If you had a Time Machine, which year would you set the dial to? This episode is about time travel. More specifically, it is about using imaginary time travel, or futurism, or deep dreaming, or whatever you want to call it, in our activism. Why is it so powerful to invite people to imagine the future? What does it do to us to step into an imaginary future? And what tips of the trade can help us to really bring it alive for people?   In this episode we are joined by Anab Jain of Superflux and by Johannes Stripple of Lund University, both fantastic exponents of the art of time travel. Essential listening for anyone who wants to bring a bit of the future into their lives and is wondering the most skilful way to do so. Enjoy the journey!   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

The time for imagining that change happens in small, incremental steps is now way behind us. As Naomi Klein says, "there are no non-radical solutions left". Today we are thinking big. Really big. With big thinkers. While some of our episodes focus on what if questions that are quite specific and focused, in this episode, Episode Twenty-Eight, we are thinking big, so hang on to your hats. Luckily we have two guests for you who are brilliant at thinking big.   Atossa Soltani has been a global campaigner for tropical rainforests and indigenous rights, for going on three decades. She is founder and board president of Amazon Watch and served as the organisation’s first executive director for eighteen years. Currently she is the director of global strategy for Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative working in alliance with 30 indigenous nations to protect 86 million acres in the most biologically diverse ecosystem on Earth. She is the Hillary Institute 2013 Global Laureate for Climate Leadership and is a producer of The Flow, a feature-length documentary currently in production on learning from nature’s genius.   Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilisation’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His upcoming book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, will be published in June this year. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth, and he writes topical articles exploring the deeper patterns of political and cultural developments at the blog Patterns of Meaning.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

This new episode, one of my favourite so far, comes with a challenge. Can you listen to it and not reimagine your own relationship with flying or, as one of our guests puts it, being "twanged around in an aluminium sausage"?   I stopped flying in 2006. I travel to the far reaches of Europe on the train, travelling to Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Mallorca, as the extent of my reach. I long one day to take the Trans-Siberian express. Yes, there are now places in the world I probably will never reach, but that’s OK. I can honestly say that not flying has not diminished my quality of life at all. I travel slower, I see more. As we reach a time where airlines and travel companies are falling over themselves to tempt you back onto airplanes to head off on holiday, we are taking a pause, a breath, to ask a question that once felt heretical, but which now feels rather exciting… “what if we all stopped flying?”   Anna Hughes is an author and flight-free adventurer, and hasn’t been on a plane for more than a decade. She is the director of Flight Free UK, a campaign that asks people to give up flying for a year in order to break a habit and try different ways of travelling. With a background in sustainable transport campaigning and behaviour change, Anna is passionate about how our individual choices can change the world.   Ed Gillespie describes himself as a ‘recovering sustainability consultant’ . He is a Director of Greenpeace UK, a facilitator at the Forward Institute on responsible leadership and is an investor/mentor of numerous ethical environmental start-ups. You may also be enjoying him on the ‘Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts’ podcasts, or even have seen him compering the wonderful Imaginarium tent at the equally wonderful, but sadly postponed, for this year, Shambhala Festival.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

These days of COVID have shown us that extraordinary profound reimagining of many aspects of society are entirely possible. Might this be the time to forever do away with the idea that the only way to measure our progress, cultural, social, spiritual, economic, is purely by how much bigger our economy is than it was last year?   It’s a weird metric… imagine if that was the only way we assessed the growth and evolution of our children? Sure, some growth at the start might be useful, but as they mature, we want to be able to measure their growth and their defining qualities in other ways than just their becoming ever more enormous… And what might the world look like if we did replace this idea of growth with something else?   We are joined for this episode of 'From What If to What Next' by two amazing guests. Kate Soper is Emerita Professor of Philosophy and a former researcher with the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University. She is the author, and co-author, of many books, and was lead researcher in the research project on ‘Alternative Hedonism, and the theory and politics of consumption’ between 2004 and 2006. Her latest book Post-Growth Living: for an Alternative Hedonism was published in 2020.   Our second guest is Tim Jackson, is an ecological economist and writer. Since 2016 he has been Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey in the UK, where he is also Professor of Sustainable Development. His book Prosperity without Growth has been translated into 17 foreign languages. His latest book Post Growth – life after capitalism was published by Polity Press in 2021. In 2016, Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate for exceptional international leadership in sustainability.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Let’s imagine, and this takes quite a leap in Britain in 2021 I’ll grant you, but stay with me, that we had a government who recognised that we are living through a time of imaginative contraction alongside a climate and ecological emergency, a social justice emergency and so much more.   Let’s imagine that they were able to recognise this as the crisis it is, that allowing a population’s imagination to contract is profoundly dangerous. And let us also imagine that they decided that they needed to put in place an infrastructure of policy, resourcing, approaches, economics, and so on, that created the best possible conditions for the imagination to flourish.   What might that look like? How would it be to live in a world where that infrastructure was in place?   Panthea Lee is a strategist, curator, organizer, and facilitator working for structural justice and collective liberation.   Cassie Robinson is Deputy Director of Funding Strategy at The National Lottery Community Fund where she’s responsible for Innovation, Policy and Practice, and oversees the Climate Action Fund, the Digital Fund and the Emerging Futures Fund amongst others.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

