Microcosms of a More Beautiful World

How a small-scale, constructive response to the omni-crisis could help to regenerate the landscape of possibility

Introduction

My starting assumption in this essay is a bleak one: the existing system will not transform itself into the world we need within the timeframe available to us.

I don’t take any pleasure in saying this. The prospect of civilisational collapse is not something to celebrate. Any serious breakdown of the systems upon which billions of lives depend would bring enormous human suffering and ecological destruction, and some of the futures now coming into view are almost unimaginably dark.

I would love to see the civilisation we presently inhabit find a way to reorganise itself around the continued flourishing of life. I just don’t believe it is capable of doing so quickly or comprehensively enough to avert much of what is now unfolding.

And that leaves a deeply uncomfortable question, on the other side of the grief and despair that naturally attend such a belief.

If the future is darker than we would hope, and the transformation we have worked towards may no longer be achievable, what do we do now?

How do we inhabit the catastrophe when salvation may no longer be available?

What is worth building? What is worth investing the agency, energy, care and resources we still possess in the window of relative stability remaining?

Finding useful answers to these questions requires us, first, to relinquish the idea that meaningful action depends upon saving the world.

And then, perhaps, to rediscover how to inhabit existence beautifully and fully within what is actually happening.

Much of our collective effort in response to the deepening global predicament has been understandably directed towards resisting destruction, protecting what remains, and attempting to bring about widespread systemic change. All of this remains valuable. But I want to suggest that we should also be devoting substantially more of our energy, imagination and resources towards a different, complementary undertaking:

Creating small-scale, coherent and genuinely beautiful alternatives to the prevailing system.

Not merely individual projects addressing particular problems, but places where many of the fundamental relationships of life — housing, food, energy, land, livelihoods, ownership, care and community — are deliberately brought together into a different kind of coherence.

Places designed not merely to reduce the harm caused by human habitation, but to contribute positively to the flourishing of the landscapes and communities of which they are part.

Places that could become living microcosms of another way of organising human life.

My conviction that such places are possible is grounded partly in experience. I’ve spent much of my adult life exploring alternative ways of living, including five years immersed in a life of radical simplicity in low-impact community in the woods of West Wales, followed by years visiting and participating in land-based projects across Britain.

Those experiences profoundly changed my understanding of what constitutes a life worth living and what is actually possible. They showed me how different life can become when organised around more life-affirming values than those operating through the prevailing system, but also how difficult that system makes it for people to step out of its own organising logic and find ways to root their lives in different, more nourishing soil.

The ideas developed in this essay grew out of that twofold experience.

I’ll be looking at what becomes possible when we bring together the best of what we already know about alternative ways of living to those sold to us through the feee-market economy — natural building, regenerative agriculture, ecological restoration, cooperative ownership, shared infrastructure, community living and the sensitive design of beautiful places — and use it to create environments in which humans and nature can thrive together.

My focus in what follows is primarily on the possibilities and obstacles involved in creating such places in the UK, where the gap between what we already know how to build and what people can actually access is particularly stark. The underlying ideas may have much wider relevance, but it is here, in the cultural and physical landscape I know, that I want to explore what a serious constructive response might look like — and what we would need in order to make such a response possible.

For while we already possess much of the knowledge needed to create such places, we lack the organised capacity to bring that knowledge together, overcome the formidable barriers to making even one such place possible, and develop the means to create more.

I Therefore want to make a case for building that capacity, and for directing collective resources towards doing so.

But why should we devote substantial resources to creating small alternatives when the predicament confronting us is so enormous?

That is the question I hope to answer.

I certainly don’t imagine that building such places will save civilisation. Their value would not depend upon doing so. Even one genuinely beautiful alternative could make life substantially better for the people who inhabit it, and for the living landscape of which it becomes a part.

But I also think their significance could reach much further.

By making another way of living materially real, such places could begin to loosen the grip of the prevailing system upon our collective imagination. They could offer tangible experiences of different relationships with land, work, ownership, community and the living world, and in doing so help regenerate the landscape of possibility.

Perhaps they could even create conditions from which new cultures, new understandings of what it means to live well, and possibilities we cannot yet imagine might emerge.

Ultimately, even if we cannot transform the civilisation we inhabit, it doesn’t follow that we must allow its destructive relationships to determine every aspect of how we live.

And even if we cannot see a way to save the world, there may still be beautiful worlds worth bringing into existence within it while we still can.

Enter the omni-crisis

The language of crisis is struggling to keep pace with the dark escalation of our global predicament.

For most of human history, crises were something people lived through for a time and then came out the other side of. No longer.

Over the past few generations, crises have stopped being temporary eruptions and have become permanent fixtures. Permacrisis has become a feature of life: something is always on fire in the background, and always will be.

Then, in the last few decades, as more and more crises emerged into permanence, these crises started interacting, cascading, and amplifying one another to form what became called the polycrisis: multiple perpetual fires, each fuelling the others.

More recently, with increased awareness of the systemic forces and underlying architectures that are generating the polycrisis, the term metacrisis arrived to point towards the underpinning structural and metaphysical causes of our civilisation’s intersecting crises: there’s fire in the foundations, fire in the well, and it’s flaring up all over the place.

More recently still, an even more comprehensive term has emerged to describe our predicament: omni-crisis.

In the omni-crisis, the fire is everywhere: everything we touch is burning, including ourselves.

For the omni-crisis is not only an expansion of the polycrisis or a deepening of the metacrisis, it speaks to the way in which our destructive civilisation has now become internalised in us, profoundly impacting our sense of self, the quality of our lived experience, and, crucially, the futures we are able to imagine for ourselves and our children.

Omni-crisis therefore describes a civilisation which not only appears increasingly unable to produce good outcomes across any of the dimensions of life that truly matter, and which is destroying the conditions of its own continuation—both bio-physical and social—but which is simultaneously producing forms of consciousness that make fundamental departure from that destructive trajectory almost impossible:

The fire has learned to reproduce itself in us, and through us.

This is the omni-crisis: intricately ecological, economic, political, social, technological, geopolitical, cultural and psychological at once; implicating the fundamental structures through which our civilisation organises the world; and producing the kinds of human beings who cannot help but propagate it forwards.

In this essay, however, I hope to point towards an alternative next evolution in the language of crisis — one that refrains from assuming the possibility of a reversal of the current trajectory, but which nevertheless responds to our current predicament in a creative way.

But in order to get there, first we really need to talk about TINA.

