I learned about Rob Hopkins and the Transition Movement in 2018 through a friend who defined herself as a regenerate. I can’t remember which podcast or video she pointed me to that formally introduced me to his work, but I will be forever grateful for the discovery.

While reading his book The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times (2011) and listening to his podcast Imagination taking power, I quickly moved from hopeless to hopeful as my own imagination took flight. Until then, I had no idea there was an entire network of people in the world already doing the important, on-the-ground work needed to shift our global narrative away from one of assured disaster, to one of creative resilience.

Until then, I thought we were doomed.

In his second book, From What Is To What If — Unleashing the Imagination to Create the Future We Want (2019), Hopkins focusses on the importance of imagining what that creative resilience might look like. He asks: “Given everything humanity has accomplished, all of it driven by leaps of the imagination, why is envisioning a safer, saner, happier, more peaceful path forward so consistently beyond our reach?”

Offering us guidance from the start, Hopkins begins From What Is to What If with a hopeful narrative he names “How Things Turned Out OK.” In this story, he describes his life some 20 years in the future, a future in which humans had the foresight to take the necessary steps to curb the climate crisis we are living now.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

I wake, well rested, in the straw-bale-walled apartment my family and I call home. Built fifteen years ago as part of a sustainable-construction initiative throughout our city, the three-storey-high apartment complex costs virtually nothing to heat, its basement hosts composting units for all the building’s toilets, and the solar panels on the roof generate all our electricity needs. I wake my kids, get them dressed and fed and accompany them to school — a walk that takes us through shared gardens with a diversity of food crops, including young ruby chard whose deep red leaves radiate like stained glass caught in the brilliant sun of this late spring morning. The streets are quiet, due to the sparse motorised traffic, and they are lined in fruit and nut trees in early blossom. The air smells of spring.

After he finishes telling his story, Hopkins lets the reader know that this imagined world is not a Utopia. He says, “It still rains, friends fall out and people have bad days. Some impacts of climate change are still felt.” And, he acknowledges his story of hope might not resemble yours.

He explains: “I start with it because we live in a time bereft of such stories — stories of what life could look like if we were able to find a way over the course of the next twenty years to be bold, brilliant and decisive, to act in proportion to the challenges we are facing and to aim for a future we actually feel good about.”

He continues by saying, “Sadly, it seems far easier to imagine almost any dystopian scenario than the possibility that we might actually still have the competence to act, to create something else, to dig ourselves out of the many holes of our making. The message that ‘it can’t be done’ is strong and pervasive.”

To read a ‘How Things Turned Out OK’ story about my home town, please click HERE.

Seeding Hope

Throughout the book, Hopkins provides ample examples and proof that cultures can change in positive and proactive ways, even “rapidly and unexpectedly,” when the need arises. He also cites many psychological studies about how tapping into our imagination can increase the likelihood of a certain outcome coming to pass. He tells us too that we must learn to nurture our imagination through practice and collective efforts.

“It is not only about images and the ability to hold a picture in your mind,” he says. “It is multisensory, encompassing smell, touch, sound, emotion, and taste.”

As a lifelong reader, film buff and (at times) tv addict, I am highly aware that we live in a time bereft, as Hopkins points out, of “stories of what life could look like if we were able to find a way over the course of the next twenty years to be bold, brilliant and decisive.” Too much time has been wasted telling disaster stories.

Take a look at The Failure of Dystopian Literature for more on this idea.

Imagine telling stories about living in a world where war has ceased, where poverty is a thing of the past, where famine is a distant memory and where disease brought on by our own greed is no longer in question. Imagine a planet healed through global awareness and a common, concerted effort. Imagine if we all wanted these healthy outcomes at the same time and we dreamed of them every day and night — together.

Imagine the innovations that could be sparked if only we had faith that we ARE bold enough, brilliant enough, and decisive enough to find our way to where we need to be.

That’s the future I want to see. Those are the stories I would like to tell.

To read my ‘How Things Turned Out OK’ story, please click HERE.

Thank you for reading. ❤️

By the way, I do not use affiliate links in my posts.

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