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And a bit about reef-safe sunscreen.
Dear Reader,
We take a break this week from Mythbuster Monday because it is now officially summer and Dot is seeking escape. Where Dot most frequently finds that escape is either outside in nature or inside the pages of a book. Dot’s most recent escape? Ian McEwan’s newest novel, What We Can Know (available on Thriftbooks and Amazon).
The story toggles between a recent past whereby a renowned poet presents his wife a poem that celebrates her love of nature and a future that reflects a world changed by climate and war. But within this altered world lives a literature researcher determined to unearth the past and find out what happened to this poem.
If you, too, are seeking escape or a book to keep you company in a hammock or on a beach towel, I highly recommend this one.
It might fall under the category of “thrutopia” — neither dys- nor utopian fiction. Let philosopher and writer Rupert Read explain: “Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where ‘there’ is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasize a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it’s similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul.”
It’s not unlike something Dot has written about before — the reimagining of our world, not as some daydreamy future, nor one that’s nightmarish, but rather as something that provides a roadmap or serves as a guide of possibilities.
I’m not sure McEwan’s book qualifies as a thrutopia. While it offers one possible future — set in a dramatically altered UK with Nigeria as a superpower and America run by warlords — it doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance.
If there is such a thing as a thrutopia — Rupert Read suggests that the closest we currently have is Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — Dot would love to escape into it. Share your suggestions here.
Literally,
Dot
For more Bluedot Climate Quick Tips, click here.
