From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins

Author:Rob Hopkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

It’s December 2018 and I’m standing in a room in Brest in France, conducting a training event for forty community energy ambassadors who will later return home to educate people in their community about energy efficiency. I invite everyone to form into a line, shoulder to shoulder, facing me. I dim the lights and ask everyone to close their eyes. I tell the ambassadors to imagine that in front of them is a door, a door to the future. It crackles with static, a powerful portal to a different world. I tell the ambassadors that when we step through this door, we shall be stepping two decades into the future. It will be a world that has been completely transformed from our current reality because eighteen years ago, there was a global tipping point, a moment when popular demand for governments to take the lead on rapid and effective action on climate change, injustice and inequality led to previously unimaginable change. Principled and determined people were elected. Communities responded with ambitious initiatives in neighbourhoods and cities across the world. A new economy emerged and flourished. Social divisions dissolved.

‘When you step through the door,’ I tell them, ‘you will be stepping into that world, with all your senses.’ I invite them to take a step forward.

I let them stand in silence for a few minutes. You can hear a pin drop. I notice some tears. After I break the silence and invite the participants to share what they are seeing or feeling, a woman speaks up.

‘There’s so much more birdsong,’ she says.

The reflections start pouring out from other people too:

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