Rob Hopkins's Conference Flashcards
Who is Rob Hopkins?
Rob Hopkins is an activist and writer on environmental issues, based in “Totnes”, England. He is best known as the founder and figurehead of the Transition movement, which he initiated in 2005.
Rob started with a quote, which is ?
“Human societies have two boundaries: one boundary is drawn by the requirements of the natural world and one by the collective imagination”. S. Griffin.
The evening is framed around one concept, one question what is it ?
“What if” that day last Friday, in Westminster London, when the same thing happened here, as well and all around the world, “What if” we come to look back on that day historically as being the day that the world tipped. That, that day, was the tipping point beyond which we entered a whole new world where change felt so much more possible we had a positive cascade of things started because of what happened on that day and as I stood there in Westminster that felt entirely possible.”
► We need to disrupt and we need to put our bodies in the way in a really creative and playful way.
What was the point of the shoe experience?
What happened is that the room was filled up with imagination. “I’m looking at you, your eyes are bright, there’s laughter, there’s connection, that’s what it feels like when we’re being imaginative with other people.”
► For Rob, if we are going to successfully get through the next 10-12 years, it needs to feel like that.
Rob proposed to time travel to 11 years into the future to 2030, what does the world look like ?
- We elected people who actually care
- Finance came in hard to support this global positive movement
- 2019 was the tipping point of that unimaginable shift
- By 2030, we are reaching a time when Belgium is the first zero carbon nation in the whole world !
Sometimes we work for something but we never sat down to imagine what our effort would look like, like what kind of world am I working for, am I willing to work for ? The power of putting an image to this thought is very powerful and should be practiced more !
IN REAL LIFE:
In France, there is a place where the education authority in the town decided they were going to, make all of the food in all of the schools 100% organic and for 70% they were going to grow themselves in the town.
► So they bought a piece of land on the edge of the town where they grow their food, they even have trainings to teach young people how to grow food.
What is the name of Rob’s book?
This book is based on a realization of something, what is it ?
The book is called “From what is to what if”.
“It was sparked by my reading about some research that was done in the US in 2010 called ”the creativity crisis”, where a researcher looked at this creativity test done with big groups of people going back to the 1960s. Her conclusion was that imagination and IQ rose together until the mid 1990s and then IQ kept rising and imagination went into what she called a “steady and persistent decline”. When this was published it was on the front page of Newsweek, it was a big story and they said: What does this mean for economic growth? What does this mean for Hollywood? But I never heard anybody say: “What does this mean for climate change, for social justice, for those of us who were trying to turn the world around?”
► Climate change is a failure of the imagination.
[WHAT IF] What if we teach our kids to learn to play again ?
A researchers blamed “the decline of play”, she said in the last 30 or 40 years we have seen a decline of children playing in free and unstructured ways.
► This is how children learn to cooperate, this is how they learn to manage conflicts, this is how they learn to take risks.
► If we have a generation of children who don’t take risks we produce a generation of adults who can’t take risks which are the last kind of adults we need today.
[WHAT IT] What if imagination was necessary for our health ?
There is a really important part of your brain called the hippocampus, it is the part of your brain where the memory and our imagination fire from.
The thing that’s most interesting about the hippocampus is that it is the part of our brain that is most uniquely vulnerable to cortisol (when we are anxious or have stress or have trauma) the hippocampus shrinks and it shrinks by up to 20% and when it does, we lose the ability to look at the future in positive and hopeful ways and we just get stuck down into the present.
At this moment we are creating the perfect conditions for the hippocampus to shrink. We live in a time with an epidemic of loneliness we live in the age of anxiety we are creating the perfect conditions for our imagination to be shrinking and continuing to shrink.
What was the genius behing Antonis Maccas, the mayor of Bogota ?
He once said: “Here’s what I learned from my career in politics: people respond to humor and playfulness from politicians, it’s the most powerful tool for change we have”.
When he was elected, Bogota had the most corrupt traffic police in the whole of Colombia and the highest levels of death on the roads. So he came into office and the first thing he did was, he sacked all of the traffic police and hired instead a team of 400 mimes who stood on every busy intersection and they had a red and a yellow card like football referees and if the cars came and they weren’t behaving very well they would show them a red card and be told they were very naughty. He said the one thing that Colombians fear more than the traffic police is public humiliation and so he solve this whole thing in a really playful way.
[WHAT IF] What if we let Nature Guides us ?
What are the 4 ingredients to bring back imagination of our society ?
- We need to create space for imagination (things we can free up, 4 days week, etc.)
- Imaginative places, places where it feels different, where people can think together about the future.
- Practices, things we can do together, imagine together.
- Pacts, where we can see those things becoming reality.
Rob ended with another quote, which is ?
“We all adults and children have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It’s easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing, an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future and they do it by imagining things can be different.”
CASE STUDY: ART ANGEL