Come with me imagination, into this iron house

One of the defining claims of Thatcher’s regime was the insistence that “there is no alternative” to the political, social and economic paradigm that she and her neoliberal cronies were propounding.

TINA, as this insistence became known, is not simply a political slogan. It expresses something fundamental about the way in which the extractive power of neoliberalism seeks to expand its dominance by flattening diversity while producing ever more of the monoculture of itself.

Among the of multitude of ecological and cultural atrocities this flattening has produced all over the world, one of its most pernicious effects has been to narrow our sense of both agency and possibility down to a very small window.

For TINA represents a double assault: it constrains not only what we can do, but what we can even conceive of doing. And therein lies its extraordinary power. For these two forms of constraint—material and imaginal—actively reinforce one another.

When so few convincing alternatives are materially visible around us, we become trapped within an ever-narrower landscape of possibility; and conversely, when alternatives can scarcely even be imagined, there is very little scope to build them.

Their material absence impoverishes the imagination, while the impoverishment of the imagination helps reproduce their material absence.

For our imaginations do not operate independently of the worlds we inhabit. They draw upon the materials of our experience, recombining what we have encountered into versions of what might be possible. So, when almost everything we encounter is organised according to the same underlying logic, that logic finds its way into the futures we imagine, even when we are consciously trying to escape it.

Through this self-reinforcing loop, the existing order acquires not merely dominance, but the appearance of reality itself. The arrangements surrounding us cease to appear as arrangements. They become simply the way the world is. And even if we object to that world, we are increasingly incapable of seeing alternatives to it.

This is the dark spell of TINA, and its effects produce one of the defining features of the omni-crisis: the civilisation generating the crisis constrains our ability to either inhabit or even imagine ways of living beyond it.

As Fredric Jameson famously observed back in 1994:

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth than the breakdown of late capitalism.”

If that statement felt true to Jameson over 30 years ago, how much more so does it feel to us today, after three further decades in which neoliberalism has extended its deadening reach into almost every dimension of our lives.

In consequence of this, and of other deep systemic issues, there is a spreading sense among a broad range of demographics here in the UK and abroad that the omni-crisis is now fully locked in, and so civilisational collapse is inevitable.

I increasingly see and hear this among activists too, many of whom are still working heroically on resisting harms or pushing towards positive systems change, but who are quietly resigning themselves to the belief that whatever might be achieved in terms of piecemeal protection, repair, or policy change, there is simply no way forward out of the omni-crisis: sooner or later, the conflagration will burn the whole world.

Tellingly, against this cultural backdrop voices maintaining that deep systems change is still possible within the timeframe we have available sound increasingly implausible: naive, deluded, or in active denial.

Perhaps this is the ultimate expression of TINA’s dark spell.

When a civilisation appears incapable of changing its destructive trajectory, but has so thoroughly colonised our imagination that we can scarcely conceive of anything beyond it, collapse begins to look like the only possible destination.

And so the spell becomes self-confirming: the less credible the prospect of systemic change appears, the more inevitable collapse seems, and the more thoroughly TINA’s central claim is reinforced.

But between a hopeless acceptance of inevitable collapse and a denial or naive underestimation of the depth and momentum of the crisis, there lies, I believe, an alternative possibility.

This possibility is what I hope to outline in what follows.

Breaking the spell, opening pathways

The alternative possibility I want to explore begins with a distinction between the future of our civilisation and the microcosms we might still be able to create within, alongside, and perhaps eventually beyond it.

We may have good reason to doubt that the dominant system can transform itself sufficiently, or quickly enough, to avert the worst consequences of the omni-crisis. But that does not need to mean we have exhausted our capacity to create other ways of living. Nor does it mean that the only possible response to a civilisation heading towards collapse is to close our eyes, hold on to whatever comforts and security we can, and accompany it to the bitter end.

But to see what else might be possible, we must first begin to break the spell of TINA — at the levels of both imagination and material reality.

We need to understand, first, as deeply as we possibly can, that there are other ways to arrange life than those presented to us by the dominant system.

One way to foster such understanding is through the past. Over the millennia, human beings have organised land, work, property, provisioning, governance and collective life in an extraordinary variety of ways. The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow gives a broad deep-time perspective on just how diverse the socio-political-economic arrangements of human societies have been through the ages.

Another way is through an anthropological lens. A look at the indigenous and traditional societies surviving around the world makes it abundantly clear that ways of living radically different to our own are not confined to the archaeological record. They persist in cultures whose manifold of social, economic and ecological relationships is very different to that our own society treats as normal.

And we can look to the many alternative practices already emerging around us, each offering living evidence that some of those relationships we take for granted can be organised differently.

From these perspectives, what appears inevitable from inside TINA’s spell can start to look a little more contingent. There are alternative ways to organise a world, other structuring priorities upon which to build a life.

But we need to be cautious about how much we can hope to break that spell through ideation alone.

There’s a growing body of work dedicated explicitly to expanding our collective imaginative capacity. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has made imagination infrastructure an important part of its Emerging Futures programme, while initiatives such as the Collective Imagination Practice Community bring together practitioners exploring how imagination can be cultivated collectively.

This is important work. But there is something revealing, and at times disheartening, about the visions that emerge from some of these practices. Even when people are explicitly invited to imagine radically different futures, what they produce often remains surprisingly close to the world they already know: familiar institutions lightly rearranged, existing systems made slightly kinder or greener, technologies tweaked — rather than fundamentally different ways of organising life from the ground up.

The problem is not a lack of effort or sincerity. It is that we cannot assume that inviting people to imagine beyond the existing order is enough to free their imaginations from it. Imagination draws upon the materials of experience, and when those materials have been overwhelmingly shaped by the very system we are trying to imagine beyond, even our most deliberate attempts at radical imagination can end up reproducing its underlying forms and assumptions.

If TINA’s spell is sustained partly by the material absence of alternatives, then imagination practices conducted within that absence may struggle to escape the very constraints they are intended to overcome.

To expand the imagination, therefore, we may need to change not only how we imagine, but what we have available to imagine from.

Without sufficient material examples, our visions remain partial, abstract, and continually pulled back towards the arrangements we already know. We may be able to imagine different pieces of another world without being able to imagine how they might come together to form a sufficiently coherent alternative to live within. We may be able to describe different relationships with land, work, property, community and the living world, but struggle to conceive of what everyday life might actually feel like when enough of those relationships are brought together to mutually reinforce each other.

