Outlook: Socio-Ecological Imaginations

Abstract

The outlook is a call to use the understanding of futuring and ideas about enactment to help liberate new environmental futures. It is about strategies in the politics of the imagination. Captured futures is about closing down, liberating futures is about opening up. Opening up the imagination is a deeply political act; ideas about how the future might be otherwise are empowering, and empowerment can come with consequences. Claiming ‘there is no alternative’ leads to passivity, but futuring could encourage mobilisation, based on the conviction that a better world is possible. Based on academic scholarship this final chapter outlines several key strategies for a new political project: backgrounding CO2, epochal storytelling, defamiliarization and bringing out the absurdity of the present, familiarization with utopia, and turning off the tap.