Video summary
Rob Hopkins introduces himself as a former permaculture teacher and founder of the Transition Movement, a global grassroots initiative that has spread to over fifty countries to address the climate and ecological emergency. He simplifies the complex reality of climate change into five core truths: the world is warming due entirely to human activities like burning fossil fuels; this crisis is undeniable among experts; it poses severe risks unless we act with creativity and passion; and most importantly, we have the power to respond rather than remain passive. To illustrate the urgency, he presents a graph showing that humanity has moved out of its "safe space," where CO2 levels stayed below 350 parts per million, into an unstable zone exceeding 410 ppm, making it critical for us to return to stability by cutting emissions significantly before 2030.
Hopkins argues against focusing solely on distant goals like the year 2050 or abstract utopias, urging instead a focus on tangible improvements visible within our lifetimes and those of our children. He reframes climate activism not as preventing collapse but as cultivating "longing"—a positive vision that gives people something exciting to run toward rather than just fleeing from disaster. To demonstrate how cultural imagination drives real-world achievement, he tells the story of humanity's journey to the moon, which was fueled by decades of stories, films, and songs before Neil Armstrong actually landed there in 1969. This historical example proves that we can achieve seemingly impossible feats if we first build a strong collective desire for them within our culture.
Applying this principle to the climate crisis, Hopkins suggests that any solution proposed today must seem at least slightly ridiculous because it needs to be ambitious enough to transform society entirely by 2030. He shares an anecdote about his hometown of Totnes in Devon, where he claims a secret laboratory beneath the castle has been working for ten years to build the world's first fully functioning time machine. This playful yet profound metaphor signifies that we are not just waiting passively for change but actively building a new future right now through practical action and shared imagination. By embracing these "ridiculous" leaps of faith, communities can organize themselves from the bottom up to create nourishing lives, cleaner air, and better mental health for everyone before the deadline arrives.
Read the full video transcript
[applause]
>> Hello everybody. Uh yes, I'll explain
this shortly. This this this old thing I
threw on this morning. I'll explain what
that's all about in a moment. Follow a
vegetable orchestra, they said. So, I
will try and I will try and do my best.
So, I'm Rob and
you may or may not have heard of me and
what I do. So, just to set a little
context, for many many years I was a
teacher of permaculture, teaching people
practical skills that we need for this
time now, how to grow their own food,
how to build their own house, all that
kind of thing. Then in my own town in
the southwest of England, I started what
became known as the transition movement,
which is a community bottom-up activism
process which started in my town very
very rapidly spread to 50 countries now
around the world where people are
organizing, sharing their stories. It's
one of been one of the great honors of
my life to be part of that extraordinary
movement.
The second bit of context is why we do
this. And I want to just speak to what
for me feels like one of the big
elephants in the corner of the room over
this last couple of days, which is the
climate and ecological emergency. Now,
climate change is something which is
complex, but it's not complicated. Those
are different things. And so, just to
distill it down into its most simple
thing, thanks to an organization called
Climate Science Basics, I just want to
share five key ideas with you. The first
one is
it's warming. You can all see it.
Wherever you've traveled from to be
here, you can all see that the world is
warming. Number two, it's us. This is
not part of a natural cycle. This is
caused by us, our addiction to burning
stuff, in particular fossil fuels, and
our addiction to chopping down trees.
Number three, we're sure.
There's no debate anymore among people
who know what they're on about that
that's what's actually happening. Number
four, it's bad. It's really bad. And
it's going to get an awful lot worse,
unimaginably worse, unless we respond to
this with with imagination and passion
and creativity and and really make this
the central thing of what we're doing.
But number five, we can do something
about this. We are not passive in the
face of this as a crisis. Now, Monday
morning is not a time for graphs. I'm
only going to show you two, I promise I
won't show you any more. And I'm showing
you them more for the stories that they
tell, right? In in this picture, if you
can see along the middle there is the
pink bit. That's humanity's safe place.
Everything we associate with human
civilization, everything that you as
food professionals associate with food,
the things that you cook with, the
recipes, the culture, all emerged in
this safe space where concentrations of
CO2 never went above 350 parts per
million. Temperatures fluctuated a bit,
but that was our stable safe place. We
have now broken out of that space. We're
at 431
parts per million and on an on an upward
trajectory. Getting that down is the
most important thing that we can do now.
