August 26, 2020
One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this article to urge you to get behind it, while also offering a rather different perspective on why I feel it matters so much.
The Bill was created by a coming together of activists, scientists and policy experts, and it sets out the key elements that government needs to address if they were to actually act, from the core of their being, as though this were a climate and ecological emergency, at a speed and ambition commensurate with the scale of the challenge (you can read the Bill itself here). It is rather brilliant. I also believe that, if enacted, it would do so much more than just what is set out in the Bill itself.
View Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill video.
This article will be based on a few assumptions which I have come to through the researching and writing of ‘From What Is to What If’. The first is that imagination, that “ability to see things as if they could be otherwise” as John Dewey put it, and having the capacity to be imaginative, is fundamentally important to our collective embracing of the changes that this emergency demands of us. We need creativity and the boldness to reimagine and rebuild everything.
Secondly, we are living in a kind of ‘perfect storm’ of factors that are causing our collective imagination to wane: unaddressed trauma, anxiety, the impacts of austerity, systemic racism, the lack of space in many peoples’ lives, colonisation, the power and addictive nature of our online lives, an education system that has largely purged imagination from many young peoples’ lives, and much more. Together they form a kind of ‘disimagination machine’ that is proving ruinous and which we urgently need to reverse.
I also came to realise that one of the beautiful things about imagination is that it thrives on limits. It needs limits in order to flourish. Which is why we use haikus, or rap, or limericks. Which is why when we study improv, we are given scenarios in which the imagination can take over (“You are a nervous bus conductor on your first day in the job, and You are a really famous person who has lost her bus ticket. Go”). And nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of the climate and ecological emergency.
An imaginative person looks at the ‘limits’ imposed by these intersecting crises, and the many others that accompany them, and their imagination kicks in, reimagining food systems, economic models, investment approaches, models of democracy, architecture, planning, work, streets, transport, beer recipes. The unimaginative person, the person who refuses to recognise such limits, clings to what they know and dismisses those who are doing the reimagining as being ‘unrealistic’ or somehow ‘naive’.
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