I never really appreciated how much of what I write would end up on the cutting room floor until recently. Paragraphs, pages, whole sections of papers, and even entire texts that I have neither the time nor the wisdom to get through the peer review process, all end up resigned to the recycling bin. I’ll occasionally remember these texts and wonder what happened to them. Here’s one such text that I wrote which explains the core themes of my book. It’s short and pithy and was supposed to be a guest post/article for a newspaper or similar. It never took off/I never heard back from the university press office (I can’t imagine why) so I’m giving it a home here.

There’s nothing wrong with our imagination. It just cannot offer an escape… 

The dust has settled after COP26 and perhaps the most interesting thing about this meeting of world leaders has been observing the reactions to it in various opinion pieces and articles. Headlines bear out a curious emotion of resigned disappointment amid a desperate search for a measured optimism: “A flop, but the climate justice movement is still growing”, “It could have been worse”, Cop26 could have gone further – but it still brought us closer to a 1.5C world.

The story that we seem to be telling is the same as it always has been, that we still have hope that things will get better. Humans, it seems, are a fundamentally hopefully species that are perhaps too enamoured with the myth of progress to imagine a reality where things are getting worse for us.

Questions of imagination sit at the heart of our response to the threat of global ecological collapse that we face. Literary luminaries like Amitav Ghosh and Ben Okri impress upon us how important it is that we try to imagine new futures, new ways out of the crisis, and commentators like George Monbiot frequently invoke the idea that our collective inaction in the face of a planet that is fast becoming unliveable for the human is a “failure of the imagination” The idea that our imagination is the key to unlocking a better response the challenges that we face now has become core to how we see the challenges that we face in the anthropocene.

But what exactly are the new solutions that we are hoping to imagine? A future where a heroic entrepreneur saves us from the potential horrors of ecological collapse with some new innovation in the area of carbon scrubbing or recycling? A future where we all “return to the land”, and set up quiet enclaves of local, communal, sustainable farming that facilitates vegan lifestyles? A future where we all flee the planet and live on Mars? The drive to imagine and create new futures, to keep dreaming of new worlds and ways of living in them, is such a potent and powerful part of what we might call the human experience that it is worth asking who or what benefits from us maintaining such a drive towards the continuous production of new imagined futures. Despite the fact that there is a litany of evidence that contemporary organizations cannot lead the fight against climate change we continue try to imagine a future where such organizations sidestep government inaction in order to really make a difference. Why?

Fredrick Jameson once commented in passing that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. In light of current events, it is necessary for us to revise this formulation and suggest that we all now joyously participate in the production of new imaginaries in order to create new markets, support new futures, and ensure the continuance of capitalism.

The idea that there is some kind of outside to capitalism is increasingly farcical. Every new innovation and imagined future is immediately captured and subordinated to market logics. It is not that there is something wrong with our imagination, it is that the very nature of capitalism involves the capture of any new offshoots or potentials. The best example is that veganism and “eco-friendly diets” are now big business. Yet another pointless consumer fad.

At this point, the truly unimaginable future seems to be one where capitalism continues indefinitely having shirked off the “drag” of the human. Imagine an underground bunker protecting a nuclear powered server farm that continues to make stock trades, long after all of an organization’s human workers are dead? This is the kind of future that capital is dreaming for us all.

Is sustainability possible? Of course it is, but there’s absolutely no reason for us to hope that the human will be involved.

If this is the case, at what point should we begin to regard the hope and optimism inherent in calls to imagine new futures as forms of “climate denialism”? The insistence that “it’ll all be OK”, at some point should be regarded evidence of a dangerous detachment from the social, political, and economic realities in which we find ourselves?

There may be no way out. Imagine that.