We are out of our safe space. We don't
know how to work in that space and we
have to get back there as quickly as
possible. What might we do about it?
Well, I think the only thing that we
have as a world for what that might look
like is the Paris Agreement, signed, as
you might imagine, in Paris in 2015.
That sets out a road map for how we
might get there. As you can see, it
means that by 2030 we need to have cut
our emissions by 48%.
Now, we can either be the people who go,
"Oh,
that's really tough, that. Maybe we
could just kick it down the road a
little bit more." Or the people who go,
"Great, wow, amazing. An opportunity to
reimagine everything. That only comes
around once every couple of hundred
years and we're here at one of those
moments. How exciting is that?" So, I'm
going to be coming back to this idea of
2030. I'm not really interested in what
the sort of 2050. I'm not interested in
utopias. I'm more interested in what
would that 2030 look like if we were
halfway there. And we could see the
world around us changing, our children's
mental health getting better, our air
getting cleaner, our lives feeling more
nourishing. That's what I want to share
with you today. And for me, in the work
that I do,
having been around climate activism for
a long time, what I try to do is reframe
that work as actually being around the
cultivation of longing. Just talking
about extinction and collapse doesn't
cut it anymore for me. How do we give
people something to run towards? So, the
story that I love to tell is about the
moon. Jules Verne, 1865, wrote a book
called From the Earth to the Moon. And
in that book, he pulled together all the
best science he could find about how we
might actually get to the moon.
Thrilling, thrilling story. That book
inspired scientists and engineers to
start figuring out how we might actually
get there. And it started into the
culture. More people wrote stories about
it. The first film made in 1902 by
Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, was
about that. We then had this whole genre
of popular science. Some of our older
members in the here in the audience will
remember growing up with magazines like
this all about how will we get to the
moon? What's it going to be like when we
get there? By [clears throat] the night
Popeye went to the moon, Mickey Mouse
went to the moon. There were dances
about what how you would walk on the
moon. It got into the culture. In the
1950s, there were 10 awful, awful films
that were all about all male crews of
astronauts going to the moon and
arriving there to find that the only
people there were women who hadn't seen
men for a very long time.
And this one is called Cat-Women of the
Moon. It is truly the worst film I've
ever seen. I watched it so you don't
have to. It says there on the poster,
"See the the the the lost city of
love-starved cat women." I love in the
poster the idea of this strange male
fantasy you would arrive on the moon
full of women who hadn't seen the men
for ages.
The men look absolutely terrified.
But it meant that it got so into the
culture, the cultural longing to get to
the moon built and built and built. It
meant that in 1963, when JFK announced
we will go to the moon not because it's
easy but because it's hard, standing in
front of a man trying very hard not to
sneeze. It meant that actually we
managed to do that. And oh, no, sorry.
Yeah, that's the wrong thing. Tintin
went to the moon, of course, very
famously. And when JFK did announce,
standing in front of a man trying hard,
very hard not to sneeze, it meant we did
it in 6 years. The average age of the
people who got us there was 28.
And it meant that when Neil Armstrong
did land on the moon, Hergé, who made
the Tintin comics, did this comic strip
of of of Neil Armstrong being greeted
onto the moon
by Tintin and Captain Haddock. Welcome
to the moon.
Because by the time we got there, we'd
been there thousands and thousands of
times in songs and stories.
We don't have 100 years to cultivate
longing to address the climate
emergency, but the same principle
applies. We need to give We need to give
people things to run towards rather than
just things to run screaming in the
opposite direction from. I love this
quote that's on the front window of the
Institute for the Future. They say, "Any
useful statement about the future should
at first seem ridiculous."
I'm a great believer in the ridiculous.
I'm kind of here to urge you all to be
more ridiculous in the work that you do
because at this point any solution put
forward to the climate emergency that
doesn't seem at least a bit ridiculous
is not ambitious enough. So, I have
traveled from our little town of Totnes
in Devon. Anyone here ever been to
Totnes in Devon?
My people.
So, you may know various things about
Totnes. We are the place where the
transition movement started, for
example. But what you don't know is that
deep underneath Totnes Castle,
we have a secret laboratory
where we have been working for the last
10 years to build the world's first
successful, fully functioning time
machine.
And my friends, I can tell you today
that we did it.