Meet Rob Hopkins, the time-traveling environmentalist

Beware the imagination-killers

Before he was a time traveler, Hopkins started the Transition Towns movement, which grew from its beginnings in the small English town of Totnes to become a worldwide network of grassroots community groups in 50 countries, working to look after their local environment and be more resilient to climate change. All of which is to say: Hopkins is not a crackpot. He knows a thing or two about getting things done.

His journeys through time are in fact facilitated group imagination sessions, which he uses to get people to visualize how things could be. When he talks about these trips as if they really happened, it’s because he believes our only chance of getting to a world like this is to leave cynicism behind. To dream big. To suspend disbelief.

The book explores Hopkins’ techniques for visualising the future, including instructions for how to ‘build your own time machine’, so anyone can take a group of fellow travelers on an imagination-sparking, cynicism-crushing trip. It also tells the stories of campaigners and community leaders who have succeeded in getting people in their area to imagine how things could be different in five, 10 or 20 years’ time – and used that as a springboard for real change.

Hopkins sees humanity’s failure to deal properly with the climate crisis (yet) as a failure of imagination – we just haven’t been able to grasp the scale of the changes required – and what the consequences of action and inaction could be.

“We are living in a time which is a kind of perfect storm of factors that are diminishing our ability to see things as if they could be otherwise,” Hopkins tells me, when we meet after an event promoting his book. He repeats this phrase for emphasis: “to see things as if they could be otherwise”. It’s his preferred definition of ‘imagination’.

The “perfect storm” of imagination-killers includes education systems that keep our thinking firmly inside the box; tech platforms designed to suck our precious attention away; precarious economic conditions that don’t give us a moment to breathe, and the mental health effects of… well, all of the above.

“In the UK one in four single mothers are avoiding or skipping meals in order to feed their children,” says Hopkins to illustrate the point. “This is not creating the conditions for an imaginative population.”

What imagination can do

The idea of taking on a challenge as huge as the climate crisis with a bit of imagination, is more grounded than it might sound – and it’s a perspective Hopkins shares with the likes of the activist and writer Rebecca Solnit and the author Amitav Ghosh.

“We’re not waiting for any new solutions for the climate emergency,” Hopkins says. “We know all the things that we have to do. What we need is a popular hunger to make those things happen. That means remembering that dealing with climate change isn’t just about cutting carbon. “If we get this right, this is the way to tackle the mental health epidemic, social isolation, loneliness… This is about food and housing and love and art and public luxury and dancing and all of these different things as well.”

Of course, imagination isn’t much use without action. But the inverse is also true, says Hopkins. “If all we do is ‘do’ things, and we don’t stop to say, why? What do we do? Where is this going? What’s the goal here? What’s the vision?… then the ‘doing’ is not anywhere near as productive as it could be.”

“The climate emergency absolutely demands that we’re able to see things as if they could be otherwise, because the current way that we do most things is profoundly damaging, and the stakes are huge,” he says.

Climate scientists have suggested the world needs to go into “emergency mode” – which Hopkins argues is a terrible phrase. “No one’s going to vote for emergency mode,” he says. “The idea that we often are presented with in the climate movement is that if we just give people the right terrifying leaflet or link on YouTube, they’re going to leap from not knowing anything about it to being really involved and really engaged. That very, very rarely happens. We need to talk about the changes that we need to make in ways that are delicious and evoke longing.”

Tell us a story

This is what Hopkins means when he talks about falling in love with the future, and to do that we need “well-told stories of what’s possible”, he believes. Scientists and activists can help with this, but it’s not typically their forte. “The cultivation of longing is the skillset of artists, playwrights, street artists, designers, poets, musicians. We can’t do this without those people.”

Real-life stories of changes happening right now, elsewhere the world, can also offer enticing visions of what could be. In his book Hopkins writes about visiting a restaurant that runs completely on solar power, a farm that reintroduced beavers to help with water management, a 1970s town that pulled up all its concrete, and a Dutch city where the majority of trips are done by bike. He encourages readers to keep their eyes open for examples like these, as fuel for their own big ideas.

Many such stories can be found in Transition Towns, a movement that Hopkins describes as embodying “hope with its sleeves rolled up”. His own hometown of Totnes went as far as minting its own currency to encourage people to spend with local businesses (‘Totnes pounds’ were in circulation for more than a decade until they fell victim to the declining use of cash). It’s an example of people getting together to make a difference for the place they live – and not waiting for leaders to do it for them. Totnes residents also grow food together, cooperate on measures to save energy and work together on measures to make the local economy stronger.

Another place that provides a shining example is Liège – a post-industrial town in Belgium with poverty levels above the national average. In 2014 a group of locals came together with a vision: what if the majority of the city’s food were grown locally? A decade on, and the Liège Food Belt is well established. Hundreds of small local producers, making everything from mushrooms to wine, have joined food co-ops which together provide more than 3,000 organic school meals every day.

It has taken a lot of hard work to make the food belt a reality. But the crucial ingredient that made it possible was, to use Hopkins’ phrase, seeing things as if they could be different. The instigators of the food belt initiative “never asked for permission”, he points out. “The municipality spent the first three years going, these people are mad, this is never going to work. And then they came to them and said, what you’re doing is incredible, how can we help?” The city has since made it easier for food producers get hold of undeveloped land at low cost – but it was citizens who showed the way.

“You see a city reimagining itself, that came from a few citizens sitting around the table saying, so should we do it? Yes, let’s do it. Now that model has spread to six other cities in Belgium. I think by 2030 it will be the new normal for cities across Europe.”

If more of us get together in the same “let’s do it” spirit, then the version of 2030 that Hopkins paid a trip to, feels within reach.

So one last question: if Hopkins could travel to any point in time… where (or rather when) would he go?

After a long pause, he says he’d like to meet Songtsen Gampo, the king who brought Buddhism to Tibet and turned it from a warring nation to a “kind of Silicon Valley of meditation and compassion research. And then, of course I’d love to go and see the Velvet Underground playing in 1968 at the Boston Tea Party.”

What about the future? “The future is not a fixed thing. There are many, many, many different quantum threads that stretch from the present off to many different futures,” says Hopkins, back in character as Time Traveler. “So when you say, where would I go in the future, it’s like… which future?”