From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
by Rob Hopkins
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added by Keely Adler · updated 18d ago
by Rob Hopkins
added by Keely Adler · updated 18d ago
I discovered that there were people the world over asking questions, large and small, about how things could be otherwise in schools, in neighbourhoods, in our relationship to nature, in our approach to health care, in how we spend our time and attention, even using it as the basis for reimagining the economic and democratic realities of their citi
... See moreOne of the biggest challenges Art Angel faces – and which, in turn, the imagination faces – is how to thrive in a world that wants to quantitatively assess and evaluate everything, what the author Rebecca Solnit calls ‘systems of accounting that can’t count what matters’.
Perhaps we should instead be asking what the world would look like if a healthy imagination were, in our everyday, considered indispensable to a healthy life?
But I start with it because we live in a time bereft of such stories – stories of what life could look like if we were able to find a way over the course of the next twenty years to be bold, brilliant and decisive, to act in proportion to the challenges we are facing and to aim for a future we actually feel good about.
imagination, rather than being seen as an ‘essential skill’, is commonly perceived as messy, unpredictable, a bit cheeky, potentially uncontrollable and a frivolous and unprofitable use of time.
Keely Adler added 5mo ago
David Fleming wrote, ‘If the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination.’
One might say that human societies have two boundaries. One boundary is drawn by the requirements of the natural world and the other by the collective imagination. —SUSAN GRIFFIN, ‘To Love the Marigold’
What do these troubling statistics and that ‘tangled mix of economic, social and emotional problems’ have to do with imagination? Absolutely nothing if you look at our current political and cultural priorities. But absolutely everything if you look at how the brain works, how the best conditions for the imagination can be cultivated, if you’re inte
... See morewe want to nurture young people who are resilient, self-reliant, entrepreneurial and adventurous – and I argue that we need to – we have to let them take risks. Risk-aversion is the last quality we need to be building in our children. As Stephen Moss put it in a report on play for the National Trust, ‘A potential risk is that children who don’t tak
... See moreit’s not just individuals making individual choices that make them ill. Socially and politically, we’re promoting policies, regulations and lifestyles that are making people ill to such a degree that stress, trauma and anxiety are being woven through and through the social fabric.