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

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Transition: Bounce Forward will support Transition groups in England through strengthening and supporting them to respond with activities that contribute towards a more equitable, resilient, caring and environmentally sustainable future. The project will also engage Transition groups and wider sustainability and social justice networks in a larger conversation about the changes needed now, and in the future, as we respond to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. How Will We Do This? Seed funding Of course, this imaginary life isn’t perfect. This imaginary community is not Utopia. It still rains, friends fall out and people have bad days. Some impacts of climate change are still felt. And the vision is likely very different to what your story of How Things Turned Out OK would be. But I start with it because we live in a time bereft of such stories – stories of what life could look like if we were able to find a way over the course of the next twenty years to be bold, brilliant and decisive, to act in proportion to the challenges we are facing and to aim for a future we actually feel good about.

From What Is to What If:Unleashing the Power of Imagination From What Is to What If:Unleashing the Power of Imagination

The Introduction and the first chapter provide the heart of the book. It occupies about a fifth of the total, with the remaining four fifths underlining and reinforcing the main points. There are two key takeaways from the book. The first is that things usually work out OK in the end. Whatever happens, we temper our expectations to fit the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Most of the time, our key strategies in life are simply muddling through. Looking at what turns up and then making the best of it as possible. There is a lot to be said for this approach. Time in nature helps us focus. The average American spends 93% of their time indoors or in vehicles a car. 3/4 of UK kids spend less time indoors than inmates of the American prison system.At last, a design for our dreams. I believe we have a debt of honour to take action. Please read this book and defy the herd. Are we golden or are we debris? 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? I hope to once write a review that does it more justice, but for now, will just say this book is one of my all-time favorites. 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.

From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination

An inspirational manifesto, From What Is to What If offers a template for creating dramatic, positive change.

Episode Twelve: What if criminal justice resources were instead invested into communities of colour?

Our imagination needs DIVERSITY. ‘’Imagination – that ‘ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’ – needs diversity to feed it. Are we more likely to be imaginative if all our food comes from one vast supermarket, or from a variety of small producers in a vibrant market? If most High Streets across the UK look identical, with the same massive chains, how does that impact our imagination compared with living somewhere that is home to an abundance of businesses unique to that particular place? Was wäre wenn... wir die negativen Vorstellungen über unsere Welt weglassen und ein positives, kreatives Bild malen, das uns dazu bringt, zum Beispiel die Umwelt zu schützen, das Leben in der Stadt grüner zu machen, die Schule angenehmer usw. Rob Hopkins zeigt in diesem zum Nachdenken anregenden Buch anhand von lokalen Beispielen in verschiedenen Ländern, wie man mehr Mut und Fantasie zeigen und von diesem Traumbild ausgehend Probleme lösen kann. Ich konnte nicht alles nachvollziehen, was der Autor dargestellt hat, aber das Buch ist gut aufbereitet, auch wenn einiges typisch britisch ist wie Internate und Schuluniformen. Do you have a project ready to go, supporting Transition activity in your community under the shadow of Covid-19? Perhaps you have but you don’t know it yet! Or you may have ongoing Transition work that’s really giving value to your community, particularly during this pandemic, that needs support. The second revelation is that, if we are content to muddle through, then why be anchored to current ways of doing things? Why don't we experiment to try things out? If they go wrong, then we can muddle along on any case. If we take this view, then we are empowered to dream about alternative states of affairs. It's a useful way to counter the fear of failure, which often acts to paralyse our actions. Like art, PLAY can have many positive effects on our imagination. Hopkins stresses the importance of ‘’free play’’ on the imagination, where children can invent their own games, make their own rules and learn how to cooperate. Consequently, Hopkins is not very enthusiastic about commercial games, which are often repetitive and tend to dull the imagination. For children, free play often comes naturally. But what about play for adults? Hopkins gives a suggestion that he himself enjoyed: Take an improv class. I liked the description of the ‘Yes, and’ improv game, which requires each player to take the story further, by starting each new contribution to the story with ‘Yes, and’. The lessons of ‘Yes, and’ also have a deeper meaning outside of improv: ‘’ ‘Yes, and’ is fundamental to improvisation. In life, saying no allows us to remain safe, whereas learning to say yes means learning to trust other people and to be open to being changed by the other person’’ (p 29).

From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins | Waterstones

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition Towns movement, and as such has spent the last 15 years nurturing creative local responses to global challenges. It’s given him a rich pool of examples and people to draw on for his latest book, From what is to what if – Unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. From What Is to What If was printed on paper supplied by Sheridan that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.I’ve seen this with my own eyes, thanks to an experiment a few friends and I initiated more than a decade ago in our hometown of Totnes in Devon, England (population 8,500). Our idea was a simple one: What if, we wondered, the change we need to see in response to the biggest challenges of our time came not from government and business, but from you and me, from communities working together? What if the answers were to be found not in the bleak solitude of survivalism and isolation, in the tweaking of ruthless commercialism, or in the dream that some electable saviour will come riding to our rescue, but rather in reconnection to community? As we put it: ‘If we wait for governments, it will be too late. If we act as individuals, it will be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, and it might just be in time.’ This is just one of the many examples in this book where art plays a vital role in increasing imagination, helping people in many other ways in the process. And of course, we can already see the impacts of climate change (and other ecological destruction) in real time with extreme weather events, the loss of biodiversity and a food system dependent on the use of vast quantities of pesticides and herbicides to coax crops from the earth. More and more people seem to be feeling accumulated pressures in their personal lives as well. There is an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of anxiety (estimated to have increased twentyfold over the past thirty years), a mental health crisis of vast proportions among young people, the rise of extremist movements and governments and much more besides. ⁸ Looks hopeless, right? In our community, the kids seem to have radically different feelings about school than they did ten years ago. The education department’s decision to eliminate testing, to give ample space for unstructured play and to provide students with opportunities within the community to acquire meaningful skills that enable them to live happy and healthy lives by their own definition means that most kids here now love going to school. My son, for example, recently upped his cooking skills by spending a week at a local restaurant.

From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins | Waterstones From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins | Waterstones

One episode of the ‘From What If to What Next’ podcast every two weeks, each exploring a different ‘What If’ question

I love this book. It is an extraordinary, reality-based report on people around the world applying the power of imagination to rebuild relationships and create a fulfilling, creative, and possible human future together. An essential read for all who care.” —David C. Korten, author of Change the Story, Change the Future and When Corporations Rule the World At last, a design for our dreams. I believe we have a debt of honour to take action. Please read this book and defy the herd. Are we golden or are we debris?” —Mark Stewart, musician, The Pop Group and Mark Stewart & The Maffia A step-by-step guide will help you to develop a vision of the future that could become lasting change.