“Our civilisation is built on stories. We tell them all the time, especially to children, who we encourage to have active imaginations. Yet it’s a trait many people do not deem important enough to carry over into adulthood.”
Rob Hopkins has seen the future – and it’s glorious. You should see it too, he says. Smell it. Hear it. There are children playing in the street again. Deafening dawn choruses. Cycle lanes chocka with rush-hour traffic. Indie shops galore. Restaurants spilling onto streets. No homelessness. Oodles of civic pride. Crystal-clean rivers rewilded by beavers. Community orchards. Pollen on the breeze. No fumes, no smog, just fresh air.
‘Field Recordings from the Future’ is a project that is the work of Rob Hopkins and ambient electronic music artist Mr Kit. In a great technological breakthrough, they have built a working time machine, and regularly travel to a low carbon, more just, fair and equal 2030, a 2030 that delights in its diversity, and when there, they record what it sounds like, and bring those recordings back to 2024. Their hope is that the impact of people hearing those recordings will be one of the key things that might tip the people into action on the scale required
I also have a story to tell and it is the story of how we came to win, how humanity turned on a dime and headed in a whole new direction, we embarked on a healing journey, one that accelerated and transformed all that surrounds us. It is a story that I want you to be part of, all of us can be part of, many of us are already and don’t fully realise it, it is time to realise that is us who create the world we inhabit. Do you really want to live in a world of warfare, climate catastrophe, extreme weather events? A world driving ever more people to abandon their lives and take the streets in seek of new refuge or to express their protest and disdain for the leadership that failed us.
War is a failure, it is a break down in communicatation, all wars end with truces and negotiation, so let that process of healing being. We cannot and will not solve our environemtal problems with the ideas and technologies that caused them, we need to completely change, we need new economic models and paradgims, a total abandonemnt of consumer culture and consigning all notions of GDP growth directly ino the bin.
We are in a crisis, multiple crises, and our leaders have failed us, they only have their own self preservation in mind, they have no solutions to offer us, only more of the poison that bought us to this low place.
Sir David King is an excellent communicator of science and has some of the big ideas that might just turn the tide on the challenges that are engulfing us
Where will the leadership come from?
The new leaders will most likely come from all the unexpected places, we need to hear the voices and perspectives from the edges, the margins, from Africa, from refugees, from the past, from the First Nations, from those people who are currently not invested in the status quo, those whose houses and lives have already been taken by the storm, these are our new leaders. Everyone of us who, however un-confidently is setting thier foot in a better direction, and comitting to be the solution, the tidal wave of good will that flows from these actions can create the critical change in our collective imagination.
We must vote with our feet, through actions, driven by our deepest of inner convictions.
My story and one the I have to tell begins with my personal journey, and then quickly the thread of my story is joined by many others. Little tributaries, that became a mighty river, and a river that fed into a great ocean.
I hope to join with artists and storytellers to help me visualise the communicate this story, strengthen some of the connections and project a positive vision further into the future.
Who will be the leaders? Let them be the story tellers, those one that can tell a different story, one that leads to if not a happy ending, one that leads to new possibilities, a re-birth, a re-boot of society, launching an ecologically restorative, regenerative, inclusive, yet complex and rapidily evolving way of being the deepens the ecological roots of our every action, informs and inspires us into new realms of creativity.
In my story, the one I will call Chimanimani, at more than one point I found myself lost, and in a place i did not want to be in, far from home, but in daring to lose everything I realised I ultimately also stood to win if not everything, certainly a whole new set of possibilities .
I dared to enter chapel perilous, more of that later.