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From What Is to What Ifauthor Rob Hopkins is a co - founder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition internet . He is also the author of The Power of Just Doing Stuff , The Transition Handbook , and The Transition Companion . He clear a spot on Nesta and the Observer ’s list of Britain ’s 50 New Radicals and was vote one of the Independent ’s top 100 conservationist — which is all to say he ’s unwilling to accept our unfitness to get a grip on the clime crisis , let alone any telephone number of other societal , cultural , and global ill .
In the interview that stick to from theWinter 2019 Seasonal Journal , Hopkins explains what prompted him to start involve What if . . . ?
What set you on this journey to rediscover imagination?
It was really a journey of find and connectedness . I start reading Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and other brilliant environmental thinkers , and they kept saying , “ clime variety is a loser of the imagination , ” and then they ’d go on to talk about something else . But I kept thinking , await now , what about that?Why are we failing at something that comes so of course to us as children?Could it be that at this most critical point in our satellite ’s history , when all our resource and senses are require , we are not well equip at all ?
We ’re so busy that there ’s no time for our imaginative lives . Our imaging is actually shot to bits . What should be a taut muscle is actually flabby and nonresponsive . There ’s something slipping through our fingers here . . . and when you point it out , it really resonates with multitude . It ’s an mind that beat under your skin . If climate change is anything , it ’s the logical , gruesome effect of when Margaret Thatcher said , “ There is no alternative . ” We keep go bad on doing the things that destroy animation because we ca n’t suppose an alternative . Really ? Future generations will say , “ You got so stuck that you could n’t even envisage it ? ? ? number on ! ”
We ’ve come to see imagery as a luxury . We need to move to see that it ’s absolutely not a luxury , that it should be fundamental to how our policy — and other face of public and private liveliness — turn . We need to make an environment where our resourcefulness enshrine us . It demand to melt down through everything we do . Instead , we ’re creating a everlasting storm of imaginary contraction , and that is the worst thing we can possibly be doing to ourselves , our mob , our communities , land , the major planet as a whole .
We ’re suffering from pre - traumatic stress upset — a unremitting background knowledge state of anxiousness . When we have anxiety , the hippocampus shrinks by 20 percent and we drop off the ability to retrieve about the hereafter . Our corporate hippocampus is shrinking , too . We’re awash with cortisol as a society . This is drive the contraction of the imagination . I became fascinated with finding a place , an actual place , that could restore this shrunken part of our mental capacity . . . a campus for the hippocampus .
That ’s what brought me to Dundee , Scotland , in 2018 to confab a project called Art Angel . It was founded in 1997 to help mass with mental wellness difficulties regain their voice through the arts . In the book , I describe how Art Angel offer an alternative , an counterpoison , even , to mainstream psychiatrical treatment , which many multitude experience as disempowering to say the least .
At Art Angel , people receive the personal warmth and connection that should be part of all psychiatric care : being a part of a community of interests , and the fortune to create something real and meaningful . Art Angel player are not call in “ patient ” or “ clients”—they are “ creative person ” because being an creative person is a sign of being human and allow someone who has lost the power to make determination to make them again . In Dundee , I saw what could happen when the contraction of the vision starts to go back the other elbow room . If there ’s any theatrical role that we need to be recreate , it ’s to create these place of safety and promise .
What if . . . our leaders prioritized the cultivation of the national imagination?
Right ! What if ? At the instant , every government elected enunciate , “ We ’re going to make a national origination strategy . ”But innovation is something you do when your fundamental model works . It ’s like pizza ; you could introduce with pizza pie because pizza is essentially great and everyone understands pizza . you’re able to innovate with unlike flours and cheeses , but you do n’t need to reimagine pizza pie because pizza is fantastic . Neoliberal growing - free-base economics are not like pizza pie , and they ’re driving us off the drop at large swiftness . When that is the cause , we involve resourcefulness more than we require creation .
So , what would happen if we had leaders who put the cultivation of imagery to the front?I spoke to an amazing woman in Mexico City who runs something within the city ’s administration that is basically a Ministry of Imagination , which sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book , but it actually exists in Mexico , and it ’s phenomenal . In Bologna , Italy , they have a Civic Imagination Office , which sits between the administration and the hoi polloi and basically works like a Transition group , firing up hoi polloi ’s imaginations with possibilities and ideas and then getting alongside them and helping their ideas take place .
In my book , I endeavor to sketch out what it would take care like if there was a National Imagination Act in which every public organization that spends public money would have to figure out how to do up the circumstances under which the imagination can flourish .
How will we know when our collective and individual imaginations are working for us again?
Yes , citizenry want to know , “ How do you measure imagination ? ” Is it possible to say Jill has an mental imagery score of 8.3 and Rob has one of 6.7 , so Jill succeed ? That ’s not hold out to work . But we can inquire what it might look like to populate in a more imaginative world . At the end of a chapter called “ What If We Considered Imagination Vital to Our Health?”I suggest that we ’ll know when our daily lives finger as though they ’re becoming rich with possibility , full of inventive thoughts , less anxious , more open to estimate . I asked Lucy Neal , an artist and Transition militant , for her opinion on this .
She aver , “ You could get out of bed and guess , ‘ I have no idea what ’s going to happen today , but I call back it might be something quite nice . I ’ll go ’ round the corner and have a look . ’ There would be joyousness in the air , and joy is very radical . . . because it connect us all to life , and life story is enthusiastic for animation . ”
What’s your dream for this book’s impact? How do you want it to be used?
I hope it will kickstart conversations and avail mass reassess education and their relationship to engineering science and their relationship to the future . I desire it lead to activists making their activism more playful and inspired . I hope it becomes an counterpoison to the raise sense of despondence , and an controversy for why that attitude runs the risk of becoming a self - fulfilling prophesy . I hope it unlocks a whole different way of life of looking at things .
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