How to Fall in Love with the Future—Rob Hopkins #205

Rob Hopkins is one of the people doing the most to assure that humanity has a healthy, thriving, and happy future. I was blown away by his new book, How to Fall in Love With the Future, which describes a radical new type of climate activism he’s invented where instead of bemoaning the current state of the world, he invites us to imagine the world we want to live in that’s just around the corner, and then do everything we can to make it a reality.

Join me now to find out how to fall in love with the future.

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Scott Snibbe: Rob Hopkins, I am so thrilled to have you back on How to Train a Happy Mind. You were a beloved guest in the past, talking about the Transition Network and all the wonderful things you’ve done to help local communities gradually scale to help—save the world, for lack of a better phrase. Now you’re back. You sent me an advance copy of your book, How to Fall in Love with the Future, and I fell in love with the book. I just finished it, and we’re here to talk about that. Welcome, Rob.

Rob Hopkins: Thanks.

Why do you think love is the most powerful motivator for action today?

Scott Snibbe: Now, just hearing that, people may be scratching their heads. You describe the future as something we can fall in love with. Why do you think love is the most powerful motivator for action today—not fear or urgency, which are probably the more dominant methods being employed?

Rob Hopkins: If Martin Luther King had said, “I have a nightmare,” history would’ve recorded that speech very differently. We’re living in a time—here in the middle of 2025—where, for many, it feels like the future is being canceled. The future is being colonized. The future is disappearing for people.

We’re living in a time—here in the middle of 2025—where, for many, it feels like the future is being canceled.

There’s that line in George Orwell’s 1984: “If you want to imagine the future, picture a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” or whatever that horrible quote is. And I feel like now we’ve basically just replaced that with Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes. It’s really dangerous because it means we stop thinking, dreaming, planning—stop seeing the future as something we can have any kind of involvement in.

As anyone who listened to the first episode will know, my work is very much underpinned by trying to find creative responses to the climate and ecological emergency. We’re also living in a time where the far right—in the US but also increasingly all around the world—are doing something terrifying: they point to the future and say, “The future looks terrifying, but we are strong and powerful, and we will protect you from that.”

And if, at the same time, the people who are more progressive—the ones who understand climate science, whose politics and worldview are rooted in compassion and care—if they are also just painting terrifying visions of the future, then people have nowhere to run to. People are kind of trapped like rabbits between two different sets of headlights. What I’m trying to say is that, for a while, the narrative we saw in the climate movement—about collapse and extinction—was really important. We need to understand that that’s where we’re headed. But that’s a terrible motivator.

One of the questions that underpins the new book is: what if we saw the purpose of our activism as helping people cultivate longing for the future? For a different future—a future that, yeah, might be on the outer edges of possibility, but it’s still possible. It’s there. That’s why I talk about falling in love with the future.

Longing is such an intense, powerful human emotion. But it’s more than strong desire—longing is like a soul ache. It’s your first love. It’s a deep, deep yearning. And that’s what we need to cultivate when we talk about what a low-carbon future looks like. How do we bring that alive for people?

Longing is such an intense, powerful human emotion. But it’s more than strong desire—longing is like a soul ache.

One of the recognitions that comes with that is that those of us who are climate activists, or climate scientists—we’re not very good at that. We can’t help people fall in love with the future without bringing in artists and poets and storytellers, people in our culture who are good at helping people fall in love with things.

We can’t help people fall in love with the future without bringing in artists and poets and storytellers, people in our culture who are good at helping people fall in love with things.

The power of longing

Scott Snibbe: When I read your distinction between desire and longing, it brought up something that people ask me a lot—as someone who leads Buddhist meditations. When you say, “Oh, desire is a delusion,” people ask, “Well, aren’t there good desires? Like desiring a healthy planet?” And in the Buddhist worldview, they very precisely articulate the mental factors. They say, no—desire is this uncomfortable feeling, like you can’t be happy unless you get something. Which you can feel as an activist—it’s part of that despair. But there’s another mental factor called aspiration, which is that longing. That’s the healthy form of wanting something.

