From the first moment he hops onto the video call, Rob Hopkins exudes effervescence. Calling us from the south of England, Hopkins’ screen is sunnily lit, surrounded by books in earthy colours scattered across shelves behind him. To see Hopkins surrounded by an abundance of written work is unsurprising: a key thing to know about Hopkins is that literature and stories are irrevocably important to both his tenets and his work.
Hopkins has made a name for himself in the global changemaking community as not only the founder of the Transition Network but also as an author, activist, podcast host, and most recently a time machine builder. Yep, you read that right, a time machine builder.
Hopkins' educational work is immersed in the world of imagination. Drawing from writers including Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Amitabh Ghosh, and George Monbiot, Hopkins shares the connecting sentiment across all these authors’ writings that the issue of climate change is a ‘failure of the imagination’, and shares that we live in a ‘dangerous time’ for our imaginations. “What does that mean?” we ask. Hopkins outlines the mould of the current society we live in, stating that “a more polarised society becomes really damaging for the imagination. The extremes of rich and poor, stress, anxiety, trauma, it's very harmful.”
Recalling a recent article he read by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in the Guardian, Hopkins reads out a sentence he was particularly struck by: ‘Contemporary far right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanised others.’ Hopkins affirms that it is this political landscape, lacking a sense of imagination, that has led to movements such as the rise of the far right and the proliferation of climate negligence.
Amidst this torrent of global turmoil, Hopkins has caught on to something that may be easy to miss: that our will to imagine still exists, and that we continue to have a choice to either continue living as we are, or to imagine better. “Fundamentally, this represents a challenge to reimagine everything; we need to reimagine our food system. We need to reimagine our energy system, our transport system, in a very short period. And we can choose to be the people who go: ‘Great, how exciting. A once in a century opportunity to rethink everything. Let's go for it.’”
We need to reimagine our energy system, our transport system, in a very short period. And we can choose to be the people who go: ‘Great, how exciting. A once in a century opportunity to rethink everything. Let's go for it.’
Imagination, albeit potent and exciting, frankly isn’t always encouraged in our day-to-day lives. “We have an education system which puts almost no value on imagination whatsoever. It quite likes creativity because you can make money out of creativity,” shares Hopkins. “Imagination is a bit naughtier, and wilful, and unpredictable and bold. It's harder to control. It's why in totalitarian states, you lock up the play rights, novelists, and musicians first.” Hopkins’ work often mentions the use of an ‘imagination muscle’: the ability to practice our imaginative abilities, dream more and dream better.
If we live in a world where imagination is not promoted, how then can we cultivate the tools to imagine beyond what we know? Hopkins comes with a set of tools to teach the art of imagination, and one of these tools is the notion of time. What compelled him to explore this theme in his educational work and his upcoming book was that he “saw a T-shirt that a young woman was wearing at a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington in 2020, and it said ‘I've been to the future. We won.’ And it gave [him] goosebumps.”
It was clear from the conversation that Hopkins’ passion for imagination permeated his work. But how, we wondered, does one balance employing imagination with applied global action? Does the imagination really lead one directly to act? Hopkins immediately referenced Mariame Kaba's 'We Do This 'Til We Free Us', where she stresses that ‘we must imagine while we build, always both’. Rob states that the notion of giving people information about global issues and simply hoping they’ll act “patently doesn’t work. We've been doing that for 20 years, 30 years. It has failed, and we are losing this badly.”
So, what could cultivate a pathway from imagination to action? Longing, says Hopkins. “The way I always talk about it is, you know, in Alice in Wonderland, the bit in Alice in Wonderland where she's grown, really, really big, and she's down on her hands and knees, and she's looking through a little door into the most beautiful garden she ever saw in her life. But she can't get in, because she's too big, but she wants to be in that garden more than anything else. And then she has to go off and try and figure out how to make herself small again. That moment, that feeling is what we need to be capturing. Cultivating longing.”
Cultivating longing: what does this mean? According to Hopkins, humankind has done it before. Hopkins recalls the campaigning behind the moon landing, and attributes its success to the fact that long before Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, artists, cartoonists and columnists had already put characters, clad in space suits or nothing at all, on the moon. It was therefore no surprise that the Hergé cartoon piece where these very same characters greeted Armstrong as he touched down from the moon was so popular, as Armstrong represented the actualisation of the ongoing artistic dream: “the longing [to go to the moon, induced by the imagery of these characters already waiting] made it inevitable that we would get there”.
The way I always talk about it is, in Alice in Wonderland, the bit where she's grown really, really big, she's looking into the most beautiful garden she ever saw, but she can't get in, but she wants to be in that garden more than anything.... that feeling is what we need to be capturing. Longing.
We know how to cultivate longing for a moon landing—so what about a better future? And where do we start? Hopkins says the ingredients are time machines and rich, fun, exciting stories. From the story of Sun Ra, a jazz artist who told a story to the world around him that he was an angel from Saturn as a means of expression and black liberation, to assorted time machines in schools and stadiums, with ministries of beauty and imagination, the need for a good story, for beauty and sustenance, for a future of sustainability and enjoyment, is critical for the mind to imagine. “If we're trying to imagine a low carbon future, but we just spend all day watching Fox News, it's almost impossible to imagine because you've got nothing to work with. You go to the cupboards of your memory and there's nothing there.”
“One of the most important things is that people have access to stories of what their future could be like.”, stresses Hopkins. “You know, examples that already exist in the world, the cycling infrastructure in Utrecht, the superblocks in Barcelona, the car free neighbourhoods of Freiburg and Germany, you know, we need those stories and people need to be full of possibilities. It makes it so much easier. You're probably not going to find those stories just on the news but go out and find them. Fill your memory cupboards, as it were. With stories of what's possible.”
Where to start? Local! Hopkins ends the call referencing STAND’s local Ireland, brainstorming quick and reaching big: “Croke Park? What would that look like if we reimagined it? What would it be like? Maybe you could have different elements, that you could stick on, or interact with, collect people’s ideas...when I did my permaculture course years and years ago, what I loved about that was it kind of rewires your brain so that you start seeing possibilities everywhere as you walk around, you're walking down the street. That just looks like a street, but your brain is going: I can have a food garden there. You could plant a tree up there. You could take the rainwater off there, and put it over there. You could put the solar panels on there. It's like a pair of glasses that you start to see the world through.”
We have our imagination tools. We have our stories. We have one another. And so, we ask, in Rob’s words: “This is your opportunity to think really big and bold and ambitious. This is a climate emergency, right? So, what are you going to do?”
To support Hopkins' work, head over to his immersive show crowdfunder here.
