving cars that never never comes up when we do this activity at all.

So there's something communal, there's something common in what people are already longing for.

Yeah, I think we just need to tap into it and then we need to build political movements that start there and then work back. How do we get there? You know, we all want live in a world where our children have good mental health and good teeth and an education in which they can flourish. So how do we get there? We need to get so much better at talking about the future in a way that people can fall in love with to come back to where we started this conversation.

Wow. Well, such an amazing journey we've been on, Rob. Thank you so much for your time. I loved it. And I hope anyone listening to got a little glimpse of the future that they're longing for and a little inspiration on the future that they're longing for and what their part is and bringing that here.

would be lovely if once you've listened to this, if you're listening to it on a forum where you can leave comments, to leave in the comments, what did 2036 look like to you? It lovely to see those.

such a good idea. Yes, I think you can comment on the episode, so please do, I would love to read those. Okay. Well, any... I think that's a great practice to leave people with. Any final thoughts?

Just to say yeah, like I said before if and so you can follow me on so I'm on Instagram as Rob Hopkins 5085 and I'm on LinkedIn those are the only ones I do now because the rest of them are run by fascists and well, not that Instagram isn't but anyway, you know what I mean and and and sign up for the newsletter because this is very much a kind of an ongoing adventure and an ongoing journey and There you'll find out about lots of different things that I'm doing. So yeah, thank you Megan. It's been a joy to be here with you today.

Thank you so much.

Megan Lambert
Next

Season 4, Ep. 10 - Dopamine is Not Desire: How AI & Screens Are Quietly Killing Your Aliveness