Today I am speaking with Rob Hopkins. 15 years ago, I visited Totnes in Devon, UK, and was amazed. They just had started to become the first transition town in the world.
Fast forward to 2021 and we live in a post-pandemic one society that faces the much bigger climate crisis and lack of imagination of what to do next.
Good we have Rob and his many allies, because they want to build imaginative infrastructures. Tune in and listen how you, I, we all, can actually do it. Because others have already done it, so it’s now down to us to follow; move through our resistance and change the way we live, work, travel and perhaps most importantly – collaborate.
Rob Hopkins is a cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, and the author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently, From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. He presents the podcast series ‘From What If to What Next‘ which invites listeners to send in their “what if” questions and then explores how to make them a reality.
In 2012, he was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events.
An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. In 2020 he was a member of the Cambridge Sustainability Commission on Scaling Sustainable Behaviour Change. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transtionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.
