On stubborn optimism

Read and imbue yourself with the ideas of stubborn optimism or active hope as a practice of self care and care of others and the world around us:

You can start with our entry about stubborn optimism

Then consider going deeper: further reading on stubborn optimism

On imagination

The power of imagination to help us visualise the future we want to be working towards is enormous. Visions of apocalypse surround us, are embedded even in the Judeo Christian world view (if you live in a society where it has had a major influence). At the same time, increasingly frequent and destructive climate impacts abound in the news, so we need to rework the personal, community and social view of where we are going. Imagination is important in order to nourish hope. Nourish that yearning for a future we have only dreamt of. 

We have imagined some future things and you can read them in the Letter from the future we desire or What if fossil fuel extraction stopped? 

To go deeper, we have collected these Further Resources on Imagination for you.

On what we already know works:

Many of the collectives participating in the 2025 call to stitch are examples of the extraordinary things that humans can do, not just big corporations and governments, but local people, getting organised, can actually do. We want to leave some links here for you to read more about some of these extraordinary things because once you know that this is actually already happening somewhere, it jumpstarts your imagination. Someone once said to me: “If it’s possible in Finland, it must be possible where I live.”

• Degrowth is an academic and social movement that critiques the central capitalist principal of constant growth on a finite planet. It has numerous proposals for living well in a world without growth as an economic imperative. There are already small scale examples out there that this works (well, most of human history, for starters). Look for Less is More by Jason Hickel and Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson (please buy from a local independent bookshop: not Amazon).
• Solidarity economy  – Solidarity economies are integral to the dreamed-for world free of exploitation, violence, and domination. This website proposes some basic principles for rebuilding our world that way.
• Rewilding is a process whereby nature is effectively left alone, and sometimes assisted with the reintroduction of keystone species that have been driven to extinction in that place. The best and most striking example has been the reintroduction of beavers across Europe where they had been hunted to extinction and how these beavers have «fixed» broken ecosystems faster than anyone thought possible. Read What’s so special about beavers? and listen to the podcast Rewilding the World for many more examples of rewilding around the world.
• Agriculture without fossil fuels – see La Ferme du Bec Hellouin (in French)
• «Understanding there is another way of living with nature and returning to our role as a keystone species instead of behaving like a meteorite.» Hózhó the joy of knowing yourself part of nature is a TEDx talk by Diné musician, scholar, and cultural historian Lyla June about living within the processes of nature.

Poetry

Poetry is another art form that can break through the bluff of “business as usual” and remind us of how we are just another bit of nature and actually so close to the trees and the microorganisms and every living being.

If you know of a wonderful poem that ought to be included here, please write to us at zurciendoelplaneta@gmail.com with the link.

Poems about trees

The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead by John Keats

Yew Trees by William Wordsworth

I am Vertical by Sylvia Plath

The Trees by Philip Larkin

Poems about water

(coming soon)

We’ll be adding more poems as and when they find us.