> Bellamy’s and Morris’s future-utopian novels form two ends of a spectrum: the former envisions an idyllic America in the year 2000 whose just and equitable so

> Bellamy’s and Morris’s future-utopian novels form two ends of a spectrum: the former envisions an idyllic America in the year 2000 whose just and equitable society is enabled by technological development and the gradual consolidation of capital in huge monopolies eventually taken over by the state, while Morris sketches a future neo-feudal pastoral idyll in which human beings live in harmony with nature, dwell in small communal units, and labor by hand. I've seen both of those Utopias. The first in Google's Mountain View campus and the second in an intentional community in Northern California. > My grad class, on the other hand, started inquiring of each novel, “What does the author do about human nature?” by which they meant all the selfish and combative impulses that would presumably prevent us from living together in an egalitarian society for any length of time. (Getting them to unpack the idea of “human nature” was the work of an entire semester.) At Google the problems of human nature are covered (more-or-less well, opinions vary) by basic professionalism and a fire hydrant gushing money. The folks at the commune seemed emotionally mature and were reliable and stable enough to build their own buildings (including a kind of micro-dairy for their cow!) > I’m still grappling with what it meant that these first-year students (who are now in their mid-20s) did not find climate change fiction particularly depressing—or rather, particularly surprising or disorienting. As I’ve written about elsewhere, I think our greatest hurdles in trying to think like utopians will be intergenerational. From my POV the writing has been on the wall since at least when I was in school (roughly a generation ago.) So I'm not surprised that they're not surprised. At least I had grounds for hope back then, but the inaction and active destruction of the last few decades has made that hope seem more and more irrational. In any event, going forward we have to manage the global ecosystem(s). Like it or not, whatever your personal beliefs about the causes of climate change, we are in the driver's seat now, so we have to either learn to drive or we'll crash or go over a cliff, y'know? We have satellites and computers, we can gather and process all the data we need, ans we also have a ll the technology we need already (not to say that we shouldn't keep innovating, of course we should! Just that that's not the limiting factor.) When it comes to changing society and dealing with the problems of human nature I think the missing piece of the puzzle is the recent advances in emotional and spiritual healing, things that are totally off the radar of the academic sphere. E.g. Reiki or the Core Transformation Process, things that help people to change for the better quickly and easily but are practically invisible to mainstream/academia.