Imaginative Eco-Leadership

Understanding Imagination as Soil

The quality and durability of any creative act depend in great measure on the fertility and force of the imagination that feeds the act. This is where it all begins. We reap what we sow

Liu & Noppe-Brandon, Imagination First: Unlocking the Power of Possibility,2009, p. 21

Understanding imagination as soil can bring needed clarity to what imagination is and does in the context of leadership. It can help differentiate words like “creativity” and “innovation” that are often, and wrongly, used synonymously with imagination. It may correct misconceptions around imagination being solely of value for children, or of utility for artists. Instead, we may see imagination as the fecund terrain of possibility from which we reap a range of leadership capacities and outcomes. This is an ecological understanding of imagination—pointing both to the relationships that generate it and that it supports, but also the contexts in which it works.

Understanding imagination as soil helps make visible key elements of imagination, including:

how it comes first—how imagination precedes the acts of creativity and innovation we see in the world;
how it is contextual—how imagination is shaped by beliefs, values, and knowledge and is enriched through diversity;
how it supports ethical organizations—as long as it is informed by a commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion;
how it is the source of our individual stories, learning, and ideas and also grounds the relational spaces between us, thus giving life to collective ideas and understanding;
how it becomes more fertile with knowledge, experience, collaboration, diversity and a climate that encourages exploration of the possible;
how it can be cultivated.

Taking Imaginative Guidance from Land

“Imagination, in its ecological sense, is the cognitive and spiritual condition of entwining with local and cosmological intelligences.… Imagination did not become a quality of a singularly human mind until mind severed itself from landscape and the depths of time.”

(Sheridan & Longboat, The Haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred, 2006, p. 370)

On one level, “imagination is soil” can be understood as a metaphor. Yet there is much to be learned by taking seriously the idea that imagination, rather than a specifically human capacity, is actually the product of our relationship with land—that is, it arises and is nourished through our spatial and temporal belonging to the living intelligence of the Earth itself. In that case, educational leaders might seek to align themselves and their communities with that intelligence. This is the foundation of imaginative eco-leadership.

Viewed through the lens of the 4 Cs of education for eco-social-cultural change, leadership guided by this conception of imagination might include the following dimensions.

The critical educator-leader

…educates themselves and others in the land-based teachings offered by Indigenous knowledge holders, both locally and on a wider scale. They also seek to learn to attend better, to the more-than-human, to children, and to adults very different from themselves. Eco-imaginative leadership must recognize that humans are not the centre of the universe, that modern adult humans are not the centre of the human world, and that white, educated, straight Western men are not the prototype for human development. Working against these tropes implies educating oneself in the literature, language, and experience of anti-colonial and anti-racist, feminist, and queer movements and bringing that more expansive (self-) understanding to the work of becoming autochthonous to place.

The community educator- leader

…nurtures the positive, supportive, mutually beneficial relationships that comprise the heart of every strong school (and NGO, community organization, etc.), and extends and opens them to include the land and its myriad wise beings. This is active, even activist work, located within structures where this kind of integration with the natural world has not only never been considered, but has been intentionally left out. Sheridan and Longboat’s emphasis on the importance of mythology—“what happens when imagination grows up”—also reminds us that communities need shared stories in order to thrive, and the stories of communities deeply rooted in place are needed to invoke the full range of wisdom that sits therein.

The change educator-leader

…starts by recognizing their own grief and culpability, and the forms of resistance, distraction, and denial present in their own struggle to become more attuned to land and place. Without compassion for themselves, they will find it hard to extend compassion to their staff and students and families as they, too, struggle to shift old habits and engage in new ways of being. There is a balance to be held between the brightness of new insight and the letting go of old assumptions, between the clarity of critical thought and the depth of emotional anguish—for we are now all fated to live in an age of great loss and upheaval. Pacing, rhythm, and humility are of vital importance, for no one can flourish under conditions of constant stress and trauma. Spaces of peace, calm, slowness, and stillness are essential to the work.

The coeur/care educator-leader

…works with the imagination as a gift-filled, place-shaped space of personal and group development in which they, too, take part. This includes seeking out and spending time with Elders and wise teachers, human and more-than-human—especially in outdoor settings where the imagination can more readily be released from its colonial domestication. Simple practices such as sit spots and listening walks can allow one to receive more of the gifts being offered, to recognize them as such and to take small but genuine steps towards reconciling mind, body, spirit, and landscape, towards autochthony. Local Indigenous practices of reciprocity and gratitude with our more-than-human kin are often relatively accessible and willingly shared. Diverse art practices can be adapted to similar ends. Here, too, there is a balance to be held, so that the robust intertwining of community remains open to ongoing, ever-deepening, and sometimes challenging and disruptive learning.

Learn more

Fettes, M. & Blenkinsop, S. (2023). Rewilding imagination: Reorienting eco-leadership in education. In Judson & Dougherty, Cultivating Imagination in Leadership: Transforming Schools and Communities (Teachers College Press).