Rob Hopkins

It's called How to Fall in Love with the Future, A Time Traveler's Guide to Changing the World.

And it's by Rob Hopkins.

And there's a lot of incredible takeaways from this book.

But the main takeaway is that if we can't visualize in Technicolor the world that we do want in 10 years, in 20 years... then how could we ever create it, right? And we're being inundated with terrifying, a lot of fear, a lot of terrifying dystopian futures scenarios.

We talked about how to fall in love with the future.

Yep.

A Time Traveler's Guide to Changing the World by Rob Hopkins.

But the book that has influenced Lancaster Gift Box the way we operate the most is a book called Unreasonable Hospitality.

And so I think what we want to centre in the report is much more that community resilience and frankly, making the case that your relations with your neighbours are a far better area of security for you than having your baked beans in your loo roll, although they're probably important.

But essentially it is about communities coming together in a collective way and Rob Hopkins I think spoke really beautifully about this when he was suggesting that instead of the loo roll and the baked beans or maybe as well as you know why don't we really put pressure on councils to release land so that people can come together and grow their own food together in local areas you know that would be a far more effective way of really protecting ourselves from what's to come and something that Rupert often says, so I hope you won't mind that I've just snuffled it so he can't say it.

But basically, it's really significant, I think, that even in the NATO treaties, that Article 3 of NATO talks about national collective resilience and basically says that, you know, around 1.5% of the amount of GDP that's meant to be being spent on security in the years to come you know can very legitimately and importantly be focused on community resilience because you can have as many weapons as you like but if your society is in total collapse that's not going to help you very much so i just think it's quite interesting that there's more and more of this kind of collapse thinking that's beginning to enter the the discourse and yet in some ways as as with angela eagle it is simply not commensurate with with the kind of scale of what we face

In many ways, I think this is why I think this report is so powerful, because our political discourse is starting to, in the background, sort of have this reality inevitably starting to enter.

This home of ours, both this church and this country, and even this world, is no longer feeling like home.

We have come to an edge, a place that is calling us, as author Rob Hopkins says, "To choose to work towards something we want to live in." Instead of living in a world reactively, always just trying to keep the things we don't want at bay.

He says, "By living an experience of a future resulting in our doing everything we possibly can do to make it true, we can map out a route to inspire change." Familiarity, continuity, belonging.

As we practice creating those here in this place, we strengthen our capacity to create them as we journey.