Resilience lacks radicality. Let’s cultivate our imagination seriously
In the Transition movement, we saw resilience as a way of “bouncing forward”. We wanted to use the anticipation of these shocks to design different and better systems.
Transition movement
Transitioning Our Money to Invest Local
People often ask, “So what do Transition Town groups do?” One answer to that question would be, “We take good ideas, bring them home, and make them real.”
Ten years of Transition in Luxembourg
In 2010, after the failure of the Copenhagen World Climate Summit, a new idea paved the way: Transition. Ten years later, the movement has also taken root in Luxembourg.
What If? there was a daily imagination lesson?
The imagination is radical. It is the only way to get us beyond what is and to get us to what if. It can get us beyond business as usual, beyond what is in front of us.
Wellbeing Farm, a “Slow Tech Living Laboratory” for the Hudson Valley Bioregion
Wellbeing Farm will explore an array of innovative heritage and leading-edge technologies by which individuals, communities, and the Hudson Valley Bioregion can thrive in decades ahead – designing and realizing pragmatic, environmentally and economically sound tools for peacefully, equitably, and intelligently transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Deepening our analysis: Connecting the dots between social justice, extractive economy, & ecological crises
Transition leaders from across the country came together to explore how Transition US could deepen, shift, or adapt our analysis of the crises we face: away from an emphasis on peak oil & resource depletion, and toward a more nuanced understanding of the extractive economy and its connection to both social justice and ecological crises.
Transforming the University to Confront the Climate Crisis, Part 3
This final part of the series presents a vision of new type of university, exemplified in the world-spanning Ecoversities Alliance, and dreamed of in Transition U and Eco Vista U, two prototypes that I am involved in co-creating with students, staff, faculty, and community members in Santa Barbara, California, and in the Transition US movement.
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 14 Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins is an author and a Co-Founder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network. He approaches the question of “What could possibly go right?” with a fascination in the power of imagination for our future.
Rob Hopkins Reviews ‘Human Kind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman’s new book, ‘Human Kind’, argues that, in essence, “most people, deep down, are decent”, and that the world would be a very different place if we were to recognise that. It may be one of the most important books you will ever read.
What the Transition Movement can Teach us About how to ‘Bounce Forward’
Central to the Transition movement from the outset has been the idea of resilience. Usually framed as the ability to ‘bounce back’, it is seen in the Transition movement as being better imagined as the capacity to ‘bounce forward’, i.e. to use it as the opportunity to move forward to something better.
From What Is to What If: A Green Stimulus and the Importance Envisioning the “Impossible”
Though many of our ideas may seem “impossible” now, history shows us again and again that today’s “what ifs” can become tomorrow’s “what is” during a time of crisis – but only if we take them seriously enough and put in the work that’s necessary to bring them to fruition.
Eco Vista: Building a Transition Town in a Student Community in California
“Eco Vista” was the name chosen in 2017 by a group of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara acting together with long-time community members to describe their vision of turning their rather unusual community of Isla Vista into an ecovillage in the next ten years. Unusual because 23,000 people live together in an area of just .54 square miles, with eighty percent of them between the ages of 18 and 24.