What is The IMAGINE Project?
The IMAGINE Project is a community-driven movement that gives people tools, activities, and social support to re-imagine their cities as biophilic, ecologically harmonious, and beautiful places. We aim for our community to be focused on equal parts creative visualization and real on-the-ground ecological transformation.
Why imagining a better world matters
The environmental movement has been sounding the alarm about ecological catastrophe for decades.
But a consistent message of climate doom and future apocalypse comes at a cost. Scary information can cause people to feel overwhelmed, to freeze up, and decrease their brain's executive functioning - and these emotional responses fail at driving people to take action.
It's time for the environmental movement to embrace a new age. Instead of condemning what we are against, we also need to illustrate the new kind of world that we are for.
Imagining a new and desirable world matters.
It matters because a vision is a goal that people can work towards. It gives people hope, optimism, and agency. It's a tool leaders use to inspire action - and a vision sparks ideas and problem-solving.
The imagination is a human being's greatest superpower. It is the seed from which every innovation throughout history has been born.
No amount of money can manifest the kind deep inspired focus that erupts humans when they are on a mission to invent, create, and master something new. It comes from a deeper power - and when that power is hatched, people really do change the world.
It instills a sense of power that it is possible to erode current unsustainable systems - like fossil fuels and disposable plastic - and a vision helps to erode the inertia that comes when trying to change anything. It lends us agency to bring new systems - like solar power, local urban agriculture, plant-based foods - into reality.
Research shows that creative imagination exercise lead to pro-environmental behavior and political action.
No one tells us that we can reimagine the world around us. The physical world of roads, buildings, canals, pipelines, and factories is not fixed. It's our canvass, our building blocks, and our clay to turn into whatever we can dream it to be.
The IMAGINE Project provides a toolkit, a community, activities, and events to help people cultivate the practice of environmental imagination. Our aim is to help people put to use their greatest superpower - the ability to imagine another possible reality, and to innovate to make it come true.