1. Home
  2. Authors
Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins is the cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He is a serial blogger, and author of The Power of Just Doing Stuff , The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion. He has been awarded a PhD by the University of Plymouth and an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the West of England. In 2012 he was voted one of the Independent's top 100 environmentalists and one of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a keen gardener and one of the founders of New Lion Brewery in Totnes and a Director of Atmos Totnes, a very ambitious community-led development project.

Rob Hopkins

The Importance of Imagination – an Interview with Rob Hopkins

By Rob Hopkins, Transition Network

Why are we failing at something that comes so naturally to us as children? Could it be that at this most critical point in our planet’s history, when all our resources and senses are required, that we are not well equipped at all? We’re so busy that there’s no time for our imaginative lives. Our imagination is actually shot to bits.

  • November 19, 2019
Tooting Twirl

The Tale of the Tooting Bus Turning Circle

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

This chapter is about how we can start asking different questions – specifically questions that begin with ‘What if . . .’ and that help us unlock the imagination in service to the big challenges we face. It’s about more than the question per se, however.

  • November 13, 2019
Peter Gray

Talking Play and Imagination with Peter Gray

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

What I’ve learned is in these band hunter gatherer cultures, children play. They are free to play all day long. There’s no such thing as anything like school. There’s no sense that it’s the adults job to educate children. Children learn on their own and they learn in play. They learn by watching, observing, and incorporating what they see in to their play. That’s how children are designed to grow up.

  • October 30, 2019
From What Is to What If?

Why I Spent the Last 2 Years Writing a Book about Imagination

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

It was a quote by my late friend and mentor David Fleming that tipped me over into thinking that writing a book about imagination was something I needed to do. In ‘Lean Logic’, he wrote “if the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination”. There was something about that sentence that got under my skin.

  • October 18, 2019
Climate strike

What if Friday September 20th 2019 was the Day the World Tipped?

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

What would It feel like to live through an era-defining, seismic social, cultural and economic transition? A tipping point beyond which nothing felt the same and everything felt possible? Clearly such things don’t come along very often, indeed they are pretty rare. So rare in fact that we usually don’t allow ourselves to believe that they are possible. But they are. And we are in one right now. And it’s amazing. Let me explain.

  • September 23, 2019
×Close