Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Thirteen: Envisioning the Future: Exercising Our Imagination
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
This episode, we’re going to talk about how to exercise our imaginations to envision better futures, whether we’re writers or not, and how that’s a vital tool in our climate solutions toolkit.
That’s a pretty bold statement, but let me talk about the caveat for a second: the idea that the process is powerful regardless of whether you’re a writer.
Though a certain lens, this entire podcast is a primer on writing hopeful climate fiction. If you’re a writer who’s cli-fi curious but haven’t written in the genre before, I’m essentially walking you through the challenges you might face, hopefully giving you inspiration and examples from the writers already working in this space.
And we need you, writers. We need a million of these stories because there’s a big, gaping hole in our imaginative space, and we need your writerly skills and your unique perspective to help fill that hole.
But, like so much in the climate fight, we really need to engage everyone possible. The fight is just too big, the problems too manifold and complex, the challenge too great to do this alone.
Many people already engaged in the climate fight are already envisioning better futures, but often that’s within the confines of their particular technology or science or activism. Broadening that imaginative process to the larger picture, getting cross-pollination from others, and grappling with how it all fits together can be incredibly generative... which you can then take back to your individual work.
For folks just starting to engage in the climate fight, envisioning a better future can be a profound exercise in not just imagination, but hope.
Non-writers can obviously read the stories already written, but engaging in the imaginative process personally unlocks your loud fears and quiet hopes, your secret dreams and not-so-secret anxieties. It brings you fully into the fight by roleplaying in a better world custom-built by you.
Here on the pod, we raise the visibility of hopeful climate fiction that has already been published, and the entire podcast is an invitation and a guide on how to write it, but today, we’re going to talk about how to engage everyone in this imaginative process.
Ursula K. LeGuin, our Patron Saint of the pod, has this quote, which fits this particularly well:
Let’s start with two examples so you can see what this looks like.
Teaching High-School Students Climate Writing
Earlier this year, Grist put me in contact with a high school teacher who was doing a unit on climate, with the students writing their own hopeful climate fiction, and she wanted an author to talk to the kids. I was eager to agree—I’m passionate about this topic, but I’ve also taught classes and workshops over a range of topics over time. Plus teens are just fun.
I suggested a series of short visits, integrated into the unit. It takes time for teens to warm up to you, and I was going to ask them to take quite a leap: to share their work with me. I had to earn that trust before I could help them tell their stories.
The first visit was just some basic storytelling hacks to get them started. I suggested a framework where their character was either mitigating climate change, adapting to it, or managing some kind of retreat. For the second visit, a few were willing to ask questions, and I ended up sharing a recent personal struggle with writing.
I told them, here I was, an author of many novels and short stories over many years, and I’d suddenly found myself unable to write because of life, and there’s not much more terrifying than that for a writer. I had to sequester away to get back my writing groove, but during that time, I wrote the story they had read in class. The teacher later told me that sharing that vulnerability really connected with the kids.
Like, maybe we’re all struggling here, right? And sharing our stories is how we get through?
For the third visit, I told the teacher I was available for one-on-one consults. I know it’s hard to share work in front of a group, and these were virtual visits, so the kids could literally take me and my floating head on an iPad out into the hall for a private discussion. In the end, I had kids lined up, eager to share their stories and get my help where they were stuck.
There’s so much about this experience that I was head-over-heels in love with. The teacher is the kind every kid wishes they had. The kids themselves were brilliant and brave—even the sullen ones, who had who-knows-what going on in their lives, had perked up by the end. I was feeling my way through the process, no idea if it would actually work, no idea if my words would reach them or if they’d be willing to take the leap to share with me. This wasn’t just a writing exercise. This was a combination of climate grief therapy and imagineering a better future with people who would be here to live it.
It was visioning, but I didn’t have that word in my head just yet.
Afterward, the teacher said the kids had all written stories and shared them with each other—that they were genuinely inspired by my visits and those visits helped them really engage with the unit. I knew she wasn’t just saying that: I heard it in their stories and saw it on their faces. They’d been given permission to hope. To dare to imagine a future they wanted to live in.
I believe strongly in the magic of vulnerability and connection and storytelling, and this was all of those things. I will absolutely be back next year to do it again.
Visioning with Grist
As much as I love working with kids—and I feel strongly that we owe these kids a lot, given the current state of the future we’re handing to them—I wince when I hear adults say hopeful climate fiction is great for kids, but it’s too childish for adults, who should only get the unvarnished horror stories of the world. There’s an implicit assumption that we’re somehow lying to these kids—that there isn’t hope, there’s nothing but death and despair and ruin ahead. Fairy tales are alright for children, but the adults should be serious.
