I Need A Miracle season 2 needs another £1,165 in pledges in the next week. Here’s where to point people. More after the interview.

Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue: we all look back at a family/company outing to In Other Worlds at the Barbican Centre.

“unexpectedly the most Foggy Outline exhibition that anybody could have conceived”

Matt: We didn’t plan it as a company outing. But it was unexpectedly the most Foggy Outline exhibition that anybody could have conceived, in that it’s about the future, and responses to the way the world and the climate are changing, but it’s also a real blend of science and hard-nosed futurism, and then fiction, poetry, filmmaking, model-making: all these different disciplines working together.

Richard: I was quickly captivated, certainly by the first audio that I listened to.

Matt: There’s a prologue and an epilogue that play on speakers, then other audio, mostly short stories, playing on headphones around the place.

Karen: The audio as we went in was a very good way of setting the scene. It almost calmed you – you couldn’t go straight in and find something, you had to sit and get your mind into what you were going to see. And it was atmospheric and calming – and not very long, just long enough to be important as part of the exhibition.

Matt: It set the tone. It was a reassurance that this isn’t going to be apocalyptic, or scolding of the current generation. It’s not going to be “We’ve done everything wrong and look how terrible we’ve made the world.”

Karen: When we looked at the description, we were wondering what an “immersive experience” was. It was very heavy on the “immersive” nature of the exhibition.

Matt: It’s arranged in these five “worlds”. The most immersive room was the fourth one, which is all about huge-scale carbon sequestration: sucking all the carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it underground to reverse the greenhouse effect. That is in a cube-shaped room with projection on every surface.

Richard: That was disorientating at first, because you walk onto what appears to be the sea. The waves are moving. But once you get yourself grounded ... I found that quite a moving experience.

“One world was about dismantling oil rigs and using them to make undersea reefs”

Matt: In my day job I have written about carbon capture and storage, years ago, when it was still entirely theoretical. So I was excited to see that it is actually being done now. But then you were saying it’s not being done on anywhere near the scale it needs to be done.

Were there any other parts of the whole thing where, with your knowledge as climate educators, you went “that bit’s pure fiction”?

Richard: No, actually, there wasn’t. That was the only part that rang alarm bells to me, because the carbon capture we’re doing at the moment tends to be used just to drive more oil out of oil wells.

Karen: After that high-tech room, we have to mention the Action Men. Someone had used their creative energies to redress Action Men to fit the various scenarios. That’s a little bit more low-tech.

Richard: Some of the physical exhibits feel almost homemade. Part of the point was that we would dismantle a lot of the infrastructure that we’ve used in the past and reuse it in different ways. One world was about dismantling oil rigs and using them to make undersea reefs. A lot of climate change scenarios see us de-industrialising, whereas that was looking at a different way of doing things: industrialising but in a more low-key, low-tech way.

Matt: A less extractive way, not taking any new resources out of the ground. After the End was the name of that world.

Richard: There was a 15-minute film in that world, written by Natasha Wanganeen, an Australian Aboriginal actress. I found that really uplifting. It was envisioning a hopeful future, and I thought its use of language was really powerful.

Karen: Some of these out-of-the-box scenarios are the things that will drive somebody to say, “Yes, that’s an idea, we can go with that.”

Richard: It does need that out-of-the-box thinking if we are going to solve these problems, and make the world better for Matt and the generations that follow him.

Matt: And to advocate for my side of the business for a bit, that’s one of the things fiction is for. It’s one of the reasons I like that this had scientific backing but brought it to life through visualisation and fiction. It’s not the only thing that science fiction is for, but there’s lots of technology that exists in the world today because it was imagined in a science fiction story, and a modern technologist went “I want that thing from that story that I read to be real, so let’s invent it.” It is important to imagine impossible things so that maybe they can become real.

There’s more to this interview. Buy us a cuppa on Ko-fi to support our work, and you can read the unabridged versions of this and every Professional Relations interview.

• Now–19:00 BST, 1 October: please pledge funds to make I Need A Miracle season 2 a reality! The smallest amount still helps, and you won’t be charged until 1 October.

• 21:00 BST, 27 September, Youtube: the final I Need A Miracle listening party livestream. I’ve been giving season 2 crowdfunding updates while screening and chatting about each episode in I Need A Miracle season 1. Get reminded when I’m going live.

• “They found calm and healing in the fragment of Atlantic temperate rainforest that occupies the steep valley”: Richard reviewed Our Oaken Bones by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison. Any recommendations for him to review next?

I Need A Miracle

With a week of fundraising left, we still need £1,165. If we don’t reach the goal, everyone keeps their money and the second series doesn’t get made. Could you nudge any friends or family who were planning to support the series but might have left it late?

The other way to look at it, of course, is that 35 people have stepped forward and pledged £1,235. That’s an average of £35 each, and one anonymous person even pledged a whole £200 to make this happen. That’s really something.

Richard highlights Professor Akira Miyawaki:

Although he died in 2021, Prof Akira Miyawaki’s legacy will live long into the future. The Japanese botanist pioneered the idea of planting native tree seedlings at a high density over small areas. This has proved to be one of the most effective methods of creating forest cover on degraded land. Planting a dense, fast-growing mini-forest encourages competition between the trees which leads to rapid growth, with forest establishment taking 20 to 30 years rather than the 100 to 150 years using traditional planting techniques.