But even when we succeed in imagining such alternatives, we encounter a second, equally formidable constraint: the almost complete absence of opportunities to actually live them.

We may have come to believe that the economic system we participate in every day is destroying the living world, concentrating wealth and power, and undermining the conditions for human flourishing. We may reject its organising principles almost entirely. We may desperately want to stop contributing to its reproduction.

But what, exactly, are we supposed to do? Recycling our plastics and shopping at farmers markets goes little way to addressing the scope of our alienation from coherent ways of living that truly support our own wellbeing and that of the living earth.

We still need clothing, shelter, water, energy, transport and the means to care for ourselves and those who depend upon us. Access to almost all of these things is organised through the very system we wish to leave behind. To secure them, most of us must continue earning, spending, borrowing, consuming and participating in the relationships we would choose to reject.

The dominant system does not depend on our ideological allegiance. It only requires our participation. And because the necessities of life are overwhelmingly organised through it, participation is extraordinarily difficult to withhold.

The problem, then, is not simply that we cannot imagine alternatives. It is that our imaginative capacity is constrained by the absence of sufficiently coherent material examples, while our ability to actually live differently is constrained by the absence of accessible alternatives.

But just as these two constraints actively reinforce one another, so might their opposites.

If the material absence of alternatives impoverishes our imagination, then their material presence could help liberate it. And if that expanded imagination can inspire further construction, we might begin to set in motion a very different kind of self-reinforcing process, one which begins to open pathways into inhabitable alternatives.

We do not need to possess a complete vision of another world before we begin constructing it. But we do need enough of a vision to make a beginning, and the willingness to discover what becomes possible as different arrangements begin to take material form.

Because something important happens when alternatives move from imagination into material reality. They begin to change the conditions under which further imagining takes place.

A functioning alternative can therefore do more than provide another way of living for those who inhabit it. It can demonstrate beyond itself that relationships we have come to regard as fixed can be rearranged. It can reveal possibilities that were difficult to conceive before they existed, and generate new questions, desires and ambitions that could not have emerged from thought alone.

It gives the imagination something real to work with.

This is where the work of imagination infrastructure and the material construction of alternatives can become aspects of the same gesture. Imaginative work helps us conceive and begin experimenting with different arrangements. Material experiments then feed back into that work, expanding the field of what can be imagined and opening possibilities for further construction.

In this way, certain forms of material construction can themselves be seen to be a necessary part of imagination infrastructure.

This constructive prefiguring of alternative futures is, I believe, one of the most powerful ways we have of responding to both TINA and the omni-crisis it helps sustain: not merely to argue that alternatives are possible, or imagine what they might look like, but to make them materially present in ways that both break the spell and open pathways into the new.

Through them, we make another world imaginable by making more of it real.

The world we already know how to build

Fortunately, we don’t need to invent such alternatives from scratch. Most of their constituent parts already exist in well-developed forms.

Agroecology produces food while restoring rather than systematically degrading living systems. Community land trusts can remove land and housing from market speculation. Cooperatives organise ownership differently. Community energy can place infrastructure under different forms of ownership and control. Cohousing, commons, mutual aid, natural building, shared infrastructure and participatory governance all embody pieces of another way of organising life.

We don’t need to invent the wheel, we just need to assemble it, bringing its parts together into relationships where they can start to reinforce and amplify one another, and where a different logic of everyday life can actually be lived.

At present, however, most alternative practices exist as fragments, surrounded by — and still heavily dependent upon — the very system whose logic they are attempting to replace.

A community farm, for example, may grow food according to agroecological principles, rebuilding soil, increasing biodiversity and feeding people locally. But its growers still need somewhere to live, and if they are paying market rents or mortgages the farm must struggle to generate enough income to meet those costs, pushing the sale price of its produce beyond the means of most people. The farm itself may be organised around a radically different set of values, but the economic conditions surrounding it constrain how fully those values can actually be lived, and also limit how many other such farms can survive in a given locale.

A local maker can work with natural materials to make beautiful, useful things designed to last. But they too still have to pay for housing, energy, transport, workshop space and materials at market rates. That means having to charge sale prices many people cannot afford, and so handmade things become occasional gifts rather than household basics, while cheaper mass-produced stuff fills our homes and profits accrue to the global corporations that produce them.

At a larger scale, a Transition Town can build a vibrant ecology of local initiatives — community gardens, repair cafés, tool libraries, renewable energy projects, local currencies, shared transport, mutual aid — and still find that the fundamental conditions shaping everyday life for most people remain largely untouched. Residents continue paying inflated housing costs, commuting to jobs elsewhere, buying most necessities through national and global markets and organising their lives around the need to earn money. The community may create dozens of beautiful fragments of an alternative world, but participation in these remains something squeezed into the margins of lives whose basic structure is still determined by an extractive logic.

The problem is obviously not with the alternatives themselves. It’s that they remain fragments, each trying to operate according to a different logic while still embedded within — and dependent upon — a system organised according to the old one. Their unresolved dependencies pull them back towards the logic of the system around them.

The dominant system, on the other hand, suffers from no such fragmentation. Its extraordinary power comes precisely from the way its parts lock together and reinforce one another. Expensive housing increases the amount of income we need; the need for income increases the amount of our lives we must sell; high land prices make low-input, labour-intensive agriculture harder to sustain; cheap fossil energy and taxpayer-subsidised transport infrastructure make food traded across continents appear cheaper than food grown carefully by people we know down the road; private ownership captures collectively created increases in value; finance determines what can be built at all.

Each part creates the conditions required by the others.

That is where so much of the system’s gravitational pull comes from. We are not held inside it by a single institution that can simply be rejected, but by a web of mutually reinforcing dependencies that continually pulls us back towards its centre.

But we can learn from this.

If we are to create the kind of beautiful and viable alternatives I’m describing, our biggest strategic move is to start bringing enough of the fragments together that they begin creating favourable conditions for one another and producing a gravity-well of their own.

Imagine a place that combines low-cost secure housing, land held in common, regenerative food production, shared energy and infrastructure, cooperative livelihoods, shared tools and workspaces, stronger relationships of reciprocity and forms of governance through which people exercise meaningful control over the conditions shaping their lives.

With each integrated fragment, all of the others become strengthened.

