Creating a politics of longing

Rob Hopkins, who founded the Transition Towns movement two decades ago, has been a tireless and engaging activist for community-led Transition ever since. As the work has developed, so have the methods. What started in the Transition Handbook as a series of technical issues for towns and communities to engage with has become a series of more interesting questions on how to help people imagine the future. His previous book, From What Is to What If, was about helping people to imagine what the Transition might feel like. His most recent book, How to Fall in Love With the Future, published in June, steps this up by addressing questions of imagination, and of how we prime the imagination for change. I was lucky to catch him talking last week at a webinar organised by the Root and Reason network, the community interest company that picked up the work on food resilience of the Agri-Foods Net Zero network after the AFNZ research grant came to an end. (And Root and Reason is definitely a…