There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being told, again and again, that things cannot be different. That the way we grow food, build cities, spend money and organise society is simply the way it has to be. That dreaming of something better is naive, or worse, dangerous. It isn’t!
Two thinkers have been sitting with us at Planting Up this year, challenging that assumption with some force. George Monbiot, writing in April 2025, argued that political failure is, at its heart, a failure of imagination. In his piece A New World, he makes the case that capitalism’s greatest trick has been to close down the space in which alternatives can even be conceived. If you can’t name the system, you can’t imagine beyond it. But once you can see it clearly — once you understand what it actually is and what it actually does — alternatives become far easier to picture than we’ve been led to believe.
Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns movement, arrives at the same place from a different direction. In his interview with Imagine5, he describes imagination as the ability “to see things as if they could be otherwise” and argues that we are living through a perfect storm of forces that diminish exactly that capacity. Precarious economics, attention-devouring technology, underfunded public services, chronic stress: none of this creates the conditions for an imaginative population. And yet imagination, he insists, is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for change.
What strikes us about both arguments is how practical they are. Neither Monbiot nor Hopkins is asking us to indulge in fantasy. They are asking us to do the unglamorous, necessary work of picturing what we actually want — specifically enough to move towards it.
Monbiot offers a useful provocation: imagine that no one is permitted to accumulate wealth beyond the point at which they can exert power over others. Imagine those resources redirected into what he calls “public luxury” – magnificent parks, free cultural life, shared spaces where flourishing isn’t rationed by income. Private sufficiency for everyone; extravagance held in common.
Hopkins takes groups on imagined journeys to the future to help them feel what a different world might be like, not just think about it abstractly. His point is that the climate emergency won’t be solved by terrifying people into compliance. It requires changes described “in ways that are delicious and evoke longing.” The cultivation of longing, he notes, is the work of artists, poets, musicians and designers, not only scientists and activists.
Meet Rob Hopkins, the time-traveling environmentalist. (Source: https://imagine5.com/interview/rob-hopkins-the-future-is-beautiful-but-to-get-there-we-have-to-believe-in-it/)
At Planting Up, this resonates. Growing things, tending land, building community around food and green space: these acts sit at the intersection of doing and imagining. A garden is always, in some sense, a vision of the world made visible. Every seed sown is a small wager on the future.
We don’t have to wait for permission. The citizens of Liège who built a food belt serving thousands of organic school meals didn’t ask the municipality first. Totnes residents didn’t wait for a government programme before growing food together and minting their own currency to strengthen local trade.
The future is not fixed. But we won’t find our way to a better one by refusing to picture it. We can start there.
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Feature image: Imagination is the only thing you need to change the world. (Source: https://medium.com/@ChrisHerd/why-imagination-is-the-only-thing-you-need-to-change-the-world-4738312b0ae9)