Rob Hopkins: Didn’t the Buddha say that desire was like honey smeared on the edge of a razor blade? That’s always been an image that really stayed with me. Part of the power of longing, for me—one of the stories I tell in the book—is about the human project to get to the moon. Jules Verne wrote a book in 1865 called From the Earth to the Moon, where he pulled together all the best evidence, research, and engineering available at the time about how you might actually do that. Then he wrote a really exciting, thrilling story about how we went to the moon.

That book became so popular it inspired loads of scientists and engineers to start figuring out how we might actually do it—how it could work. And that, in turn, inspired other storytellers, musicians, and filmmakers. The first feature film, in 1902, was called A Trip to the Moon. There was this whole genre of popular science—magazines asking things like: What will we eat on the moon? How will we play football on the moon?

The storytelling goes first. It creates the longing to get there. We don’t have a hundred years when it comes to climate change and the ecological crisis, but the same principle applies. We need to be so much better at giving people things to run towards, rather than just things to run screaming away from.

We need to be so much better at giving people things to run towards, rather than just things to run screaming away from.

Scott Snibbe: There’s the famous quote by John F. Kennedy, We choose to go to the moon and do these other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard—in that Boston accent. I quote that all the time. My daughter knows it by heart. But we don’t have politicians saying those kinds of things much anymore, do we?

Rob Hopkins: No, we don’t.

The time traveling activist

Scott Snibbe: I was really struck, reading your book, by how your approach to activism has changed in many ways since the last time we spoke. Now you show up as a time traveler from the future, telling a story about coming back from a world that’s working.

What does this metaphor unlock for you that other forms of activism don’t—this idea of being a time traveler?

Rob Hopkins: I turned 57 this year. I’ve been involved in activism, in some shape or form, since I was about 14. And I kind of feel like right now, we are losing—at quite an epic scale. I don’t know what will work, but I know it needs to look different from what we’ve been doing up until now. Because those things haven’t worked. Or they’ve worked a bit—but not enough.

Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we’ve seen a massive pushback from oil and gas companies, the meat industry, plastics, agrochemical companies—we’re slipping and slipping. The idea of time travel came to me around 2021. I saw a young woman at a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington wearing a T-shirt that said: I’ve been to the future. We won. And it gave me goosebumps.

And it made me think—that’s brilliant. What if that was how we communicated and talked about the change we need to make? My friend Sarah Corbett, who does something she calls “craftivism,” said recently, “We need to move from furious to curious.” I thought that was really lovely.

So about three weeks after I saw that T-shirt—which had just set my mind racing—I thought: what would that actually look like? “I’ve been to the future. We won.” How would you communicate that? What would activism look like if it grew from that? Not long after, I was invited to speak at a big event in London organized by Extinction Rebellion. It was called The Big One—a hundred thousand people surrounding Parliament, calling for more climate action.

I thought, Okay, I’m going to try something different for this. I went to a shop and bought this sort of white bodysuit, and a space helmet, and I showed up like a time traveler. I gave this talk where I said, “I’ve just parked my time machine around the corner. I’ve come back from 2030, and I had to rush over here to tell you—oh my God, it’s amazing. And we saw this, and we saw that—the bicycle rush hours of 2030 were amazing. The regenerative farming, and all these different things.” It was quite theatrical. I imagined myself as Phileas Fogg, just come back from some incredible adventure, talking about what I’d seen.

And there was a moment, about two-thirds of the way through, where I said something like, “Having been there, and having seen how it turned out, just standing here in front of you all and telling you about it makes me feel really emotional.” I looked around at the faces of the people gathered around me—there were lots of people standing very close, like those old political rallies from the 1950s—and there were tears on their faces. And I thought, this is really interesting. What’s going on here?

That was really the inquiry that started me writing the book: what’s happening in people’s minds? That’s why I’ve now developed this character of the time traveler and built a whole narrative around it. Here in Totnes, we built this time machine. It works like this: we bring back artifacts from the future. We bring back photos, recordings—we take people there.