If secure, low-cost housing reduces the amount of money someone needs to earn, that can release time for food production, care, ecological restoration, community life or meaningful work that pays less. If food production reduces monetary requirements further, the effect compounds. Similarly with shared low-impact infrastructure — water, energy, transport. When more and more of the necessities of life can be organised through relationships other than market exchange, dependence upon the dominant system can begin to loosen. Time opens up, and abundance increases.

At some point we are no longer simply collecting alternative practices. We are beginning to create a different material context in which those practices reinforce one another to embody an alternative culture.

And as these different arrangements become woven into the ordinary fabric of everyday life, they begin to shape the experiences, relationships, habits and expectations of the people living within them. What was once an abstract possibility becomes the familiar texture of daily existence. The alternative is no longer merely something people can imagine, but something they experience as real.

In this, we are beginning to create new ground on which to stand, and different conditions within which to be human.

Somewhere else to stand

Land-based settlements seem to me particularly promising places in which to explore this possibility because they bring many of the basic conditions of life into the same physical context: land, housing, food, energy, livelihoods, ownership, infrastructure, care, governance and ecological restoration.

I’ve developed a detailed design proposal for what such a settlement might look like: fifteen households on around 40–50 acres, bringing together beautiful, affordable natural homes, regenerative food production, ecological restoration, shared infrastructure, livelihoods and community life within a single integrated design.

The land would not simply be a setting for the houses. It would be a living landscape in which food production, woodland, water, wildlife, gardens, homes and places of work were deliberately brought into relationship with one another.

The homes themselves could be beautiful, comfortable and built predominantly from natural, locally appropriate materials. They could be designed for warmth, simplicity and delight, with secure tenure and costs low enough to substantially reduce the pressure to earn money simply to keep a roof overhead.

Around them, productive gardens, orchards, agroforestry, woodland, pasture and areas devoted primarily to ecological restoration could form a richly varied landscape, shaped by the needs of its human inhabitants but increasingly abundant in other forms of life.

Shared workshops, tools, vehicles, energy and water systems, communal spaces and facilities for care could reduce the need for every household to purchase and maintain its own version of everything. Cooperative ownership and governance could give people meaningful control over the conditions shaping their lives.

And within this different material context, growers, makers, carers, craftspeople and others might find it possible to pursue forms of work that are extraordinarily difficult to sustain when the full costs of conventional housing, land and infrastructure must be met through monetary income.

The aim would not be to eliminate people’s relationships with the wider economy, or to impose a particular way of living upon everyone. It would be to create a place where more of the necessities and pleasures of life could be met through relationships of mutual support, ecological stewardship and shared abundance, allowing people to participate in the wider world from a position of greater freedom.

Fifteen households seems to me a particularly promising scale. Enough people, skills and resources to make meaningful integration possible across many of the basic conditions of life, while remaining small enough for the relationships between them to be comprehensible, and for the undertaking itself to be achievable.

It isn’t a blueprint. Different places would take different forms, responding to their landscapes, their inhabitants and the possibilities available to them. But it is one concrete expression of what might become possible when we begin designing the fundamental relationships of everyday life together, rather than treating them as separate problems.

And I want these places to exist.

I believe they should exist.

I want them for all the people who would love to live in them, and for the children who might be born and grow up within them.

I want them for the land they would be rooted in. For its replenishing soils, its returning species, its recovering waters and the growing complexity and abundance of its living communities.

I want them for the people who might visit, encounter something they hadn’t known was possible, and go away inspired to create beautiful alternatives of their own, in service of human and ecological flourishing.

There may be better things to want, and better reasons to want them, than these. But there are certainly many worse.

And I’d love to see thousands of such places come into existence, in all sorts of different forms, each shaped by its particular landscape and the people who inhabit it.

But I don’t want the vision to stop at residential settlements.

I’d love to see a much wider ecology of land-based projects emerging alongside them.

Community farms that bring together secure access to land, housing, cooperative infrastructure and other arrangements that allow growers to strengthen local food systems without being crushed by the economics of conventional agriculture.

Makers’ hubs where affordable workshops, shared tools, natural materials and different relationships with land and livelihood make it possible to rebuild local economies of beautiful, useful, handmade things.

Places devoted to ecological and cultural stewardship. Retreat spaces shaped by permaculture principles, with beautiful natural buildings nestled into living landscapes, where people can slow down, sink into the land and experience a deeper entanglement with its animate intelligence.

Places that bring human life back into meaningful relationship with the living earth.

The fifteen-household settlement interests me partly because it could bring many of these activities together within a single place. Food production, making, ecological restoration, care, hospitality, learning, celebration and everyday residential life could become mutually sustaining parts of a shared culture.

But not everyone will want to live in a land-based community, nor should they have to. There are countless other ways in which the relationships between people, land and livelihood might be reorganised, and I’d love to see a great diversity of them flourishing.

What matters is not the replication of any particular model, but the creation of places where different arrangements of life can take root, develop their own coherence and become genuinely available to people who want them.

Not because I believe they will save civilisation.

Not because their existence must somehow lead to a transformation of the world around them.

But because they could make life more beautiful, meaningful and abundant, for people and for the living landscapes of which they are part.

Because a world in which such places exist would be a more beautiful world than one in which they do not.

What becomes imaginable

But the significance of these places need not end at their boundaries.

Especially in today’s hyper-networked world, alternatives don’t have to scale materially in order to scale imaginatively.

A settlement might house fifty people while reaching fifty thousand, or fifty million, as an invitation to imagine differently.

And this brings us back to TINA.

The prevailing system maintains its apparent inevitability partly through the absence of convincing alternatives within ordinary experience. We encounter its arrangements everywhere, and in their ubiquity they acquire the appearance of necessity.

But what happens when that apparent necessity is interrupted by the existence of something genuinely different?

What happens when people can visit a place where beautiful homes are secure and affordable, where food is produced in ways that replenish the land, where people have more time for their children, neighbours and creative pursuits, and where ownership, work and the necessities of life are organised through relationships other than those we have come to regard as inevitable?

Perhaps they want to live there.

Perhaps they don’t.

But they have encountered something that changes the materials available to their imagination.

A person might return home questioning why their housing is so expensive, why their neighbourhood has so few shared spaces, why food production is so disconnected from everyday life, or why so much of their time must be devoted to earning the money required simply to exist.

And those questions might lead somewhere quite different from the settlement that inspired them.

A community organiser might begin imagining different forms of neighbourhood life. A grower might see new possibilities for combining land access, housing and livelihood. An architect might discover different ways of designing beautiful, affordable homes. A local authority might begin questioning the assumptions that shape its approach to development.

