Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Doughnut Economics is rapidly moving from the fringe to the mainstream. Amsterdam in Holland was recently confirmed as the first ‘Doughnut City’, using the model to underpin its economic development strategy.
If lesson one of coronavirus is that things can change, and lesson two is that they easily slip back again, then lesson three must be about the importance of presenting images of the future that motivate people to imagine change.
Rob Hopkins is an author and a Co-Founder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network. He approaches the question of “What could possibly go right?” with a fascination in the power of imagination for our future.
One of the benefits of the lockdown has been an awful lot less mowing of lawns in public spaces. There are many places I walk regularly where the grass is now several feet tall, and I love it.
The aim of the Sundial is to act as a heuristic or design tool for how we might set out, intentionally and skilfully, to rebuild the imaginative capacity of people, organisations or nations. Underpinning this is the belief, as set out in ‘From What Is to What If’ that we are living in a time of imaginative decline at the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative.
So we arrive in 2020, reaping the results of decades of down valuing, sidelining and undermining the imagination. The potential rewards that would emerge from letting the imagination loose are incalculable, but instead we keep it locked in tall tower, protected by the dragon of disimagination. What would it look like if we were to set it free?
Though many of our ideas may seem “impossible” now, history shows us again and again that today’s “what ifs” can become tomorrow’s “what is” during a time of crisis – but only if we take them seriously enough and put in the work that’s necessary to bring them to fruition.
I feel right now as though we are at, or very close to, the tipping point on these issues, nearing the moment where the gravity begins to change. I have felt, since Extinction Rebellion and the School Strikes began, since Greta began her strikes, as though deep beneath our feet the tectonic plates have finally begun to shift. Slowly and imperceptibly at first, but definitely shifting.
It felt like such an honour to be part of this process, to see it unfold. It was such an affirmation for me of how these ‘What If’ tools can take us deeper, can support us to access our deeper imagination. And as more and more organisations and businesses come to the realisation of the urgency and the scale of the climate and ecological emergency, we will need the tools to support them to go deeper in this way.
I returned from my time there with some thoughts, some reflections, which I hope will prove useful in the battles that lie ahead, in the ongoing uphill push to wrestle our future back from insane men who feel it is OK to dash headlong into creating the conditions in which we no longer have one. And a future that could be so, so beautiful.
The questions posed by the ecological crises – notably the climate emergency – are a series of provocations. These questions drive us back not only to intimate connections between our actions and the fate of the earth and our atmosphere, but to the intimate realm of our attention and capacity to care both individually and collectively.
We should all be able to “see possibilities everywhere”, and those possibilities have to include, indeed be led by, the possibility that oil companies disappear from our lives very soon, or reimagine their business model so that they leave 80% of reserves in the ground, becoming 100% renewable energy companies within 5 years.
