Where to begin?
Synchronicity is a good place to start. You know Synchronicity? It’s the barely explored idea that there are other ways the universe functions other than a straight line of cause and effect. It says that similar things—ideas, actions, people, natural happenings—tend to congregate in the same underlying places, showing themselves as ‘only coincidences’ or as a strange attraction even over distances of things of like ‘mind’. It’s an underlying motive for this magazine, and this press, in fact. I wanted to see who of like mind it would attract. And who would attract me.
So it was with the way I found Jason W. Moore’s work, and Diana Gildea’s work, and through them, found my way, this summer to the tenth World Ecology Conference, in San Francisco. (Thanks, Charlotte Freeman, for turning me on to Jason’s book, “Capitalism in the Web of Life.” Incredible work.)
The World Ecology Conference being about eighty people of different disciplines (including a dog and a baby) asking “Change is bearing down on us like a freight train. What the fuck do we do now?”
Amazing to feel the energy there, and amazing to connect and realize these connections are spreading—see it in the videos from the conference linked here, in everything, from Food Sovereignty Research to Sustainability Studies, from Science to Science Fiction, from Art to Education, from Fantasy to Imagined Reality, there are amazing people working on amazing projects and amazing ideas, dragging us over from what Jason Moore calls “The Ecology of Hopelessness” to a map for positive action.
I gave my own talk “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” which you can find here. I’ll bet you already know it’s how visionary fiction has a huge role to play in our upcoming human evolution. I mean, I’ll never stop banging on about that.
Other highlights were Lucy HG Solomon’s talk on the work of the art collective Cesar and Lois (you’ll be astonished to see a fungus tweet its own message to the world), and, of course, the plenary speech by legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, “A Good Anthropocene.”
If anyone writes visionary fiction, it’s Kim Stanley Robinson. Read the Mars Trilogy. And then consider what he says in his talk: don’t think we’re going to escape to Mars, people. Things are serious right here and now.
I wouldn’t miss any of it, if I were you. In fact, I was me and I didn’t miss any of it. Wish I could do it all again. It was nourishing in the finest possible way. A feast of the Ecology of Hope.
Meanwhile, here in EAP land, speaking of nourishment, and ways to face Eternity with a modicum of courage, I recommend Bruce Thompson’s searing Following in the Steps of Gilgamesh, about how he survived the death of one of his children. There’s a lot of grief in this issue, but from mourning comes hope. Have a look at Jonah Kruvant’s fear that history repeats itself and hope that it will spiral up instead in The Lost Tribe of Europe, Marissa Bell Toffoli’s sadness at endings in Evening Air. Then read about the heroism of a female mystic in Brian Griffith’s The Angel of the Babists. It can happen, people. Despair is never an option.
(That last, by the way, is an excerpt from Brian’s upcoming book, Mother Persia, a history of astonishing Iranian women, to be published by EAP in the summer of next year.)
Have a look and join in the realization that sorrow is a part of eternity just like rain is a part of the weather. It goes clouds, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, breeze, sun, repeat. Always repeat. That’s on the way to eternity too.
Spiral up.
Welcome back.