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Sarah Woods on imagination and “the crisis of what comes next”.
If it is true that we are living through a time in which our collective imagination is increasingly devalued and undernourished, what might be the role of story in that, and how might story be part of the remedy? There are few better people to discuss this with than Sarah Woods. Sarah is a writer across all media and her work has been produced by many companies including the RSC, Hampstead and the BBC.
Her opera ‘Wake’, composed by Giorgio Battistelli, opens in March, as does her play ‘Primary’, about the UK state education system. Alongside many other projects, she is currently writing the musical of the play she co-wrote with the late Heathcote Williams ‘The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency’, about squatting and DIY culture. Her play ‘Borderland’ just won the Tinniswood Award for best radio drama script of 2017.
Sarah is a Wales Green Hero, and her work is about, as she told me, “story wherever it’s most useful, across the board”. I started by asking her the question I always ask in these interviews, but never as the first question. If you had been elected as the Prime Minister at the next election and you had run on a programme of ‘Make Britain Imaginative Again’, what might be some of the things that you would announce in your first 100 days?
“I would want for everybody to start looking at society and their lives as systems, which is about three things isn’t it? Elements and interconnections and then the things that come out of that. I suppose at the moment I feel that we’ve got a problem with the way that we’re relating to each other. There’s a lot of division so that we’re in little boxes.
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Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World | Solutions
Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World | Solutions.
A Marine Corps friend of mine defines resilience as the ability to take a gut punch and come back swinging. More formally, it is said to be the capacity to maintain core functions and values in the face of outside disturbance. Either way, the concept is elusive, a matter of more or less, not either/or. The combination of slow, cumulative changes like soil erosion, loss of species, and acidification of oceans with fast, Black Swan events, such as the Fukushima disaster, like intersecting ocean currents, will create overlapping levels of unpredictable turbulence at various depths1. Against that prospect, the idea that we can improve resilience at scales ranging from cities to global civilization is becoming an important part of policy discussions, but mostly in reaction to crises like the global economic crisis of 2008 and the prospect of rapid climate change. If we are serious about it we will have to improve not only our capacity to act with foresight but also develop the wherewithal to diagnose and remedy the deeper problems rooted in language, paradigms, social structure, and economy that undermine resilience in the first place.
The theoretical underpinnings of the concept go back to the writings of C. S. Holling on the resilience of ecological systems and to metaphors drawn from the disciplines of systems theory, mathematics, and engineering. More recently, scholars such as Joseph Tainter, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Jared Diamond have documented the histories of societies that collapsed for lack of foresight, competence, ecological intelligence, and environmental restraint.2
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