A thrutopia is a story that will help us imagine how we can create a healthy future on this planet, starting from our present time. I am in the process of writing a novel about how it could happen in the place where I live, in New Zealand.
The novel is still in the pipeline. However, what I’ve put on this website is a contribution towards a thrutopia vision.
I spend loads of time imagining what it could be like to live in a life supporting way, in the not very distant future. This is what keeps me positive in the face of the calamities happening right now, floods, fires and war.
Since 2007, I was part of transition towns and ecovillages; we were hoping to build a sustainable way of living for our future, before the terrible crises hit. Now it’s too late for that. We’ll have to do it in the midst of trouble.
I imagine a scenario like this. Everyone in our locality has had to their houses destroyed, by flood or fire, or sea level rise. They’re evacuated in a school hall up the hill, damp, cold. They haven’t had quite enough to eat, they haven’t slept properly because it’s cold. The most important thing is to keep warm, dry, and fed. Theey’re worried about friends and relations.
Some of them have a plan for keeping people safe in the short term. They’re being fed, they’ve shared out the blankets. Local people come along with a sandwich to contribute. Sandwiches appear every time there’s a flood, out of the fridges of people lucky enough to not be washed away.
Will they rebuild here? or have to relocate? If they have no vision about what needs to be different in the future, they’re likely to rebuild the same old way. That isn’t going to serve us.
This bit has not been dealt with enough. Those of us who’ve been involved in transition towns and the like, might have been thinking about long-term plans. How do we rebuild? What do we need for the future? What are our priorities, to base the rebuild on? What do we consider most precious?
Our biggest question will be, how can we stay alive, and build something sustainable, so our children can stay alive too? I think our priority is going to be clear. We do what will best support life,
When we prioritise life instead of money, that will change every decision we make. If we put supporting life as our first priority, we may have a chance of survival.
We will create a lifestyle that will make us a lot happier. We’re not happy at the moment. The way we live now is causing the climate disasters and wars. Patriarchy and neoliberalism, are killing us all. Life itself, all the life on our planet, is becoming more and more threatened by climate instability.
I do believe we have no choice but to do things a different way. If we want to support life, we’ll have to create a happier positive future.
For one thing, we will remember that we cannot have life without Mother Nature. What we build has to help our climate not to get worse too: to reverse the warming.
It’s not just the buildings and food gardens. How do we maintain a community that can work together in the longer term?
None of us can survive on our own. We’ll have to work together. In a crisis, people do mostly work together. We need to maintain that, so we can plan and build new communities together. Not just let it go again after a crisis and go back to the old style, of every man for himself. That too will create more happiness. At the moment we’re too isolated and lonely. We don’t know how to do community.
We’ll have to make sure everybody’s included. We’ll have to figure out together how to feed us, clothe us, whatever we need, instead of this awful situation we’ve got, which is not feeding us all, even though there’s plenty of money and plenty of food.
Often at the moment, people I know say they don’t know what they could do towards a future.
Here’s something you can do, today, right now. We can all use our creative imagination, do visioning, plan, think out, talk about, what we could do, when the moment comes that we or our neighbours will be in this position.
That’s why I put on this website a lot of things about visioning to help us do that visioning, let’s start envisioning our thrutopia!
May there be many more thrutopias written. to inspire us to do something good. The point of thrutopia, to me, is to share our visions of what we can do to make things work well for the future. Set us on the path of thinking up ideas. If we give people the idea that we can do better. That will inspire us to carry on. It’s going to be all of us doing it in our lives, starting now. We’ll be creating our own, in real life.