The point is not simply to persuade people that these particular settlements are desirable. It is to give them experiences, images and evidence from which they can begin imagining possibilities of their own.

And the more such places exist, the richer that material becomes.

Different communities would make different choices, discover different possibilities, encounter different problems and develop different cultures. Some would be more beautiful than others. Some arrangements would work wonderfully; others might prove disappointing or unexpectedly difficult.

But all of that would contribute to a growing body of lived experience from which we could begin to imagine more intelligently.

We could move beyond the sterile opposition between a prevailing system we increasingly recognise as destructive and an alternative world that remains largely abstract.

There would be actual places to visit, inhabitants to speak with, buildings to enter, landscapes to walk through, practices to learn from and failures to examine.

Other ways of living would no longer exist only as proposals, critiques or visions of the future.

They would be here.

None of this is premised upon the idea that exposing enough people to these alternatives will somehow bring about the transformation of the prevailing system. I have little confidence that such a transformation remains within our reach.

But that doesn’t mean we should leave the cultural imagination entirely in the keeping of the world we have.

Even if the prevailing system continues much as it is until it eventually self-terminates, there is enormous value in making genuinely different ways of living visible, desirable and increasingly accessible.

In giving people something beautiful to aspire towards, something tangible to draw inspiration from, and perhaps, if we can create enough of these places, somewhere else to actually live.

And beyond that, who knows what possibilities might emerge when we begin giving the imagination different experiences from which to work?

TINA reproduces itself through the relationship between material and imaginative absence. Alternatives are difficult to imagine because so few are materially present around us; and because they are difficult to imagine, there is little cultural energy behind creating them.

The creation of radical alternatives gives us an opportunity to set that process running in reverse.

We build something beautiful and coherent enough to rupture people’s sense of what is inevitable.

Then we make it visible enough that its influence travels far beyond the people who actually live there.

In this way, lived reality begins to seed the cultural imagination with new possibilities.

And then, perhaps, as the imagination expands, it will begin seeding reality in return.

Ripple effects

One way that an expanding sense of possibility might begin changing material reality is by making it easier to create more of the alternatives that inspired it.

Once a genuinely different way of living exists somewhere, and people can see that it works, the obstacles to creating more of it begin to look different.

Why can’t we have more of this?

Why is public land not being used for it?

Why does planning make it so difficult?

Why does finance favour the conventional alternative?

These are not necessarily demands for the wholesale transformation of society. They are questions about why people who want to live differently should find it so extraordinarily difficult to do so.

And they are questions that functioning alternatives could make harder to dismiss.

Perhaps a local authority becomes willing to make land available for a new community. Perhaps a lender begins to recognise the viability of a different ownership structure. Perhaps planning policy changes to accommodate forms of low-impact development that have demonstrated their value.

None of these changes would require the prevailing system to abandon its fundamental character. But each could create a little more room within it for something different to flourish.

And those new places could provide further evidence of what is possible, expose the next set of barriers and perhaps help open further opportunities.

There is no guarantee that such a process would gather momentum, or that it would ever become significant beyond a relatively small number of places.

But that isn’t the point.

We don’t need to transform the whole system in order to change the conditions under which more pockets of difference can start to exist within it.

And if we can begin doing that, we might create room for considerably more beauty, freedom and possibility than the prevailing arrangements presently allow.

Before we need them

There’s yet another reason to take this work seriously.

The emerging future is a deeply uncertain one.

Supply chains may become less reliable. Energy and basic necessities may become substantially more expensive. Flooding, drought, heat and ecological deterioration may disrupt existing patterns of food production and settlement. Economic and political shocks may create conditions we cannot presently anticipate.

The ways of living we have become accustomed to may become much harder to sustain, and capacities that presently seem marginal may suddenly matter a great deal.

The kinds of places I’m talking about could become not lifeboats, capable of sheltering us from whatever may be coming, but seed banks of practice and lived experience which could help to shape what might come next.

They could preserve and develop ways of doing things that the dominant system has allowed to atrophy: producing food close to where people live; building beautiful homes from locally appropriate materials at radically lower cost; repairing and making things; sharing tools, vehicles and infrastructure; caring for land and water; holding resources in common; meeting more of our needs through relationships rather than transactions; and learning how to live well together with less.

These things cannot simply be rediscovered overnight when circumstances suddenly make them necessary.

People have to learn how to grow food, build things, repair things, care for landscapes, share resources, make decisions together and resolve conflict. Places have to develop cultures around doing these things. Knowledge has to pass between people and generations. Mistakes have to be made while there is still enough stability to survive them.

None of this should be mistaken for a fantasy of small communities serenely surviving civilisational collapse. If the systems upon which billions of lives depend break badly enough, there may be very little that experiments of this kind can do.

But between the smooth continuation of the present and total catastrophe lies an enormous range of possible futures. In many of them, knowing how to produce more of what we need locally, live with fewer material demands, care for the land around us and depend more intelligently upon one another may become considerably more useful than it appears today.

Creating these places matters because they allow us to begin recovering ways of living that we may one day be extremely grateful not to have forgotten.

The deeper value

There is one further possibility I want to explore, and in some ways it is the deepest.

Much of what I’ve been describing concerns the different ways in which we might organise the material conditions of life: housing, land, food, energy, ownership, livelihoods, care and community.

But those arrangements do not simply determine what we can do.

They also shape what we experience, what we value, what we desire, and what we are capable of imagining.

One response I see increasingly often to the predicament of the omni-crisis is a turn inwards. As faith in our political and economic institutions diminishes, people are looking elsewhere for ways of making sense of what is happening: towards meditation and contemplative practice, psychedelic and ceremonial cultures, ecological spirituality, ancient traditions, and attempts to recover some felt experience of belonging within the living world.

I understand this impulse deeply. There is something moving in the flourishing of practices devoted to recovering forms of connection that modern life seems to have stripped away.

But I keep returning to a difficulty.

So many of these responses ask us to transform our experience of the world while leaving largely untouched the material conditions that continually produce that experience.

We are asked to experience ourselves as inseparable from the living world while our food arrives anonymously through supermarkets, our water through pipes, our energy through sockets and our waste disappears into systems we rarely see. We are encouraged to rediscover community while our material security depends overwhelmingly upon individual income and private accumulation. We seek a different relationship with time while organising our lives around the demands of wage labour, debt and rent.