That’s one of the more pernicious lies the status quo likes to tell.
We all need hope. We all need permission to envision better futures and the courage to work for them.
I saw this clearly in the Grist visioning workshop I attended last month.
It was called Imagining Better Climate Futures: Visioning for Fiction, and it was part of Grist’s effort to grow and inspire hopeful climate fiction writers, but it turned out many of the attendees weren’t writers at all—or perhaps they didn’t self-identify as “writers” yet. Yet the workshop still served its intended purpose.
The process was collective brainstorming with a digital whiteboard and sticky notes. We broke into small groups, and there were a couple rounds to the activity. First, we were told to envision some detail of the future we wanted, describing it on a sticky note and placing it on the timeline (up to Year 2200). In the second round, we took turns picking a sticky (ours or someone else’s) and brainstorming as a group to flesh out the idea. The workshop was a little more detailed than that, but that was the basic idea.
As an example, someone might place a sticky at 2075 that said “Regenerative agriculture is the norm,” and then we’d collectively brainstorm things like “universal composting” and “free education for regen ag degrees” and “rewilding 30% of the planet.” Brief discussions on those topics ensued. The group was supportive and knowledgeable and we quickly ran out of time before we ran out of ideas.
Interestingly, in my group, we all envisioned near-future scenarios in the first round—very few stickies were placed out at 2200. Which apparently was common across all the groups. So we challenged ourselves to think bigger on the next round, and that really opened things up. There was a lot of hesitation about where on the timeline these things belonged—was too soon too optimistic or not daring enough? Even in our unbounded exercise of imagination, there was a lot of concern about being “realistic.”
But everyone self-reported being inspired. The act of putting ideas down, with the kind of concreteness that words and a timeline can conjure, and then having our fellow workshoppers take that seriously and add onto it was very affirming. For some, it was the first time they’d ever done something like this.
For me, I do this every day. But I realized both how powerful it was to do collectively and that for so many, this was brand new. And transformative. I could see the same spark of hope and excitement in my fellow adult workshoppers as I saw in the faces of the kids writing their climate stories.
It is radical to dream of a better future with actual words on the page and stickies on a timeline.
I somehow forgot that because I do it all the time.
Teaching Climate Fiction in New York City
This fall, I’ll be teaching a climate fiction workshop at the Climate Imaginarium on Governor’s Island in New York City. I will definitely be including a visioning process like this, and if you happen to be in the area, please come! But you don’t have to wait until Fall—the Imaginarium is running classes all summer, plus they have exhibits of climate stories and art, and I highly recommend you making the trip out there if you’re anywhere nearby.
You could argue that nothing concrete comes out of daydreaming about the future.
I’d argue that nothing concrete happens without us imagining it first.
You don’t have to be an expert in climate solutions—those students were just kids, telling stories of their fears about the future and what they want to see in the world. You don’t have to be a professional writer—it’s not the crafting of words but the envisioning of possibilities that was happening at the Grist workshop.
Imagination is our superpower. It’s a tool that every one of us has access to, a powerful tool that can be a climate solution if we use it properly. But we have to beat back the status quo culture that says it’s foolish to dream of how things could be.
Envision A Better Future
I encourage you to do just that, in whatever way is easiest and most accessible to you. Maybe privately. Maybe with a friend or two. Give yourself a minute (or an hour) and manifest the thing you’d really like to see in the world via paper and ink. It can be something as big as oceans without plastic or as small as planting a seed in your garden. Think about what would have to happen, what concrete steps would need to be involved, for that to become reality. It’s okay to not have the answers. Asking the right question is half the solution. March your steps backward in time, to smaller and smaller steps, until you reach where you are sitting, right now, in your small spot on the planet.
That’s where you start. That’s one thing you can do. Maybe it’s the exercise itself. Maybe it’s something you pledge to do next week or next month. Maybe it’s something you can’t do yourself, but want to find out who is already working on this, and support them. Whatever it is, whatever your next step, will it change the world? Probably not. But it will change something, starting with you.
To get you started, here’s a video on imagination that I found inspiring.
I hope you will gather your courage and give the exercise a try.
Bright Green Futures is a weekly newsletter/podcast. Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. The best way to support the show is to subscribe and share the stories with your friends.
LINKS Ep. 13: Envisioning the Future: Exercising Our Imagination
Seven Sisters by Susan Kaye Quinn
Climate Imaginarium, Governor’s Island NYC
Fascism and the Failure of Imagination video by Zoe Bee
Ep. 13: Envisioning the Future: Exercising Our Imagination