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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.

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
Ben Goldfarb

Ben Goldfarb on How Beavers can Boost the Collective Imagination

By Rob Hopkins, Ben Goldfarb, Rob Hopkins blog

One of the finest books I’ve read recently was ‘Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter’ by Ben Goldfarb. Ben is an American environmental journalist who has taken great interest in this remarkable creature and its ability to, as he put it when we spoke, “help tackle many of our ecological problems if we just get out of the way and let the rodent do the work”. 

  • July 10, 2019
Climate emergency event

‘So You’ve Declared a Climate Emergency, Now What?’ Event Review

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

What a climate emergency would mean for Exeter University, and what a genuinely low-carbon, resilient, localised, embedded, civic, ‘anchor institution’ would look like is a huge conversation, one that will need to cultivate an imaginative culture where anything feels possible, but on the strength of this event, that process has, hopefully, begun.

  • June 6, 2019
Market gardens

Why the Next 12 Years Could be the Making of us

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

It was a delightful taste of what the climate emergency will look, feel, taste and sound like if we get it right. It was the future. It was common sense. And I can tell you, it smelt, tasted and looked absolutely fantastic.

  • June 3, 2019
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