Reviewing permaculturist and Transition Towns co-initiator Rob Hopkins’ latest book From What Is to What If, The Guardian’s Leo Benedictus recently summarized “ten ways to imagine ourselves out of the climate crisis.” Most of them are sensible ways of reclaiming urban space, rekindling connections with natural processes, and unleashing the imagination — all things that EcoCultureLab supports in principle, and that we have tried to put into practice in our events (like Feverish World).
The idea of creating a “Ministry of Imagination” is one of the more provocative ones. Hopkins has interviewed people who’ve done something like this in cities around the world — Gabriella Gómez-Mont, who leads Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad and Michele d’Alena of Bologna’s Civic Imagination Office (l’Ufficio Immaginazione Civica), among others. And there are initiatives like the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (which is not exactly what it sounds like), and Henry Jenkins’ Civic Imagination Project, and others in a similar vein.
With Burlington’s history of urban innovation — from Bernie Sanders’s mayoral heyday of the 1980s (and the dissident Greens led by Murray Bookchin, he who inspired so much of the recent Syrian Kurdish revolution) to the pragmatic progressivism of the decades since then — there seems no reason for this city not to have an “office of civic imagination and cultural experimentation,” or something like it.
With the goal of promoting this kind of idea, EcoCultureLab will soon be sharing our call for ecotopian visions for the Greater Burlington Area. One of the goals of Feverish World had been to help launch a process by which this place — Burlington, Balitan-Odzihozsek, the Lower Winooski Watershed, the Greater Burlington Metropolitan Area, the Eastern Lake Champlain Basin (or the entire Green Mountains-to-Adirondacks bioregion), or however we define our place(s) — can prepare for the deeply challenging, potentially even dark, times ahead.
(For yet another scientific report documenting the challenges — these seem to be coming out daily — see yesterday’s BioScience “Viewpoint” article “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” signed by over 1,100 practicing scientists and academics. Oh, and didn’t we just discuss those “world scientists’ warnings”?)
The Transition Network has been working on mobilizing these sorts of local transitions for a while now, as have numerous other initiatives, but in the absence of a more coordinated global movement to institute the socio-ecological changes that are called for, it sometimes seems as if we are fiddling within our own sandboxes while Rome burns (is that one too many metaphors?). Yet the local remains the space we live in most directly, and so, for most of us — especially for those who don’t live a chunk of their lives on airplanes and the rest of them online — it remains the place to start: the place where we can be most directly heard, felt, seen, dreamed, and danced with.
Along the same lines, EcoCultureLab is preparing to organize an action that will be part of the 2020 Global Teach-In, a worldwide event on Earth Day (April 22) to mark the 50th anniversary of the mass action (and teach-in) that catalyzed the global environmental movement. It’s an appropriate time to ask: What have the last 50 years (of environmental and eco-social activism and organizing) accomplished? What haven’t they, and why not? What’s on the slate for the next 50 years?