Rob Hopkins

When we approached him in 2013 and said, “Have you ever thought about quinoa growing?” He said, “Have I ever thought about quinoa growing?!” He said, “I tried it in the 80s and no-one was interested.” And we said, “Look at the internet, Peter”. And he phoned up the next day, and he said, “Quinoa is everywhere!” “Yep, people are ready for quinoa. Your moment is here.”

When people say, “Well it didn’t do me any harm” which a lot of people say, and then you stop, and you pause, and you ask them the question, “Do you remember the first day?” some people will go, “Oh, well of course I remember the first day, it was terrible, you know.”  There are so many stories of people who were really excited about going to boarding school.  It had been built up.  And then there they are standing on the threshold of this huge institution, these tiny little children with a monster stranger, who is called the Headmaster, or a Headmistress.

Professor Gordon Turnbull is someone I wanted to interview for this book project for a long time.  He is a consultant psychiatrist who has spent a lot of his career in the Royal Airforce before going into civvy street, where he continues to work as a consultant psychiatrist.  In 2011 he wrote a brilliant book ‘Trauma: from Lockerbie to 7/7: how trauma affects our minds and how we fight back’ which I highly recommend. He pioneered a recognition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the armed services and more widely in society.

He sees trauma, as he told me, as “part of the human condition.  It’s actually the way we learn about things, particularly under duress”.   “It’s oddly not right to see PTSD as a disease”, he continued, “as an aberrant reaction.  It’s actually a normal reaction to an abnormal stimulus.  An abnormally long life threatening experience, so that we actually make the most of that experience to learn a new skill”.  We chatted by Skype, and here is an edited version of our conversation.  I started by asking him just how prevalent, in society, he believes trauma is today:

There I was, at 10 o’clock at night, wandering the streets of Gothenburg in the dark, with an 17kg sack (which is heavy) of biochar straddling the handle of my wheelie suitcase thing, lost, tired, and wondering what on earth I was doing.  It wasn’t the plan.  Someone was meant to meet me at the station, carry the bag, and show me where I was staying.  But, due to some confusion, it was just me and my bag of biochar.  “One day”, I thought, desperate for my bed, “I will be able to share this and to laugh about it.  One day.  But certainly not today”.  When I finally arrived at the hotel, exhausted, and delighted to no longer have to drag biochar around the city, the receptionist said “what’s that?”  “It’s a long story” I said.  But it’s a story I’m going to share with you now.

“How come we can still stick with a procedure from the late eighteenth century, elections, believing they are synonymous with democracy?  It’s a very, very recent procedure and it was originally not even conceived as a tool for democracy.  Elections were introduced to stop democracy, rather than to make democracy possible.  If innovation is truly important, let us rethink the key procedure we use to let people speak.  Ticking a box is no longer an option”.

Michael Kiser probably has the best bird’s eye view of the craft beer movement in the US of anyone.  He is the founder of Good Beer Hunting, a fascinating blog which through writing, podcasts and beautiful photography, has introduced its readers to the dazzling diversity of brewers in the US and elsewhere.  He also advises breweries from the very large to the very small, helping them hone their story, their offer and their messaging.  He sees that side of his work as being “devoted to helping craft brewers think about the future and grow”.   As part of the research I am doing, I am looking at the craft beer sector as a great example of a space in which the imagination can flourish, indeed in which imagination is a pre-requisite to flourishing.  

I’m just back from 3 weeks of travelling and speaking in Sweden, Mallorca, Spain and France.  It was rather wonderful and included many great events, connections and inspirations.  In this blog I am going to share it with you, with lots of photos and videos and links to media generated during the trip.  If you followed my travels on Facebook you’ll be familiar with a lot of it, but hopefully it is useful to gather it all in one place.  My deepest thanks to everyone who made it possible, and everyone I met.  Apart from the guy who snored all night on the seat in front of me on the ferry from Mallorca to Barcelona.  Not him.  I hope you enjoy this, and it gives you a flavour of how it was. 

Jamie Hanson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychology and a Research Scientist at the Learning Research & Development Center.  I read a paper he co-authored called Association between Income and the Hippocampus which explored the impact of poverty on the part of the brain most associated with the generation of imagination.  The paper suggested that growing up in poverty can result in decrements in attentional processes, working memory, and a measurably smaller hippocampus.  In an exploration as to the reasons why, as a culture, we might be less able to constructively imagine the future, Jamie felt like an important person to talk to. 

Last week I joined seven others people in London for a Level 1A Improvisation training, led by Jeremy Finch of the Spontaneity Shop. I was intrigued by improv, and in taking some time and space to learn how, as an adult, to play again. As adults in 2017, we don’t play very much. As Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White, founders of Spontaneity Shop, wrote in ‘The Improv Handbook’, “many adults have simply stopped being creative, so those muscles are tired and atrophied. The imagination is like a scared animal – it needs cossetting and encouraging”. And so there we were, gathered in a room in an arts centre in London, all looking slightly nervous, but ready to cosset and encourage our imaginations.

Many of these challenges are what are called ‘eternity’ issues.  Funds have had to be set aside, for eternity (which is quite a long time), to stabilise the landscape, to stop the mines filling with water, deal with ongoing infrastructure challenges and so on.  I found myself thinking, on the 3 days I just spent there, what a powerful metaphor it was for the fossil fuel age as a whole.  Had the people at the beginning, when coal extraction first began, been able to know what the long term impacts would be, what the ‘eternity’ costs would be, how it would shape the future the place was then able to build on top of the tailings of 200 years of coal extraction, would they have bothered?