The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving the coming Collapse (Part 1)

Utopias are often just premature truths. Alphonse de Lamartine The Bad News I haven’t looked into any concrete stats on this, but my sense is that there is growing popular suspicion that something very big is coming to an end. We might not know what that ‘something’ is, exactly (Civilization? Industrialism? Capitalism?), but with every passing season, the lurking shadow of collapse is taking shape … Continue reading The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving the coming Collapse (Part 1)

Reversing The Fall: Our Next Demographic Transition

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable — and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way. Daniel Quinn Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life. Lierre Keith In this blog, I have written extensively about the need for building concrete model communities as triggers for wider social change. … Continue reading Reversing The Fall: Our Next Demographic Transition

Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place

I want to leave my country without leaving my home. Kirkpatrick Sale We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. Joni Mitchell A couple months ago, my wife and I finally got down to Costa Rica on vacation, for 10 glorious days. We have been trying to get there for a while now, but you know… pandemic and post-pandemic and all that. As we … Continue reading Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place

Three C-Words We Need to Embrace: Contraction, Community & Cleanup

Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes. Ronald Wright Because the future has no image, the utopian imagination must reclaim, must resurrect, past ruins … Continue reading Three C-Words We Need to Embrace: Contraction, Community & Cleanup

Recapitulation: How to Save the World

The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource. The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By … Continue reading Recapitulation: How to Save the World

Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code

The development of new, alternative perspectives define utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion and so … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code

Rescuing the Future – Part 1

What if this ongoing fear of ‘collapse’ … is a narrative designed to quell a worse fear: that things might not collapse, but continue like this? That the Earth’s final wild frontiers may be tamed and diluted, ravaged and destroyed, and that we would not care much because we were too busy following the logic of our narrative to its endpoint, becoming our machines – … Continue reading Rescuing the Future – Part 1

BHB: Bigger Home Bases – Reasons why we need to start living in larger groups now

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at. Oscar Wilde For so many of us, the couple form and the job wind up bearing the weight of all of our hopes and dreams and need for human contact, and they were never meant to bear that weight. We need human relationships that extend beyond the romantic or … Continue reading BHB: Bigger Home Bases – Reasons why we need to start living in larger groups now

Utopia Now! Model communities & UBI: our last off-ramps to a sane, realistic future

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. Talmudic Proverb Many thinkers…have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. … Continue reading Utopia Now! Model communities & UBI: our last off-ramps to a sane, realistic future

Narrowing Options

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller The galloping, microscopic horseman of Covid has quickly exposed the fatal flaws in the American system, and the mixed messaging that we’re getting from our leaders cannot obscure the basic facts, which are not too complicated but profoundly terrifying nonetheless. The … Continue reading Narrowing Options