There’s a version of resilience that promises continuity — the hope that we can endure disruption and still remain who we were.
The truth is that moving through transition changes us. It pares things back. It teaches skills. It can deepen our relationships with nature and each other.
In the context of fair share ethics, that feels less like loss and more like learning how to live within reality — and be shaped by it.
#RobHopkins #FairShareEthics #ResilienceTransition #LivingWithinLimits
![A social post from @lifeboatacademy which says: “Emerging at the other end [of resilience transition], we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and, ultimately, wiser.” — Rob Hopkins](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/826/289/658/126/236/original/2d9b0a459b74a9c1.jpg)
Rob Hopkins puts it plainly; the scale that might actually matter is community — neighbours, groups, circles choosing to respond together.
This is where we break wetiko’s isolation and build the kind of resilience that can hold real change.
It doesn’t have to be grand.
It just has to be shared.
#LifeboatAcademy #CommunityAction #LocalResilience #Enoughness #AutumnEarth #RobHopkins
Book review: How to fall in love with the future, by Rob Hopkins
Years ago when I was more involved in the Transition Towns movement, I took part in one of their community training sessions. One of the highlights was an imaginative exercise where we interviewed someone from the future about how they had solved climate change and the energy crisis, and the steps that had got them there. It was a kind of purposeful improvisation that was equal parts silly and moving, unlocking something hopeful in participants who had gathered to think about the world’s biggest problems.
This playful futurism has been a hallmark of Rob Hopkins’ work, often cropping up in his books or his talks. In this new book he addresses it directly, looking at why hopeful imagining of the future is a vital ingredient in activism. Imagining hypothetical events make it more likely that we will act to make them real. Without something to aim for, to long for, we end up paralysed into inaction or forced onto the defensive, trying to protect what we have.
Too often, people go from ignoring climate change to despairing that anything can be done. Hopkins suggests that this is “like waking up in the night, smelling smoke and calling the insurance company rather than the fire brigade.” But environmentalism may be to blame – when the movement over-emphasises extinction and collapse, where else can people go? “If that’s our sole narrative, we run the risk of reinforcing a self-fulfilling narrative of doom.”
Instead, we need positive stories of the future that people find appealing and want to work towards. We need to ‘nurture longing’ for that better future, empowering people to throw themselves into creating it. The book describes a whole range of examples of people doing this, from communities hosting themed feasts, to a sun-powered restaurant, to a fictional encyclopedia from 2060. Sometimes these sorts of things can be dismissed as being arty and pretentious, and so Hopkins goes the extra mile to find examples from the margins. There are sections on afrofuturism and ‘Black quantum futures’, or the cosmic philosophy of Sun Ra and his orchestra. I particularly enjoyed the story of Zambian prankster rocket-scientist Edward Festus Mukuka Nkoloso, who created a satirical space programme in the 1960s.
The book also describes the author’s own experiments in imaginative futurism, which he writes about with gleeful deadpan humour – “calibrate the belief suspenders”, engage the “cynicism override”, and see what happens. His talks are often based around time travel, where he will tell his audience he to has visited the future and he can tell them what it’s like, or making it participative and inviting them to time travel with him. Simple props and a willingness to commit to the idea can be enough, inviting people to dream and hope.
There’s something countercultural about this, when you stop and think about the prevailing visions of the future that we see in popular culture. Hopkins wants to call time on the doom. “We’re done with dystopias,” he writes. “They paralyse us. We’ve had enough. Cast them from from our cinemas and toss them from the bookshelves. Fascists hate creativity, imagination, daring, playfulness, and people who speak of dreams and build pictures of a future predicated on decency, compassion, courage and connection.”
Like Sarah Housley’s book Designing Hope, Hopkins makes a compelling case for engaging more creatively in the future. Dystopia tells us that the future has nothing to offer, and that outsiders want what we have. That’s how extremist politics gets a foothold, and so imagining the future is deeply political and potentially radical, as well as being playful and fun. Isn’t that something you want to try?
If we wait for the governments, it'll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it'll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.
#LiveEvent: Beyond the Brink: Imagining the Possible in a World Unraveling
November 13, 2025 • 10:00am US Pacific
#RobHopkins (founder of the Transition Town movement, author of How to Fall in Love With the Future) #JacquiPatterson (2024 Time Magazine Woman of the Year for her #climatejustice leadership
Together we’ll explore:
How to align dreams of the #future with real-world action today
How a vision for a better #future is critical in navigating the Great Unraveling
#robhopkins #lifeboatacademy #metacrisis #quotes #climateaction #SocialJustice #elbowsup #FightOligarchy
#lifeboatacademy #robhopkins #transition #transitioneconomics #Resilience #metacrisis #apocaloptimism
![A social post from @lifeboatacademy which says: “Emerging at the other end [of resilience transition], we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and, ultimately, wiser.” — Rob Hopkins
Text superimposed on an image of mulched garden beds with a figure crouched over, digging in the soil to plant seedlings.](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/178/098/707/730/099/original/9c431335ea55eda1.jpg)
New #RobHopkins book coming out in June How to fall in love with the future - a time traveler’s guide to changing the world
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
> that means restoring ecology, integrating psychology into our communities and making our communities are free so that our basic daily activities don’t require cars, and our food and water are drawn from the area around us
Ae. Rob Hopkins and the
Transition Towns crews had the right idea almost 20 years ago;
https://transitionnetwork.org/people/rob_hopkins/
Here's a PDF of Hopkin's full Transition Handbook;
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/CSC2600/transition-handbook.pdf
Last week, we were privileged to take a journey to the future with Rob Hopkins.
