We Keep Imagining the End of the World. Here's how to Imagine Something Else.
Ellie Breeze explores the skills we need to build a regenerative and ecological world.
Members of Together Culture’s Digital Co-Learning Community
Last month, Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a National Economic Council, bringing together the leaders of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to drive what the UK government is calling "good growth in every postcode across the UK."
Hearing that took me back to March this year, when I attended the Bennett School of Public Policy Annual Conference, a gathering of UK academics and policymakers at the University of Cambridge. Burnham, then the Mayor of Greater Manchester, joined as a keynote speaker to call out the inequality that seems to be inseparable from economic growth. Back then, as today, he called for the right kind of growth. Growth itself was never questioned.
The same old story
But what does good growth actually mean? Good for whom? Measured how? Burnham has more power now than he's ever had, and the story hasn't moved an inch. That's not a criticism of one politician; in Carnegie UK’s 2023 report, A critical assessment of GDP as a measure of economic performance and social progress, Cressida Gaukroger states ‘To argue against growth is a political third rail.’ This is what happens when a story is this deeply embedded. It survives the change of hands, good intentions, even people who can see the shadow it casts.
That story is so deeply embedded that we struggle to imagine a world in which a different economy - one that is regenerative, rather than extractive - is the norm, not the exception.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
The proof a new economy is possible
Even so, a different, more regenerative economy is already taking root in pockets across the country.
In Frome, an entire neighbourhood is working towards cooperative stewardship. In Brixton, a community has raised millions to buy their market back from a private equity firm. In Cambridge, in the neighbourhood we work in, a cooperative society opened in 1868 and by 1930 one in five residents were members. As recently as the 1990s, 80,000 people in a city of 101,000 belonged to it. People still remember their family's membership number, decades after it closed.
These cooperative neighbourhoods are proof that a regenerative economy isn't a distant theory. It has worked before, and it's working now, at a moment when more of us are ready to stop asking how to grow fairly and start asking the bigger question. What we need now is to stop each starting from scratch, alone, and to instead find ways to learn from each other; ways to connect as we do this regenerative work.
The skills we need to imagine a regenerative world
Photo: Mark Chilvers
That takes a particular kind of skill. Not just conviction (though you need that in buckets too). It takes knowing how to find the story that's actually operating in your context - the one that stops people from imagining that a more regenerative world is possible. It takes understanding what's holding it in place, and knowing who to gather to shift it.
It's why we started the Together Culture Digital Co-Learning Community. A space to learn these skills alongside other people doing this work in their own neighbourhoods, workplaces, and organisations, so the cracks in the old story start to connect.
Our free workshop, Find the Story, is the entry point. It's a freebie that gives you the tools to uncover the hidden narratives shaping our culture, and our own thinking, often without us realising. These narratives are part of what makes change work so hard. Once you can see them clearly, you can start to shift them.
The next session is 21 September. Free, online, and open to anyone ready to stop imagining the end of the world and start building a more inclusive and ecological world instead. Register here.
