Becoming imagination activists. Happy Baashkaakodin-Giizis (Freezing Moon) - 28 November 2023

Nibi, Gift of the Thirteen Moons: Illustration by Zhaawano Giizhik

Happy Baashkaakodin-Giizis (Freezing Moon)!

“In our teachings we refer the Moon as our Grandmother and the Sun as the Grandfather, Sky as the Father, Earth as the Mother. Which I will speak about next week. We did not measure time like time is measured today. We did not have days of the week as we know them today. This is what we have Nangwaa-today, Waabang- tomorrow, Awos waabang- the next future day, Kchi awos waabang- the day after that, Jiinaagwaa- Yesterday, Awos naagwaa- the day before yesterday, Kchi awos naagwaa- the day before that. We do not have months as you see on the calendar we have moons, thirteen of them.” Anishinaabemdaa 

Youth Imagine the Future festival

“We need to rewild our imagination. We must learn how to dream again, and we have to learn that together.”

Extinction Rebellion

Youth Imagine the Future, a festival of stories and art, invited the amazing youth in grades 7-12 from the Limestone District and Algonquin & Lakeshore School Boards region to showcase their creativity by crafting a short story or art piece envisioning a better future. Come witness the unique perspectives that are unleashed when imagination is encouraged to run wild!

Becoming imagination activists

Amitav Ghosh wrote that what we need now is a “vitalist mass movement”, a collective work of beauty and art and imagination and human spirit, which “may actually be magical enough to change hearts and minds across the world.”

What if we explored the idea of imagination activism in 2024?

How might imagination activism help us create an infectious and ambitious story about what it means to grow into a City in a Forest? What if we think of each little forest as a song, poem, love letter to the land? What does a City in a Forest feel like, smell like, taste like, look like? How might we reforest our minds? How can the power of language help us rewrite the ecological imagination? What if we had a Ministry of Multispecies Communications? How might we become better kin and find belonging in a world of relations? How might we partner with plants, animals, microbes, rivers and other more-than-human actors in designing a multispecies city? What if we treated infrastructuring as a verb, a playground, to reimagine what it is to be a road, a city, a neighbourhood, an ecology?

The concept of thrutopia says: Don't defer your dreams. We need those dreams now. What are desperately needed, but as yet barely exist, are what I term thrutopias. Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure.

Rupert Read,  Why neither dystopias nor utopias are enough to get us through the climate crisis, and how a 'Thrutopia' could be

“It is precisely here, in our agency of imagination, where new possibilities arise, where we can see afresh, think differently, and create another relationship to each other and the world around us... waking us up and reconnecting to our senses”

Eva Bakkeslett, Playing for Time

The Imagination Sundial is a design tool from the Doughnut Economics Action Lab for intentionally cultivating our collective imagination with the intentional design of experiments to build an alternative and abundant future. CoLab Dudley used the sundial to write their friendly guide to collaboration. Wolverhampton for Everyone used the sundial to kick off their planning for 2021. How might we use this tool to help us collectively imagine Kingston as a city in a forest?

“An Imagination Activist is a new kind of activist and civic leader powered by imagination and the vision and tools to create new systems.”

Phoebe Tickell, Moral Imaginations

What if municipal imagination became a core capability of 21st century civil service leadership? This year, in a program called Camden Imagines, Moral Imaginations trained 32 Imagination Activists – employees of Camden Council – in the tools and practices of collective imagination. Their vision? Embed the Moral Imagining Framework’s Three Pillars model (Future Generations, Nature, Ancestors) into the way Camden makes decisions, invests, and governs.

Harvesting collective imagination

The Seed Planting Scrapbook of the Collective Imagination Practice Community offers a wonderful metaphor for collective imagination practices:

• Our collective imagination activities are like seeds.  

• First we select (or design) a seed (practice or experiment) that we hope will bring new possibilities to the forest we are working in. The forest is a question, topic or context we are imagining about (eg. mental health, peat bogs, or the future of your town).

• Then we sow the seed (our collective imagination practice), water and tend it, and observe how it swells and germinates.

• The journey of the seed (or imagination practice) cannot be separated from the forest it is planted into, the conditions of this habitat play a big role in activating it or constraining its growth. So too with our practice.

• The forest already has established ways of thinking about this topic (the soil) which will influence how your seed will germinate and grow.

• The forest will already have established activities and structures to ‘fix’ the topic (the dominant vegetation) which shape the forest landscape

Here’s a lovely video they created that further unpacks this metaphor.