There is clearly value in the interior work. But it seems strange to recognise how profoundly modern life has alienated us from one another and the living world, and then locate the work of overcoming that alienation primarily within ourselves.

Perhaps we should change some of the conditions producing it.

Perhaps, instead of asking people formed within one set of material relationships to somehow think and feel their way into another, we should create places in which different relationships can actually be lived.

Places where our dependence upon one another and the living world is not an abstract truth to be remembered but an ordinary fact of everyday life.

And then we can discover what happens to us there.

What kinds of human beings might different material relationships produce?

I know something of the power of living within radically different conditions because I’ve experienced it myself.

Five years immersed in a life of elemental simplicity in the woods of West Wales changed my understanding of wealth, beauty, comfort, belonging and what constitutes a life worth living.

Those years didn’t simply give me new ideas. They changed the texture of my everyday experience, and with it my sense of what mattered and what was possible.

Much of what I’m now able to imagine grows directly from those experiences. They gave me materials to think with that I simply hadn’t possessed before.

The places I’m proposing would be very different from the life I lived then. They would be more comfortable, more socially integrated, and accessible to people who have no desire to spend years living in a little mud hut in the woods.

But part of what I hope they might offer is the possibility of discovering, through everyday experience, things that are difficult even to imagine from within the prevailing arrangements of life.

What happens to our understanding of security when a home is something we can depend upon rather than something we must continually struggle to afford?

What happens to our relationship with work when our material needs can be met with less monetary income?

What happens to our experience of belonging when we participate directly in caring for the land that sustains us?

What happens to our understanding of wealth when more of life’s richness comes from relationships, shared resources, meaningful activity and the abundance of the living world?

And what might children growing up in such places take for granted that we struggle even to conceive?

We can design buildings, landscapes, ownership structures and infrastructure with considerable confidence. But we cannot fully design the cultures that will emerge from people inhabiting them.

Those cultures will develop through lived experience, through relationships, conflict, discovery, adaptation and the slow accumulation of shared practices.

And the people who grow up within them may come to understand the world in ways their parents could never have anticipated.

I sometimes wonder what I would be capable of imagining now if I hadn’t spent those years living in the woods, or encountered the extraordinary people and projects I’ve known since.

So much of what I believe possible has grown out of experiences that the prevailing system makes difficult to access.

And that leaves me wondering what might become imaginable to people who grow up in places where secure housing, ecological belonging, mutual care and a different relationship with work and money are simply part of ordinary life.

What might they see that we cannot yet see?

We would not merely be creating places that embody an alternative vision. We would be creating conditions from which further visions could emerge.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest possibilities contained in this undertaking.

Not that we already know exactly what a more beautiful world should look like.

But that we might create places beautiful enough, and different enough, to allow people to begin discovering possibilities beyond the reach of our present imagination.

Building organised capacity

If places like these could offer so much, why aren’t we creating them?

There’s a long history of people creating intentional communities, cooperatives, communes and ecological settlements. Here in the UK, places such as Lammas, Landmatters and Tinkers Bubble have travelled some distance into the territory I’m describing, while cohousing communities, housing cooperatives, community farms and other projects have explored different parts of it. Elsewhere in the world there are many more experiments, some of which may come much closer to the kind of integration I have in mind.

There is a great deal to learn from these places, and from the people who have spent decades developing the practices upon which more integrated alternatives could be built.

But as far as I have been able to establish, very few places in Britain have seriously attempted to bring all these elements together, and none quite in the fully developed form I am proposing.

Why?

The answer becomes fairly obvious as soon as you imagine actually trying.

A group of perhaps fifteen households wanting to build one of these places cannot simply decide to live differently and get on with it. They must first find one another, agree upon what they are trying to create, work out who owns what and how decisions will be made, find suitable land, somehow secure it while planning permission remains uncertain, raise finance, understand an unfamiliar planning system, commission ecological surveys, find architects and engineers, design low-impact infrastructure, navigate building regulations, devise legal and ownership structures, work out how food will be produced and livelihoods supported, negotiate with councils, lawyers, lenders and landowners who may never have encountered anything like the proposal before, and somehow hold a functioning human group together through years of uncertainty while doing all of this.

And they must generally do it while continuing to earn enough money to survive within the very system they are attempting to step partly outside.

Put like that, the surprising thing is perhaps not that so few land-based communities exist.

It’s that anyone is trying to create them at all.

But many are. They just aren’t getting very far.

For we have effectively treated the construction of alternatives as a private hobby for unusually determined groups of people at the margins of society, requiring each new group to become, simultaneously, property developer, planning consultancy, financing vehicle, legal innovator, ecological designer, community organiser and governance laboratory.

They may accumulate an extraordinary body of knowledge in the process, but where does this accrue and how is it passed on? And if they fail, much of what could be learned from the attempt simply disappears.

Either way, somewhere else another group begins again from scratch.

This is where I think a significant and currently neglected opportunity comes into view.

If creating alternatives is to amount to more than a succession of heroic attempts, we can’t rely on individual groups: we need to create organisations capable of building alternatives.

I spent nearly three years attempting to establish an organisation called the Land-Based Living Collective, with precisely this ambition: to bring together the people, knowledge and resources needed to make the creation of integrated land-based communities more achievable.

I didn’t succeed in getting it off the ground. And while there were undoubtedly things I could have done differently, the experience brought home to me something important about the problem itself: developing the capacity to create these places is an enormous undertaking in its own right. It requires people with complementary skills, sustained coordination, financial resources and the ability to keep working towards an outcome that may remain uncertain for years.

In other words, even building the organisation that could make these communities possible is difficult to do without the kind of support and capacity that is presently missing.

The Ecological Land Co-op is one such organisation that already exists, and which is doing wonderful work. But its model is narrower than what I’m proposing, bringing together an important but limited number of alternative practices to create small clusters of individual smallholdings rather than more fully integrated land-based communities.

The One Planet Council is another organisation, set up with the aim of supporting those seeking to adopt land-based living by providing a bridge between applicants and local planning authorities in Wales, where the One Planet Development policy allows such developments. It is, however, a voluntary organisation, able to advise and provide tools but with little capacity to do the heavy lifting required to enable developments to happen.

There are many other organisations holding various pieces of the puzzle, from Radical Routes to the Landworkers’ Alliance and the Bioregional Learning Centre in South Devon, to name but a few.

But there is nothing that brings all the pieces together in a way that would enable deeply integrated land-based communities to start emerging.

