Transcript

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(transcribed by AI so there maybe some small errors!)

Marina Robb: What if wild, not domesticated, should be our normal instead of factory farmed lives? What if you could cultivate fulfilling lives and contribute to a healthy natural world.

The wild minds podcast is brought to you by me. Marina Robb an author, social entrepreneur, Forest School and nature-based trainer and consultant and pioneer in developing green programs for the health service in the UK.

Join me as I discover new perspectives on what it is to be a human in a more than human world, challenging dominant paradigms, finding ways to be kinder on ourselves and harder on the system. I'm also the founder of the outdoor teacher and creator of practical online for school, outdoor learning and nature-based trainings for people in health, education and business. Tune in for interviews, insights, cutting edge and actionable approaches to help you to improve your relationship with yourself, others and the natural world.

I'm thrilled to introduce episode 53 unleashing the power of imagination with the Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Town network and transition town in the UK, which began in 2006 the timing of this conversation felt particularly significant as my feelings over the past few months and my reflection episodes have at times, felt like hard work, the realities of the ecological crisis and the unquestioned pursuit of economic growth that I hear everywhere can often feel to me overwhelming and even hopeless, yet history shows that real change begins from the ground up with politicians following the momentum of the people.

Rob has dedicated his life to creating grassroots opportunities for communities, not through wishful thinking, but through real, tangible action, his work and research demonstrate how communities around the world are making a meaningful impact, positioning him as a true Pathfinder.

In this episode, Rob shares insights on the power of mass mobilization, the de Growth Movement and the importance of reshaping the narratives we tell about our future. He's also the author of several books, including the transition handbook, and most recently, from what is to what if, unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want, and there's more. His upcoming book how to fall in love with the future is on the horizon, along with a rare workshop at Hawkwood College in summer 2025, this episode is a must listen.

You Rob, so welcome to the wild minds podcast, it's really nice to have you here. Thank you so much.

Rob: Oh what a joy. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Marina: So you may know that I like to start with gratitude. It kind of brings me into the zone, and if you'd be happy to share some in a minute. That would be wonderful. So my gratitude today actually is for the winter, because we're in January at the moment, and, yeah, I really appreciate that we've had some really cold weather in the last few days. And it, I love it. I love the snow. I love the fact that we have this period where we can hopefully rest a little bit, slow down, switch off. So I'm really grateful for this season. Yeah, and would you do you have any gratitude? Could be anything?

Rob: I mean, I would, I guess I am. Would have gratitude for that. We've just. Had those few days between Christmas and New Year. What do people call it betwixt or something? You know it's like, but I love those few days. I have a lot of gratitude for those few days when I forget what day it is and I'm not that bothered. And I got to read a novel, and I had to play chess with my son and to hang out with family, and it was really nice. So I just, yeah, I'm always grateful for that, because I look forward to it all year round, those few days when I forget what day it is,

Marina: that's lovely. And I guess it speaks to how busy you are at the moment. Because, uh, if you're looking forward to that all year, that means you're quite, quite a busy person. Yeah, thank you so much for joining me. I've got lots to talk to you about, and I think, I think let's start first with a little bit of history, because I know you through the transition town, moment movement, and I don't know you personally, but I've read the book, and I believe that was, well as a movement. I believe it started 2006 that sort of period and for those that don't know about it, because, surprisingly, there are people out there that still don't know about it, Shocking, isn't it shocking? What can you do? But would you at least start a little bit about, well, what is that? And you know, why did you do it? And you know, what has anything changed between when you started that? And here we are in 2025,

Rob: yeah, so, I guess so the transition movement started in initially, down here in Devon, in tot s in about in 2005 officially kicked off, I suppose, 2006 and spread very quickly to many different places, actually, where you are in, Lewis was the second place to become a transition town. There's now 1000s of transition towns in about 50 different countries around the world. And the idea was that it would be, you know, we have these massive problems of climate change and energy depletion, and, you know, there's the things that governments can do and need to do, and in some cases, do, but in a lot of cases, don't. We have all those things that we can do as individuals that we're regularly told we should, you know, drive less and change our light bulbs and all that sort of thing. And transition emerged as an exploration of, well, what about that middle bit, which is what we can do in the places that we live with the people around us, with the resources and the passion and the connections that we have, maybe there are pieces of this that we could do. We used to there was a thing that was in a lot of the early transition stuff, that used to say, if we try and do this as individuals, it'll be too little. If we wait for government, it'll be too late. But if we get together with the people around us, it might just be enough, and it might just be in time. So as I said, it started here in Tottenham, it's spread very quickly. There's now, I think, 26 countries that have, like a National Transition organization, what we call a hub, which supports transition in those countries. And it's been, it's a fascinating thing, how it's spread. So in some places, actually, now transition is in most places, it's still a community driven process. There are some places, particularly in France, where mayors have a lot more power and they could actually make things happen, where there are some mayors who are deeply inspired by the transition movement, who started it, and they're doing incredible things with it. You know, it's led to, you know, we could do a sort of a 40 hour, 48 hour podcast special, just telling stories from across that movement that range from lots of small things, communities coming together to create new gardens, or whatever, up to the really ambitious things, like in the city of Liege in Belgium, where they're completely reimagining the food system of that city, and it's spreading to many other places. Community Energy companies that have raised 10s of millions of pounds for community renewables. You know, it's really that bit about, yeah, what can we do where we are without waiting for permission, without thinking the cavalry is coming riding to the rescue? What if we are that cavalry? What do? How do we act as if we believe that we are that cavalry?

