“The Possitopian approach to future thinking expands the cone of the possible future, draws on geophysical realities and data, and also applies imagination to help you imagine future scenarios which are potentially worse or better than you might allow yourself to think.” 

So says this week’s guest, Bridget McKenzie. Bridget is an artist and regenerative thought leader working to engage people with what she calls the Earth Crisis – which is a new term to me but feels a much better fit than MetaCrisis or Polycrisis. Her career includes being Tate’s Education manager and the British Library’s Head of Learning. In 2006, she founded Flow Associates, a research consultancy in cultural learning. In the past decade, she has focused on the intersection of culture and environment, and has developed training, collectives and campaigns pushing at the radical edges of this field. This includes founding Climate Museum UK, a creative collective putting the Earth Crisis in context, and Earth Talk, a community of practice for Earth Literacy. She co-founded Culture Declares, a movement of cultural workers declaring a planetary emergency. She experiments with creative activism in her city of Norwich.

And creative activism is what we’re all about – how do we stretch our imaginations beyond the bounds of what we believe to be true now, to what might be true if we can only lay the foundations for something utterly outside our current capacity to imagine?

This was such an inspiring conversation with someone who thinks deeply about the nature of art, creativity, culture – and the ways we can engage ourselves and each other at the deepest level.