Rob Hopkins is a cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, and the author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently, From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. He presents the podcast series ‘From What If to What Next‘ which invites listeners to send in their “what if” questions and then explores how to make them a reality. In 2012, he was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events. An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transtionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.
From Tiny Acorns: celebrating 21 years of the Kinsale permaculture course
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
The idea of a permaculture course that might go on to change the world would have seemed a completely absurd idea that June day in John Thuellier’s office. But as Naomi Klein says, “there are no non-radical solutions left”.
A Great Custodian of the Collective Imagination
By Rob Hopkins, Transition Network
That there’s… In my dream world just one gathering that’s only about imagination. What are we dreaming into the world? How do we imagine our work will be of service to the future?
“Hope with its sleeves rolled up” blooms in Wellington
By Rob Hopkins, Transition Together
If positive feedbacks can be the way we describe how the world unravels and declines, perhaps it’s time we started using them as a way of describing what is so evident in Wellington: that self-reinforcing expansion of confidence and sense of what’s possible that comes from seeing real people creating real change on the ground.
Stories from the movement: Transition Toronto
By Rob Hopkins, Transition Network
The principle in Transition of focusing your energy on what you are passionate about is beautifully captured in the work of Transition Toronto in Canada.
Transition Wilmslow’s gardens grow and grow
By Rob Hopkins, Transition Together
With real momentum clearly underway with the community garden at Oakenclough, how has seeing this project taking shape informed the group’s sense of what might be possible in the future? What are they dreaming for where all this might go?
“The possible has been tried and failed: now I want to try the impossible”: What Sun Ra can teach the climate movement
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
What if, as climate activists, we were to respectfully adopt that concept of “I’ve been to the future. We won” and build on it.
Reflections on tsunamis, determination and a week in Glasgow
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
And so I leave Glasgow not optimistic or pessimistic, but infinitely more determined. And feeling like the power, the flow, the surge of Friday and Saturday’s tsunamis will carry us forward. I feel it at my back, I feel it in my stomach, and I will feel it forever.
COP26 and the Five Stages of Grief
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
The output of COP26 needs to be, as BreakThrough put it, “a ‘big minus’ in emissions, not ‘net zero’ emissions”. But it also needs to communicate acceptance an honest and a truthfulness, that the climate and ecological emergency goes far far deeper than just electric cars and heat pumps, it demands a fundamental reimagining of everything.