Why the Climate Emergency needs a National Imagination Act

What a few weeks it’s been in terms of the sense of urgency and proportion in relation to climate change and the world’s unravelling ecological crisis. Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, the Welsh and Scottish governments declaring a climate emergency, then the UK and Irish parliaments. There appears to be a new, and long-overdue, sense of ambition and momentum, of tectonic plates finally shifting deep below the surface.

A public meeting organised by Bologna’s ‘Civil Imagination Office’.

Last week, Caroline Lucas and other MPs argued that all new laws should need to pass a ‘compassion threshold’ before being enacted to ensure that they make society a more compassionate place, not less. It would ensure that legislation acts in the interests of future generations as well as present ones. It is a powerful and inspired idea. But I would like to propose something I believe could be even more impactful, a ‘National Imagination Act’.

As I argue in the book I’ve just finished writing, ‘From What Is to What If’: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want’, we are living in a time of increasing imaginative poverty, a time in which our ability to be imaginative seems to be under unprecedented pressure. We spend, on average, 65% of our waking hours in front of screens. Austerity has led to the closure of 478 libraries and has decimated community arts initiatives. Teaching hours for arts subjects fell 21% between 2010 and 2017, and entries for arts GCSEs fell by 35% in the same period.

One-third of adults, surveys show, feel as though they don’t use their imagination for work. We are living in a time that has been called the ‘Age of Anxiety’, and neuroscience shows how anxiety, fear and stress directly impact the parts of our brain vital to the imagination. As Aditya Chakrabortty puts it, “One of the great casualties of austerity is likely to be imagination, the sense that alternatives to this broken regime not only exist, but can be built by us”.

Read the story from Resilience by Rob Hopkins - “Why the Climate Emergency needs a National Imagination Act.”