At the end of September I will be in Copenhagen for what promises to be an amazing event. Well, two events actually. On the afternoon of Friday 26th September, I will be on a panel with Kate Rawort…| Rob Hopkins
We live in a time when what should be happening is that the government is printing money to enable a renewable energy/energy conservation revolution, turning every home into a super-insulated power…| Rob Hopkins
I'm delighted to announce the launch of the Crowdfunder for our Field Recordings from the Future project. The link to the Crowdfunder is here. Every penny raised will enable us to roll out time machines in as many places as possible, portals that will allow people to access the future that turned out the best it possibly could have. It's vitally important work, as Mr Kit and myself explain...| Rob Hopkins
It's very exciting to finally be able to share with you the cover of 'How to Fall in Love with the Future' which will be published June 17th by Chelsea Green Publishing. It took us a while to get there, but I hope you'll agree it was worth sticking with it. The cover needed to capture a future worth falling in love with, and I think we've achieved that.| Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins, a pioneer in sustainability and community-driven change, believes that the future isn’t something we stumble upon—it’s something we actively create or fail at. At the heart of his work lies a question: what happens when we lose the ability to imagine a better world? For Hopkins, imagination is more than just creativity—it’s a survival tool essential for unlocking the sustainable, resilient, and equitable futures we are desperately in need of [Original here].| Rob Hopkins
When I was about 18, I read Angela Carter’s extraordinary 1972 novel ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’, and in these dark days as my 57th birthday approaches it comes back into my imagination often.| Rob Hopkins
Here's a treat you might like to offer yourself in 2025. At the end of May, at the wonderful Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, I will be running a weekend course based on my forthcoming book 'How to Fall in Love with the Future' (coming May 2025), sharing the tools and practices I use to bring the future that results from our doing everything we could possibly have done alive for people. See you there.| Rob Hopkins
It was an honour to be a keynote speaker at the Planetiers conference in Portugal as my month-long trip there came to a close. Here is the talk I gave there, including your introduction to the movie 'Cat Women of the Moon'.| Rob Hopkins
This is a write-up of the tour we just finished around Portugal, which I hope captures how it was. It was quite an adventure! May it leave a legacy of renewed energy and momentum and some new tools and practices, as well as new connections between people.| Rob Hopkins
Here is a beautiful video that tells the story of the 'Town Anywhere' activity, designed by Ruth Ben Tovim and which I co-facilitated with her at the event back in August 2024. It captures wonderfully the magic that happens when people are invited to imagine the future and to then physically build it.| Rob Hopkins
I’m delighted to announce that Ruth and I (my first time co-facilitating it) will be putting it on in Bristol on August 29th, 10am-4pm as part of the fabulous Forwards Festival. It’s go…| Rob Hopkins
If you spend any time reading about the connection between education and the imagination, one name comes up repeatedly. Kieran Egan has been writing about how to make education more imaginative si…| Rob Hopkins
Something really amazing is happening in Liége in Belgium. I was last there 4 years ago, where I gave talks and did meetings in support of Liege en Transition, and to attend a meeting to promote a…| Rob Hopkins
Eric Holthaus was once called ‘The Rebel Nerd of Meteorology’ by Rolling Stone magazine and is a journalist who writes about climate change. In 2013, sitting at an airport, he burst into tears havi…| Rob Hopkins
When looking through research into imagination, memory and the brain, one name that keeps appearing is that of Dan Schacter. We recently interviewed Donna Rose Addis on this podcast, and she and D…| Rob Hopkins
How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and …| Rob Hopkins
When it comes to the perennial question of how best to engage communities in thinking about the past, the present and, most importantly, the future in playful and imaginative ways, there are few mo…| Rob Hopkins
If it is true that we are living through a time in which our collective imagination is increasingly devalued and undernourished, what might be the role of story in that, and how might story be part…| Rob Hopkins
I don’t know about you, but most of my time at school did very little to foster my imagination. It tended to be viewed as though I had brought a naughty, troublesome friend to school with me, one n…| Rob Hopkins
As the research stage of the book I am writing on imagination starts to wraps up, it was a real treat recently to chat to Donna Rose Addis, a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University o…| Rob Hopkins
“In 1890, Clément Ader was fascinated by bats. He wanted to fly like them. He brought gigantic bats with 1 meter long wings from India and studied their morphology by letting them fly in his …| 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, …| Rob Hopkins
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…| Rob Hopkins
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…| Rob Hopkins
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 ‘So…| Rob Hopkins
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…| Rob Hopkins
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, …| Rob Hopkins
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 …| Rob Hopkins
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 wha…| Rob Hopkins
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 …| Rob Hopkins
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, unstopp…| Rob Hopkins
In case you don’t know, the Transition Hubs are the organisations that represent and support Transition in different countries (Transition Mexico, Transition Germany etc…). They work closely togeth…| 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…| Rob Hopkins
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&…| Rob Hopkins
It is a joy to be asked to write a foreword for this delightful book. Having written most of the early published books about Transition, it is to be greatly celebrated that other voices are now ste…| Rob Hopkins
And so ‘The Ministry of Imagination Manifesto: an imagination-based manifesto for times that need one’ was born. We’ve painstakingly edited together all the policies, under subject head…| Rob Hopkins
Last month, the River Exe came alive with song, night swimming, stories and a wild salmon run for the first Festival of the River Exe. Transition co-founder Rob Hopkins hears about the three Transi…| Rob Hopkins
Our four day immersion in London Transition activities started on Thursday evening at the Doreen Bazell Hall, a Tenants and Residents Association (TRA) Hall on the Goldington Estate in Camden, to v…| Rob Hopkins
I have no idea how many trees have been planted by Transition groups since the movement began (17 years ago), and no way of knowing, but it must be a pretty huge number by now. But how do they orga…| Rob Hopkins
What would it sound like to live in a future in which beavers were now considered an essential part of our now rapidly-rewilding landscapes? If flooding in towns and cities across the UK was now hu…| Rob Hopkins
I keep coming back to how vitally important it is to create space for the imagination, what I call ‘What If spaces’, whether in our own lives, our organisations or our communities. In this article,…| Rob Hopkins
