From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

Product Information

We are living through a perfect storm of factors ruinous to the imagination” warns Hopkins. “As we face vast crises that demand imaginative and urgent responses and a reimagining of everything, we are simply not up to it.” The longer our inertia persists, the steeper and more demanding that task becomes. As Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, stated when the report was released, ‘Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes.’ ⁷ One might say that human societies have two boundaries. One boundary is drawn by the requirements of the natural world and the other by the collective imagination. An inspirational manifesto, From What Is to What If offers a template for creating dramatic, positive change." Rob Hopkins suggests that something similar to these biological processes in individual human beings happens to societies as a whole, asking: ‘’Might it be that the more deeply we are immersed in a crises and the more dystopian the future appears, the less able we are to imagine a way out?’’ (p 48).

First review of ‘From What Is to What If’! - Rob Hopkins First review of ‘From What Is to What If’! - Rob Hopkins

Times of great change invite us to rethink where we are at and what might need to be transformed in our communities. As part of Transition: Bounce Forward’s work in Great Britain, we invite you to join together with your group to explore: Transition projects relating to local economy, community resilience, neighbourhood mutual aid, support for disadvantaged groups, local food growing and more. I pass what used to be one of the district’s supermarkets, most of which closed down about ten years ago. The explosion in community food production and rapid shift of community investment led to a withdrawal of support from supermarkets, which precipitated the collapse of the industrial food model over the space of only a couple of years. The building was repurposed and became home to a variety of local food processors, small-scale manufacturing and a training centre linked to local schools. The place is buzzing. Our former supermarket houses a mill that processes locally grown grains, as well as a sawmill that processes locally harvested timber. What had been extensive car parks are now intensive food gardens – modelled on those that surrounded Paris a hundred years ago – and they provide local food for local markets. This is important in the study of the future. If we are to create alternative future constructs, then we need to be able to draw upon a range of alternative future states, some of them very different from our current situation. From where does this creativity come? We dream it. We make it up. We ask ourselves 'What if?'. It is from this liminal zone that our creativity springs in whatever undertaking we are engaged in.Reading this book is like listening to the voice of Rob Hopkins. A voice full of kindness, optimism, brightness, humor, and imagination. And that spirit is precisely what we need to build a better future and to reconnect with each other and the better part of ourselves. With this book, Rob poses a crucial question: How could we create another world, one in which human beings live in harmony with each other and with nature, if we are not able to imagine it first? We can’t—and that’s why this book is so necessary.” —Cyril Dion, writer, filmmaker, and producer of the film Tomorrow What Next is an online summit being developed with CTRLshift that will bring all this thinking together. We will join with others from outside of the Transition movement to explore how we can advocate for wider and ambitious societal changes towards a just recovery, and make our visions our reality. (20th-28th February 2021). Get Involved

The Book – Rob Hopkins

Since 1970, numbers of birds, fish, reptiles, and mammals on planet has dropped by 60%. We lose between 150-200 species every day according to the UN. As we derive our language from the natural world, what happens to our quality of speech once we lose these species? By 2100, over half world's 6,000 languages will be gone. National Geographic lost 93% of food variety seeds in just 80 years. We've lost 85% of apple cultivars in the same time period. What are also the effects on imagination when food supply and shopping sources are all the same no matter the location?As part of a plan for helping an autonomous Transition Hub to emerge in England and Wales we were supported by the The National Lottery Community Fund to develop a 4 year project which we hoped to have been able to start delivering in Great Britain from July of this year. You may have seen or responded to the surveys we carried out last year with British groups that informed this funding bid. However, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic this funding stream has been put on hold until at least next year, though we are still hopeful that our bid will be successful in the future. A step-by-step guide will help you to develop a vision of the future that could become lasting change. Sadly, it seems far easier to imagine almost any dystopian scenario than the possibility that we might actually still have the competence to act, to create something else, to dig ourselves out of the many holes of our own making. The message that ‘it can’t be done’ is strong and pervasive. As Susan Griffin puts it: Our thanks to National Lottery Players, and The National Lottery Community Fund for enabling us to Bounce Forward! 2 Comments