This is the organisation which I believe we need now.

It could develop relationships with landowners and identify suitable sites before a group had even formed. It could acquire land, or secure options over it, rather than requiring prospective residents to gamble their savings on speculative purchases. It could retain planning, legal, architectural, ecological and agricultural expertise between projects. It could develop ownership structures that were tested and adapted rather than invented from scratch each time. It could assemble finance and carry some of the development risk. It could retain designs for buildings and infrastructure, relationships with authorities and contractors, knowledge of what had failed, and evidence of what had worked.

Most importantly, it could accumulate knowledge, practice and momentum.

Its first project would change the starting conditions of the second. The second would change those of the third.

The first planning application may take years because nobody has seen anything quite like it; the fifth will not. The first ownership structure may require expensive specialist legal work; the fifth will not. The first lender may have no idea how to assess the proposition; the fifth will have evidence. The first group may have to discover through painful experience which forms of shared infrastructure actually save money and resources; the next should inherit that knowledge.

Failures would become useful rather than simply tragic because the lessons they produced would remain somewhere.

This is what I mean by organised capacity.

And again, there is nothing particularly unusual about the idea. The conventional system possesses organised capacity in extraordinary abundance.

If I want to live in a conventional housing development, I do not have to find twenty other people who share my vision, locate a field, persuade a landowner to sell it to us, learn planning law, design a house, invent a tenure model and raise millions of pounds of development finance.

An enormous institutional apparatus has already done all of that for me.

Land agents, developers, investors, banks, architects, planning consultants, lawyers, builders, estate agents and mortgage lenders work together to produce the conventional housing options available to us. I need only choose among them, assuming I can afford to.

This is one of the largely invisible reasons why TINA is so powerful.

The dominant system is not merely an idea with which alternatives must compete. It possesses vast machinery devoted to continually reproducing itself in material form.

The alternative does not. Yet.

But this is not only a question of organisational capacity. It is also a question of power.

Alternatives of the kind I’m describing do not simply arrange things differently. They change who owns land, who captures increases in its value, who controls housing and infrastructure, how much income people need to earn, and who gets to make decisions about the resources upon which their lives depend. However small the places themselves may be, some of the relationships they seek to reorganise are precisely the relationships through which wealth and power are presently distributed and maintained.

We should not assume that those who benefit from existing arrangements will always welcome attempts to organise things differently.

If such alternatives ever become consequential, then, we should not assume that the only obstacles they will encounter are technical ones. Organised capacity matters not merely because it makes unusual projects easier to build, but because it can give different arrangements enough institutional strength to establish themselves, protect what they create and persist.

And there is another dimension to the capacity we need to develop.

If these places are to nourish the wider imagination, their experiences must be made available beyond their physical boundaries.

That means building the ability not only to create them, but to document and communicate what happens within them.

Document it. Photograph it. Film it. Publish the numbers. Invite people in. Let journalists, researchers, politicians, planners, growers, architects, students, neighbours and sceptics walk around it. Tell the stories of the people who live there. Make the designs and legal structures available. Be candid about the conflicts and failures as well as all the things that work.

The organisations we create should be capable of turning the extraordinary richness of these places into stories, images, knowledge and experiences that can travel far beyond them.

Not as propaganda for a predetermined future, but as raw material for a culture that has become desperately short of convincing visions of how life might otherwise be organised.

And so perhaps the decisive threshold is not reached when an unusually committed group of people proves that another way of living is technically possible.

It is reached when other people no longer have to create that alternative by themselves.

When someone can encounter a land-based community, decide that they would like to live somewhere similar, and move into one with an available home without first devoting ten years of their life to bringing the place into existence, something fundamental has changed.

The alternative has moved from the landscape of imagination into the landscape of actual possibility.

That seems to me to be one of the most important things organised capacity could achieve.

But I’m not talking about the mass replication of a single model. Not thousands of identical eco-settlements rolled out across the countryside. Different places should respond to different landscapes, communities, needs and possibilities. Diversity is essential.

The point is only to make creating integrated alternatives easier.

To ensure that knowledge, skills, legal structures, financial mechanisms, relationships, evidence and hard-won experience accumulate and gain coherence, rather than continually evaporate.

To create the machinery through which we become progressively more capable of building things that do not yet exist.

Without that capacity, alternatives remain beautiful possibilities, or incipient realities forever struggling to emerge within a hostile environment.

With it, we could begin making places like these genuinely accessible to people who want to live in them — and perhaps, in time, make it easier for a much wider diversity of alternatives to take root.

Where we put our resources

All this brings me to what is perhaps the simplest practical implication of the argument I’ve been making.

We should devote serious resources to building alternatives.

Where we put our resources should reflect our best understanding of what is actually achievable. Yet much of the money, organisational talent and political energy currently devoted to systemic change still rests upon an assumption that has become increasingly difficult for many of us to sustain: that the principal task is to transform the existing system into the world we need.

If you believe that transformation remains achievable within the timeframe available to us, then this allocation of resources makes sense.

But for many people working on these problems, I suspect there is now a widening gap between what we privately believe about the future and the strategies to which we continue to devote our time, money and energy.

We may no longer really believe that the great transformation is coming, while continuing to organise our efforts as though it is.

That gap matters, because our strategies should follow our understanding of reality. If our assessment of what is achievable has changed, then where we put our resources should change with it.

This does not mean that every effort to change the existing system becomes pointless. There will always be destruction worth preventing, people and places worth protecting, political battles worth fighting and suffering that can be reduced. But there is a difference between fighting to make a destructive system less destructive and continuing to organise our efforts around the expectation that we can transform it into something fundamentally different.

If we no longer believe that the latter is likely, we need to ask what else our resources might be capable of doing.

Imagine if some meaningful fraction of the money, organisational talent and political mobilisation already directed towards demanding systemic change were also directed towards constructing, developing and opening access to places that embody the change being demanded.

This, I believe, is a seriously neglected strategic opportunity.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, £100 million devoted to building alternatives.

Some of it could help growers gain secure access to land and housing, allowing them to produce food and restore ecosystems without carrying impossible land costs.

Some could create permanently affordable homes outside speculative markets.

Some could acquire land and build small land-based communities bringing housing, food production, ecological restoration and shared infrastructure into relationship.

A handful of places could go much further, integrating housing, food, energy, transport, livelihoods, ownership, care, ecological restoration and governance in order to discover what becomes possible when many of the foundational relationships of everyday life are reorganised together.

