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.
Imagining the future
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 makes 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.
The two extremes of climate perception
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.”
Positive future narratives
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 has visited the future, and he can tell them what it’s like, or make it participative and invite 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 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?
First published in The Earthbound Report.
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