Rob Hopkins

“Personally I couldn’t imagine my world without being out listening to this. It would be hugely impoverished. It’s something you can’t do second hand. You can’t get this experience of listening to these birds second hand through a screen, or through an MP3 player, or through YouTube. You get a simulacra. You get something similar but not in any way the same. You have to get out here”.

Creativity comes from this intersection of two disparate ideas that happen to cross, and that’s where you get these creative ideas come out, and solutions. Ultimately we are social beings and we want to connect, we want to have connections. I feel like what I see in these processes is first of all where we jokingly call it ‘speed dating for communities’. People want to connect with each other anyways, so they’re getting a chance to do it and they’re getting to know all these resources and skillsets and people and there’s a lot of serendipity, a lot of accidents.

“I don’t want to get drawn in too much about talking about the machinations of Brexit and Trump, but I’m fascinated by it because what I think is going on actually is culturally we have a huge yearning for home, but we have profoundly lost touch with what home is or could be”.

As Emily told me, “now we have a grain processing unit in our town, and that’s because some people decided it was a good idea, other people agreed it was a good idea, and now it’s here. If you can do that with grain, then what else that we’re not happy with can we do that with?” What indeed.

Ultimately what sustains me is a rather heady cocktail of stubbornness, optimism, a strong faith in the human spirit and in other people, rage, a deep wish to live a life of service to others, the thrill of seeing people step up and take their lives into their own hands, all coupled with a deep sense of urgency. It works for me.

There was also a great Dutch game called ‘Spijkerpoepen’, where you had to tie a screw on the end of a piece of string to the back of your trousers, and then only by looking backwards between your legs, get the screw into a bottle. It required amazing levels of concentration, as I hope this photo conveys. You should try it at your next staff meeting at work.

Mark Sears has the wonderful job title of ‘Chief Wild Officer for the Wild Network’.  The Wild Network grew out of the film Project Wild Thing (see trailer below), and aims to reconnect young people with nature, inspired also by the findings of the 2012 Natural Childhood report.  Their mission is “to support children, parents and […]

“All of these things in many ways undermine what I call the ‘social imagination’. That is an imagination capable of understanding why the public good matters. Why the question of a commons matters. Why we need to think in terms of eliminating a culture of cruelty and hardness that’s been put into place by a market driven culture. What it means to save the planet, and to have some sense of how important that is. And what it means to revive the language of democracy and community”.

As we detach from the conversations that since forever formed the bedrock of our culture, we imagine that the ability to be always connected will make us less lonely. And yet loneliness is a national epidemic.

Whatever happens as a result of the Presidential elections, something fascinating is building in France. Something based on celebrating a new story, something that speaks to care, to human values, to solidarity. Something that seems to be popping up all over the place, and particularly speaking to young people, but bringing a creativity and imagination to a culture where those in charge seem to have run out of both. Watch this space…