We’re developing a comic book that tells the story of how we built the time machine to collect recordings from the future. We’ve made a music project called Field Recordings from the Future, based on the idea that I go and record places in 2025 that already sound like the future needs to sound—and then I work with this ambient electronic music artist who creates these beautiful pieces from the recordings.

We’ve developed a live music and video performance that takes people into experiencing that future. And just last night, for the first time, I was working with this young engineer who’s built us a “predict your future” machine. You press a button, and it prints out visions from 2030.

One of the people I talk about a lot in the book is Sun Ra, the jazz musician. He always told the story that he wasn’t actually a human being at all. He said he was an angel from Saturn. I read an article about him that described him as someone who did what he did with unshakable certainty and deadpan humor. And that’s kind of the quality I try to bring to this work.

Why pessimism is forbidden

Scott Snibbe: What you do is like a kind of climate improv, right? One of the first things you learn in improv comedy is that you’re never allowed to say no. You have to say “yes, and… yes, and…” That comes up early in your book too—you write that time traveler training forbids sayings like, “That’s never going to work.” I think a lot of people might be grumbling at that right now.

Can you explain why pessimism is forbidden? And what’s the role of criticism or analysis in making a better future?

Rob Hopkins: That comes in a section of the book that starts with a kind of report back from a recent trip we took to 2030. It gives people an experience of walking down the streets and across the rooftops of that world. We always say the time travel suits we wear aren’t to protect us—they’re to protect the people in the future. They have this anti-cynicism coating, so if we happen to bring any residual despondency or despair with us from 2025 into 2030, it won’t affect what’s happening there.

We always say the time travel suits we wear aren’t to protect us—they’re to protect the people in the future. They have this anti-cynicism coating, so if we happen to bring any residual despondency or despair with us from 2025 into 2030, it won’t affect what’s happening there.

We use this term “pastsplaining.” Because in 2030, there’s this sense of excitement and exhilaration—people can see the world around them changing really fast, and they’re thrilled by it. So if we show up from 2025 saying, Well, that’s never going to work, it’s not helpful. Even here in the present, when we’re trying to change things, we don’t want that kind of energy around.

Now, the work and ideas in How to Fall in Love with the Future—I’m not saying this should replace all other forms of activism. I’m not saying, This is now the only way everybody has to do everything. Absolutely not. There’s also a huge and very important role for work around grief—grief-tending, the work of Joanna Macy, all of that is still absolutely essential. What I’m doing isn’t saying, The future will turn out like this. What I’m saying is: it could. And if we shut down the possibility that it could, then we’re done for.

Scott Snibbe: Yeah. I’m also recognizing that this anti-despair coating is for you too, right? That you do feel that despair, and you’re finding ways to antidote it in yourself.

Rob Hopkins: I always say in my talks: if you’re not regularly terrified about the climate and ecological crisis, you’re not paying attention. This isn’t an approach that emerges from some kind of happy-clappy hopium, skirting around the crisis. For me, when I was writing this book, one of the most important parts comes quite early on—when I interview Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who, for me, is one of the most important people working in the field.

If you’re not regularly terrified about the climate and ecological crisis, you’re not paying attention.

Because he’s not willing anymore to sit in some academic ivory tower writing papers. He needs to be out in the world, doing something. He’s been arrested—once for chaining himself to the front of Chase Bank, which is still outrageously funding oil and gas projects, and also for blockading a private jet airport.

I had a long conversation with him where I said, As a climate scientist, you’re presenting these reports that show all the current trends—where we’re headed if we don’t act. That’s what your work focuses on. But what about the line we don’t hear so much about—the line that shows what would happen if we did everything we possibly could? Draw that line for me. What does that look like?

He said, Well, that’s what I call going into emergency mode. That means phasing out fossil fuels very quickly, phasing out industrial meat production very quickly. And if we did that, we could still stay below two degrees. Then we could start, at scale, doing all the natural things that draw down carbon—seaweed forests, soils, all of it. I said, That’s fantastic, but emergency mode is a rubbish name. No one’s going to say, Ooh, let’s go into emergency mode! We need to call it something like delicious possibility mode or something better than that.

