there are many things you may have heard about Totten s and Devon one of them is that if you live there long enough as our Poet Laureate Matt Harvey says that your body starts to secrete a hormone called tottensterone where you're masculine and feminine come into perfect alignment with each other but actually the thing that you don't know about the place is that we have a we are home to a super secret uh time travel program we've been working on it for years in a Cellar deep beneath totnes castl
e and uh uh and it's very very secret so don't tell everybody okay we've been working on perfect do come a bit closer by the way I feel like you're all miles away and like the sound system might all start up in a minute and you won't be able to hear me anyway so um so yeah we've been working on developing disbelief suspenders very powerful piece of technology and the cynicism overrider circuits are something really quite uh really something to behold and uh we've been very inspired by afrofuturi
sm and how they talk about time that in the west we talk about time as a linear process we go past present future actually enough futurism they say it's more like a wheel and we're in the middle and from that you can access different kinds of Futures and different pasts from that place it's inspired by Bell hooks who wrote what we cannot imagine cannot come into being and by the great Sun ra who said we've tried the possible and it failed so now it's time to try the impossible [Applause] always
like it when sunrise gets a round of applause do you know a little story about Sunrise he's an amazing jazz musician who said that he was an angel from Saturn and he wasn't human and I wrote a book A Blog about him once and someone sent in a comment and they said yeah we once invited him to play at our town in Wales and the rider that the band sent in advance you know which is normally we want a bottle of Jack Daniels and blue M M's or something the one for Sunrise band said and you need to keep
the kick six car parking spaces in front of the venue free so that his spaceship has somewhere to land so it's true that at the moment the future looks like a very Bleak and difficult and horrible place but in our time machine we've built it to explore different possible Futures that aren't Utopias aren't dystopias but are the future that resulted from us doing absolutely everything we could possibly have done during these next 10 years what would that be like we don't make the space the time t
o really allow ourselves to imagine that might be possible and while it's really important that in our movements we make space to explore the question of what if it's too late that we also don't shut the door on the question of well what if it isn't too late so I want to tell you a story here a story of a recent Journey that we took into 2030 in our time machine you might like to think of me as the kind of Marco Polo of the climate movement of the Phineas fog coming back from an extraordinary Ad
venture that I've been on with my friend into 2030 and I want to tell you how that was the air smells amazing London smelled like the Alps in Spring it was just gorgeous the bird song was so so loud the city had now so many more trees and because of we realized in the summer of 2022 that above 38 39 degrees concrete and tarmac kills people we had now taken it up in huge amounts in the streets that were looking so much Greener the UK had now passed a hundred percent renewable energy much of it in
community ownership we now export energy to other places who are a bit slower Off the Mark and getting to this point in history those eight or nine years between now and then no seven because my math is shocking they haven't improved even by then was has been the most exhilarating time in human history what an amazing time it has been to live through it's felt like we lived through a revolution of the imagination and the bicep Rush Hour my friends the bicycle rush hours I have no words to expla
in how extraordinary you've never seen anything like them the number of underground car parks that in 2023 we gave over to cars we've taken back they're filled with bicycles when you now cycle into London you don't see those signs that tell you how many car parking spaces there are with the digital things those are for bicycles now because we realized that for every billion pounds we spend building a cycling infrastructure we save 38 billion pounds off the National Health Bill we're now so much
healthier and better exercise and in 2024 the banks the worst of the speculative most obnoxious Banks collapsed and this time we didn't bail them out and they were brought in service of the green New Deal and the Marshall Plan that we needed in many of their offices are now turned over to community businesses to cooperatives citizens assemblies are now used it was beautiful we went to visit some of them amazing people really engaging in democracy that sense of deep deliberation and mature decisi
on-making was just a thrill to see that actually happening every town every city now has a Civic imagination office beautiful where people come together and they reflect and they imagine and they dream and then they do it Marianne Kaba the great prisons abolition activist back in the early 2020s if any of you can remember back that far she said we must imagine while we build always both schools have now become much more democratic imaginative artistic the living embodiment of sustainability desi
gned by the kids many of them now have a rain forest in the middle because that was one of the things that kids said that they really wanted to see in their schools people in 2030 at about 80 percent less meat than we did back in 2023 and the thing was nobody even really noticed it was made out like that would be some huge hardship for everybody it was just a shift and it happened and we're all better off as a result now 70 of the housing stock has been retrofitted is fantastic all new buildings
