We need to approach the future in a richer manner than either utopia or dystopia - the “no”-place that could never exist, and the “bad”-place you never want to exist. The sheer complexity and unpredictability of the challenges coming from climate meltdown, radical technologies and new cultural/resistance movements, demands that we improve our frameworks of understanding.

Here are two buzzy, powerful and ecology-centred reframes of how we could talk about the future.

“POSSITOPIAN”

Bridget McKenzie is a futures thinker with Flow (and latterly for Culture Declares Emergency), specialising in museum design. But she’s been dwelling on how to improve our understanding of the futures, and is hanging her insights on a new term: Possitopian.

In a 2020 blog, Bridget defines it thus:

Possitopian thinking maybe offers a field rather than a path. It helps you resist predefined or hackneyed visions. We already know images of dystopia and utopian from movies and advertising. There may well be utopian and dystopian patterns which form out of cultural tropes (e.g. tech will save us) and psychological states.

Possitopian approaches don’t try to create a third trope but to overcome fixed, limited and binary ways of thinking. Many people might flip from dystopian to utopian visions – drawing on what culture has offered them – depending on their feelings at any moment. Possitopian practice allows us to imagine new possibilities by talking and weaving together rather than flipping helplessly.

Bridget uses a traditional tool of futures thinking - the cone of possible futures - and places her emphasis on the widest, hard-lines of the possible (in the diagram below):

As you look through the cone, the usual ways of setting out future pathways are either binary, or a four-quadrant matrix. Bridget suggests a more fractal and multiple framework, aiming for Possitopias:

In her New Year’s post last week, Bridget hazarded what a Possitopian view of our coming future might look like:

Possitopian thinking is essentially non-binary, as it allows possible scenarios to be explored within an assumption that we ARE in a context of collapse, and also that the biosphere and its lifeforms hold potential of regenerative recovery. It’s moving from dystopia and utopia as black and white, towards an intertwining of decay and regrowth. So, how might this inform my future vision?

We have to accept that the future will be a climate-changed one, and that Earth will take around 10 million years to recover from the damage of human industrial activities. A bright and brilliant future will not be possible for everyone, as so many people have already been or will be traumatised, displaced and hungry. That said, the challenge we collectively face is to prefigure and build a more regenerative system at every scale — domestic, local, inter-bioregional and global.

This better future looks to me like hard work. We will have to put in extraordinary time and effort to reduce the harm both for our close loved ones and for every species and community on Earth. This effort isn’t just about keeping fossil fuels in the ground, although this is absolutely vital. It is also about justice for those most affected, reducing conflict and illness, and ending extreme inequalities. And it’s about protecting and restoring wild places and biosphere systems.

It will be hard work but here’s a counter-thought from Sam Knights: “Activism is not work in the conventional sense of the word, either; at its best, activism is about love. About the opening up of new possibilities. It should enliven, enrich, and excite you.”

In this world of hard work and love, here are some of the things we’ll be working on, and ways we’ll be working.

Holistic understanding of the core problems

People will know that the big problem they are collectively tackling is extractive capitalism, which has historical roots in biocolonialism, and that has generated interconnected crises of environmental and social injustice and threats to all our futures.
People will access therapeutic, cultural and spiritual services that will help them reconnect, to overcome the separations from the biodiverse world and from human diversity.
People will experience and provide education and training that develops eco-capacities and acknowledges the fragility & traumatised state of the biosphere. Children will be able to learn from home, in arts & play spaces, or in wild places, as long as they are healthy and safe.

Fundamental needs are recognised

Communities and civic agencies will recognise the basic needs of food, water, shelter, health and energy, so that…

According to their capacities, they will get stuck into achievable projects that share resources, that they can start in one place and roll out to other neighbourhoods. For example, they might set up a Community Fridge or a Library of Things.
People will form a variety of food co-ops and community agriculture schemes that allow them to grow food locally, sell it into local markets for fair prices or distribute it freely to those in need, or to share space and resources to make food growing more equitable and beneficial. Where possible, such schemes will restore ecosystems whether by allowing agricultural land to recover, creating food forests, or reducing waste and pollution. Food will be seen as fundamental to wellbeing — and people will know what to consume to maximise their immunity and contribution to society, and will avoid Ultra Processed Food.
People will form renewable energy co-operatives, like Stokey Energy, to work for more renewable infrastructure and supply in civic buildings and new developments. Co-operative efforts will also increase the efficiency and eco-benefits of new and existing buildings.
High streets and shopping centres will be full of repair centres, equipment sharing services, micro-farms and indoor farms, plant-based and food waste cafes, co-work and maker spaces, skills-sharing spaces, libraries, museums, galleries, heritage craft shops, garden centres, ceremony & exercise spaces, pharmacies & health services, play & childcare facilities, and so on. It will be more appealing to make or mend your own clothes with others, or to hire and borrow, than to buy fast fashion.

