Falling In Love With The Future: Antidote To Climate Anxiety

In this imaginative and hopeful episode, Rob Hopkins—founder of the Transition movement and author of How to Fall in Love with the Future—guides listeners through a vivid meditation envisioning himself as a time traveler returning from the year 2030. Drawing on years of community activism and storytelling, Rob invites us to step through a metaphorical door into a future shaped by collective action, resilience, and radical imagination. What might our cities, communities, and daily lives look like if we did everything we could to build a better world? This episode offers a powerful glimpse into that possibility.

Transcript

So,

I'd like to invite you to imagine that you,

That in front of you,

There is a door,

A wooden door,

Beautiful,

Has lovely carvings on it,

Patterns,

Feels very old,

And it crackles with a kind of electricity,

A kind of magic.

And on the other side of that door is the year 2030.

It's not just any 2030,

There are many,

Many different 2030s ahead of us,

Many,

Many different quantum threads that go from the future,

From the present,

To many,

Many different futures.

But the one that we're going to follow is the one that takes us to the 2030 that was the result of us having done everything we possibly could have done.

You know,

Like I say,

We have followed many of the other ones,

The places they go were horrible,

You don't want to go there,

Believe me,

We've been there,

We've checked it out.

But the one that takes us to the future that resulted from us doing everything we could have possibly done is astonishing and extraordinary.

We did it,

And we want to take you there to see it.

So in a moment,

I'm going to ask you,

If you imagine that you reach out to that door,

And you open that door and you step through it,

And when we do that,

I'm going to ask you to take a walk around using all of your senses.

What does that world smell like?

What is it feel like on your skin?

What does it taste like on the tip of your tongue?

What can you hear?

What can you see?

Okay,

So in your own time,

Imagine that you reach out,

Turn the handle on that door,

Swing it open,

And take a step through into the bright light of that 2030,

And then take a walk around.

So you may at this point like to pause this recording and capture in some way what you saw.

Maybe you might like to write something.

You might like to draw something.

You might like to try and capture in some way what it was that you saw,

And to then share that with other people.

But I'm just going to say a little bit about where I went and the future that I see when I do this,

Because as you might imagine,

I do this quite a lot,

And I find that the more you do this,

The more this future starts to come into clearer and clearer detail.

The first time you do it,

It's a bit fuzzy.

It's a bit murky.

You start to see some details.

The more you do it,

It comes more and more and more into focus.

So for me,

When I land into that future,

I'm just going to shut this window just one second.

So for me,

When I arrive into that world,

The first thing that always strikes me is how much louder the birdsong is in that world.

And then secondly,

How different the air smells.

If you had the nose of a sommelier,

And you could really unpack what you're smelling,

You would be smelling herbs,

You would be smelling air that almost smells like honey.

It's so clean.

You would be smelling the smell of rain on stone.

And also maybe the most important thing is the look in people's eyes.

As you walk past people,

There's a look in people's eyes,

A sense of,

I think we might just do this,

A sense of excitement,

A sense of exhilaration,

A sense of being part of something that feels historic,

That feels remarkable,

That people can see around them that the biodiversity is starting to come back,

That young people's mental health is starting to come back,

That the inequalities that so scarred our society five or ten years before are starting to rapidly close,

And people are coming together much more.

People see more public luxury in the world around them.

There's much more of a sense of us than a sense of I,

And it feels like the unclenching of a fist.

And as I walk around,

One of the things that I'm struck by is by the number of bicycles,

Because we built the infrastructure for people to use it.

Bicycles are just going backwards and forwards,

Huge numbers,

Almost like a river of bicycles.

The bicycle rush hours in this future are amazing because we built the infrastructure for people to use it,

And they used it.

And as a result,

We are fitter and healthier.

The air has improved so much as a result.

All those underground car parks we used to use that we don't need anymore,

We now use them as free,

Safe,

Clean places for people to store their bicycles.

It's been an amazing shift.

You see children of all ages riding to work.

You see people riding to work on building sites,

Carrying their tools.

You see all kinds of things go past you.

Much,

Much less cars in our cities.

One of the things that was a real surprise to me last time I went was that somebody introduced me to the kind of parallel world happening in our cities on the rooftops.

This movement that began,

Which was about rooftop gardening and rooftop farming and using that space,

Has accelerated so fast.

And when I was there,

Somebody took me up the stairs,

Spiral stairs up onto the roof of one building where there was the most amazing market garden happening up there.

Lots of young people.

Now being a rooftop urban farmer is one of the coolest jobs in our cities.

Way cooler than being a rapper now is to be a rooftop salad grower.

And there are now so many of these flat rooftops that have been bought into productive uses that actually the municipalities have invested in bridges and walkways so that you can take your bicycle up and now cycle around from rooftop to rooftop to rooftop.