And a substantial part of the money could build the organised capacity required to make all of this easier: institutions capable of finding and acquiring land, assembling patient finance, navigating planning, developing legal and ownership structures, producing reusable designs, training people, sharing knowledge, documenting what happens and creating routes into these places for people who do not already possess land, capital or years of spare time.

£100 million would not transform Britain. It would not create an alternative system at national scale. It would not shelter us from everything that may be coming.

But it could put an extraordinary amount of reality into the world.

It could buy land. Build homes. Restore damaged ecosystems. Put growers onto farms. Create livelihoods. Establish commons. Test new forms of ownership. Develop practical knowledge. Train people. Build institutions. Turn scattered fragments of another way of living into actual places in which those relationships can begin interacting with one another.

And because those places would exist, rather than merely being proposed, they could teach us things that argument cannot.

Perhaps some of our assumptions would turn out to be wrong. Perhaps integrated communities demand exhausting amounts of governance. Perhaps apparent affordability conceals unsustainable quantities of unpaid labour. Perhaps some forms of sharing prove liberating and others unbearable. Perhaps people value privacy, convenience and individual autonomy far more than the designers anticipated. Perhaps some of the relationships we expect to reinforce one another simply do not.

If we are serious about creating places in which people can flourish, we must be willing to discover where our designs fall short.

But these places could also reveal possibilities we have failed to imagine precisely because almost nobody has had the resources to try them seriously.

This is what substantial resource allocation changes. It does not simply allow more projects to happen. It changes the quality of what can be attempted.

Instead of heroic groups spending ten years fighting for a single piece of land, we could build organisations capable of securing land repeatedly.

Instead of every project inventing its legal structures from scratch, we could develop forms that others can use.

Instead of depending upon people with capital, unusual persistence and specialist knowledge, we could begin creating routes through which more ordinary people can participate.

Instead of isolated projects disappearing with their founders, knowledge, land and institutional capacity could accumulate.

Instead of asking whether one underfunded community somehow proves the viability of an entirely different way of organising life, we could create enough variation to discover what actually works.

The purpose would not be to find the model and then roll it out across the country. Nor would the value of this work depend upon these places eventually replacing the systems around them.

The point is to begin putting meaningful resources behind possibilities that we presently leave almost entirely to pioneers, volunteers and unusually determined groups operating at the margins.

For decades, many of us have devoted ourselves to trying to make another world politically possible.

Perhaps our understanding of what is possible has changed.

If it has, our strategy should change with it.

We should continue resisting what needs to be resisted and protecting what can still be protected. But alongside that work, while we still possess extraordinary resources, knowledge, institutional capacity and freedom to act, we should devote far more of what we have to simply building pieces of the world we want.

Microcosms of a more beautiful world

At the beginning of this essay, I suggested that we might need another evolution in the language of crisis.

The progression from permacrisis through polycrisis and metacrisis to omni-crisis describes a predicament whose reach has become ever more comprehensive, until even our consciousness, desires and imaginations are implicated in its reproduction.

But perhaps the next development in this language need not describe a further deepening of the crisis, if that were even possible.

Perhaps it could name a way of living differently within it.

Extra-crisis living.

Not post-crisis, as though we had somehow resolved the predicament or emerged safely on the other side of it. Nor a fantasy of escaping its consequences, from which none of us can insulate ourselves.

But living beyond the crisis’s organising logic, without necessarily escaping its historical conditions.

The crisis is still there. But it no longer has an exclusive claim upon the organisation of everyday life.

This is what I believe the creation of beautiful, coherent alternatives could begin to make possible.

Places where the relationships through which we secure housing, food, energy, livelihoods, care and belonging are no longer organised predominantly according to the same destructive logic that governs the world around them.

Places where people can participate in restoring a culture of both human and ecological flourishing rather than merely attempting to reduce their contribution to the destructive culture they find themselves enmeshed in.

Places where positive relationships with land, work, ownership, community and the more-than-human world can become the ordinary texture of everyday existence.

These places would not exist outside history. They would remain entangled with the wider economy, dependent upon infrastructures and institutions they do not control, and vulnerable to the deepening disruptions of the omni-crisis.

But they could nevertheless embody something genuinely different.

The omni-crisis may be the condition of our civilisation without having to become the condition of every life lived within it.

And this, perhaps, is the most important distinction of all.

We do not have to transform the prevailing system before we can begin creating beautiful alternatives to it.

We do not have to wait until the crisis is over before we can begin living according to different relationships.

Nor do we have to believe that these alternatives will eventually save civilisation in order to recognise their worth.

Perhaps, initially at least, we create them as much as works of art as attempts to change the world. As expressions of the beauty of the human spirit, brought into being for their own sake, rather than blueprints for some promised future.

Or perhaps as a form of creative civil disobedience. A refusal to remain wholly complicit in the destruction of life, and an insistence that our creative energies need not be devoted exclusively to maintaining the arrangements we have inherited.

Who knows where such gestures might lead?

But their worth need not depend upon the answer.

There is land we can restore, lives we can make better, relationships we can reorganise, knowledge we can recover and beautiful places we can bring into existence now.

And in doing so, we can begin to loosen the grip of a civilisation that has taught us to regard its own arrangements as the limits of what is possible.

Not a solution to the crisis itself, but a refusal to allow the crisis to define the whole landscape of possibility.

Which brings us, finally, back to TINA.

The deepest challenge to “there is no alternative” has never been to produce a better argument against it.

It is to make the statement untrue.

And we make it untrue by building alternatives.

Not after the revolution. Not after governments finally agree upon an adequate programme of transformation. Not when we finally know exactly what the future should look like.

Now, while we still possess the extraordinary wealth, knowledge, freedom and capacity to do it.

There is an old saying, often attributed to Martin Luther, that even if he knew the world would end tomorrow, he would still plant an apple tree today.

I find something profoundly moving in that gesture.

Not the expectation that the tree will save the world, or even the certainty that anyone will be there to enjoy its fruit.

But the simple refusal to allow the possibility of catastrophe to extinguish the impulse to create something beautiful and life-giving.

And perhaps that’s what I’m proposing here, only on a slightly larger scale.

That instead of devoting all our remaining energies to trying to wrestle the destructive system into something less monstrous, we turn some of them towards the fertile ground of the living earth beneath our feet, and begin planting our brightest visions of what is possible.

Not because we know what will become of them.

But simply because they are worth planting.