By Cheri Avery Black

For 280 years there has been no police and little crime in Accompong, a sovereign Jamaican town of over 1,000 residents who have upheld their strong traditions from Akan, Asante, and indigenous Taino cultural heritages.

“I know you have the safest place in the country, but I don’t want to wait until you have problems,” the Jamaican National Security Minister stated recently as he announced the establishment of the town’s first “preventive” police post.

Accompong residents speak of personal responsibility, and family and community looking out for each other as key values they have held on to as they adapted them in response to changing times.

What Can We Do?

Our global and local problems have already grown huge, perhaps overwhelming to many. Empowered by the strength and perseverance of our ancestors, we can overcome. The urgency of our climate crisis can be the focus of us coming together. Our response to this urgency will determine whether we and our children will be able to live in a world we can still recognize. If we don’t respond creatively and urgently, the first to go under water in our area, is not only New York City and New Jersey but all of Philadelphia below Market Street.

There are inspirational and practical steps being taken around the world. One example is from the town of Totnes, England, as reported by RobHopkins.net. Among the questions they wrestled with, successfully using their imagination, was:

“If we do everything we can possibly do in the next 11 years to respond to the climate emergency, working together locally and thinking globally, if we threw all the resources, imagination, courage and political will at it, what could we create?”

Hopkins just published a visionary book about a possible 2030, far different from the current disastrous path we’re on, entitled From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want.

David Fleming, in Lean Logic, wrote “if the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination.”

As Hopkins says, “Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most.

“Wedohave the capability to effect dramatic change,” Hopkins argues. His bookis a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.

Reference: RobHopkins.net