Marina: So I'm thinking about, you know the what if, and I know that you've written a book about what if, and I'd love to come back to that. But before we go there, when we talk about transition, as I understand it, we're talking about moving from a society that's been driven by petroleum, really, you know, oil and then moving to carbon free, sort of society that's correct, is that right?

Rob: It's the transition, yeah, from a world that's made possible by the availability of cheap fossil fuels and cheap energy to one that has moved beyond that. But it's not just about energy. You know, transition is also about food and Education and Economics and what does the economy look like if we, you know, if it's more local, more resilient, more community ownership, more cooperative, that's kind of the transition that we're talking about.

Marina: So I often agonize about, what can I do as an individual, and what I perceive governments being able to do, or big businesses be being able to do. And I would really like to just kind of drop into that a little bit now, because I you said, you said, a minute ago, just about, oh, you know, from changing light bulbs, or you didn't mention this, but like recycling, those are the kind of things that many of us think, well, we can do, right? And I feel, you know, as a somebody that's been involved for a long time, I feel a bit overwhelmed and a bit exasperated by a sense of disempowerment. Now, I know we, I know what you're also saying, hang on there, is, we do have power. We can change things. And I'm definitely want to keep talking about that, because that's so important. But before that, there's a sense of, Well, What's the difference between what we do locally and what we could imagine the possibility of national and international change. That is possible. I mean, who needs to do what do you kind of know? What I mean? I think everybody question is a big question, and I tend to do that, but I don't want to miss that, because there's something about here around I was, I don't know what I was listening to recently, where they were kind of saying, you know, we as the people are led to believe that we're making some change from, for example, taking recycled clothes back to H, M, I think it was As a shopping center, and we think we feel good about that, right? Because we're doing what we're doing. And then you find out later that actually a lot of the clothes that we're taking to these shops are actually being exported to Ghana or something. I might not be correct in my facts, and then it's pretty horrific. So I'm starting in a negative place here, but we'll get to the positive. But I'm interested by that, because there's something around the people going, Well, look, we're doing what we were doing what we can but behind that is these quite horrific stories, which I know that you're not you. I know you know about them. You must know about them. So I don't know what the question is exactly. There's something about we can do stuff locally, but what actually needs to happen to make this massive shift? Or is that just a fantasy of mine?

Rob: Well, I mean, the reality is we need a massive shift. Yeah. And in those years, since 2006 when we started the transition movement, 30% of all the CO two ever emitted by humanity has been produced in those years. So we are not winning this at this point. You know, there was the news today that 2024, was the year where the world passed a 1.5 degree increase on pre industrial levels for the first time, and with and even just in the last couple of months, you know, we're seeing what that means around the world, increased wildfires, stronger storms, more flooding. Every degree the world warms, the atmosphere holds 7% more moisture. All that moisture has got to go somewhere, you know. So we are in a climate emergency. So for me, the question is, what does it look like? You know, the question about, in a sense, that question about what can I do, is kind of what capitalism does to us. Because really the reality is, what can we do? And it's like we need to be working on this together. And one of the great sort of cons that oil and gas companies like Chevron pulled on people, was this idea of where we've created a carbon calculator so you can't calculate your carbon footprint. So hang on a minute. What about Exxon's carbon footprint? You know? And so in reality, what needs to be happening, is that the cut this the kind of scale of ambitious response that an emergency should trigger needs to be coming from absolutely everywhere so and at the moment, what it feels to me is that all those different levels and organizations and parties are sitting looking at each other, using each other's inaction To justify their own well, why should I do something when Jeremy Clarkson has a big tractor? Why should shell do something when Exxon aren't? Why should Argentina do something when Bolivia aren't? You know, we're all it's in that kind of model, whereas, actually for me, it's like, it should be like a race. It should be like we're. We're trying to make those changes quicker than each other, and our credibility among each other comes from the changes that we're doing, because it's so exciting, and what we could be moving towards as possible, in terms of coming back to your questions, as individuals, we know the things that we should be doing. We should be eating a lot less meat. We should be flying only when we absolutely have to. You know, at the moment, the average carbon footprint a year in the UK something like nine tons a year. By 2050 that needs to be down to about one which means we need to be cutting by about 7% a year. If you cut meat out of your diet, if you cut dairy out of your diet that makes a big dent into that. If you put it, if we fly to New York and back to go to a friend's party, we use about four years worth of our allowance in that future that we're moving towards, you know, So for me, I stopped flying in 2006 I only travel if I can travel by train. I haven't eaten meat since I was 14. My kids grow up in a house where we grow some of our own food. We buy local food. It's like, how do we make this stuff just the normal? We know what we have to do. The point is, I feel like we have to stop thinking we can negotiate with physics, and we just need to get on with it. And I as someone who doesn't fly and hasn't flown for a long time, and who, every time I travel anywhere I you know every if a lot of people, if they know one thing about me, it's probably that I don't fly because I talk about that, and I know a lot of people who have made that same shift as a result of being inspired by that. So I think we need to make those changes, and then live as an example of having made those changes.

