Imagination taking power
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We are Dingy Butterflies CIC, a community arts organisation based and working in central Gateshead in North East England. We develop projects with residents, community organisations, artists, community workers, and academics to connect in a creative way the communities we work with and explore the issues affecting them. Since January 2025 we have been working with Tyne Derwent Way, a project that…
On my way to South Milton beach where I went to watch it I was listening to the news on the radio. You were hosting a COBRA meeting after the most ruinously hot summer ever, over 1000 wildfires burning across the UK, crops dying in the fields, almost 3000 excess deaths, nurses fainting in hospitals. Surely this is the moment, I thought, where for the first time in your 3 weeks in charge, you'll…
It is with great sadness that I take this moment to mourn the passing of my friend Richard Heinberg and to celebrate his life and work. Richard passed away after a short illness a few days ago and will be much missed. He was a Fellow at Post Carbon Institute, and the author of many […]
This is a guest post by Cali Smith, who had got in touch to tell me about how she was using HTFILWTF in her classroom at Mission Hill Middle School (photo below). It’s a beautiful story: "A week out from the finish line of the school year, the air conditioning unit is malfunctioning, and the room fills with the heat of anxiously excited middle school bodies and the fast-approaching California…
When writing 'How to Fall in Love with the Future', I did lots of interviews, some of which didn't make it into the final edit. One of my favourite was with US-based hip hop artist and writer Gabriel Teodros. A rapper who makes music about time machines? I needed to speak to this guy! Here is our conversation:
My very final stop on this ‘tournee’ was Marseille. It turned out that my visit to Aix-en-Provence to speak at Fest’IC was on the same day as a rather special birthday party just down the road. Le Presage, the amazing solar restaurant, was having its second birthday party. Given that I visited it before it was even built, made a track about it with Mr Kit for our ‘Field Recordings from the Future’…
From the long long days of Sweden I took a night train to Hamburg and then trains all the way down to Bourges, pretty much right in the middle of France. I was on my way to ‘Earth in Transition’, a 3 day event at Abbaye de Fontmorigny, near Bourges, a stunningly beautiful medieval abbey complex. Earth in Transition is described as “a 3-day summer solstice gathering where young people come together…
In early drafts of 'How to Fall in Love with the Future' the second chapter was all about Sun Ra. I thought it was rather good, and did lots of research for it, but it didn't survive the final editing process. While the great man appeared in there quite a lot, he didn't get a chapter all to himself. But it was a rather nice piece of work I thought, so I'm going to share it here:
My second and final Swedish visit was to Lindeborgs Eco Retreat about half an hour drive from Norrköping. It’s an incredibly beautiful 74 hectare organic farm run by Julia and Carl Lindeborg, who have aspirations to turn into a Swedish version of Schumacher College, hosting courses "to inspire concrete action for health, harmony and sustainability in the world". I had been invited there to run my…
Next stop on my tour after taking the train from Grenoble in France, via Frankfurt and Hamburg to Malmö in Sweden, was the amazing Malmö Möts democracy festival ("a week for democracy") organised by the municipality there. It was a far bigger and more ambitious event than I had imagined it would be. It felt a bit like being at Glastonbury Festival, with far too many things to choose from than one…
