Imagine this...

Remember when you were a kid, and you could transform your backyard, your sheet-draped table, or your tree house into the most fantastical imaginative place you could think of? And once you established this this world, this situation, you could keep sailing on that creative wave, inventing complex scenarios about kings and queens and wizards and elves? Of adventure, struggle, laughter and joy?

Maybe you didn’t steal as many plots and ideas from The Hobbit as I might have, but I’d bet you spun together some very creative adventures, and still continue to tap into that creativity.

In reading about issues of sustainability, I remember seeing a graph of the various “ages” of our human history; we’ve seen the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, on up through the giant leaps of the Industrial Age. Now we have the esoteric Post Industrial Age. Despite the dedicated attempts of my history professor tor try to drive me to utter boredom, a spark of interest lit up when I thought about that term. The Post Industrial Age. I’ll admit, by itself it’s not particularly interesting or very descriptive. But it implies possibility. Maybe we can’t really describe this age very well because we are in an intersection of possible paths forward. This is what sparked my intrigue, my imagination, the same stuff from where I was a kid.

What happens next? What if we go here and this happens? Adventure, struggle, mystery. What would world will we find, make destroy, regenerate, inherit?

Using our imaginative process to project out a positive path forward into this possibility serves as a key element in tackling the ongoing issues around sustainable development. So often I read the climate change reports, about the dwindling Southwest water supplies, about the blunders of Industrial Agriculture and become overwhelmed in the mountains of bleak data. Or I read the various lengthy plans and strategies with quantified, analyzed, and scrupulous findings that promote sustainable solutions, but become numbed by the dry and dusty communication.

And then I read about projects like Patricia Johanson’s Garden Cities, or Nils Norman’s Edible Park, or wonder for myself what a sustainable future would look like, and I become captive to that creative process; I become engaged, because they offer me an opportunity to directly interact with these fictionally tangible ideas.

Patricia Johanson, Cabbage City, from the Home and Garden Commission, 1969

Patricia Johanson,  Animal Garden:Sheep, from the House and Garden Commission, 1969

Sustainability stems in many ways from a kind of utopian ideal, defining a state of balance and harmony within our human and land communities. But maybe this sustainability stuff isn’t an end goal or a finish line with green flags waving; like Norman’s Edible Park, maybe sustainability lays out a set of ideals and provides a framework for activating the process of sustainability. By allowing us the time to wonder how we could work the process of those ideals better, visioning gives inspiration, creativity, wonder, adventure, laughter, and joy.

Nils Norman with Permacultuur Centrum Den Haag, model for Edible Park, 2010