From What If to What Next

Imandeep Kaur, or Immy to her friends, is the Director and Co-Founder of Civic Square in Birmingham, their Director of Mission and Strategy. She is, to put it simply, one of the most inspiring people I have ever met, and to me she is one of the great guardians of the collective radical imagination. Together with many people and partners, Civic Square are reimagining land stewardship, finance, governance, and deeply committing to ecological building design, bio-based material retrofit, and enabling a wider built environment transition. Their focus on how we build locally-rooted resilience to climate change by putting people at the forefront of their own social, ecological, economic and climate transition is state of the art, entirely replicable and brilliant. What a delight to spend an hour with Immy. I hope you're going to love it too.

This month's episode is a conversation with producer Jordan Flaherty about the incredible new Afrofuturist film 'Space to Breathe', of which the promotional material states "Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police. The year is 2070 and Sojourner is a young genderqueer filmmaker who sets out to understand how abolition came to be, through history's archives on the movements of the early 21st Century". See more here. It was a joy to meet him and discuss the film in depth, and in this episode, our Producer Bee Addicott has cut our conversation together with short passages from the film. I'd love to know what you think. It's a film that moved me deeply. Why not organise a screening in your neighbourhood? The film was written by Walidah Imarisha, who appeared in Episode 100 of this podcast.

Kate Pickett was co-author of the seminal 'The Spirit Level', and she just published her new book 'The Good Society: and how we make it'. 'The Good Society' is an utterly brilliant and compelling vision of what a more equal future fundamentally rooted in care would look like. I can't recommend it highly enough. It draws on a wide array of empirical evidence to bring alive what such a future would be like. It was a huge honour to sit down with Kate to explore some of the themes in the book and where they overlap with the need to boost and build our radical imagination(s). I hope you love this conversation, do let me know what you think.

The second (Episode 102) of my rejuvenated and back-in-your-life podcast, 'From What If to What Next' features my conversation with the fabulous Solitaire Townsend. Following 2025's New York Climate Week online, the key thing that caught my attention was Solitaire standing up and boldly stating 'Fuck Doom'. She told Climate Week "Fuck the sad little "last generation" memes. Fuck climate being served up as clickbait.  Fuck the guilt and grief shoved down our throats.  Fuck waiting for the end of the world like it's a season finale".  In my chair many miles away, I whooped in support. I wanted to find out more. Why does it matter so much that we come out fighting for a liveable future rather than resigning to collapse and disaster? It's a wonderful conversation that goes off in so many directions. In it we discuss her 'F*ck Doom' campaign, William Shakespeare, why she's just written a novel, and why climate activism needs to move beyond, in theatrical terms, 'Act One'. It's brilliant and rich.

It's deeply exciting to be able to present your first new episode of 'From What If to What Next' in almost 2 years. As the months have gone past, I've had a sense that there was more still to do, more conversations to be had. From the research I did for 'How to Fall in Love with the Future' and since, I've come across so many amazing people with stories that you read need to hear, with important things to say at this moment in time.   The guest in our first return episode is the person I most wanted in all the 100 previous episodes, the wonderful Rasheedah Phillips, one half of Black Quantum Futurism. Her work is so hugely inspiring, if you haven't come across it already. I will be publishing these now once a month. I'd love to know what you think, your thoughts on this conversation.