Marina: So I completely agree with you, and I understand that the things you said make a difference, but I guess I'm pushing here a little bit on you as an individual compared to big governmental changes. So there's a lot you've said, a lot in that, and I guess, you know, I've had, I've been criticized to consider not eating meat. I haven't eaten meat also since, um, since I was about 18. But rightly so. A lot of people cannot afford to do what you've just said in lies. And again, I've know that you're not suggesting that isn't the case. I know that because I've listened and read what you're saying, but that's a big that's a big problem, isn't it? That it isn't. Loads of people can't do those things. They don't have the privilege. We're privileged to do that. And again, I keep feeling, not feeling, knowing that we alongside those that can, where are the big shifts going to take place, you know, the ones that can really alongside what you're saying. You know, the other, the big kind of like say, Wake up calls to from governments, from corporations that can make those changes in their emissions. For example, as I understand it, it's the production of concrete that creates huge impact.

Rob: Yeah, 9% of all climate emissions are driven by the cement and use of concrete and yeah,

Marina: So it's kind of and I talk to my children, and they are saying things like, well, you know, it's not good. Oh, yeah, I might not fly, but that's what's that going to do compared to what these other people are going to do? And it's not all My children, not that I got millions of children, but I can kind of hear it, you know? I can hear it in the language of, kind of, yeah, I can do that. But actually, until the real shifts change, it's not going to make that much difference. So there's a despondency.

Rob: There's a big despondency, yeah, there's a huge which I think is heartbreaking. And I you know, before COVID, we had the Fridays for future strikes, which were extraordinary. I took my kids to all of those and I cried every time. And they were, it was awesome to see how, how they learned to organize. You know, I remember those people who were saying, Well, you know, they should be in school. Yes, you should stay in school, because that's where you learn. It's like, are you joking? Do you know how much kids learnt being part of those things? I saw how they learned to organize and communicate and work together. It was phenomenal. But that when that, and who knows where that was basically killed by COVID, you know, if who knows where that would have gone. But at its peak, for example, in Sweden, the companies that operated the national airports in Sweden reported a 9% decline in aviate use of aviation. They call it the Greta effect, and the meat industry reported a decline in sales as well at that time. You know, it's like we are not helpless and powerless in this situation. Yeah, and, you know, it's, I just even look at, in the last, you know, maybe six or seven years ago, how many places served plant based milks like, how quickly has that just become amazing, massive shift happens. And there's a brilliant book that I read called imaginable by Jane McGonigal, where she lists a whole load of massive shifts in society that happened over a 10 year period from when Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on that bus. It was 10 years till the Civil Rights Act was passed, 10 years from the first international sanctions on South Africa to the new constitution in South Africa. And there were tons and tons of those. And they start, they start with people. There's a lovely quote in the last that I had in the last book that came from a woman who I interviewed, who writes what she calls solar punk, hope punk, or something books. And she said, Yeah, we may not know how to do it, but they're all good stories start with the belief that you don't know how to do it, but somewhere drunk in a bar, someone is going, Yeah, but I bet we can figure out a way to do it. You know, it's like. So I think, yeah, we have seen a huge rise in despondency. And I think that's partly because, you know, in terms of Fridays for future, all those kids, millions of kids, mobilized around the world, and governments didn't change anything, and the governments and then you had extinction rebellion. Just dot oil, that phenomenal movement, articulate, well educated, clear, and the government just stuck people imprisoned and did nothing about it, and let oil and gas companies write the legislation that cracked down on those protests. It was disgusting, you know, but for me, it's like what a lot of those people want most is for us to just give up our hope that another world is possible. And the book that I'm writing now that we'll come on to talk about how to fall in love with the future came from me actually taking a shift from just reading books generally written by middle aged white men about how everything is about to collapse, to books and things produced by black women in the United States who are part of an astonishing sort of movement there about imagination and time travel and looking and talking about hope and optimism in very different kinds of ways that really touched me very deeply.

Marina: I really want to talk about that, but I'm also holding back yet it's come. It's coming because I, too, I'm a great believer and advocate about that vision. You know, you how can you possibly walk towards something if you don't have an imagination of that? Yeah, so I absolutely, we will get there, I promise you. But I want to stay in the mud a little bit, just for a little bit longer. And I do like playing in the mud. So that's good. So what I wanted to because, again, you said so many interesting things with my neurons already going on fire, but it's something about politics. Now, what was it that you said that made me think about, yeah, this kind of idea. I mean, my dad, he died quite a long time ago, but I remember him kind of saying to me, you know, there are good people in politics. Of course, there are, you know, people go into politics because they really care about society and wanting to change things. And not everybody is driven by profit and wanting to look after themselves. So there's a part of me that really wants to believe that, even though I also grew up in other countries where I saw firsthand corruption, you know, as is. Of course, it exists everywhere. Nobody in their right mind would know that that wasn't the case, because either they've seen it physically handing over of money or it's behind doors. But really my point is that when we speak about these things, there's a sense of we can put people behind bars for speaking their minds and for standing up for something that is so important. And then I think, well, who is we? Because we've got to be quite careful. Because I'm sure there are many people in politics and in big business who are not wanting to participate, but are somehow we clue, don't we? We get, we end up and we collude somehow. So I just wanted to say that, because here we are also on a journey thinking of re envisioning democracy, I think, you know, or finding ways that make it more representative of people's wider views. And, yeah, can we just speak a little bit about that perhaps. Yeah, whilst it is happening that people are put away behind bars for having a voice? Do you also, in your vast experience of working in this area, you also meeting politicians and businesses who do want to make change. Yes, good, I'm glad to hear that.

