{"id":3514450,"date":"2025-07-07T10:20:02","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T10:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3514450"},"modified":"2025-07-09T10:57:34","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T10:57:34","slug":"how-to-fall-in-love-with-the-future-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-07-07\/how-to-fall-in-love-with-the-future-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Fall in Love with the Future: Excerpt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bookcover\"The following is an excerpt from Rob Hopkins\u2019s<\/strong> new book\u00a0How to Fall in Love with the Future<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (Chelsea Green Publishing) and is printed with permission from the publisher.<\/p>\n

Adjust Your Disbelief Suspenders<\/h3>\n

I have the fortune \u2013 in my role as someone often invited to speak in places already doing great work to decarbonise themselves and build a new economy \u2013 to be able to see, touch, smell, taste and hear places and initiatives that most of us have been conditioned to believe are impossible. So, when people ask me for one thing they can do to bring about a more positive future, I suggest they seek out stories of real change that are happening right now<\/em>. I\u2019m talking about local food projects, renewable energy projects and neighbourhoods coming together to create their own solutions. This is the simplest, easiest way to start expanding your imagination \u2013 and envisioning what you want the future to look like. Once you start looking, you\u2019ll find it\u2019s happening everywhere, and that discovery will colour how you then see the possibilities in the world around you.<\/p>\n

The fact that examples already exist in the present is evidence that the changes we are fighting for are absolutely<\/em> possible. A 2024 study by Jason\u00a0Hickel and Dylan\u00a0Sullivan showed that the world could provide decent living standards for 8.5 billion people while consuming just 30 per cent of current global resource and energy use, leaving, as they put it, \u2018a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments\u2019.\u00a0If we put our minds to it we can, as Scottish land reform campaigner Alastair McIntosh puts it, unlock \u2018a new constellation of possibility\u2019.<\/p>\n

Fill the cupboards of your memory with these stories. Then, when someone says that something you aspire to is not possible, you\u2019ll know that, in fact, it is \u2013 because look over there: they\u2019re already doing it. Such stories make it easier to piece together your own vision of the future, the first steps in what Patrick Reinsborough calls \u2018the spark of \u201cwhat if?\u201d that grows into the conflagration of \u201cthis must be!\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

Here are just a few of the many examples that I have been to see over the years \u2013 and that stock the cupboards of my own memory and my own hopes and visions for the future.<\/p>\n

Commercial Restaurants That Cook Just with Heat from the Sun? Impossible\u2026<\/h3>\n

In June 2024, I visited Marseille for the opening of France\u2019s first restaurant run exclusively on solar power. Le Pr\u00e9sage, which means \u2018the omen\u2019 in French, is housed in a timber-frame construction with earth bricks and clay plaster made from onsite subsoil and a combination of hemp and lime infill. Two large mirrored parabolic dishes focus Marseille\u2019s abundant sunshine into the back of the restaurant\u2019s ovens. Hold a piece of wood in the place where the heat reaches the back of the oven, and it immediately bursts into flames.<\/p>\n

I first visited Le Pr\u00e9sage back in 2021, when it was little more than a kitchen in a shipping container \u2013 albeit a solar-powered kitchen in a shipping container, even then \u2013 in the middle of an overgrown plot on the edge of Marseille. On that day, I met founder Pierre-Andr\u00e9 Aubert, who had big plans. He had recently been granted planning approval and funding to build France\u2019s most ecological restaurant. His plan was for a timber-framed, highly sustainable restaurant, surrounded by food gardens, a food forest and ponds, with food waste-generated biogas for those rare days when the sun doesn\u2019t shine in Marseille. An on-site wastewater treatment system would be capable of cycling clean water to irrigate the gardens.<\/p>\n

When I first visited in 2021, I asked Pierre-Andr\u00e9 to describe Le Pr\u00e9sage in 2030, after it had been built and had had a few years to get established. He gathered his thoughts.<\/p>\n

\u2018Welcome,\u2019 he said. \u2018It\u2019s been almost seven years now since we opened the big restaurant. And we still exist, which means people came and enjoyed our food.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Warming to his storytelling, Pierre-Andr\u00e9 gestured to the scrubby field surrounding us.<\/p>\n

\u2018You see the gardens: it\u2019s quite amazing. We said to everyone it\u2019s going to take at least five years until we really use the garden because, you know, trees have to grow! We have fruits from our trees and it\u2019s so beautiful, I can\u2019t tell you. The whole garden is quite amazing because it\u2019s working with the restaurant. We set the restaurant up as a single organism. It\u2019s not just a garden with a restaurant, it\u2019s really an organism and it works well. It\u2019s just so .\u00a0.\u00a0. lush.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pierre-Andr\u00e9 described how in this 2030 the model they pioneered had spread to other places around Marseille, and that the planting of edible forests has seized the public\u2019s imagination. He reflected on what it had felt like, back in 2021, to be a pioneer of such an unusual idea.<\/p>\n

\u2018We showed that, actually, crazy ideas are only crazy for the ones who believe they are crazy,\u2019 he told me. \u2018Back then, we were saying that we need some imagination, that we need to tell stories about another future. That\u2019s what we did. And today we are telling people we can do things differently; we can step away from the normal traditional paths and, sometimes, well, it works \u2013 and it\u2019s beautiful.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was transported. I could see this empty plot through a new lens, as though its future was being projected on top of reality. Not only could I see it, I could smell it, feel it, taste it. I could even hear the trickling water in the ponds, the bees sucking on the flowers, the voices of the gardeners chatting and laughing as they harvested the day\u2019s produce. I felt, as Pierre-Andr\u00e9 described his vision of 2030, that I was standing not in the 2021 prototype version of Le Pr\u00e9sage, with its shipping container and polytunnel, but as though I had fallen through a time slip to 2030.<\/p>\n

And then, fast forward only three years, and there I was again, being served food in the newly completed Le Pr\u00e9sage at its formal opening. On a scorching hot day, the place was packed with local residents, friends of the project, local and national politicians, food writers and others. It was so wonderful to see this dream realised, and to taste the delicious food emerging from the kitchen of Pierre-Andr\u00e9\u2019s imagination, some of it flavoured with herbs already growing in the garden. It\u2019s like tasting the future.<\/p>\n

Later, over email, he explained the meaning behind Le Pr\u00e9sage\u2019s name to me. \u2018Presage\u2019 is an anagram of the French word for asparagus, asperge<\/em>. He explained that as a child, he would go foraging in the hills around Marseille for wild asparagus in the spring and became quite good at finding it. \u2018To me,\u2019 he said, \u2018it\u2019s the perfect example of the true luxury we need to come back to.\u2019 He explained his understanding of luxury: something offered by nature for a short time, some knowledge, and some time to take advantage of the opportunity \u2013 and, of course, the taste. \u2018Le Pr\u00e9sage is cool because it means, at least to me, a good omen for a delicious future!\u2019 he said. Indeed, the backs of the staff \u2019s T-shirts are emblazoned with #FuturD\u00e9licieux, which means \u2018delicious future\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, when people ask me for one thing they can do to bring about a more positive future, I suggest they seek out stories of real change that are happening right now. I\u2019m talking about local food projects, renewable energy projects and neighbourhoods coming together to create their own solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3514511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213524,79718,79720,213535],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3514450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-picks","category-environment","category-society","category-society-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3514450"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3514591,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514450\/revisions\/3514591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3514511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3514450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3514450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3514450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}