More Positive Possibilities

These days I am working on writing solarpunk and positive speculative fiction. Solarpunk and speculative fiction point us toward ways of being and living together that many folks may not have even thought of.  The goal isn’t to depict the “correct” way we could be living in the future, the goal is to show that there are many possible ways and there should be many possibilities, that what the future looks like may vary from place to place.

In her book, Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown talks about “Creating More Possibilities” as an essential part of her strategy:  “… where we shape tomorrow towards abundance.”  She says, “…in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that world.  We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist. … The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the foundational level in this world.”

My only problem with “creating more possibilities” is that there are folks (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, Modi, etc) who are busy trying to create possibilities that I fear are very hurtful to people.  I want to see us “producing more positive possibilities”–ones that support people and the planet and I think we need to produce lots and lots of them.

In adrienne maree brown’s book Loving Corrections, she quotes Ursula Leguin as saying: “I create alternatives. I show that alternatives exist. Probably the sum total of my messages to the world is that you do not have to do it one way.” 

I also like what Octavia Butler says in A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: “…there’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems.  There’s no magic bullet.  Instead there are thousands of answers–at least.”  

And what Mariame Kaba says in her book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: “I’ve been talking to folks about the importance of us building a million different little experiments, just building and trying and taking risks…  And the issue is to figure out which alternative works for what situation.” 

So that’s what I hope solarpunk and utopian works show: that “alternatives exist,” that there are many positive possibilities, “thousands of answers,” “a million different little experiments,” “in order to create a world that works for more people.”

 

Okay, Let's Try This Again

I had all but given up on this blog.  

For the last decade, my focus has been on Commune Life, the blog and the Facebook feed and for part of the last year, we've been on Mastodon as well.  I ended that a couple of days ago.  Fortunately, the Commune Life blog will remain accessible with well over thirteen hundred posts, a huge archive of information on income sharing communities.  However that also means that over time it will become increasingly outdated.

With that over, I am hoping that I can return here.  I am still (and perhaps more than ever) concerned about social change and I hope to post stuff here, at least occasionally.

My latest interest (besides social change and income sharing communities, both of which I remain interested in) is writing solarpunk.  Solarpunk stories are optimistic speculative fiction, looking at futures where we actually survive and prosper.  It's solar because it looks at futures with more ecological energy sources and it's punk because these are futures where people take things into their own hands, DIY, or better yet, DIT: Do It Together.  And I have a blog for my solarpunk writing and reviews of positive speculative fiction (including utopian fiction).  It's called Simple Joyful Futures.

And, just as I have seen communities as laboratories for social change, solarpunk and other forms of positive speculative fiction point to how we could be living better. As I have said many times, it's all connected.  And I think my main purpose in the world these days is to point out possibilities.  There are many, many alternatives, and I hope people realize that.  

I will talk more about this in posts to come.