Rob: Weirdly, I'm kind of better known in the French speaking world than I am in the English speaking world, because in 2015 I was in a film which was called tomorrow, which is amazing. It's not amazing because I'm in it. It's amazing, because it was AMAZING film. And it was a film about two people, one of whom just became a mother, feeling so concerned about the climate emergency that they wanted to try and figure out, well, what can we do about it? And it's like a road trip. They go around the world, and it's beautiful. It's a great soundtrack. It's very, very cool film. And it was a film phenomenon in France that's, in a way that's difficult for us to imagine here, like it was shown in mainstream cinemas for like, six months and was full every night, and it was shown in company boardrooms and in municipalities and in schools and universities. And there's a whole generation of kids who grew up watching that film, who they call generation de man, whose lives have been really changed by that film. So because I'm in that film, and because I'm one of the few people in it who's funny, I get in lots of invites to go and speak in France, and I meet lots of I go to visit lots of places where the mayor, like mayors in France, have a lot more power than they do here, and when the mayors are inspired by that, there's some extraordinary things happening, really extraordinary things happening, like towns completely redesigning the whole food system for I want, like one place I went to visit where all the school meals in that place, or 100% organic, and 80% of it is grown in the town, fabulous. And they do it at the same price that the government pays for school meals up and down the country.

Marina: Amazing. Can we have a link for that in the show notes?

Rob: Sure we can you know. And I go to visit. I mean, we could spend hours doing this, but yeah, I was in I went to Utrecht in Holland, where they've built such good cycling infrastructure that 40,000 people cycle into that center every day. Because the Dutch government's philosophy is, for every half a billion euros they spend building good cycling infrastructure, they save 19 billion euros off the national health bill, the science fiction writer William Gibson said the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed, you know. So when we're talking about, what would the future be like if we did all this stuff, it's not some like Star Trek fantasy in Rob Hopkins's imagination. It's the transport infrastructure of Utrecht. It's the super blocks of Barcelona. It's the car free neighborhoods of Freiburg in Germany. It's the rooftop farms of Paris. You know, all this stuff exists somewhere. We're not waiting for someone to invent the great miracle app that's going to save everything. We just need to pull our finger out and start thinking more joined up and more holistically and putting all of these stories together and telling a narrative about what we could create with that is ultimately more satisfying than the narrative that's being put out by the people who have no imagination and who just say, we have to just keep economic growth and globalization going at all costs, because that's there's such a profound poverty of imagination in there.

Marina: So what you're telling me is actually there are people in within politics, there are people within businesses that collect collaboratively across the board, from the communities into those professions, if you like, there. Yeah, there are great examples of how we how we can do it differently, yeah.

Rob: I mean even in the UK. from where we were a year ago, we now at least have a government that understands climate science. We have a government that is massively accelerating the move towards renewables, with it, with a target that is least, at least kind of vaguely consistent with the science of where we need to get to. It's not ambitious enough. It's not thinking holistically enough. It's still very much sort of sidelining the role of communities, and in that thing, it's still not tackling a lot of the really strong, vested power that is moving against this. But it's, we're in a hell of a lot better position than we were a year ago in terms of that stuff.

Marina: I agree. So there's a couple of things I love. I think this came from you as well. Like, what can we learn from these massive mobilizations like COVID and. And indeed, what happened after the war, you know, because here we are. Yeah, this seems really important. And you've mentioned the civil rights movement at the beginning, which is something that I often lean into when I can see that change is possible, although, as we can say, see, still see on the ground. There's so much to do, obviously, but nevertheless, these are huge mobilizations where, you know, governments and the people come together. Can you give me something around what? What do we learn from that? Because, clearly, it's possible.

Rob: What can we learn from successful movements of the past?

Marina: Yeah, like COVID, being able to say, right, we need to change now. And this is how, what we have to do right now. And the war, you know, in the war, like we, as I understand it, you know, it was, we were feeding ourselves. We were, you know, we had so many things going on where communities came together and looked after each other. And, yeah

Rob: yeah, okay. So, I mean, I guess the Yeah, that dig the dig for victory. I love collecting photos from some dig for victory. There's a lovely one of the Tower of London just surrounded by allotments. You know, people grew food everywhere, and it just became part of the fabric. You know, when we started doing Transition Town Tottenham, 2006 seven, I did a whole one of the first things I did was a big oral history piece where I went and talked to the old people who were still around in the town, most of whom still aren't around anymore, but to put to like, well, what did this town look like before cheap energy and before globalization and when we had a more local agriculture? Like, how was that, because it's not within my lifetimes experience at all, and to so interesting to hear people's stories, and then I always asked them, you know, what are the things that you're really happy to leave in the past, and what other things you hope that we would carry forward with us? And people, I remember that people were really happy to leave coal behind, and it was when I really understood what, what a phenomenal invention the washing machine was, in terms of liberating women from the Mangle, which was the horrible thing, but then, but people said what they missed was food being grown around where they lived, being able to hear chickens in urban spaces, that sort of stuff. I think what we can learn from COVID Was that it is possible that governments can sit down with scientists, and scientists can say this is an emergency, and the government can go, right shit, okay, well, we better act like it's an emergency. Then don't worry. We'll find the money. We'll change what needs to be changed. Climate change is like a million times the emergency that COVID was in terms of in terms of its impact at scale and but we don't see that same sense of emergency, but we saw with COVID that the government overnight paid people not to go to work. We saw companies who made Formula One racing cars turning their production lines to making ventilators. We saw breweries repurposing their system to make hand sanitizer because we needed hand sanitizer. You know? We saw we had weeks and weeks where there were no planes in the sky, and we found that actually, do you know what? You can run a successful business without having to fly all your team to Paris once a month for a breakfast meeting. You can be a successful academic without flying around the world delivering your paper into endless pointless conferences. You know that we could profoundly rethink things and the scale in a very short period of time. It's not impossible. When I do talks and I ask people to imagine the future, people come up and then they say, Oh yeah, well, I saw, you know, it was much greener, it was much quieter, there were much less cars. And there's always a moment where they go, oh yeah, like in those first weeks of COVID. You know, actually, COVID gave us that little taste of actually it could be like this. And also it gave us this sense, this ludicrous idea that everybody needs to commute into work every day to some office somewhere. Actually, you don't need people. Would let people work from home, and it works fine. Yeah. So COVID and all of those things taught us, if we decide to act like it's an emergency, then we can do it. But also, what we find is that there is a huge amount of latent creativity and imagination that then kicks in, and we find that things that previously we thought were unsolvable and impossible. Actually, of course, we're smarter than that. We can figure this stuff out where, you know, we put someone on the moon, for heaven's sake, we can figure out how to do this stuff.

