From What If to What Next

The diversity of the natural world is declining at a rapid rate, and has been for many decades. Many people present that as being an inevitability, a trade-off to economic progress. But what if we could create a future in which we enabled the natural world to regenerate? What would that look like, and what would it do to our ability to imagine a different future? This week I am joined by Rebecca W...

We're back, and boy oh boy are you in for a treat. Since Episode One there were two guests I most wanted to have on this podcast. The first, adrienne maree brown, I was fortunate enough to speak to in Episode Fifty. The second I am sharing with you today. This time there's just one guest, and it is the brilliant prison abolition activist Mariame Kaba. I've admired her work, and her writing, for ye...

Recent research, entitled The Future of Consumption in an 1.5°C World, carried out by the University of Leeds, C40 Cities and Arup, powerfully shows that the world's comfortably off need to do the most to reduce the world's carbon emissions and need to reduce the impacts of their consumption by two thirds by 2030. But this will only happen if it feels like a move towards something rather than bein...

This was such a beautiful conversation to be part of, with two old friends, and a story that I play at least a small role in. In 2015, Transition Network, an organisation I had co-founded, undertook a transition of its own, from a pretty conventional management model to a non-hierarchical structure that distributed power, using Holocracy. We had to learn how to do it, and were brilliantly supporte...

We're never one to shy away from the big questions, and to dive deep into the remarkable and far more delightful world that could yet be created if we do so. This week we are joined by two truly great guests who help us explore the question of what our economics system and thinking could look if we were to consciously and ambitiously decolonise it. You're going to love this one. My guests are Prof...

If you were one of those kids in school who stared out of the window most of the time, this episode is for you. I'm joined by Kwesia X, aka City Girl in Nature (check out her many amazing videos), and by Ben Rawlence, author of three books, most recently The Treeline and founder and director of Black Mountains College. It's a beautiful and thought-provoking conversation. Just how different could o...

Today's episode brings a big idea, like a really BIG idea, one that you may initially need to suspend disbelief in order to settle into but which, hopefully, by the end, you'll be fizzing with the possibilities of. I'm joined by Della Duncan, Renegade Economist, host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and so much more,...

This week I'm joined by two of the greatest practitioners of the imagination that I know. Dr. Penny A Hay is an artist, educator and researcher, Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning and Research Fellow Bath Spa University and Director of Research, House of Imagination. Signature projects include School Without Walls and Forest of Imagination. Ruth Sapsed is the Director of Cambridge Curiosity...

This episode of 'From What If to What Next' focuses on Utopianism, on our ability to imagine better futures. This is such an amazing conversation with two people who know more about Utopias than the rest of us. Alex Zamalin's work first came to my attention through his book 'Black Utopia', which I hugely recommend, and which introduced me to so many great ideas and thinkers. And more recently, Gre...

It's time for our Christmas special. We wanted to leave 2022 on a high, with a hugely inspirational story of imagination in action, of imagination going big, one that will leave your mind fizzing with possibility. Recently, Camden Council in London became the first UK local authority to offer Imagination Activist training to its staff. 32 people took part over 8 weeks in a course designed to expan...

The advertising industry is one of the key things driving the levels of consumption that are pushing us towards climate breakdown. But there are people within the advertising industry who are trying to push things in a different direction. In this episode, we speak to Lisa Merrick-Lawless of Purpose Distruptors, and strategy director and writer Michael Hines, to enter into a future in which the ad...

This is not a podcast that shies away from the big and important What If questions, and today we're reaching out for one of the big ones of our time. Homelessness is one of scourges of our times, and is on the rise. But is it unavoidable and inevitable, or is it just the result of a series of decisions that could just as easily be made differently? Our two amazing guests, Ana Rausch and Sam Tsembe...

You're in for such a treat. Today's episode is about beavers, and what the future would look like if we allowed them to reshape the world in the way they are so incredibly good at. During the summer I went to Cornwall and fell in love with beavers, which inspired this episode. My two guests are Chris Jones, whose farm I visited to see the beavers, and Eva Bishop, whose work with the Beaver Trust i...

Today's episode was recorded live at the BTS Centre's Convocation 2022, an online event with the theme of 'Imagination and Collective Liberation for a Climate-Changed World'. It was recorded before a live (online) audience.   This was an event which set out to explore "what it means to nourish our imaginations toward a world of joyful possibility and embodied hope, while also holding space for the...

This week's episode is such a treat. Over the summer I devoured Ekow Eshun's amazing book 'In the Black Fantastic', the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at the Hayward Gallery which, sadly, I didn't get to see. But even just the book was an incredible feast for the imagination, as was his concept of the Black Fantastic. If you enjoyed our podcast on Afrofuturism, you're going to love t...

I think you are really going to enjoy this one. My reading over the summer holidays was Shayda Kafai's brilliant book 'Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid' (which I notice in the podcast I call 'Crip Wisdom' - sorry!), and as soon as I finished it I knew I had to ask Shayda to come onto the podcast to discuss her ideas. I asked her who her dream fellow guest would b...

Just 1% of the population own half the land in England, and citizens have a Right to Roam over only 8% of its surface. This deliberate exclusion has many bad side effects, not least its impact on our collective imagination. But it's only like this because some people imagined it like this. What if we were to reimagine this arrangement so that, like in Scotland, our Right to Roam actually enabled u...

Today's podcast is something a little different. We're departing from our usual format a little to spend some time in deeper conversation with one of the great guardians of the collective imagination, Cyril Dion.   If you've ever seen the film 'Demain' ('Tomorrow'), or his more recent film 'Animal', you'll know him, and his amazing work. He's also a poet, a collaborator with musicians, a writer, a...

Today's episode is really rather beautiful, with Chloe Naldrett and David Micklem exploring the role of theatre in the great transition that lies ahead of us. I hope you love it. Do let me know what you think.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting  www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

It's hardly a surprise that we struggle to hold onto hope and optimism given that the news we receive every day is filled with so much misery, appalling human behaviour, despots, narcissists and hopelessness. So what if instead we lived in a world in which the majority of the news we encountered was positive news? Stories of change going in the right way? That's our question for exploration today,...

I'm posting this on the hottest day ever recorded in the UK. If we ever needed imaginative thinking about how to tackle the climate and ecological emergency, we needed it 30 years ago, but the second best time would be now.   Today's episode brings together two people who believe that vital to the refiring of the collective imagination is the availability of life-long learning. We're joined by And...

As the cost of living crisis impacts more and more people, and energy security becomes something far more widely discussed than it was 10 years ago, here is a vital conversation with two leading pioneers of the notion of community energy. Community energy is a movement that is spreading in spite of, rather than because of, government actions, but its potential is huge. What if by 2030 it was the n...

In the light of the UK government's recent appalling proposed deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda and their new policy to electronically tag everyone who arrives on our shores, as well as the massive growth in what we might call the 'immigration industrial complex' around the world, this week we are asking a vital, and rarely asked question, what if we just got rid of the idea of borders altog...

An odd question perhaps... yet in the hands of our guests, Belina Raffy and Sam Knights, a powerful and pertinent one. What if we were to harness the power of humour as a tool in the fight to engage people in the climate emergency? What can humour allow and enable us to do that other approaches don't?   We had a lot of fun making this episode, and I hope you will have as much fun listening to it....

Welcome to our 54th episode, our 54th journey into the future that is still possible, just.   But before I tell you more, a suggestion, as you'll hear in the episode, that this episode will be a lot more enjoyable, and a fuller experience, if you listen to it in a space with fresh bread being baked. So if you've never made bread before, here is a link with an easy-to-make recipe. Good luck!   And...