a passive house it's just beautiful to walk around homelessness energy poverty fuel poverty really is a thing of the past you don't see any of that stuff anymore because back in 20 in 2030 the right decisions are made to enable that people look back on 2023 in horror and shame and wonder what were they thinking back in 2023 Michelle and BP went out of business in 2026. and we celebrated their party with such Fierce dancing people still talk about those parties that we had when that happened and
we know don't see any floods anymore in 2020 in 2030 because we realized we developed the humility to recognize that beavers are much better hydrological Engineers than we are we're rewilders and reforested and given back to beavers and the re-explosion of biodiversity has been amazing Aviation and Fallen a harvests or any planes at all it was like that first lockdown it was just amazing now rather than fighting hard to stop new runways open all of the big battles now all the big conversation i
s about which ones do we close and in what order we've already shot two runways that Heathrow and turn them back into Forest we went to visit it it's so beautiful public transport's now free it was all amazing and universities teach everything through the lens of the climate and ecological emergency all the universities are surrounded by Gardens it's just amazing you're gonna love it and Rich she soon like finally had his climate change Dark Night of the soul in 2024 and dedicated all of his fas
t resources to fighting this battle as quickly as possible and King Charles and King Charles decided to donate all of them to rewild all of his land and put it into public ownership and no one has heard anything from Jeremy Clarkson for seven years [Applause] UK is now the most welcoming place in the world for displaced people policing Leasing and transformed with restorative justice and funding goes into some more funding goes into supporting poorer communities than goes into policing them we h
ave a universal basic income mental health has improved hugely and levels of anxiety are way way down where they were before and all those beautiful but burnt out exhausted activists who fought so hard and unrelentingly for the world to get to get us to this place of positive change finally got to take a rest [Applause] is the direction of travel had started to change and because you were right and in 2030 when we walked down those streets full of Carnival and conversation and music food growing
children playing we now by the way in 2030 they use the number of children playing in the street as the key well-being indicator for how our cities are doing hard for me to express how beautiful that world was I get really emotional even just thinking about it in early 2025 the UK and many other nations made reparations for slavery and colonization International debts were canceled loss and damage was paid and we've seen a flourishing as a result of democracy and the building of low-carbon econ
omies around the world and a huge investment in the education of women which when we look back from 2030 turned out to be one of the key drivers of the shift that happened okay [Applause] so you might be wondering why Rob do you need to wear a Time Traveler's suit to travel to 2030 because it's not to protect me we have to protect the people there because the thing that you really notice when you go to that 2030 is a fragile but very real sense of do you know I think we might just do this so one
of the rules of time traveling is that you can't do any past splaining you can't contaminate that process with your kind of 2023 sort of chat right like that's gonna work because it's working and it's tangible and you can feel it and it's one of the most uh noticeable things about it is that is that that's what's happening so my sense is that while it's really important that we talk about collapse we talk about Extinction we also have to express something beautiful and irresistible and deliciou
s for people to run towards war is recently published a study where they said all chance of staying below one and a half degrees is now over unless we see a rapid transformation of society so all the newspaper articles all the magazine covers all LED with headlines 1.5 is finished I didn't see a single headline that said let's have a rapid transformation of society shall we wouldn't that be cool just now so let's have a rapid transformation of society let's talk in every conversation we have abo
ut climate change about what we long for yes we need to talk about the science and what's happening but I also want to hear what it is in that future that you long for I long to live in a city where the rivers are so clean that people swim to work I long to live in a city where the bird song drowns out the traffic in a book about Octavia Butler uh she said all organizing is science fiction I love that all organizing is science fiction because this is about the stories that we tell and how those
stories touch people as deeply as possible so let's make our story one that nurtures and Kindles a longing for the future because it's longing that is going to make the shift that we need so I need to go now because I've left the time machine out on double yellow lines around the corner and you know what they're like in London so sorry about that but I'm just going to leave you with a quote from the poet rilka who said the future must enter into you a long time before it happens which is so beau
tiful I'm going to say it again the future must enter into you a long time before it happens and as activists never ever forget that because that's what our activism needs to do is to allow that future that I've been to and shared with you here today to enter into people so before I go in Paris in 1968 the students used to say power to the imagination imagination taking power so power to the imagination imagination hardly hear you wants more power to the imagination thank you very much thank you
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Comments
Well done Rob!
Brilliant💚
Grande Rob...miss u