Marina: I completely agree with you. I am very grateful, actually, for your ability to kind of really pull out really concrete examples of what we do, what we did do. Because. Forget. I agree. I think we forget these things just before we get into vision, which we've been, you know, we've been talking about that already, in some ways, dancing around it, and what I wanted to say, you said, run a successful business. And again, I kind of feel that I meet a lot, in my thinking, in my reading, in my conversations this, I don't know if it's an elephant in the room, but everybody talks about, well, the economy. You know, if we don't grow our economy, we will not survive. Basically, that's the kind of summary that the economy needs to grow. And I've got any, I think, in the news last week, you know, I think I wrote it down as part of my notes that Brompton bikes. I don't know if that's the right one, but I think it was, you know, it's like, well, we can't. And this is about bikes, you know, we can't produce. We need to, you know, if we're going to have to pay higher, whatever tax, then we won't invest, and therefore, you know, we're going to have less jobs and, you know, and so on. And I kind of often feel that's the point where people stop, they go, this is the model, you know, this is our model of the way everything runs, capitalism, yeah. And that's it. Can you just speak a little bit to that? And I guess in a sense, we're moving to what are the alternatives, a little bit and the reality of scaling that up. And I know this is a journey you're absolutely right from even when I began 30 years ago, to now, so much has changed, and let's not forget that. But can you speak to that a little bit? Because I do feel that often people just go, well, even governments, because, or every single political party, as far as I can understand, it still about gross national product.

Rob: Well, I always, the way I like to talk about it when I do talks is like, I have four sons, right? And, you know what I want my kids to do when they were younger is I wanted them to grow, and that was definitely a good thing. I wanted them to keep growing, ideally, until they were just slightly smaller than me, and then to and then to grow in other ways, to become wiser and kinder and more skillful and nicer people. And if I just if I only valued their success by the fact that they were bigger than they were the previous year and they ended up about 40 meters tall, something would have gone really quite horribly wrong. But for the economy, that's the only metric we use. It has to be bigger than it was last year, actually, if it was bigger because more people got cancer, and we were selling loads and loads of weapons to Israel, and we were having to clean up all the mess of climate change because we hadn't done anything about it. That's not really a that's not that useful. The point is that we measure the wrong things, you know. So the de Growth Movement, which is really, really fascinating, movement which says, it doesn't say, you know, we could, you could still have be in a world where, for example, in Lewis, the economy of Lewis can be growing, in a sense, but it's growing in a different way. You know, we can be baking a different kind of an economy where the primary focus is not just the fact that it's bigger than it was last year. So, you know, I always like to suggest that maybe by 2030 we use a different set of metrics for how we gage our economy being successful. What if the way that we measured the success of the economy was actually the wellbeing of the people in it, the number of people with good teeth. How different would the economy of the UK look like if actually our primary aim was we want people to have good teeth. We want girls to be able to cycle home on their own after dark. We want children to be playing in the street. We're going to measure that. That's going to be the metrics that we thought that we value indicator of success. Yeah, we have different indicators, yeah, and then we're measuring the right things. And then the economy. We build the economy around that, you know, the idea that just massive corporations need to get bigger and bigger. You know, all like Geoff Bezos, all these people, you know, Alexandra, Ocasio COVID In America, the senator there, she says every billionaire is a policy failure. And you know this, I feel like this myth that's being pushed and particularly now in the next few years in America, of basically the way, and Liz truss's idea that the way that you build success is just by allowing billionaires to do whatever they want, however they want, is profoundly dangerous, and that actually we need to be shifting. The argument in transition has always been, we need to be shifting towards an economy which is more local, greater degree of local, community ownership, more cooperative, more rooted in place.

Marina: Okay, I'm ready to go there. We need to go there now Absolutely. So you've already said it. What are the what you know, first of all, I want. Thank you very much for your podcast. What if, because I know it's ended, you know, but I've been really enjoying it, and I want to just tell listeners and listen to all of that. Thank you so much. So, yeah, we tell me about the power of imagination. Tell me about this book, How to fall in love with the future and yet speak to why it's so important that we really see what's possible.