We’ve procrastinated so long that if we’d started 20 years ago, the shift could’ve been a gentle curve. Now it’s almost a vertical drop—but we have to make it. Because if we don’t, we’re toast. So for me, the question is: how do we tell the story of that? In a way that makes it feel like we’re moving toward something—something we’re excited to be part of? And the only way to do that is if we can conjure the magic of longing in the way we talk about the future.

Cities that are living in the future

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, this is the bread and butter of your life. And your book is full of vivid, sensory stories of actual transformation happening right now—like depaving streets, rooftop gardens. I was particularly struck by the story of the German city of Vauban.

Could you briefly share how the people of that city took charge of a better future? Because stories like that in your book made me feel, more than anything else, that this is possible.

Rob Hopkins: This is in Freiburg, Germany—Vauban is a district there. It used to be an old French military barracks. And when the French army decommissioned it and moved out, there was a public consultation about what should happen with the land. The public got very involved and said, We want this to be a really low-carbon, sustainable neighborhood. One of the key things they wanted was for it to be as car-free as possible.

What often happens with ideas like that is they get watered down—We’ll have fewer cars, or some limited parking. But in Vauban, they really followed through. About 3,000 people live in this neighborhood, and the entire central area is car-free. If you live there and own a car, you can bring it in to drop things off, but you can’t park it on the street. There’s a shared, multi-story car park on the edge of the neighborhood, covered in solar panels, but no parking within the development itself.

I went there as part of this project I’m doing—recordings of what the future might sound like. I thought, I know what it’ll sound like: kids playing, bikes going by. But I spent three days making field recordings, and after a while, I started to notice things I could hear because the constant growl of internal combustion engines was gone. I could hear people having piano lessons in their homes. I could hear knives and forks clinking on plates inside. You could hear human life in more granular detail. It was amazing.

There are a few places like that in the book—places where, when you arrive, it feels like you’ve stepped into the future. It looks familiar, but something’s different, and it takes a moment to figure out what. Vauban is one. Another is the cycling infrastructure in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

The Dutch government spends half a billion euros a year building excellent cycling infrastructure—because they know it saves them 19 billion euros a year on national health costs. It’s an investment in public health and well-being. When we visit cities like Utrecht or Amsterdam and see the incredible cycling culture, we assume it must have always been like that. But actually, up until the early 1970s, the Netherlands was just as car-centric as anywhere else.

The Dutch government spends half a billion euros a year building excellent cycling infrastructure—because they know it saves them 19 billion euros a year on national health costs. It’s an investment in public health and well-being.

Then one year, 3,000 people were killed on Dutch roads—400 of them were children. One of those children was the son of a journalist, who wrote an article titled Stop the Child Murder in one of the country’s major newspapers. That phrase—Stop the Child Murder—caught on and sparked a national movement. Groups of children started closing streets to play, painting bike lanes at night. It became a massive, citizen-led push. And by the 1980s, many of the people who led that movement had gotten into politics and were able to push those ideas into policy.

So when you arrive in the center of Utrecht now, there’s a particular area with just trams and bicycles. Every morning, 40,000 bicycles pass through. If you sit there at 8 a.m. and watch, it’s just breathtaking. Last time I was there, I met the woman who heads transport planning for the municipality. She said, All those problems we had ten years ago with cars? Now we have them with bicycles—because we just have so many. And I thought—wow. A lot of cities would give their right arm to have that kind of problem.

The role of creatives in helping solve the climate crisis

Scott Snibbe: These are very wealthy, technologically advanced, not particularly socialist countries where this is working. So—it could work everywhere. You reference storytelling, art, even street fashion as tools of your time-traveling revolution. You suggest that maybe artists are the people best equipped to tell the positive stories of our future.

Can you talk a little more about the role of creative people in helping to solve the climate crisis?

Rob Hopkins: If we ask the question: what would activism look like if its primary objective was the cultivation of longing—then we have to recognize something. Climate scientists are rubbish at cultivating longing. That’s not what they’re trained for. Climate activists, too—generally not very good at it. They’re very good at the problem. At focusing on the problem, mobilizing around the problem. But not so good at vividly bringing to life where we could go as a result.

