A Deficit of Imagination: Why Artists Are Essential Leaders in the Climate Crisis
“The climate crisis is a crisis of culture, and thus a crisis of imagination”
— Amativ Ghosh
“I assume you have been trained to think — to have an intelligent encounter with problem-solving. It’s certainly what you will be expected to do. But I want to talk about the step before that. The preamble to problem-solving. I want to talk about the activity you were always warned against as being wasteful, impractical, hopeless. I want to talk about dreaming. Not the activity of the sleeping brain, but rather the activity of a wakened, alert one. Not idle wishful speculation, but engaged, directed daytime vision.”
— Toni Morrison; “Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address” 1988
I’ve been reflecting on a few experiences I’ve had in my professional life over the past year and a half. It is interesting to me how limited the imaginations are of those who seek to save the world and how unaware they can be of those of us who stand to lose the most if swift, decisive, and radical actions aren’t taken in the face of global catastrophe.
I think the issue is that some of the solutions are so simple they seem feeble and others are so vast or strenuous that they seem unfathomable.
Not the least of these simple solutions being: imagine. Imagine. Dream. Believe. All of these actions are the predecessors to our primary objective: Create.
We want to create a world that has not existed for as long as most of us have been alive. We want to figure out how to take the best from our past and our present and create a future worth living in (or in the most dismal of projections: a future to live in at all).
We want to create without giving ourselves (and others) permission to imagine, yet without the simplicity of wonder and imagination we can’t expand our thinking, our vision, to what was once unfathomable.
I think about this in my own, very recent, professional experience. I’ve spent the past year and a half working for a relatively significant NGO in the ocean conservation space. I work in a position that has not previously existed and I’m grateful to the person who imagined this position. The courage and fortitude that it has taken to get others to imagine the unfathomable is not lost on me, because I find myself, now, doing the same. I’m humbled and amazed to sit back and think that, in this position that hold, I’m the flesh and bone of someone else’s imagination.
What was jarring when I entered the space, was how few people can imagine into “someone else’s situation, sphere.[i]” I spend the majority of my time imagining into someone else’s sphere. Frankly, it’s my favorite thing to do. A writing exercise I used to do in college was sit in the quad, inconspicuous and invisible (for reasons Ralph Ellison and other writers have either dramatized or theorized), and write down the tidbits of dialogue I heard from my peers and passersby — a living found poem. In short, I care and I’m curious.
I’m intrigued by my fellow man. I care about their internal landscape. Not just what they think, but how they think and why they think the way they do. I want to know others intimately. I want to be transformed through stories and connections. It’s an almost insatiable hunger to collect as many experiences as possible with as many people as possible. I’m inspired by even the worst of us. It is genuinely the ugliest and most rewarding endeavor I’ve undertaken: to get to know and love both the beautiful and grotesque of our collective human experience. I walk into every space carrying that and I believe that comes off to some as a sense of whimsy that only belongs in the space of artistry and has no place in more serious endeavors like law and public policy.
I’ve been perpetually nudged, if not directly told, by people who look like me in this relatively significant NGO to focus my energies in the film and media sphere. Recently a coworker said something to the effect of, “…the best way to navigate this space is to think about where you want to go next, don’t do a whole bunch of policy work if you want to work in film. Use this as an opportunity to build that career…” She then asked me to work on a film project with her for her grant partners.
My former supervisor, when I expressed interest in law, policy, and organizing work (because that was the need that I identified in my region), also tried to nudge me towards film and media. She went so far as to deny my request for professional development funding that would have given me several influential connections in my region and to tell me, “You could get your drone license or buy film equipment to film your coastline receding. You can build your film portfolio, don’t focus on something you don’t really want to do.”
While these are not inherently bad suggestions, they undermine my autonomy and give the impression that I can’t be trusted with my own interests. It is an attempt to pigeonhole someone that you either consciously or subconsciously do not believe has the skills (nor do you have an interest in helping them develop the skills needed) to occupy the space of their interests.
From my very real experience in my academic life, I no longer have an interest in colonizing my art, which is to say, I’m not interested in producing certain art forms outside of the pleasure of simply creating them. However, my experience as an artist has given me skills, such as writing, public speaking, and improvisation, that translate very well to law, public policy, and community organizing.
I also do not believe, as others seem to, that one does not and can not inform the other. That thinking, to me, is indicative of our imagination deficit. We are attempting to create holistic solutions with compartmentalized thinking, and that is a logical fallacy that gives me a hearty laugh — the kind of laugh you’d give a child’s clever yet flawed remark.
I’m a product of the youth spoken word movement. In poetry slams, there’s a 3-minute time limit with a 10-second grace period. When I started attending city council meetings I learned that you get the same amount of time for public comment.
I believe whole-heartedly in arts education and the necessity of artists participating in advocacy, I also do not believe that everyone who practices an art form should be a professional artist. In the communities that I serve, there’s a disproportionate number of young people who want to be professional artists and athletes. This is also, a crisis of imagination — I’d even venture to call it a stagnation of imagination. We crave entry into these spaces because we don’t see ourselves reflected in other spaces.
There’s currently amazing work being produced at the intersections of conservation, art, and equity — giving us new images to aspire to — such as the book turned Hulu Series Black Cake. One of the leads in the show is a Black man who works in ocean conservation and we are gifted scenes that are very candid about the experiences of those of us who are people of color and work in the conservation space.
None of this is to say that I don’t appreciate working in conservation. If anything, this work has expanded my imagination immensely. While I was floundering, wondering what all this social theory I studied in school was for, I was introduced to environmental conservation, and the world opened up. I’d spent countless hours in my classes thinking, “What is the material change that all this talk of inequality, racism, classism, and the like made in people’s everyday lives?” When I was getting onboarded and I began to think deeply about environmental conservation and stewardship it was like someone opened a large door in a dark room. My social justice lens immediately informed my conservation lens, and the more I learn about conservation, the more my social justice lens expands.
This is the part we don’t often allow ourselves to do, imagine the best possibilities. This is why I’ve come to believe that we need more artists who pursue endeavors in science, policy, technology, and finance. These spaces all need people who are adept at imagining. If we are striving for adaptation, we have to ask adaptive questions. We need to continuously ask, “What if?” and allow ourselves the gift of pursuing that wonder.
[i] Morrison, Toni. “Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address.” The Source of Self-Regard, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019, pp. 67–73
