422 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
visions, is a valid one, then personal as well as impersonal styles of communication
and visual, oral or kinetic forms of expression are also legitimate vehicles for con-
veying these visions. In fact, different forms of expression will be inherent in some
of the efforts, suggested above, to broaden the content of visions by including art,
popular culture or traditional knowledge. Future visions abound, for example, in
American popular and traditional cultures, such as science-fiction novels, short
stories, comics and films; Hopi prophecies; post-apocalyptic rock videos; and tel-
evision shows.
Furthermore, as O’Riordan and Timmerman (chapter 14 Global Environmental
Risk, Earthscan, 2001) show in their discussion of the paintings of Swedish energy
futures, multiple forms of expression may also be used to gainful (and democratic)
effect in the social sciences. Local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and vil-
lagers in rural India have been using maps, models and time lines (made from local
materials) to theorize the present and to imagine possible local futures (Mascarenhas
et al, 1991). The Peace 2010 contest of the Christian Science Monitor received 1300
essays, written from the perspective of the year 2010, explaining ‘how peace came to
the world’ (Foell and Nenneman, 1986). Policy exercises like those reported by
Achebe et al (1990) use the literary device of alternative histories to construct
alternate futures. The essays from diverse ‘envisionaries’ throughout the world as
part of Project 2050 suggest the range of planetary futures that remain to be dis-
covered and articulated (Nagpal and Foltz, 1995). Commentators from the South
(e.g. Banuri and Marglin, 1993) see the roots of global environmental destruction
in the power and violence inherent in the Western tradition.
Science, Imagination and Story
Within science, the notion of ‘objective’ rationality, untainted by society, personal-
ity or values, tends to be a caricature. Indeed, many scientists have long noted the
artificiality of divisions between science and imagination. Popularizers of physics
have, for example, pointed out the dissolution of orthodox dualities (matter versus
energy, observer versus observed) in the ‘new’ physics – a physics that explicitly
acknowledges that a complete understanding of reality lies beyond the capabilities
of rational thought. Statements by Einstein and others on the role played in sci-
ence by serendipity, inspiration, creativity and a childlike sense of wonder speak to
the same point.
Although many scientists embrace qualities such as intuition and imagination,
the mechanistic paradigm also survives, zealously protected by orthodox propo-
nents with a tenacity likened by Lynn Margulis (1991, p213) to that of medieval
monastic scholars. They reflect the relegation of intuition and imagination to the
status of ‘other’ in much of Western society.
Imagination is an ‘absolutely essential human faculty... If you truly eradicated it
in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant’ (LeGuin, 1979, pp41–42). This is