There are little cafes up there,

Places where people do yoga,

Where people do meditation,

All kinds of things being grown.

It's like a parallel world happening above our feet.

And when we,

Just one second,

I'm just on a Zoom.

One of the things that I noticed when I'm back on the ground and walking around down there is that there has been a real shift for young people.

In 2025,

There was this opinion poll that showed that nearly 50% of young people said that they would rather live without the internet.

That grew very quickly into a movement of young people who were craving analog experiences,

Human connection,

Things that we did together in real communities rather than online communities.

And as we walked around,

We could see that in terms of street parties,

Places where people were gathering to play games,

People were gathering to debate ideas,

People were gathering to have huge big food festivals in streets where they had long tables and they were cooking for each other,

Feeding each other in communal shared spaces.

And the sound of conversation and conviviality and new connections being made was just an absolutely beautiful,

Beautiful thing.

We saw it in so many different places.

And this move away from social media,

People realized in 2025,

2026,

The real damage that social media was doing to people's ability to concentrate,

To be able to tolerate differences of opinion.

And we just decided we'd had enough of it.

It was causing more damage than good.

And so there was a move towards people doing things together,

Theater in public places was we walked through the park,

There's people making music,

There's people playing games,

There's people debating ideas with a willingness to listen to each other that we had really lost before,

I think.

There was many places as well in the cities where there used to be flooding and just outside of those areas that flooding had been stopped by the reintroduction of beavers because we realized that beavers were much better hydrological engineers than human beings could ever be because we realized many of the solutions that we needed actually came from human beings trusting in nature and wilderness just being left to do its own thing.

So the beavers had taken those areas,

Transformed them into these incredibly biodiverse spaces where huge amounts of water and silt were held and trapped.

And the biodiversity just absolutely exploded.

So around our cities,

There are many fascinating,

Amazing places we can go now to see this rewilding happening.

And because after the ban on pesticides back in 2026,

When we started to see the natural world starting to rebounce,

We saw that in our cities as well.

And we were starting to reconceive of our cities as actually being like national parks,

As being like national parks with buildings in rather than cities with a few trees.

And that led to a real shift as well.

So as we walk around in this city,

What I see is a place where people are finding each other again,

Where there is a sense that we're all pulling in the same direction towards something where there is art and beauty and creativity as a public right,

As a public function everywhere that we go.

We see a lot less of the big,

Big,

Big businesses that we used to see before and a lot more small independent businesses that are taking over different spaces.

So it feels like every city you visit,

Every town you visit has a unique culture,

A unique flavor,

Unique tastes that we can experiences that we can have there that we can't have anywhere else.

So everywhere has become much,

Much more rich in a,

In a cultural sense.

And we don't see the extremes of poverty.

We don't see homelessness anymore.

We also don't see the extremes of wealth,

Sort of flashy,

Ostentatious displaying of wealth has become deeply,

Deeply unpopular and as a sign of kind of weakness and lack of character rather than as something to emulate.

And just the last thing to mention is that as,

As we walk around,

We saw democracy as so much more than something that we just do once every four or five years when we get to cast a vote.

Because we're now all part of a number of different cooperatives in a,

In a very different kind of an economy,

We all have some sort of say,

Some sort of involvement,

Whether it's in our schools,

Many of which now run using democratic principles where kids get to shape schools and make decisions from a young age by learning how to do that on behalf of their peers.

Uh,

You know,

We,

But that runs through the businesses we work in now are much more democratic.

The neighborhoods we live in,

How decisions are made in terms of how public money is spent.

Democracy is now something that is,

Is much,

Much more part of our,

Our everyday experience.

We see it as a,

As a responsibility.

We see it as a something that we do on behalf of the wellbeing of our peers rather than just in pursuit of our own kind of self-interest.

So,

Uh,

And just before we leave,

We,

We meet a couple of young people who were telling us,

We say,

Well,

What's this shift been like,

Like how,

How has it been to live through this?

We've,

We've just come from 2025.

This felt completely unimaginable in 2025.

And they said,

Well,

One of the things that really changed was that there was a move away from cynicism among young people in our,

In the culture that was so rooted in cynicism.

And we began to realize that it just wasted so much energy.

And instead we,

We came together,

We created clear visions and directions of where we wanted to go.

And we started to work to rebuild the world around those visions and the world that we see now is the result of that.

And it's an extraordinary thing to see.

So I'm going to just,

We climbed back into our time machine and set the controls back for 2025 and fly back to the present day.

And when we step out,

I always like to make the point to people that actually all the things that we've seen in that 2030,

You can find already in places in 2025,

Go and find those stories and see those as the seeds of what comes next and that we need to enhance and expand.

And yeah,

Thank you for time traveling to 2030 with me.