Buon Giorno and Happy 2024 to you,
I’ve been deep in ancient Sicilian research this month and am still brewing up stories to share with you around that. In the meantime, I’ve put together a list of some inspirational places to help you dream up, map out, and create from visions of better futures.
Not perfect futures. Not perfect plans. Not perfect creations. But starts, futures, and creations that come out of answering questions like:
What can we create from here? What are today’s silver linings that we can build on? What is ending we want for this story… for the story of our times?
It’s important to answer such questions, imperfect as our answers will be, because if we do not know where we want to go, how will we ever find our way to somewhere better?
The current will not naturally take us to a better future this time around. This time, we have to put in intention and effort, humble and seemingly small, as our impact may appear.
In other words:
To dream the future we want is to give ourselves a compass. One that always points us in the direction of our true north.
Let’s give our better future a name. One that gives us a little happy, natural dopamine release when we say it. How about Post-Climate Change…. or Climate Stabilization… or maybe the Era of Restoration? The Age of Renewal? The Ecological Renaissance?
Any suggestions…?
It would be best to dream of this era in a pragmatic sort of way. A way that includes our losses, our mistakes, our enemies, and our not-so-flattering side.
Let us dream, not an impossible utopia, but many possible semi-topias.
Ones where the grand essentials like climate renewal, human rights guarantees, and responsible use of high technology have been (largely) worked out….but where we still have the issues that come along, part and parcel, with human life.
Issues like conflict, fear, pirates, jealousy, bias, hustlers, scarcity, and the power-hungry.
We get what we design for… then test… and then redesign… and then test again. And what we fail to design, test and redesign for usually bites us in the butt.
So in this grand vision beyond the first half of the 21st century, let’s make sure to dream not just for those we agree with, not just for our tribe or for the 99%, but for 100% of us.
Here’s some resources (that aren’t Star Trek) to get you inspired…. or maybe resources isn’t quite the right word. Too many folks get bad school memories from it. Let’s call them instead dreaming wells.
Places with deep, clean pools to draw inspiration up from. Places to stare into so you can maybe get a glimpse of the water woman who is rumored to live down there. Places to throw a spare coin into after you’ve wished on it.
Long live the dreaming wells and all you find in them.
It’s 2050 and This is How We Stopped Climate Change
This article asks leaders of very different environmental restoration projects to imagine a Post-Climate Change 2050 and give us tour around the place. Then, they explain to us what we did in the 2020s that got us on the right road to this futurescape.
Say it with me now: Post-Climate Change 2050.
Mmmmm, dopamine……
Five Principles for Thinking like a Futurist
If visioning out the possibilities for a better future feels unreachable, these basic techniques used by futurists can help you tune into the signals all around you.
Spoiler: Prediction isn’t a part of it. Hope that takes some of the pressure off….
Future Ecologies
This podcast takes a clear-eyed looked at various aspects of our climate crisis, examines the ways we got here, and then moves the story forward into the possibilities for renewal.
Think tracking the Turtle Island roots of food forests, designing the wilderness, and slaying the Dragons of Inaction… climate change inaction, that is.
Here’s the teaser for the excellent Inaction series that comes complete with mythic Dragon names….
Imaginary Worlds
This half-hour podcast explores the world-building in sci-fi, fantasy, games, and pop culture. Although not strictly focused on them, better futures regularly come up alongside stories of how the imaginary worlds we build impact our real lives. Here’s a couple of favorite episodes
Episode 198: Snow Crashing Into The Metaverse
If you ever need to prove how art can impact life, this is the episode you’re looking for. Snow Crash, a 1992 cyberpunk novel, imagined a technologically advanced dystopia where the gap between haves and have-nots had spiraled out of the control. One of the core mechanisms of control in this future is a virtual reality named…. drumroll, please….
…the Metaverse.
Yes, you read that right. This novel has been openly used in the tech industry as a blueprint for the creation of virtual reality…. even though the author meant it as a satire. As as a warning story. But here we are.
