This is part 1 of a two-part article. View part 2 here.
To all the dystopian gloom and doomers out there. Things can turn out OK. That’s the message of Rob Hopkins’ book, “From What Is to What If -Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want.” And he’s got the proof it can happen.
Hopkins is the co-founder of the Transition Towns Movement which began in Britain and Ireland in 2006, and has since grown into a global network of communities in 67 countries. In Transition Towns, people connect on a local level to envision how to remake their community to benefit themselves and nature. Many transition towns have already made the shift from one way of living to another across all areas of society – creating renewable energy projects, supporting local food production, establishing cooperative businesses and connecting with nature and each other. In his latest book, Hopkins showcases the many examples of how people have begun to create a healthier, happier and more resilient way of life through the power of imagination.
Imagination, it turns out, is now rapidly declining, blunted by a society and economy which values profit above all, at a time when it is most needed to avert the quickening environmental and societal calamities. Hopkins presents numerous neurological and social research studies that show how imagination is vital to our mental and physical health. It is essential to a sense of our own well-being, to empathy, to changing our behaviors, and to being able to “look at things as if they could be otherwise.” What if, Hopkins asks, we could apply imagination to our most complex problems?
There’s no shortage of the seriousness of the problems we face. Hopkins informs us of devastatingly awful facts – the rapid loss of opportunities for children to engage in unstructured play, the steep rise in inequality which correlates to alarming increased rates of anxiety and mental illness, the relationship between the rise in atmospheric CO2 and decreased cognitive abilities, the loss over 80 years of 93% of food seed varieties, the loss, according to a United Nations report, of 150-200 species a day (!), the highjacking of our attention by technology to the extent half of Americans say they couldn’t live without their smartphones.
Imagination Reprioritized and Set Free
But then the imaginative responses to these problems created in local areas by neighbors working together lift you out of any sense of despair and hopelessness and stimulate your own imagination about your own town. If they could do that, why can’t we?
There’s the Playing Out program that supports parents who close off their street to traffic for short periods of time so that children can own the streets. There’s Art Angel, a successful alternative psychiatric treatment, which uses the power of the imagination to transform peoples’ mental health. Given a safe and hopeful space, patients become artists as they create, learning to see with new eyes and reimagine themselves. There’s the campaign to turn London into a National Park City (It did in 2019) with a map with no buildings, but all the parks, woodlands, streams, farms, places to swim and climb a hill. There’s Park(ing) Day in San Francisco, where you pay for a parking spot and make it into a mini park, a finger-painting studio, a free head and neck massage, free bike repair or whatever you can imagine. There’s Better Block, which helps communities reimagine and transform vacant lots into community hotspots.
Reimagining Education
There’s the reimagination of eduction by the Reggio Emilia school model where kids have rights and collaborate with teachers to design their curriculum. The School of the Possible in France and the Green Free School in Copenhagen incorporate gardening, art, stories through project learning. The Plymouth School of Creative Arts in the UK created inside an old department store with the idea of learning through making, has big open floor plans that house a learning kitchen, performance spaces and science labs, totally accessible to the inner city neighborhood it sits in. There are programs within existing schools, like Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, which designs”ways for people of all ages to develop their own curiosity and imagination by inviting them into playful environments, both indoors and outdoors, and giving them the permission to explore.” In one activity, children explore a particular place and the layers of images, poems and meanings are incorporated into a Fantastical Map(see below). And there’s the idea of “unschooling,” expressed by “Udaipur as a Learning City,” which sees its community as an opportunity to learn. “We find that once we step out of the boundaries of school, we’re no longer, poor, backward, underdeveloped people. We actually have brilliant, abundant resources of learning all around us.”
Imagining the Future in the Present
In an activity called Transition Town Anywhere, participants are asked to imagine they are about to step into the near future. “All we have to take with us is our experience, each other and our imagination, we have the chance today to build a thriving, connected town centre together…Are we ready to go?” For the next several hours, participants group themselves into areas of interest and imagine community banks, doctors’ surgeries, bike-repair workshops, new businesses, and construct a whole town out of cardboard boxes. The inspiration from this activity gave many participants the energy and vision to go back to their hometowns and make them real.
What if we became better storytellers? At a workshop run by the Centre for Artistic Activism, mothers of children caught in the criminal justice system are campaigning for legislation to gain better access to their children. They’re asked to imagine they got it – and now what? We want it implemented and enforced. OK, you got it, and now what? They discuss that and say they want a world where their kids don’t get pulled into crime. And now what? We want a world without crime, prison or police. OK. Imagine you have that. Now what? “We’d actually just live together, and we’d enjoy each other.” And they imagined it in detail – the laughter, the sun on their back, the smells of cooking. “This is where we start. You start with the dream.”
The point? Maybe a few people care about a particular piece of legislation, but “if you want to reach the majority of the population, you have to create this greater dream, because they can access it at all sorts of different points and go on there with you.”
Another example. A training event for people who will educate their community about energy efficiency. Imagine it’s two decades in the future, and effective action was taken on climate change. A new economy emerged and social divisions dissolved. Now imagine that world with all your senses. What would it be like? People’s reflections poured out. There’d be more birdsong, everyone would be more relaxed, there are more trees, lots of bicycles, food gardens, happy children playing, solar panels, no homeless people, no big shopping centers. So many of us who work for a better world never take the time to actually imagine what it would be like. One participant said how odd it was to work for something you can’t even imagine.
Imagining is a Realistic Path Forwards
Neuroscience tells us that facts don’t change people – new stories do. In our present dystopia, imagining the future positively becomes an act of courage, rebellion and resistance. But, we all know what a good world is. As kids we already knew. There should be no war, no pollution, no starving children. There should be music and play and fun and nature and beauty. We need to tell better stories in all sorts of media that allow people to feel, taste and hear a positive future.
It all looks impossible, but with imagination, “things that currently look like intractable problems are actually huge opportunities for new thinking.” James McKay, an artist who draws what a low carbon future would look like, suggests “Find a place you pass every day, sit down and imagine it in the future, a future in which things turn out OK.”
And there are plenty of examples of how asking better questions that elicit longing and can be answered many ways result in better outcomes, like.… See next article
Esther Kronenberg would like to thank Clare Follmann, formerly of Orca Books Cooperative, for recommending this wonderful book
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