He shared about his forthcoming book for the first time and had advice for activists on how to give people a window into what a positive future can look, smell, sound and taste like, as a way to inspire and engage folks with the action we need to take to build it.
Watch back the recording of this brilliant session, which ranged from the landscape of beavers to Afrofuturism, music recordings to sound out the future to how art is paving the way for us to imagine different solutions. It is an inspiring way to start your year!
📽🍿 https://transitiontogether.org.uk/when-rob-hopkins-helped-us-fall-in-love-with-the-future/
#transitiontown #lovethefuture #CommunityAction #ClimateAction #robhopkins
Les philosophes sont souvent difficiles à lire. Notre humanité est capable d'un niveau d'abstraction considérable ! je n'ai pas bcp creusé #JacquesEllul, mais ce que j'en ai compris (grâce à la vulgarisation aussi) me semble juste essentiel et génial. En particulier cette idée que ce que l'humanité **sacralise** aujourd'hui c'est la #technique
Consacrer plus de temps à l'étude ou s'engager mieux en pratique qu'en théorie, à la suite d'autres #technocritique s plus contemporaines telles #VandanaShiva, #RobHopkins, #Starhawk ou #JoannaMacy ?
Dia 15 de outubro de 2024, das 18h às 20h na sala principal do Cine-Teatro Garrett, na Póvoa de Varzim, decorrerá a Conferência “Transição para uma nova economia” com Rob Hopkins, fundador do Movimento de Transição, organizada pelo Centro do Clima de Póvoa de Varzim
#transição #RobHopkins #PóvoadeVarzim #CentrodoClima
https://sustentabilidadeeaccao.blogspot.com/2024/10/conferencia-transicao-para-uma-nova.html
"I would increasingly argue that the challenge that we need to address in order to move forward in the best way to build resilience is not through ‘building community’ (a subject I have addressed previously), or through a crash course of community reskilling, but rather through issues of governance and social entrepreneurship, areas where the green movement has fallen short for many years..."
#RobHopkins, 2010
https://www.transitionculture.org/2010/08/31/why-green-wizards-get-us-nowhere-new/
Also true for software freedom IMHO
"Both Transition and green wizardry are based on the ideas that peak oil, and peak various other things too, will lead to a future of economic contraction and declining net energy availability, where the communities that are most successful are those that have most successfully strengthened and refocused their local economies in advance."
#RobHopkins, 2010
https://www.transitionculture.org/2010/08/31/why-green-wizards-get-us-nowhere-new/
Autoproduzione: atto di lotta radicale e non violenta
Scrivo mosso dall'articolo, ormai di qualche anno fa, intitolato “Dove andiamo?” (La Città invisibile, 29 settembre 2020). Propongo qui alcune riflessioni che scaturiscono dalla mia partecipazione al gruppo “Statuto in Transi
https://www.perunaltracitta.org/homepage/2024/01/07/autoproduzione-atto-di-lotta-radicale-e-non-violenta/
#FirenzeEDintorni #autoproduzione #biodiversit #firenze #RobHopkins #StatutoInTransizione #TransitionTowns
Transition Chipping Norton revitalised their group by giving the town's young residents a space to shape their future.
Transition Network co-founder Rob Hopkins shares the brilliant story how a Transition Together seed funding grant, made possible by funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, turned things round both for the young people's sense of confidence and agency, and the Transition group itself.
Read more: https://transitiontogether.org.uk/doing-it-for-the-kids-transition-chipping-norton/
#transitiontowns #transitiontown #communityaction #youth #ukfunding #oxfordshire #robhopkins
Our lineup of guests is now confirmed and complete!
#IainMcGilchrist, #LylaJune, #EveAnnecke, #RobHopkins, #NateHagens, #MarkBoyle, #IsabelleFrémeaux and #VandanaShiva.
Be among a community of fifty people joining each in turn in conversation this winter, discussing what life well lived looks like in times like ours:
https://www.ce.sterlingcollege.edu/surviving-the-future-the-deeper-dive
My piece about Sterling College's forthcoming #SurvivingTheFuture: #TheDeeperDive
With me, #VandanaShiva, #LylaJune, #NateHagens, #IsabelleFrémeaux, #RobHopkins and others!
Just an amazing experience, with spaces going fast..
(also a small conversational gathering later today, 7-8pm BST) 😊🤫
https://www.darkoptimism.org/2023/10/09/surviving-the-future-the-deeper-dive-2024/
