Designed by Akil Mazumder
As a child, I resisted those four little words with unrelenting fervour. I remember them as a full stop at the end of wonder—an authoritative curtain closing on my curiosity. Adults called me contrary, “perversely inclined to disagree,” they said. While my obstinacy was dismissed as a feature of childhood, something I would outgrow along with my training wheels and wobbly teeth, my resistance wasn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. I now see it as something else entirely. It was imagination insisting on its right to exist.
Over time, I have come to value rules: seatbelts, passports, and silence in libraries. But I’ve never accepted the deeper assumption beneath those words—that to accept is mature, and that to imagine is childish. Especially not now, in our present era of environmental change, I believe that this social assumption—the enclosure of imagination in favour of managed order—is one of the most consequential ideologies shaping our collective future.
As children, our imaginations made the world elastic. A stick could become a sword and a garden, a kingdom. The villain and the hero were played by the same hand. Play wasn’t escapism; it was rehearsal. To enter into play requires the belief that we can momentarily become the thing we enact, and that the world is mouldable, not fixed. Play was our first taste of agency—the practice of possibility.
But as we grew, so too did our awareness of limits. Limits of our bodies, of others’ expectations, of death and consequence. We learned that we are fallible. Slowly, imperceptibly, that fallibility hardened into a kind of fatalism. Not because we became cynical but because the world we inherited told us, relentlessly, that it was already too late.
For my generation, this grief is not a sudden thunderclap, but a steady hum. We were raised on burning forests, bleaching reefs, and exponential graphs. The air was thick with wildfire smoke, and the sound of promises never kept. We didn’t need to be told we were living in the Anthropocene—we absorbed it like background radiation. Not just the knowledge that the world is in crisis, but that we are both its cause and its inheritor. To come of age in this era is to internalize collapse as ordinary. To know the loss of the natural world not as history, but as home.
We were never given the space to dream. We have inherited a climate discourse shaped by technocrats, economists, and empirical scientists. While many of their insights are essential, the elevation of their frameworks into the only valid forms of knowledge has narrowed the imagination of the possible. In Western epistemology, knowledge is deemed actionable only when measurable, when proven, categorized, and peer-reviewed.
So, the climate crisis becomes a grand narrative with a preordained arc: Act now or lose everything. There is only one right path, and it is paved with innovation, policy levers, and scalable solutions. Efficiency becomes ethics. Data becomes truth. And urgency becomes the excuse for enclosure.
And yet—what if climate change is not a problem to be solved, but a mirror held up to our collective becoming? What if the rush to act—without space to reflect—has left us mimicking the very logics that produced this mess in the first place? What would it look like to reframe climate change from an empirical crisis to a crisis of meaning, of imagination, of dismemberment from the living world?
The narrative of collapse, though justified in its concern, has stolen something from us. In the name of solutions, we are handed dashboards and carbon credits, planetary boundaries and crisis clocks. Tools, yes—but also symbols of control. Instead of dreams, we are given deadlines. Instead of play, conformity. Instead of grief, scapegoats. And so, power consolidates in think tanks, consultant firms, and elites who claim the authority to chart the future. Our role as a generation is to listen and obey. Somewhere in our eco-anxiety, we surrendered imagination in exchange for survival. We began to internalize the idea that to be mature is to be resigned.
But I don’t want to be resigned. I want to be contrary.
This is why critique matters. Not to negate the need for change, but to keep the future open. A way to say: this isn’t the only story. Foucault reminds us that critique is not about saying things are bad. It’s about making visible how certain ideas come to seem inevitable. And when we begin to see tools like planetary boundaries, the Doomsday Clock, or the Sustainable Development Goals not only as scientific instruments but as cultural artifacts, we can begin to interrogate their assumptions. Are they fuelling our transformation or just managing our dread?
I used to think climate collapse was a puzzle to solve. That if I just worked harder—read the right papers, joined the right movement, optimized my activism—I could be part of the “solution.” But the more I tried to fix the world, the more I felt hollowed out by its demands. The grand narrative of collapse had tricked me into urgency without reflection, effort without embodiment. I ran, without thinking, because I feared we were running out of time. But that fear was the same logic as “because I said so”—an enclosure of thought masquerading as direction.
Now, I see the climate crisis not just as a planetary emergency, but as an existential invitation. An invitation to slow down. To feel. To refuse totalizing scripts. To remember that even now, systems are being transformed—and that youth have the right to dream.
We need courage not just to act, but to imagine. To resist the guise of certainty. To mourn the world not as a closed chapter, but as a living manuscript, we are still writing together. To say: yes, the garden is burning—and yet, we will plant seeds anyway.
Because hope is not naïve. It is defiant. It is the refusal to allow imagination to be fenced in by fear.
So here I am, still contrary, still asking questions, still believing in play. Imagination is not childish. It is what makes us human. And it might just be what saves us.