Digest: Falling in Love with the Future – Imagination as a tool for resilience

TL;DR

Rob Hopkins closed our resilience webinar series in July explaining why food system transformation stalls: we are fluent in fear but cannot picture a future worth wanting. What changes if cultivating that longing becomes the goal?

• Hopkins argues that a better food future is held back less by missing solutions than by our inability to picture and want it.
• His “time travel to 2036” makes that desire concrete, assembling real, present-day visions, from beaver-slowed rivers to council market gardens feeding schools, into a future you can imagine visiting.
• He asks us to pair the mapping of shocks and vulnerabilities with an equally vivid picture of the resilient system we want, and to treat what might be seen as today’s marginal projects as the foundations of tomorrow’s normal.
• Bottom line: imagining the food future we want is a precondition for building it, not a replacement for the practical work of resilience.

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This summer the climate crisis stopped being something that kept people awake because they had read the report and became something that kept them awake because of the heat. That was how Rob Hopkins opened our final resilience webinar in July. He argued that we are already fluent in fear; what we cannot do is picture, in any detail, a future we would actually want to live in.

Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition movement, calls that missing capacity longing, and thinks its absence, rather than any shortage of innovation, is what holds transformation back. His remedy involves using a piece of theatre: a “time machine” that travels to 2036 and returns with dispatches, including bicycle rush hours, rewilded rivers, and council market gardens growing school dinners. Every example already exists somewhere in 2026. He is collecting the evidence that a better future is already underway. 

Recent sessions in our webinar series have mapped the shocks and vulnerabilities facing the food system, and made the case for resilience as national security. Hopkins asked a different question: what would our activism look like if cultivating longing for a thriving food future were its main objective?

Quick Take

• The real barrier to change is a failure of imagination. We can picture collapse in vivid detail, Hopkins argues, but cannot picture, or want, a future worth living in. The solutions largely exist already, so activism’s primary task now is to cultivate longing, because people only build what they can first imagine.

• Fear-based messaging has hit a ceiling. Extinction and collapse are legitimate framings, Hopkins accepts, but they have engaged perhaps only 3 to 4 per cent of people. This is why he wants to retire “emergency mode” in favour of what he calls “delicious opportunity mode”, which is playful and deliberately absurd, and, he argues, cannot be done without artists.

• His “time travel to 2036” makes the desirable future concrete, and it already exists somewhere in 2026. The imagined 2036 is based on community-owned energy, rivers rewilded by beavers, diversifying farms and agroforestry, and towns growing their own school meals. Hopkins presents these as the “weak signals” of a transition already under way.

• The point is to make the good outcome vivid rather than the bad one. Asked how to get people to take food resilience seriously without spreading alarm, Hopkins described “sensual futuring”, a term he borrows from a Berlin activist. This involves rendering in multisensory detail what a food-secure nation feels like. Hopkins pointed to the Swiss canton of Geneva, which has voted to make access to a good diet a universal right.

Deep Dive

Postcards from a 2036 that already exists

Hopkins opened the webinar by asking the audience to step out of his time machine onto a street in 2036. The first thing you notice is the air, which smells of warm honey and spring in the mountains; then the birdsong, louder than you remember; then the traffic, which is bicycles, moving, he says, like ballet. Children help tend a market garden on land the council bought so that every school meal in town could be grown nearby.

The point beneath this imagining is serious: every feature of this 2036 is drawn from something real in 2026, a “weak signal” of a transition already under way. Community-owned renewable energy, homes built by community land trusts from hemp and lime, rivers slowed and rewilded by reintroduced beavers, a fast-growing industry making food, materials and packaging from mycelium. 

For food and farming, his imagined decade brings diversification into agroforestry, more people back on the land, towns reconnected to the fields around them, and, he suggests, 70 to 80 per cent less meat eaten than today, a shift he claims people barely noticed.

The most dramatic details are imagined by design: a council market garden that leaves a whole town eating less ultra-processed food; beavers whose dams cut flood risk enough for insurers to fund their release. Hopkins offers them as memories carried back from a future worth wanting.

The case for longing over fear

Why go to such lengths? Because, Hopkins argues, the climate movement’s usual way of talking about the future has reached its limit. Messaging built on extinction and collapse is legitimate, and may be accurate, but it has engaged a small minority, perhaps only 3 to 4 per cent of people. His alternative is to centre longing, and to treat the deliberately absurd as a tool: one of his favourite quotes is that any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.

His touchstone is the moon landing. Jules Verne’s 1865 novel about firing astronauts to the moon was wrong on the engineering but set off a century of films, comics and fairground rides that rehearsed the trip, so that when the moment came it felt inevitable. Hopkins wants the same rehearsal for a liveable future, through what he calls temporal fluidity: stepping into the future to see the present differently. He traces the practice to a t-shirt he once saw on a protester, reading “I’ve been to the future. We won.”

What to ask of leaders, and why the fringe matters

During the Q&A participants asked Hopkins what he would want from political leaders, and from a metro mayor such as Andy Burnham in particular. His asks include ruling out new North Sea oil and gas; giving a national climate emergency briefing and pairing it with a “national imagination briefing” that is as honest about the ambition required as about the risk; and hand communities the power of compulsory purchase over derelict and brownfield sites so they can lead their own regeneration. Across these requests was a plea for our leaders to be honest about the scale of both the challenge and the imagination it will take.

A primary teacher asked which part of 2036 was his favourite, so she could tell her students. His answer was the landscapes being rewilded by beavers, a kind of benign Jurassic Park where you stand among a large native mammal most of us have never seen and watch it demonstrate why it’s a better hydrological engineer than any human. We would come away, as he put it, in love with life. Best of all, he noted, this is a future you can already visit: he sends people to sit by the beaver ponds at Chris Jones’s Woodland Valley Farm in Cornwall at dusk.

Hopkins’ most encouraging answer was to a question about how to get from the marginal to the mainstream. An audience member described how easily radical hopes get dismissed as niche, and asked Hopkins what his answer is to “it will never work.” Hopkins reframed “impossible” as “not yet”: the things we are told are impossible are often the very things we know we must do, and the people already doing them, on small budgets and against the grain, are laying the foundations that become the new normal. He says he could imagine sitting beside Rosa Parks in the 1950s telling her a Civil Rights Act would pass within a decade. The projects that feel lonely now, he suggested, are the ones a thriving 2036 will thank us for.

What now?

Hopkins left us with a challenge: to treat imagining a better future for our food system as seriously as we map the risks to the current one. This Root and Reason webinar series has spent the last few months exploring the shocks and vulnerabilities running through the UK food system, and what it takes to trust the evidence and act on it. Hopkins’s argument is that this focus needs a companion in the form of a vivid, shared picture of the resilient food system we actually want, and appealing enough that people will help build it. The elements of this future are already around us, in community energy, market gardens feeding schoolchildren, farms moving into agroforestry and rivers handed back to beavers.

It is a fitting note on which to close our resilience series. We will be back in September with a new series on justice in the food system. 

You can find out more in Hopkins’ latest book ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future’ and by signing up for his newsletter.