Moral of the Story: Be wise with what you create. What we put out into the world… through our art, our words, our politics, our work, our businesses, our conversations, and our social media posts can be that impactful.
Episode 144: Solarpunk the Future
You don’t need to start dreaming a better future from scratch; Solarpunk has you covered. Stemming from Brazil and now worldwide, this genre is dedicated to imagining post-climate change worlds that are full of free peoples… but not free of human drama.
Where’s the punk you ask? In the audacity to believe a better future can come out of this. As one solarpunk put it, this is “a rebellion against despair.”
Family-Friendly Solarpunk
Now, let me mention, that Solarpunk tends to have a political bend to the left in it. Often a **democracy-based** left-of-capitalism bend. To be clear, I’m talking about the the kind that generated the ideas for Northern Europe’s medical system and brought American workers weekends and overtime pay. Not the kind that collapsed into authoritarianism, which I’ve written about here.
There’s also creators that are politically agnostic as well as ones that sketch out ideas for hybrid economies and forms of capitalism that have become sustainable and economically fair.
I suspect as well that as right-of-center folks increasingly come to grapple with climate change, economic inequality, and concerns over corporate power, they too may be forming visions of free, sustainable futures. (If you know of any, please send them, I’d love to see).
I curated this list in a way that removes as much of the politics as possible so that the whole family can leave the disagreements to the side and dream together for a bit.
How We Get to a Star Trek Economy
An awesome, practical look at the first steps towards a Star Trek economy, which means securing a stable, fair financial system where everyone wins. This one’s based on classic capitalist ideas around universal dividends and economic safety netting.
Yes. Some of fathers of capitalism theorized that the entrepreneurial risks of a such an economy would make safety netting necessary. As do some conservative thinkers today. Common ground, anyone?
Why Nuclear Energy is Key to Combating Climate Change
This episode completely changed my mind on nuclear energy as a part of our energy solution, especially because of what it could mean for developing countries.
Nuclear is an imperfect but pragmatically possible solution. A semi-topian one, not a utopian one. I think it’s possible that with responsible regulation and continued improvement, nuclear just may work…
…especially alongside clean energy development… and other new high-energy developments like fission that could take us into the stars….
Together Towards Sustainability: Labor’s Role in Climate Solutions with Matt Huber
From the **democracy-based** left-of-capitalism, this conversation gets into one of the big errors in the (US) environmental movement. It’s accidental classism.
Huber gets into why we regularly see environmentalists and blue collar workers at odds….
….and how an everyday-people-first approach can prevent a elitist sustainable future.
Whether or not you dig this political vantage point, I think you’ll find it insightful to get a clear, clean explanation of why the working class and environmentalism sometime clash… and how we can create a sustainable future that doesn’t cost anyone their livelihood.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Did you know that if we humans all lived in sprawling, luxury apartments in mile-high buildings, 98% of land on Earth could be wild places?
Yes, it’s plausible, and Isaac Arthur, science educator and president of the American National Space Society, can show you the receipts… I mean, the math…
This visually dazzling YouTube channel dives into theoretically possible futures including, but not limited to, thriving post-climate change Earth. The science is a bit technical, so that I watch it at .75 playback speed with caps on so that I can absorb a bit more of the paradigm-leaping info. Here’s a bit about those lux apartments….
Future Conjunto
Thank you to J. J. over at Lupo Sounds for introducing me to this wildly imaginative project. Combining music, visuals, theater, and sci-fi, Future Conjunto tells the story of a rough-but-hopeful, future Rio Grande Valley. One where the people most vulnerable in the region today have continued to survive and persist… even through an apocalypse.
If you’re in the mood for a work that’s one-part art rock, one-part turntablism and one-part classic Mexican regional music, you can listen here…
…And if that’s not your cup of tea, you can skip that and just tune into an interview with the artists behind the project. Favorite quote from the interview:
“We were really interested in focusing on our shared anxieties and fears about what might happen in the future and then to alchemize them into art.”
Happy dreaming, my dear friends. May you find dazzling visions of semi-topias that we can all build into reality.
Un abbraccio,
(an embrace)
R.G.