Back in early 2021…
My friend Natalie: What do you think about creating a book together?
Me: What would the book be about?Creative Climate Resilience Climate resilience and creativity. Art and climate change - building new narratives for change.
Imagination and changemaking
What does it even mean to ‘imagine’ on a planet deeply entrenched in a polycrisis? How do we experience this planetary emergency together/alone?
Is chaos a bad thing? Is it possible to imagine in the present to start repairing the relationships (to ourselves, to each other, to this planet)?
These questions, and so many others became a book. But not the kind of book I expected to bring to life.
IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency isn't a book about climate solutions, nor is it about awe. Well… not quite.
Here's what I mean: when we truly encounter the complexity of our current moment, the entangled mess of climate breakdown, social fragmentation, systems collapse and new systems emergence…it's overwhelming. Awesome and awful in the truest sense. That moment when you feel simultaneously vast and tiny, connected and lost? That's awe. And I've come to believe it's often the first doorway into seeing differently, even (and maybe especially) when we feel the weight of this moment on this planet.
When we experience awe, we can often be flooded with new questions. Grand questions about the universe, or tiny questions about our inner landscape. For a moment, we’re present. We’re tethered to that moment.
And in that presence, something else becomes available: imagination.
This isn’t a big book. But it carries artifacts about questions, big and small, and how to think about imagination as something that can exist in the present moment. Not something that only floats you to the future, but that can anchor you to what can exist right now.
This book started as something else entirely. When my good friend Natalie Seisser (designer and director extraordinaire), Lars Harmsen (the brilliant head of Slanted Publishing) and Viola Dessin (editorial design genius) and I initially thought we were creating an anthology about creative climate resilience. We thought we knew what that meant. But as we began conversations with contributors across six continents, something shifted. The people who were doing incredibly transformative work - the Indonesian conservationist protecting Asia's last great rainforest, the activists building pathways for women working in landfills, the designers collaborating with more-than-human intelligence - weren't offering solutions in any traditional sense.
They were offering new ways of seeing.
Rudi Putra, who's been protecting the Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia, doesn't just have a conservation strategy. He has a way of feeling into the forest that transforms how you understand our relationships to trees. Vanessa Andreotti doesn't just teach about decolonial futures - she embodies a different relationship to knowledge that makes space for wisdom our dominant systems have forgotten. Dr.Hossein Resai's architectural innovations aren't just about sustainable design -they're about remembering what it means to build with rather than against the living world.
Each conversation left me with more questions than answers. And slowly, I realized: that was the point.
In my work with Awe Exchange, I've been exploring how awe can catalyze systems change. But the deeper I go, the more I understand that our obsession with solutions - our need to move quickly from problem to fix - might be preventing us from accessing the kind of ‘intelligence’ we need.
The challenges we're facing are what complexity theorists call "wicked problems"; issues so interconnected and dynamic that traditional problem-solving approaches not only fail, they often make things worse. Climate change isn't just an environmental problem. It's entangled with histories of colonialism, systems of economic extraction, patterns of social alienation, and fundamentally different ways of understanding what it means to be human on this planet.
When we rush to solutions, we risk bypassing the essential work of learning to see and feel differently. We stay trapped in the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.
But what if we approached these challenges the way we approach awe? With presence rather than urgency. With curiosity rather than certainty. With openness to being changed by what we encounter.
Working on IMAGINE has been like participating in a slow-motion mind meld with some of the most visionary people I've ever crossed paths with.
There’s Eddy Ekete, Congolese Postwar & Contemporary artist, whose practices hold a mirror up to how the West ‘restitutes’ artifacts and art from places like the Congo. His art uncovers what history and politics attempt to hide.
Brother Phap Linh of Plum Village, who helped me deepen my understanding that inner transformation required for outer change isn't separate from systems work—it is systems work.
Nora Bateson, a visionary and pioneer thinker whose work is anchored in the question “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”
Gab Mejia, a queer Filipino photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and environmental engineer whose exhibition “The Forest Listens, Their Spirits Cry” documents the sacred relationship between the Talaandig-Manobo people and Mount Kalatungan’s forests in the Philippines.
Each contributor taught me something about what imagination actually is. Not the ability to envision perfect futures, but the capacity to stay present with complexity without rushing to premature closure. The willingness to let ourselves be undone by what we encounter.
IMAGINE isn't a manual. It's not a framework. It definitely doesn't promise to solve anything.
It's a collection of artifacts and provocations, some visual, written, philosophical… that invite you to loosen your grip on certainty and explore what becomes possible when we engage with chaos and possibility through imagination.
The book is organized around six invitations, six chapters:
Imagine... Life Was at the Center - What shifts when we remember that we're part of the living world, not separate from it?
Imagine... We Left No Trace - How do we design for death, decay, and the composting of systems that no longer serve?
Imagine... Beyond the Map - What becomes visible when we venture beyond the boundaries of our familiar thinking? To trust the map, we must trust the mapmaker!
Imagine... in Poetry - How do we make space for ways of knowing that can't be captured in linear logic? What does it mean to be ‘poetically correct’?
Imagine... a Gentle Revolution - What does transformation look like when it emerges from love? Can it be radical?
Imagine... Being - How do we cultivate the presence needed for collective healing?
I narrate the introduction to these chapters, weaving in the work of the other voices that bring this book to life.
Throughout this process, I've been struck by how rarely we create space for the questions that might actually deeply matter. In our rush to be productive, to be seen as an ‘expert’, to have impact, to make a difference, we often bypass the essential and constant work of inquiry.
What if the questions are more important than the answers right now?
What if our capacity to sit with uncertainty is exactly what we need to navigate complexity?
What if the transformation we're seeking requires us to be changed by what we encounter rather than changing what we encounter?
What if imagination isn't about escaping reality but about engaging more fully with it?
With gratitude and curiosity,
Laura
IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency will be available September 13th 2025. The book emerges from a collaboration between 35+ global contributors, co-created alongside Natalie Seisser, Lars Harmsen and Viola Dessin, published by Slanted Publishers and co-produced by anewkind.
IMAGINE is available for pre-order, and our book launch event in Singapore is accessible to all!
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