The future is not what it used to be. Our Utopian imagination has atrophied in the stifling atmosphere of apocalyptic predictions: a climate catastrophe, energy shortages, mass extinctions, economic meltdowns, resource wars and intensifying social injustice. It is a lot easier to imagine the world ending than changing for the better. But it is exactly when Utopia becomes unimaginable that it is most needed. Not as an escapist Neverland, nor as a universal system or perfect future, but as the constant wrench in the gut that reminds us that we do not have to accept the crumbs of the present.
We had had enough of our lives in London: a couple in a flat, constantly staring at computer screens, always hooked into the internet, never using our hands to make things, rarely touching living systems, consuming too much energy, and working too hard. Despite being activists in the direct action ecological justice movements, we felt there was a chasm between our words and our deeds. Our protests had always been models of non-hierarchical, ecological life – reclaim the streets parties, the rebel clown army, summit mobilizations, and so on – but they were just temporary, cracks in capitalism that closed up as soon as we returned home.