Collaboration and networking at scale

People will collaborate and network at the bioregional scale, so that bioregions become units of decision-making, more significant than nation states. This will allow the rights of more-than-human beings and places to be considered in decision-making.
People will make judicious use of digital tools & platforms so that they can resist harmful propaganda while distributing ecocentric knowledge, providing finance where it’s most needed and using data for good.
People will be empowered to be politically active, to be involved in participatory democracy that contributes directly to decisions at a higher level or at scale. They will express solidarity for people who are marginalised from decision-making, defending their right to representation.
People will collaborate to take legal action, to sue governments and companies guilty of climate violence, ecocide and exploitation of human labour and animals, on grounds of violation of their rights.

Activism will have to continue

People will — where still necessary — carry out direct activism on the worst, most polluting projects, such as coal mines or oil pipelines, or rainforest deforestation, and support campaigns both local and global. If the better world has led to such projects being illegal (e.g. due to an international ecocide law) they will be vigilant for continued harm and will work for reparations for places & people historically affected by past ecocide and conflict.
People will be working to protect communities from the impacts of global warming — such as fire, flood, rising seas and high winds, and ocean acidification. This means forming direct aid and rescue services. It means retrofitting and building new housing that is safe and resilient. It means creating ecological infrastructure to protect against flooding, managing forests to reduce risk of large wildfires, or restoring coral reefs. It also means ensuring that the most vulnerable communities (e.g. located in low-lying areas) have places of refuge and aid.
People will collaborate globally to end wars, to help war-torn communities to recover, to support refugees, and to bring peace through fair distribution of resources.
People will work to transform their industries and professions so that they are more horizontal and equitable, so that they tackle extreme wealth inequality and so that their organisations are entirely motivated to heal breached planetary boundaries to continue diverse life on Earth. This will see companies taking long-term decisions rather than being driven by short-term profits for share-holders.
People will work to end the influence and power of fossil fuel industries, by divesting their finances and transforming the financial system so that it is in more democratic control.

More here.

“THRUTOPIAN”

Screenshot from The Worlds of Ursula Le Guin documentary, BBC

Towards the end of her 2020 piece, Bridget made an intriguing mention of the XR strategist and academic philosopher Rupert Read’s concept of Thrutopia, as outlined in this Huffington Post blog. Again, like Bridget, the duality of utopia (bright but too far away) and dystopia (dark but too dispiriting) is rejected, in favour of thrutopias:

Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure.

The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it's similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias.

We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.

The nearest we have to a detailed thrutopia of the imagination is Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed. That sci-fi work brilliantly juxtaposes a superficially-attractive but dystopian world of extreme inequality and only marginal democracy (a world disturbingly like our own), with what appears at first to be an anarchist utopia.

But the true genius of the novel is one's gradual realisation that utopia could never be static. Any true utopia demands being continually remade. In this way, we come to understand that any utopia has to be what I call a thrutopia, on a long-term basis. On, to be precise, a pretty much permanent basis. Thrutopia isn't second best, it's the genuine article.

And once we see this, we realise how deeply the putting off of our dreams to some distant allegedly secure place - a utopia - gets things wrong. By contrast, a thrutopia - though beginning with the idea of us getting through crisis - actually emphasises paying attention to the present, indefinitely (or even infinitely) into the future.

It doesn't let us defer our dreams to somewhere else, 'utopia'. We have to realise what we need now. The better society we want to attain cannot wait. We need a vast transformation starting now; nothing else is going to be enough. And we need to enjoy and to be present now; because there may not be a future to enjoy (we may not get 'through').

The concept of thrutopia says: Don't defer your dreams. We need those dreams now. Experience the present as paradisiacal, and change it where it isn't, and then we might just get through.

Le Guin's book is a generation old, and has in any case no direct bearing on the climate crisis. It's time for political thinkers of vision, for economists who dare to escape the death grip of their discipline, for applied ecologists and philosophers, for intellectuals of all stripes, and above all for creative artists, to turn their talents to thrutopianism.

For only when the many who are looking for somewhere to turn in the wake of these harbinger storms are shown a truly realistic way forward -- rather than merely offered the weak gruel of Pollyanna-ish fantasies or told cynically that its too late to do anything -- will our love for our children be able to flower again.

Being the clever, creative mammals that we are, it's time to think seriously about the way through the storms of our children and grandchildren and beyond. It's time for the Sisyphean but joyful era of thrutopianism.