The people in our culture who are good at that are the street artists, the musicians, the writers, the poets—the creative people. We can’t do this without them. The book is, in many ways, a plea to people in the creative world: bring your skills to this. Now is when we need them. In this brief window we have left to pull away from the abyss—why would you make art or music or culture about anything else, really?

We know so many creative people who dedicate their expertise to producing dystopian stuff. We’re awash in dystopias right now—humans being wiped out by zombies, viruses, aliens, gremlins, whatever it is. We don’t need more dystopias. And we don’t really need utopias either—they’re often so far away, so perfect, that they don’t feel actionable or relatable.

What we do need are what my friend Manda Scott calls “thrutopias”—stories about how we got through. Stories about the transition. About how this massive shift actually started now, and how it built over time. There was a film made a few years ago, called 2040, by an Australian filmmaker. He tried to visualize what the world could look like in 2040 if we had done everything we possibly could have. He used lots of CGI and visual storytelling to bring it to life. He called it “an exercise in evidence-based dreaming.” I love that phrase. I think it’s beautiful. And that’s really what I try to do in the work that I do.

Buddhist activism

Scott Snibbe: There was a tiny scene I remember vividly in the new Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson. It stuck out because it was so rare. In one of the episodes, they said something like, We could have a future where half the planet is green, and we live in good relation with it. And they had a beautiful visual—this 3D graphic of what that future could look like. I remember my heart just swelling. Like—wow, I never see this. We need more images like that in popular media.

As a Buddhist—I know you have a Buddhist background too—I couldn’t help but see a connection to Vajrayana Buddhism. Because in Vajrayana, you imagine the very best possible future for yourself as an enlightened being. You try to actually picture: what would it be like if I were the best version of what a human being can be?

Has that crossed your mind at all in terms of your activism?

Rob Hopkins: I remember when I was researching my last book, From What Is to What If, I interviewed Matthieu Ricard—the French monk and incredible teacher. That’s kind of where I was trying to take him in the conversation. I said, Actually, isn’t this kind of like Vajrayana Buddhism? We’re trying to get society to imagine the best world it could create, then to imagine its own role in that world, and to meditate on that, in whatever form that takes—to become that.

It was a really interesting conversation. He’s very analytical, very scholarly. He kind of kicked against the word “imagination.” Because for him, imagination represented something more like mind—daydreamy, monkey-mind stuff. He saw it as potentially distracting. But I felt like he kind of missed the point.

The thing I did love that he said was when I asked him about social media and its impact on our ability to envision the future. As our attention spans get worse, how does that affect our capacity to reimagine the world? And I loved what he said, If the Buddha had Twitter, he never would’ve left the palace. It’s like, if Van Gogh had had TikTok, he never would’ve painted the sunflowers—he’d have just taken a picture and stuck it online.

If the Buddha had Twitter, he never would’ve left the palace.

Also, there was something I wanted to come back to—when you were talking earlier about films that show those kinds of rare, uplifting moments. One thing I’ve started to notice is how we actually do the opposite all the time. I don’t know if you’ve watched The Handmaid’s Tale or read the book, but one of the things they do really powerfully in the TV series is take well-known places in the U.S.—famous landmarks—and set scenes of this horrific dystopia in those exact places.

There’s a scene by the Lincoln Memorial, which has been altered to reflect the new regime. We’re very good at taking familiar places and imagining them in awful dystopian futures—like the White House being blown up by aliens in Independence Day. But we don’t often do the reverse. We rarely take places people know and love and show them transformed into something better. And that’s something I’d love to see more of—because I think it could work really beautifully.

We rarely take places people know and love and show them transformed into something better.

Shifting cultural values regarding wealth

Scott Snibbe: One of your stories from the future is that wealth began to seem deeply unattractive. What changes culturally to shift those values? Unfortunately, one of the harmful trends right now is this kind of disgusting, overblown wealth—not necessarily serving humanity.

Do you see signs of that happening? How does wealth become deeply unattractive, and are there signs of that?