When was the last time you read a book cover to cover? And if you are still able to do this, do you feel you read in the same way you did, say, 20 years ago? How is the decline in our collective attention span affecting our ability to read and, by extension, our collective capacity for knowledge, wisdom and art? What do we lose when we lose our ability to focus? This was such a fascinating conversation, with two people who have given this question a great deal of thought.   Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Centre for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Centre for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century and most recently of the brilliant Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.   Sven Birkerts defines himself as an essayist, a teacher of writing, and the editor of a literary journal at Boston University called AGNI. He started out as a book reviewer, which led him into becoming a writer of essays and memoirs. In 1994 he wrote ‘The Guthenberg Elegies’, which explored the demise of reading and the rise of digital culture. It’s a phenomenal book. Then, in 2015, he wrote ‘Changing the Subject’, an update on his relationship with digital media, and a powerful cry for the importance of attention and imagination in a time where both appear to be waning.   More recently Sven has become, as he puts it, “kind of obsessed, both in a very literal ‘get and out and do it’ way, but also thinking about it, by taking photographs. With his phone. As he puts it, “It has become a little fixation of some sort that has me thinking a lot about how we take in the world and what we keep and what serves us, and what is artistic and what isn’t”. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. I interviewed him previously as part of the research for 'From What Is to What If'.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Today we are looking at street art. Street art has stood alongside the fight for climate justice, the Black Lives Matter revolution, and pretty much every mass uprising for change through history. But is it just decoration? Or does it have the power to deeply shift a culture? To fire the collective imagination? And what if it was everywhere?   I am joined today by two incredible, insightful, passionate masters of this particular artform. Ghanaian-born artist Tijay Mohammed combines his work as an artist, with numerous accolades and residencies, as well as working with the diverse communities he surrounds himself with. He lives in the Bronx, New York, and was one of the artists who created the huge Black Lives Matter mural in that city. He also maintains a studio in Ghana which serves as a sanctuary for visiting artists to interact with local residents, promoting multicultural dialogue through story circles and art workshops, a source of motivation for him in both his studio and teaching practice.   Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her practice boldly reshapes the myths, stories, and cultural practices of the present, while healing from the wounds of the past. Her work serves as a record of her human experiences as a woman of colour embracing joy, sexual pleasure and personal transformation through psychedelics as an antidote to the life-long impacts of systemic racism. She is the co-founder and president of The Centre for Cultural Power, a national organisation igniting change at the intersection of art, culture and social justice.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

This week we are exploring failure. More precisely, what if we were able to create a culture in which failure is embraced, celebrated even, rather than feared, avoided or ridiculed? What would society look like if we embraced failure in politics, education, economics and everyday life, indeed if we learned from a young age that failure was just as important as success? There's a great What If question to stretch your imagination...   My two guests have so many great insights into failure and its importance. Social visionary, entrepreneur and thought leader Simon Cohen strives to make the world a happier and more fulfilled place—he is uniquely placed as the individual who gave away his £1m company, Global Tolerance. A champion for media ethics, social justice and values, he expounds his wisdom as an international keynote speaker. He is also the first person in the UK to place an entire company on a one year sabbatical.   And Carlos Zimbrón is the Co-founder and CEO of Fuckup Inc. He is also the Co-founder of WE ARE TODOS (cultural space), architect, art and history lover, who describes himself as “always curious” and was described by the Economic Times of India as “Not glamorising failure, just embracing it”.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

It was recently announced that Chuck Feeney, the Irish American former airport duty free shopping entrepreneur who was worth $8bn, had, at the age of 89, succeeded in his goal of giving away all of his money to initiatives working to make the world a better place. Every cent. He suggested that to give away a huge fortune was far more fun than holding onto it. He once wrote “to those wondering about giving while living… try it, you’ll like it”.   In today's podcast we are exploring how it would be if Feeney's thinking were to be embraced by those holding the vast reserves of money that the world needs to address its complex problems right now. What if they shifted and recognised the need to let go of what they're holding onto? And how would it feel to do so?   Dr Wanda Wyporska is Executive Director at The Equality Trust, the national charity that campaigns to reduce social and economic inequality. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of York, a trustee of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, Redthread Youth, and Equally Ours, as well as Governor of a primary school.   Chuck Collins is the Director for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org. He is author of the seminal book, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good and co-author of Wealth and Our Commonwealth, a case for taxing inherited fortunes. His new book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, is about the wealth defence industry and will be published in the UK in February 2021 and US in March 2021 by Polity Press.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Today we are exploring the question of trauma, and I must confess that recording this conversation rather blew my mind, as it will no doubt blow yours. I had to lie down afterward and digest it for a while. I am joined by two amazing thinkers for this conversation. I hope you love it. Susan Raffo is a bodyworker, cultural worker and writer. For the last 15 years she has focused her work through the lens of healing justice with a particular interest in supporting individual and collective practices of safety and wellness. This also means attending to how generational and historical trauma shapes the present moment , including both internalised and systemic supremacy. She spent her first seven years of adulthood living in Bristol, England, particularly shaped by the anti-imperialism and sustainability movements of the 1980s (the protests at Greenham Common being an especially life-shaping experience). She has lived in south Minneapolis in the US for 30 years with her awesome partner, Rocki, and their daughter, Luca.   Staci K. Haines is a national leader in the field of Somatics, specialising in intersecting personal and social change. Staci is the co-founder of generative somatics, a multiracial social justice organisation bringing somatics to social and climate justice leaders and organisations. She specialises in somatics and trauma, and leads programs for healers, therapists, and social change leaders to transform the impact of individual and social trauma and violence. Her new book The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice (North Atlantic Press 2019) is based on that work. She is the founder of generationFIVE, a community based organisation whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations.   As mentioned in the podcast, Staci and Susan sent in the list of recommended readings, which are available at https://bit.ly/3eoPRdT   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.