The following is an excerpt from Rob Hopkins’s new book How to Fall in Love with the Future (Chelsea Green Publishing) and is printed with permission from the publisher.

Adjust Your Disbelief Suspenders

I have the fortune – in my role as someone often invited to speak in places already doing great work to decarbonise themselves and build a new economy – 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. I’m 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 – and envisioning what you want the future to look like. Once you start looking, you’ll find it’s happening everywhere, and that discovery will colour how you then see the possibilities in the world around you.

The fact that examples already exist in the present is evidence that the changes we are fighting for are absolutely possible. A 2024 study by Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan 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, ‘a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments’. If we put our minds to it we can, as Scottish land reform campaigner Alastair McIntosh puts it, unlock ‘a new constellation of possibility’.

Fill the cupboards of your memory with these stories. Then, when someone says that something you aspire to is not possible, you’ll know that, in fact, it is – because look over there: they’re 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 ‘the spark of “what if?” that grows into the conflagration of “this must be!”’

Here are just a few of the many examples that I have been to see over the years – and that stock the cupboards of my own memory and my own hopes and visions for the future.

Commercial Restaurants That Cook Just with Heat from the Sun? Impossible…

In June 2024, I visited Marseille for the opening of France’s first restaurant run exclusively on solar power. Le Présage, which means ‘the omen’ 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’s abundant sunshine into the back of the restaurant’s ovens. Hold a piece of wood in the place where the heat reaches the back of the oven, and it immediately bursts into flames.

I first visited Le Présage back in 2021, when it was little more than a kitchen in a shipping container – albeit a solar-powered kitchen in a shipping container, even then – in the middle of an overgrown plot on the edge of Marseille. On that day, I met founder Pierre-André Aubert, who had big plans. He had recently been granted planning approval and funding to build France’s 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’t shine in Marseille. An on-site wastewater treatment system would be capable of cycling clean water to irrigate the gardens.

When I first visited in 2021, I asked Pierre-André to describe Le Présage in 2030, after it had been built and had had a few years to get established. He gathered his thoughts.

‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘It’s been almost seven years now since we opened the big restaurant. And we still exist, which means people came and enjoyed our food.’

Warming to his storytelling, Pierre-André gestured to the scrubby field surrounding us.

‘You see the gardens: it’s quite amazing. We said to everyone it’s 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’s so beautiful, I can’t tell you. The whole garden is quite amazing because it’s working with the restaurant. We set the restaurant up as a single organism. It’s not just a garden with a restaurant, it’s really an organism and it works well. It’s just so . . . lush.’

Pierre-André 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’s imagination. He reflected on what it had felt like, back in 2021, to be a pioneer of such an unusual idea.

‘We showed that, actually, crazy ideas are only crazy for the ones who believe they are crazy,’ he told me. ‘Back then, we were saying that we need some imagination, that we need to tell stories about another future. That’s 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 – and it’s beautiful.’

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’s produce. I felt, as Pierre-André described his vision of 2030, that I was standing not in the 2021 prototype version of Le Présage, with its shipping container and polytunnel, but as though I had fallen through a time slip to 2030.

And then, fast forward only three years, and there I was again, being served food in the newly completed Le Présage 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-André’s imagination, some of it flavoured with herbs already growing in the garden. It’s like tasting the future.

Later, over email, he explained the meaning behind Le Présage’s name to me. ‘Presage’ is an anagram of the French word for asparagus, asperge. 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. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘it’s the perfect example of the true luxury we need to come back to.’ 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 – and, of course, the taste. ‘Le Présage is cool because it means, at least to me, a good omen for a delicious future!’ he said. Indeed, the backs of the staff ’s T-shirts are emblazoned with #FuturDélicieux, which means ‘delicious future’.