Marek reviewed From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins
Some nice ideas and enjoyable notions in a pleasant mind-opener
3 stars
A paean to the imagination, and the importance of re-organising our civic, educational, and political institutions to encourage and facilitate people's imaginations.
The basic message of it the book is that climate change, and other major, indeed existential, problems are not problems of technology, they are problems of imagination. The worst of the challenges are made worst by the constraints we put on ourselves in the way that address them, and the range of positive outcomes is much more broad and diverse than we have so far given credit.
Inevitably, the book is a little preachy at times. I also personally find the occasional foray into neurobollocks (the insistent belief that some particular part of the brain is the magical part that we have to 'protect' from abuse or damage, in this case, the over-worked hippocampus), very off-putting.
At its best, though, it provides a host of concrete examples of …
A paean to the imagination, and the importance of re-organising our civic, educational, and political institutions to encourage and facilitate people's imaginations.
The basic message of it the book is that climate change, and other major, indeed existential, problems are not problems of technology, they are problems of imagination. The worst of the challenges are made worst by the constraints we put on ourselves in the way that address them, and the range of positive outcomes is much more broad and diverse than we have so far given credit.
Inevitably, the book is a little preachy at times. I also personally find the occasional foray into neurobollocks (the insistent belief that some particular part of the brain is the magical part that we have to 'protect' from abuse or damage, in this case, the over-worked hippocampus), very off-putting.
At its best, though, it provides a host of concrete examples of real ways in which places, institutions, and cultural practices can all be changed for the better, and potentially at scale. The diversity of them is the real strength - the point is not to find a small set of massive solutions, but to recognise that there's a plethora of small ones, none of them perfect.
It won't change your life, but it might open your mind in some interesting ways.