Rob Hopkins: I think there are some signs—especially in a lot of young people’s politics, around things like taxing the rich. What we’re seeing, particularly in the U.S., is this kind of worship of billionaires—this idea that all we have to do is create the perfect conditions for billionaires, and everything else will work itself out. And it’s producing such revolting, abhorrent outcomes, I think we will see a big cultural shift away from it. I think we’re right on the cusp.

We just saw Jeff Bezos getting married in Venice—$35 million on a wedding that involved basically taking over someone else’s city for his own event. Here in the UK, until recently, we had Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister—one of the worst we’ve ever had—whose wife was richer than the Queen. You had someone in the highest office in the land, in a country where one in four single mothers is going hungry because they can’t afford to feed their children. And yet his wife could’ve eradicated food poverty in the UK and paid for it with a credit card. It wouldn’t have made the slightest dent in her wealth.

You had someone in the highest office in the land, in a country where one in four single mothers is going hungry because they can’t afford to feed their children. And yet his wife could’ve eradicated food poverty in the UK and paid for it with a credit card.

Back in Victorian times—of course, there were many awful aspects to that era—but among the wealthy, there was a culture of prestige based on what they endowed: the libraries, art galleries, schools, universities, and public buildings. The public luxury they helped create. We don’t have that now. There’s no Elon Musk Hospital. No Elon Musk Art Gallery. No Elon Musk Schools.

So yes, I think we could be on the cusp of a cultural shift around this.

How imagination saved concentration camp inmates from death

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, and looking back to that era also reminds me of the power of artists. In many ways, Charles Dickens helped create the welfare state. The emotional impact of his books influenced the wealthy who were reading them to care about the plight of poor people. The story that hit me the most in your book—and that I was completely unfamiliar with—is that of the surrealist Robert Desnos, who literally saved a truckload of concentration camp inmates from death by imagining a different future for them.

Can you tell that story for people? It’s extraordinary.

Rob Hopkins: Robert Desnos was a surrealist poet living in France. He was part of the French Resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo, then sent to a succession of different camps. The story goes that in one of these camps, the guards came around and loaded all the men from his barracks into the back of a truck. Desnos knew they were being taken to be killed. When they arrived and the back of the truck was opened, Robert was the first person off. He stood by the truck and began reading the palms of the men as they came out.

He said things like, Oh, I see you have a very long lifeline. You’re going to live a long life. You’ll have many children and great happiness. And something changed. Something shifted in the space—so much so that the guards couldn’t go through with it. They put everyone back on the truck and drove them back to the camp. There’s something about that—even in the darkest, darkest spaces—the imagination still matters. That sense of possibility is vital.

There’s something about that—even in the darkest, darkest spaces—the imagination still matters. That sense of possibility is vital.

Another story I share in the book comes from a talk I gave in France. A few weeks earlier, they’d hosted another speaker there—a 95-year-old woman who was one of the last surviving members of the French Resistance. She’d joined as a teenager. Someone asked her, Of all the people you knew in the Resistance, was there something they had in common? She thought for a moment and said, They were all optimists.

That really struck me. When you need optimists, you really need them. And we really need them now. So I suppose I see a lot of my work as building optimism-generating machines.

When you need optimists, you really need them. And we really need them now.

Scott Snibbe: I’m an optimist too—but not in a Pollyanna kind of way. I try to explain to people: a pessimist is often wrong because they’re so sure. They say, That’s it. The world’s over. Oceans will rise three feet. Cities will burn. But the future’s not here yet. Now sure, it might be an 80% possibility—we might say, “We only have a 20% chance”—but even then…

Rob Hopkins: Great! Twenty percent chance? Let’s do that then.

Scott Snibbe: Kim Stanley Robinson—he probably knows more than almost anyone about this whole problem—and I asked him how he manages to stay optimistic. He said, I’m a functional optimist. Because I want to make a difference. He recognizes the odds might favor disaster over salvation, but he still says: I’m going to do everything I possibly can to make that smaller probability come true.

Rob Hopkins: And there are so many examples throughout human history of things that changed very, very fast. We forget those stories—we don’t often hear them. We just hear that everything is slow and incremental.

