Futures Studies Economics Ecology

FROM WHAT IS TO WHAT IF

Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

by Rob Hopkins Review by David Lorimer, April 2020

Published: 2019
Publisher: Chelsea Green
Format: Hardback
Pages: 228 pp.
ISBN: 9781403589055

Publisher’s description

"Big ideas that just might save the world"--The Guardian The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it. In these times of deep division and deeper despair, if there is a consensus about anything in the world, it is that the future is going to be awful. There is an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of anxiety, a mental health crisis of vast proportions, especially among young people. There's a rise in extremist movements and governments. Catastrophic climate change. Biodiversity loss. Food insecurity. The fracturing of ecosystems and communities beyond, it seems, repair. The future--to say nothing of the present--looks grim. But as Transition movement cofounder Rob Hopkins tells us, there is plenty of evidence that things can change, and cultures can change, rapidly, dramatically, and unexpectedly--for the better. He has seen it happen around the world and in his own town of Totnes, England, where the community is becoming its own housing developer, energy company, enterprise incubator, and local food network--with cascading benefits to the community that extend far beyond the projects themselves. We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we're failing because we've largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if? And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now. Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. Once we do, there is no end to what we might accomplish. From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, as we speak, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.

Rob Hopkins is best known for his role in co-founding Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network (transitionnetwork.org). He supports the vision of the World Social Forum that 'another world is possible' while stressing the central importance of cultivating the imagination, which has been downplayed by dominant education systems based on testing and measurement. There is a certain irony and hope in our current situation to the title of the introduction: what if things turned out okay? However, the question is now even more important and imagination absolutely essential. It is easy to forget that everything human we see around us was once a thought in somebody's mind. I am writing this review at a bureau designed by my grandfather, Sir Robert Lorimer – the bureau originated in his imagination. The same is true for our institutions, which means that we potentially have the imaginative capacity to redesign them for higher purposes.

The book is structured around nine 'what if' questions: taking play seriously, imagination and health, following the lead of nature, reclaiming our attention, nurturing imagination among the young, better storytelling, asking better questions, prioritising the cultivation of imagination and finally: what if all this came to pass? The content is based on over 100 interviews and projects around the world, all of which exemplify a reconnection to local community (and sometimes to nature), with a corresponding empowerment. Some of these projects are amazingly imaginative. Antanas Mockus was originally President of the University of Colombia, but was sacked for an incident involving dropping his trousers when confronting disruptive far-left student activists; he told them 'innovative behaviour can be useful when you run out of words.' Bizarrely, this gave him a platform to run as Mayor of Bogota where in office he took on the notoriously corrupt traffic police, who pocketed most of the fines and had little impact on drivers. So he hired 420 mime artists 'who stood at the city's intersections showing red cards to bad drivers, stopping the traffic and applauding good drivers. He sacked the entire traffic police department, offering them their jobs back if they retrained as mimes. Four hundred did. His actions reduce traffic fatalities by 50%.' (p. 29) Reflecting on this success, he commented that people respond to humour and playfulness from politicians.

Rob highlights the growing mental health crisis where media messages and capitalism 'colonise people's imagination of what is possible' and hijack attention for commercial purposes. US electronic media consumption has gone up from 9 hours 32 minutes a day in 2014 to 11 hours six minutes in 2018. Moreover, there is an inextricable link between attention and imagination, which both require mental space that is now heavily cluttered on a daily basis. Here, as Sherry Terkel observes, face-to-face conversation is vital, without which we are 'less empathic, less connected, less creative and fulfilled.' (p. 81) Faced with the scale of global challenges, we have no alternative but to 'imagine a way out of them.' This has to entail cultivating imagination among the young, and Rob gives some inspiring examples of project-based learning around the world which may even require, according to some people, a process of unlearning and un-schooling as first suggested by Ivan Illich in the 1970s. Corresponding to a loss of biodiversity is a thinning of language and possibility, according to the writer Robert Macfarlane. And it is sobering to read that 'in 1903 there were almost 500 varieties of lettuce, and by 1983 just 36. Similarly, the number of cucumber varieties fell from 285 to just 16. Cabbage varieties fell from 544 to 28, and radishes from 463 to 27.' (p. 56)

Storytelling is the substance of traditional oral cultures and conveys a framework of meaning. As Alex Evans also argues in a book reviewed in this section, facts are not enough – we need a new story for a corresponding change of behaviour. When people are given the opportunity, imaginative possibilities flourish, but in our current circumstances, as Rob points out, 'imagining the future in a positive way is an act of immense courage, of resistance, of rebellion.' The alternative is passively succumbing to negative stories and a corresponding 'despair, hopelessness and discouragement' promulgated by mainstream media. This is not the first book I have read recently that quotes Milton Friedman: 'Only a crisis – actual or perceived – reduces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable (my italics).' (p. 119) As readers will realise, Friedman's promotion of the currently predominant neoliberalism and free-market ideology has given rise to its own crisis and, hopefully, potential demise.

As Rob argues, we certainly have to start asking questions, and he gives various examples of successful projects that have done just this, for instance in Derby, Preston, Norwich and Liège in Belgium. In the current pandemic crisis, it was anticipated in the planning scenario of October 2019 that the story or narrative would have to be managed to keep things on track. We are now seeing this activated with the censorship of alternative views on Facebook and YouTube, especially those that question the global vaccination agenda promulgated by Bill Gates and the WHO. If you control perception, you also control behaviour, as advertisers and propagandists know only too well. A danger highlighted by a former MEP is that 'the volume of mental stuff simply overwhelms the imagination.' We do not need passive assent but rather an active deliberative democracy – perhaps what some people are calling the Great Pause will give us some space to envisage new possibilities. In this respect, this book is essential reading 'about what kind of future we might create, a future that it is still possible to create' - otherwise we will have to accept the future planned by those who exercise power behind the scenes, one of surveillance and control that we are already seeing enacted in China: if we do not use the power of imagination to envisage radical new possibilities we will end up with an imposed extension of our current dystopia.

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