As our current system shudders to a halt, we need a "Pluriverse" of pathways ahead. Here's a free dictionary of them
The iceberg, from Tom Smith
It’s actually very difficult to predict where our politics will be over the next few months, given that the basic mechanics of modern capitalism have completely frozen up. No buyers, no sellers, few wage earners, governments randomly printing money, no concrete anticipation of an end to our various quarantines and separations…
If there was ever a moment to use any time this releases into your life for contemplation of alternative models of society, this is it. (We appreciate that very many, maybe the majority, this will be a worrying and exacting period - and they won’t have the energy or leisure for this).
We first recommend that you explore this very website, and the pages of this blog. As co-initiator Indra Adnan will write in her editorial this week, a vision of self-determination, flourishing and resilience for communities and citizens is what we’ve bet on for three years - through Brexits and Trumps, referenda and wildfires, rebellions and pandemics.
Pursue the keywords in our Category Clouds and Tag Clouds page, and you will find a multitude of practical options, new framings of reality, and inspirational interventions. Ones that might make a future that’s different from a collapsing mainstream seem attractive, joyful and useful. For a start, see what’s happening under Localism, Futures, New Economics, Personal Development, Environmentalists, Democratic Innovation, Artists.
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In that spirit, we were delighted to find (on the tweeted recommendation of eco-designer John Thackara), this recently published compendium of deep and wide alternatives, titled The Pluriverse (available from this website as a free download and purchase, and you can also directly save the full PDF from here).
What’s striking about this book is the sheer diversity of alternative takes on “development-as-progress” that it gathers together. Each entry is only 1000 words, so it’s an efficient tour of the horizon. Helpfully, the two main sections counterpose what it calls “Universalising The Earth: Reformist Solutions” with a teeming “A People’s Pluriverse: Transformative Initiatives” of options - see the screen grabs of the contents pages below.
There’s much that regular readers of this blog will recognise. Our interest is particularly piqued by “Sea Ontologies”, “Convivialism”, and “Biocivilisation”, but also by the intriguingly titled models from all over the world - Minobimaatisiiwin, the North American First Nations’ definition of the good life; Prakrikit Swaraj, an Indian method for face-to-face-assembly; Agdals, a Moroccan/Berber tradition of communal management of resources - and many others.
We also note, in the “universalist” ledger, some approaches we are interested in, as part of a “futures” agenda about technology that needs to be put at the service of fully-human communities, like “Transhumanism” or “Ecomodernism”. But it’s a time for crossing all kinds of subject and method boundaries, in all ways. The size of the crisis demands eclecticism in solutions, at least.