“What if” exercises

Scott Snibbe: I don’t know if you know this one—I remember reading it when I was really young. It gave me the kind of optimism you talk about. The level of horse manure on New York streets was exponentially increasing before the automobile. Engineers projected we’d be three feet deep in it within a few years. They said it was an unsolvable problem.

Then life changed. The automobile came along—introducing new problems, sure. Stuart Brand has this great line: Every problem was once a solution. That’s nice to think—maybe some of the great climate solutions will bring about some interesting new problems too.

I wanted you to talk about the “what if” exercise you do in your workshops. I found that really powerful, and it feels like a practical note to end on.

Rob Hopkins: I feel like those two words—what if—are two of the most important words in our language. A good “what if” question is like that moment in Alice in Wonderland where she’s too big to get into the garden, but she can see through the door. She really wants to be in there. It gives us a window onto possibility—something that feels doable and exciting.

In workshops, we often do what’s called a “walk of what if.” We begin with an overarching question: What if, in everything it did, this organization acted like this was truly a climate and ecological emergency? What would it do? What would it do differently? Then people go for a walk with strips of paper that each end with “what if,” and they brainstorm ideas. There are two rules: don’t be constrained by what already exists, and no one is allowed to say “yes, but.”

You can say “yes, and”—you can add, build, let the idea evolve—but “yes, but” is the death of imagination. When they come back, we explore the questions and work some of them into firm proposals. A good “what if” question can unlock so much. One example I always use is Liège, in Belgium, which I talk about in the book. They’re building a food belt around the city—an amazing visionary project. It started with five people asking: What if, in a generation’s time, the majority of food eaten in Liège came from the land closest to it?

That question sparked so much curiosity. People thought, I’d love to see that—and I have something I can contribute. They held a big public event around that question. Six hundred people showed up. That event launched numerous projects. Four years later, they had raised five million euros to fund 30 new cooperatives. That money didn’t come from banks or the municipality. It came from the people of Liège investing in their own city.

A good “what if” question gives us a different lens for seeing problems. It opens up possibility. And it’s really good fun.

Time traveling to the future as a daily practice

Scott Snibbe: Do you have any final thoughts—a specific tactic or habit from your practice—that a listener could take into their daily life to be a force for positive change?

Rob Hopkins: Well, I guess before we get to that, I’ll share something we always do in my workshops and talks. I bring my time machine—we turn the room into a time machine—and take a step into the future. We walk around using all our senses: What does this world smell like? Taste like? What does it sound like? This world you long for, the one you most want to see.

After the journey, we come back and share what we saw and experienced. I always tell people—this should be a daily practice. Like meditation, yoga, or running. Because the opposite is also a daily practice. We wake up, reach for our phones, and they tell us everything is awful, the world’s broken, and there’s no point trying. That’s incredibly paralyzing.

When we imagine the future, our minds go to the cupboards of our memory to find raw materials. If we only consume negative media, those cupboards are empty. It’s hard to assemble anything hopeful from that. So one of the most important things you can do to feed your imagination is to know the stories of what’s possible.

That’s what I try to do in the book. There’s a chapter where I say we need to stop using the word impossible and replace it with not yet. The things we’re told are impossible—like taxing billionaires, transforming energy systems, or acting meaningfully on climate change—are things we know are possible. We’ve seen them happen, somewhere. Meanwhile, the things we’re told are possible—like infinite economic growth on a finite planet—are clearly impossible.

So find those stories. Find the films, the websites, the social feeds that are sharing them. Because if all we let in are the stories of breakdown and collapse, the future disappears. We owe it to ourselves to intentionally and mindfully fill the cupboards of our memory with stories of possibility.

We owe it to ourselves to intentionally and mindfully fill the cupboards of our memory with stories of possibility.

Scott Snibbe: That’s beautiful. It’s a real invitation for people to take into their lives. That addition of “yet”—young people are learning it. In my daughter’s school, whenever someone says, I don’t know how to play the ukulele, or I can’t solve simultaneous equations, they’re told: Add yet.