Rob: So about two years ago, three years ago, I saw a t-shirt that a young woman was wearing at a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, and it said, I've been to the future. We won, and it gave me goosebumps. And I was just before I was due to give a talk at the extinction rebellions big one protest up outside Westminster and it meant that I thought, okay, I can always whenever I'm going to try something new, if I feel really nervous about it, that's usually a good indicator that it's worth giving it ago. So I did. I bought from my local hardware shop, like a hazmat suit, and I bought a space man's helmet online, and I went along and I gave this presentation as if thanks to the time machine that we had recently built here in the town of tottenest, the world's first fully functioning Time Machine. I've heard about it. Yeah. It's, if I don't win the Nobel Prize next year, I'm going to be really miffed. And I gave this talk, as in, I had just come back from this 2030 and Oh, my God, it's incredible. It was the 2030 that resulted from us doing absolutely everything we could have done between now and then. There are plenty of other 2030s and we've been some of them too, and they're horrible, believe me, we don't want to go there, trust me on that. But there's on the outer edges of possibility. There's still futures there that are awesome. And I've been there, and let me tell you about it. So I told them about the bicycle rush hours of 2030 the urban rooftop farms, the etc, etc.

Marina: Degrowth. Absolutely.

Rob: And then at one point,

Marina: can I just add in there limit, you know, media, legal, you know, legal kind of policies to reduce the impact of, I don't know so many things around social media, yeah, billionaires, limitations. All that

Rob: exactly so. And then at one point in that near the end, I said something like, you know, and when I really think about what I saw there, and the fact that I'm able to stand here and tell you about it makes me feel really, really emotional. And then I looked round the crowd, and there were tears in people's eyes, and I thought, this is really, really interesting, like, what's going on here? And so that was what then set me off on the process of writing this book, How to fall in love with the future, because I started looking around. You know, there's that beautiful bit in Alice in Wonderland, where she's too big to fit through the little door, the door into the little garden. And it's the most beautiful garden she's ever seen in her life. And more than anything, she wants to be in that garden. I feel like, for a long time, activism around climate change has been underpinned by just, we just need to talk about collapse and extinction all the time, and then people will do something. I feel like, actually, climate activism needs to be like Alice looking through that door into that little garden, and that it's about the cultivation of longing. If people really are longing for that different future, then that's how we're going to do it. I came when I did the podcast which you mentioned, which was called from what is from what if to what next. I set myself a rule at the beginning to never do a single episode which had two white male guests. And it was such a good task to set myself because it meant I had to be a much more curious and bring in lots of different voices. And from that, I started to find this whole really interesting. It's not really a movement, but it's like a there's in the US, there's quite a few, mostly black women in the US, who write about time travel as a tool for activists. It's incredible. Two women run this thing called Black quantum futurism, which is one of the most inspiring things I've ever come across and artists who practice what in the book I call temporal fluidity, like playing around with time, because so much of our activism is like in the present. There's a challenge in the present, right? So it's like, what do we want? When do we want it? Now? No one ever says, When do we want it? In about 230, years or 50 years ago, you know? And that idea that we can play with time and help people fall in love with the future, because so many of the narratives as we started this conversation, you speak to so many people, the future has just disappeared, or the future is just Elon Musk and Donald Trump, sort of dancing on top of a bonfire. It.

Marina: And some, AI, some horrible, you know, continual, like, we're now, we're now locked down in this concrete jungle, and we don't go out

Rob: exactly. It's like, really, none of that stuff is for sure and cast in stone. And actually, the future can still be shaped and so the book is really about giving people the thinking tools and the inspiration to help people around and fall in love with the future. So for example, one example is in the Brecon Beacons National Park, which now calls itself whatever the Brecon Beacons National Park is in Welsh, which I'm not going to attempt on your podcast, but they recently did a management plan up to 2050 and normally management plans up to 2050 are pretty dry, boring things. They wrote theirs as a future vision document. It had poems from the future. It had photos from the future. It had stories and postcards of what happened during that transition. It's a beautiful piece of work. And then I was, I gave a talk, and a couple of the people who were behind it were there when they were current, when they were in the stage of thinking, Yeah, but how do we get this out into the community of the National Park and really inspire them with this? And having heard the talk that I did, they found that the council owned an old mobile planetarium. I don't remember why, but for some reason they had this mobile planetarium, and they repurposed it as a time machine, and they now take this time machine around to all the different communities, and they show films of the past and then also films of the future, and open up this kind of temporally fluid space of saying, well, let's play with time in that sense. So that's the stuff that is really kind of exciting me at the moment. How do we bring the future alive for people? How do we make sort of tears in the time so that we can reach into the future and bring it back, what I call a pop up tomorrow. You know, that gives people that sort of a taste of the world that we could still create if we did everything we possibly could.

Marina: it is very exciting. And I'm I can feel it, and I can feel the huge difference between focusing on what's gone wrong, to really inspiring our imagination and also the possibility. And again, I think of children, and I think of the sense of agency. You know, here we are. Well, I am involved in trying to support young people to feel they have agency, and to feel they can make a difference. And all of this is I can, I could see millions of children, hopefully, with their parents kind of behind these stories and these possibilities, because they are, because we would, most of us would want that, of course, why wouldn't we so very excited

Rob: when I do talks and workshops, I do an activity where I tell them I bought my time machine, and I'm going to turn this world into a time machine. And I ask them to close their eyes and imagine they're traveling through time we did at the beginning of every episode of the podcast, too. I've done that exercise now with 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people. What's really interesting to me is then, when we hear back from people how uniform those responses are, it's quieter, it's greener. People are more relaxed. The you know, the air smells NICER, all of that stuff, which actually I then read an article by someone called Elise Golding, who was doing this very similar work back in the back 2530 years ago in prisons in the United States, exactly the same. And she says, I reckon if you did this at any point back through human history, you would find very, very similar things that people talk about in terms of the future that they really want to see. So why is it that we don't have political parties, that's where they start? You start there and then you work out how we're actually going to get there, rather than just incremental, pointless little steps that maintain the status quo. Let's actually figure out you start there and then you work backwards,

