Evidence-Based
Utopianism

 
Summer 2009

What if?...seeing the world as a place of radical possibility

Ten years ago, thousands of people turned the streets of Seattle, Washington into a kind of carnival of dreams, a place where, temporarily, instead of the glitzy, distracting, anxiety-filled spectacle of consumption, there were Big Questions on view. That intrusion of possibility was one impetus for the original WHAT IF? Now we return, via cyberspace, a space that stills needs humanizing and eco-logizing as only a Journal of Radical Possibilities can do... read on

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pastpresentfutureperfect
(visionary movements and ideas)

In this issue: jobs for artists! and sacred time vs. contemporary time

The Creativity Stimulus
by Jeff Chang

How creativity supports community, and why the good society should support both.

"Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon's 1968 election sealed the backlash of the 'silent majority' were community organizer and artist." read on

Jeff Chang will speak about the importance of building the community arts movement at Jobs for Artists! an event at the San Francisco Women's Building on Tuesday July 7th at 7 pm.


Fires of the Solstice
by Marguerite Yourcenar

What became of sacred time? The great 20th century French essayist reflects on its traces in our festivals.

"Yet, at the very thought of a solstitial festival, a curious sort of vertigo overtakes us...that apogee signals the beginning of a descent..." read on

visionaryvoices
(poetry, rants, word-art)

The Messenger and Other Poems
by Carol Tarlen

he sits on a concrete wall
watches the sun drop behind the Ferry Building

an empty orange knapsack
flung across his bike's handlebars

his friends are silent, smoking
he never stops talking

he says he quit school at 14
and no one noticed... read on

Commemorating the 5th anniversary of the untimely death of this great radical poet. Carol's work will be read and her life remembered at a tribute at Modern Times Books in San Francisco on Friday July 10 at 7:30 pm.

 
 

 

 

surviving&thriving
(other green worlds)

In this issue: what would a permaculture revolution look like? and ecological systems thinking

What is Permaculture, Anyway?

"We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby." --Bill Mollison, father of modern permaculture

Permaculturist Geoff Lawton Greens the Desert
a five-minute video of a miracle

"You can solve all the world's problems in a garden. Most people don't know that, and that's why most people are insecure."


We need to understand how ecological systems work and start understanding our economies as ecologies...

Too Big to Fail?
by Chip Ward

"In nature, nothing is too big to fail. In fact, big is bound to fail. To understand why that's so means stepping away from a prevailing set of beliefs that holds us in its sway, especially the deep conviction that we operate apart from nature's limits and rules." read on

For Energy, Food and Even Finance, Bio-diversity Offers a Model for Sustainability
by Karla Bell

"[A]ll complex systems, including our monetary and financial ones, become structurally unstable whenever efficiency is overemphasized at the expense of diversity, inter-connectivity and the crucial resilience they provide." read on

 

miscellenea...
(reviews, comment, and ephemera)

Interview with the Future #27
by Diana B. Swift

The first of a selected series of interviews done by our roving correspondent from the future, Diana B. Swift. In this encounter with the young inhabitant of what was once a thriving manufacturing town, we get a child's eye view of what happens when a whole society runs out of gas...

 

imagegallery
(featured art and photography)

Marcos in the Mission and Other Works
by Fernando Martí

 

 

WHAT IF? recommends:

LaborFest
a month-long series of Bay Area cultural events commemorating the 1934 San Francisco General Strike

The Free Farm Stand
a place in San Francisco where gift culture happens, a place to get involved in producing and distributing food from local gardens and farms

Steven Shaviro's blog
cultural critique with a serious underlay of philosophy... this is a thoughtful entry questioning the concept of "self-organizing systems" from the Gaia hypothesis to the WTO protests

Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine
a print and webzine publishing some of the best, most truly speculative fiction we've seen anywhere

The Break the Silence Mural Project and the Olympia-Rafah Mural Project

 

(watch this space for more information of interest on the visionary front...)

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