we need a sustained ethical reflection on the scope, nature, and limits of our engagement with the possible and the consequences this engagement has for ourselves, for others, for society, and for the planet. Being in the position to envision a course of action and its alternatives and to evaluate which possibilities should be acted upon and which

By foregrounding hope, imagination, agency and creativity, we can get to fully appreciate what it means to be human in a world that oftentimes resists our needs, expectations, and aspirations.

Becoming aware of what is possible and comparatively assessing various possibilities goes beyond cognitive – or, for that matter, neurological – processes. The possible is not merely a mental representation or way of processing information; it involves the entire being and it especially has a strong motivational and emotional dynamic.

As beings dwelling within a world that is at once actual and possible, the human condition involves a radical open-endedness and orientation towards the future that change how we are and how we understand ourselves.

The construction of norms, values, and ideologies around who, in society, is expected or has the right to discover new possibilities and, conversely, who is denied such opportunities is a political act. In fact, power relations within and between groups are a key determinant in the dynamic of the possible and the imposition of impossibility.

as we go against such formidable constraints, we can still rely on the quintessentially human capacity to hope, to imagine and to envision new possibilities for environmental action, justice and peace. The possible re-emerges as an organising category in our lives and our thinking not despite but because of living through the seemingly impossible a

our engagement with possibility is, at all times, constrained (e.g., by what is, by previous imaginations of what could be, by their enactment). This doesn’t mean that we cannot envision radical possibilities but that constraints – themselves never fully fixed in time and space – are enablers of our relationship with what is possible, both in its m

The possible emerges in human experience whenever there is a multitude of perspectives available for individual, groups and societies to draw upon in understanding themselves and their environment.

From the interdictions of quarantine to the forced migration of millions, from post-truth politics to the consequences of extreme weather phenomena, our reality reminds us that the positive futures imagined for the 21st century are in question. Or, at least, that we paradoxically live, at once, in the best and the worst of times (Wijnberg, 2019)