Marina: of course. And again, any business strategist would understand that too. So, you know. So this is about strategy. This is simply strategy, you know, look where we want to get to and how we want to get there. And I completely agree with you, and I guess I'd like to put in there, which I haven't said before, but for me, because I work a lot in mental health, you know, I would love that future to be where people really have had time to work with their inner world, and not just their imaginative to but to look and see. You know, what do I do when I feel jealous? What do I do when I feel angry? What do I do when I don't when I want to hold stuff for me because I don't feel safe enough? You know? And I think these are, this is a huge strand as well, isn't it? It's our own psychology and imagining. And, you know, a few. And I, you know, I want to say, because I can, you know, with psychosis, you know, I can imagine, and spoke to so many families, that rather than being locked up in a room, you know, I imagine wonderful places where people who are ill can go and rest and have huge opportunities to heal themselves. So I just want to put that in there, because there's something about, yeah, let's imagine food systems and all the things you've talked about. And I love it. I absolutely want to be there. I want to as I say, I want to be one of the people behind those visions. I am one of those people, you know, so but let's also put in really amazing places for help, for health and wellbeing, because it's such a huge issue, isn't it, in our society. And I think understanding our own psychology, you know, the shadows are things that we hide. Let's just say, Hey, this is what we have, you know, and work with it. So that, with that said, I want to know a couple of things, because you kind of insinuated field recordings from the future. Because I almost started to think, oh, so is that what you mean about your pop-up things like, what is this field recordings from the future? And I know you've got this workshop in you said, Hawkwood house. I'd love to know about those two things. Can you speak to that?

Rob: Sure. So, yeah. So during the COVID, like lots of people. I was working from home, and I like listening to music while I work, but what I find is that if there's a beat or if there's lyrics, I can't really concentrate. And so I started, I discovered this whole world of ambient electronic music, which is just beautiful, just a fascinating, really beautiful genre of music. And I love music. It's a big part of my life. And so there were some artists in particular who use field recordings in really interesting ways. Particularly, there's a Norwegian guy called who makes music called biosphere, who uses field recordings just in really beautiful ways. And I started thinking, Well, What if the field recordings that we used actually came from the future? If we had recordings from this 2030 2035 that was resulted from us doing absolutely everything we could possibly have done, and we could play those to people, maybe that would help to cultivate the longing for getting there. And there was a particular piece of music by an artist I love called Mr. Kit that used field recordings in the most gorgeous way that really evoked community and longing and togetherness. And I thought if I did this project, I'd love to do it with that Mr. Kit guy, but he probably lives in Berlin or LA, and he's, like, impossibly cool and never answers emails. And then I looked him up, and he lived in my town, no. And it turned out that actually, he'd known my kids when, when they were at school. So I had a coffee with him, and I said, like, I've got this idea. And he said, Oh yeah, this is great. So then I started going to visit places that already sound like the future needs to sound like. So I went to the car free neighborhood in Freiburg in Germany, the valban. I went to the bicycle rush hour in Utrecht. I went to a beaver rewilding project down in Cornwall. I went to a regenerative farm near where I live, underground mushroom farm in the middle of Brussels, and I made recordings there and then worked with kit to produce these pieces of music. The idea is that it's like it's really immersive, and it kind of gets into your the poet Rilke once said The future must enter into you a long time before it happens. And that's kind of what this is trying to do. It's like this stuff needs to get into your bones and into your cells, you know? So in June, around the same time as the next book is coming out, we're going to be releasing the eight tracks that we've made of field recordings from the future as a as a vinyl record, which is possibly the most exciting thing that's ever happened in my whole life, and also digitally. But we're developing, we're working with somebody who, near Totnes, who does, who is one of the best people in the country at doing like, into sort of light projections.

Marina: Oh, yeah, I know, I've been to a few of those in the last few years. They're fantastic, absolutely.

Rob: So we're going to do one of those where we create a kind of a time portal that will open for a day in whatever the places and where people come in, and then it's a mixture of video and music, and you're just transported to those places. So that's a real it's really a beautiful project, and I'm really enjoying that. So that's field recordings from the future.

Marina: How do we book on that? Like, if I'm sitting, if I when this goes out and I want to book on it, because I want to get a place, how do I do that?

