Post Carbon Institute Fellow Rob Hopkins’ new book “From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want” and environmental projects are highlighted in this article by The Guardian.

From the article:

It’s not easy to be a happy environmentalist, but Rob Hopkins might have found a way. In 2005, together with a group of friends in Totnes, Devon, he co-founded what became known as the Transition movement. It seeks to make the world a sustainable place to live, not through protest or resistance, but simply by looking at where you live and making it sustainable. “It’s not that difficult, actually,” he says.

In Totnes, they connected neighbours to share unused gardens. They planted fruit and nut trees in public spaces and bought their own mill. They are now building 27 sustainable homes. And Totnes is just one of the 992 initiatives all over the world that now make up the movement.

In his new book, From What Is to What If, Hopkins looks around this wide network, and elsewhere, at the sometimes brilliant, sometimes eccentric, but always imaginative ideas people have come up with. Sometimes Hopkins can be too imaginative – for instance his summaries of psychology, education and brain science seem wishfully simplistic. In person, however, he is not dogmatic or excitable. Tall and bespectacled, he speaks softly and kindly. Besides, in the most important ways, he is right. We can feel optimistic if we are willing to imagine new ways of doing things not every single one of them needs to work. “Part of the beauty of Transition,” Hopkins writes, “is that it’s all an experiment. I don’t know how to do it. Neither do you.”