Rob Hopkins: Exactly. Sometimes we like to paint a low-carbon future as if we’re asking people to imagine a complex Star Trek plot—something far-fetched and tricky. But I always say to people, It’s not that hard. It’s the cycling infrastructure of Rotterdam. It’s the superblocks of Barcelona. It’s the car-free neighborhoods of Freiburg. It’s the food system of Liège. It’s the commitment to reclaiming public space from cars that we’re seeing in Paris. Et cetera, et cetera. Everything we need to do already exists somewhere.

Scott Snibbe: Thank you so much, Rob. It’s extraordinary speaking with you, and I know you have a tight schedule with other interviews. In the next episode, we’re going to have you tell one of your future stories, and I’m really looking forward to that. Listeners can find that in the next episode. Thank you for everything you’re doing for the planet.

Rob Hopkins: And thank you, Scott, for everything you are doing—for the planet, and for bringing together the dharma with the crises we’re facing today. The places where those meet—that’s such precious and important work. Thank you for doing that as well.

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Rob Hopkins books

How to Fall in Love with the Future (2025)

In How to Fall in Love with the Future: A time traveller’s guide to changing the world, Transition Network cofounder Rob Hopkins shares how a pandemic-born podcast led him to explore the power of imagination through “time travel” conversations with guests envisioning the world of 2030. Drawing on history, neuroscience, and cultural movements, he reveals how imagining positive futures can reshape activism, creativity, and collective action. This inspiring book invites readers to envision—and begin building—a future they would be excited to live in.

From What Is to What If (2019)

From What Is to What If: Unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want by Rob Hopkins argues that humanity’s most vital tool—imagination—is in decline at the very moment it’s needed most. Amid crises of climate, biodiversity, inequality, and mental health, Hopkins shows how communities worldwide are already harnessing imagination to transform housing, energy, food, and local economies. Urging a collective “What if?” mindset, the book calls on us to revive imagination as the key to empathy, resilience, and building a hopeful future.

The Transition Starts Here, Now and Together (2017)

In 2005, Rob Hopkins began a grassroots experiment in Totnes, England, inviting neighbors to build a new, locally based economy. The resulting “Transition Town” model encouraged short food supply chains, local renewable energy, and community currencies, showing how ordinary citizens could create resilience from the ground up. From that first initiative, the movement has spread to over 1,200 communities in 47 countries, each quietly transforming local life into a more sustainable and self-reliant future.

The Power of Just Doing Stuff (2013)

The Power of Just Doing Stuff: How local action can change the world shows how ordinary people, tired of waiting for permission, are transforming their communities by taking action together. It argues that these grassroots efforts form the seeds of a new economy—one built on local resilience, creativity, entrepreneurship, and well-being—and demonstrates that such change is already working worldwide. Filled with inspiring real-life examples, the book is a powerful resource for schools, campaigners, community groups, and anyone ready to be part of this shift.

The Transition Companion (2011)

In 2009, The Transition Handbook: Making your community more resilient in uncertain times introduced a community-led model for addressing peak oil and climate change, sparking a global movement that now thrives in villages, cities, and universities worldwide. Its follow-up, The Transition Companion, builds on this momentum with practical tools and inspiring stories of communities creating resilient local economies, reducing energy use, and fostering creativity. By combining vision, guidance, and real-world examples, the book shows how collective action can transform vulnerability into opportunity and hope.

The Transition Handbook (2009)

Humanity has built a deep dependence on oil in an astonishingly short time, with little preparation for scarcity or rising costs. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience reframes this challenge as an opportunity, showing how communities can revive local economies, develop new skills, create local currencies, and produce their own food, fuel, and housing. Serving as a practical manual for “energy descent,” it makes the case that small, community-driven solutions are not only inevitable but also hopeful and empowering.

Local Food (2009)

As recession and rising fuel costs intensify, Local Food: How to make it happen in your community offers a practical and inspiring guide to what communities can achieve by working together. Drawing on Transition initiatives and global examples, it highlights the power of collaboration through community gardens, food guides, local currencies, and Community Supported Agriculture. Urging collective action, the book shows how local efforts can create resilient food systems that are greater than the sum of their parts.

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