Rob: I think at the moment I would say, just follow me on Instagram and Twitter, and your there'll be announcements where, at the moment, we're still just developing what this thing is going to be. So okay. Hopefully the first time it's performed will be in Copenhagen in April, if all goes well, okay, and then what was the second thing was

Marina: awkward. Well, I was interested, because clearly, you know, we can only touch on these things in a podcast, but you know, if I want to learn some of these skills, if I want to participate in a way, and like I say, be one of the community that you know, really learns and supports all. You mentioned something in in May, I think you said,

Rob: yeah, so I'm always a great believer that, you know, I might well get knocked on, knocked over by a bus tomorrow, and I'm not a great believer in intellectual property and hanging on to things so a lot of the tools that I develop, I like to just sort of giveaway to people and say, take them and use them. Develop your own versions of them. Take them wherever they want to go. Always, it was always the philosophy that underpinned the transition movement from the beginning, really. So since from what is to what if came out, the last book about imagination, I've been developing trainings around imagination. And I've worked with lots of organizations doing it, from Patagonia to Balenciaga to the London Marathon group to all sorts of different people to just try and stretch that organizational collective imagination. So and in I was just in Portugal for a month in October, just going around, running workshops in all sorts of different places. So in the last weekend of May at Hawkwood house, which is a gorgeous venue near Stroud, I'll be running a weekend workshop on how to fall in love with the future, which will share a lot of the ideas from the book. But also very much in the spirit of take these. Take them. Run, run with them. Use them however you want. And I sort of collect tools and activities that can expand the imagination, and so I'll be sharing a lot of those, and I don't do that often. So it's kind of quite it's an unusual opportunity to get to come and sort of poke around under the bonnet with me in that sense.

Marina: Well, I'm sure it will be full up. No doubt about that. Yeah, I guess I want to bring this to the close, to a close. I don't want to bring it to a close, but we don't have forever. But I'm feeling the sense of this longing. You said about cultivating a longing and yeah, I wonder whether we can, yeah, bring this to a close with a sense of longing and this sense of vision. And if there's anything that stirs in you to kind of bring this podcast to a close, I'd really appreciate that. Yeah.

Rob: yeah I'm feeling it good. There's a political theorist called Wendy Brown who wrote, who I read an interview with her last year, and in that she wrote, only a compelling vision of a less frightening and insecure future will recruit anyone to a progressive or revolutionary alternative future, or rouse apolitical citizens for the project of making that future. This vision must be seductive and exciting, and it must be embodied in seductive and exciting leadership and movements. And I love that. And so for me, when I look around at the climate movement and the people around and I think okay, if we were to say that the primary objective of this as a movement is the cultivation of longing for a very different future. Who are the people in our culture who are brilliant at cultivating longing. Are they climate scientists? No. Are they climate activists, occasionally, but generally not. They tend to be street artists and poets and musicians and people who write series for Netflix, people who work in advertising. You know, these are the people we can't do it with, we can't do this without those people. So I'm feeling like part of where I'm trying to take a lot of this stuff is into that space. So I'm teaching in a couple of weeks at the National Film School. I'm trying. I'm sort of, it's interesting. I'm getting more invitations from organizations who the creatives. It's like, we need you, and also they're within that there is a really interesting one of the episodes of the podcast was with some people who form something called purpose disruptors, which is people who work within the advertising industry, but who are also parents and who have to sit and look at their children over breakfast, who were saying, actually, what are we doing? We have the skills, and we're using them to just hasten our demise. What would it look like if we use them in a better way? So I feel like the cultivation of longing is not a skill that necessarily comes naturally to those of us who are instinctively drawn to trying to tackle the challenges of the times that we're in. We have a we kind of have a toolkit. It, which is very important, of like naming things and calling things out and mobilizing people and challenging things, but unless we're able to add longing, the cultivation of longing, into that mix, and to become the storytellers of what comes next and to find those ways, there's somebody who I interviewed for the book. Is a young woman who lives in Berlin called Wassim malabic Who does work that she calls Muslim futures. She works with Muslim people in Germany who experience horrible levels of racism to help them think about the future in different ways. And she calls her work sensual futuring. And when I do my workshops, one of the activities that we do after people have visioned and imagined the future is a thing which are called Making Sense of the future, but sense as in S, C, E, N, T, S, and I give people a little cup, and I say, okay, you've got 20 minutes to go outside and to make a cocktail in this cup of smells that smells to you like that future will smell like, and you have to give it a name, like a cocktail, because all good cocktails have names. And then we have a little cup. We have a cocktail party where everyone has to get round and smell all these different smells of the future. And it's like, it's sensual futuring. It gets into your bones. Human beings can remember 10,000 smells and attach emotions and memories to all of those smells. When do activists ever use smell as a way of mobilizing people to think about the future in different ways? So hopefully, what I'm pulling together in this book is a kind of a, sort of an, maybe like an additional toolkit, like an upgrade of toolkit for people who are already doing this work about helping people to fall in love with the future in a multi-sensory way.

Marina: I love that, and I agree. I mean, it's through our bodies, through our senses, that these things take hold of us, perhaps. And so well, thank you. I feel what an inspiring chat. And yeah, we need each other. And I do feel we are, yeah, we're all part of this community that is here and wanting to be birthed with all these ideas. So thank you so much, and I look forward to just hopefully coming to this immersive experience that would be amazing. Look on. So, yeah, it's gonna be amazing. So yeah, thanks very much Rob. 

Rob: Pleasure, thank you so much for inviting me.

Marina: I really hope you enjoyed this conversation. I'm always inspired by what communities can achieve together and the incredible power of imagination and vision when paired with action. It reminds me that we all have our own part to play, no matter how small it may seem. See you next week, when I reflect on some key issues raised in recent episodes and explore Nate Hagen's concept of the great simplification, along with my own thoughts on our natural operating system.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Wild Minds Podcast. If you enjoyed it and want to help support this podcast, please subscribe, share and leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Your review will help others find the show. To stay updated with the wild mines podcast and get all the behind the scenes content. You can visit theoutdoorteacher.com or follow me on Facebook at the outdoor teacher UK and LinkedIn. Marina Robb,

The music was written and performed by Geoff Robb.

See you next week. Same time, same place