My favorite books to help us make utopian dreams come true

I’ve been a climate activist for 15+ years and suffered major mental breakdowns as a result. This book has been liberatory.

The Three Ecologies practically explains the overlapping relationships between ecology, society, and the human mind and, written as it was in the ‘80s, Guattari’s proposed ‘ecosophy’ was alarmingly prescient, and practical. He simplifies the complexities of technological, social, and ecological devastation into action.

We’re not the isolated beings our culture says we are. Our minds are made up of and drastically impacted by our ecology and our society, and vice versa. Ecosophy is a practice, a different way of being in the world.

Coming to understand myself as physically and mentally embedded in the world gave me a sense of safety and strength. It gave me confidence in my own mind, a mind that had been pathologised for over a decade.

Guattari was a visionary ecologist, an incandescent critic of psychiatric oppression, a revolutionary. I desperately wish we’d met, but having this concise, powerful book is more than enough for me.

This book is a bible for people who care about changing the system, rather than just tinkering around the edges.

A soliologist and organiser, Erik Olin Wright manages to map out strategic exits from our exploitative economic, social, and political structures. He pulls together building blocks for a different world, shows them to us, and offers them for us to experiment with. Olin Wright was writing about things like universal basic income way before they were sexy and he writes with both passion and precision.

As someone who’s spent most of my life trying to get closer to the roots of our collective struggles, Olin Wright’s work is a huge support. It’s often difficult to feel like we’re making a difference, like everything’s sliding in the wrong direction no matter what we do.

Envisioning Real Utopias is a solid manual and a vital companion, covered with ink stains and pencil marks, to navigate a world that seems determined to make everything more complicated. Only a rare kind of inspiration can provide Envisioning Real Utopias’ level of beautiful simplicity.

Kimberly Ann Johnson suffered deep physical and emotional trauma after childbirth and spent years recovering. Through that recovery, she became a skilled somatics practitioner and profound communicator.

The Call of the Wild is a deep dive into the inextricability of mind and body – together referred to as the soma and a toolkit for reinhabiting ourselves. I’m really not a self-help kind of guy, but this book punctured that cynicism for me. It’s a powerful, tender reminder of the force we all have within us, that we can metabolise our suffering into agency and allow ourselves to trust and settle into pleasure and joy.

When I attempted suicide in 2019 – the fall that left me a double amputee – I also tore my pelvis apart. Initially, even though pelvic injury led Kimberly Ann Johnson to this work, I didn’t feel it was a space I was meant to be in, often focused as it was on women’s traumas. In a way that I’m still mystified by, her work eased me not only into trauma resolution and a deeper awareness of myself, but also allowed me to feel what had happened to me for the first time.

The Call of the Wild its tools, tone, and exercises made the severe dissociation I’ve had for years evaporate at points. What happened to me ‘landed’ in me properly. Somatics gave me the practices I needed to feel it, safely, and turn it into something good. This might sound unrelated to utopias, but there’s a direct link between how we are taught to inhabit our bodies within this system, our minds, our selves, and the ‘stuckness’ of our culture as a whole. 

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds is a field guide to some of the more confusing and difficult elements of trying to heal ourselves and the world. It’s beautiful and inviting.

maree brown argues we have to reinvent how we work together and support each other in the process of change making. We can’t rush at unprecedentedly huge problems with the same old behaviours that got us here in the first place. 

Emergent Strategy draws on maree brown’s extensive experience in movement spaces to tease out lessons and practices, like the need to “move at the speed of trust.” Throughout the book, she uses memorable symbols to tie together general values and principles with easy-to-apply practices. The murmurations of starlings, for example, stand for collective leadership and trusting that simple guiding principles result in mass adaptability. 

The book spins lines from individual and group behaviour out to social movements and brings into focus kinds of change that only radical imagination can. Reading it was a refuge. The work is rigorous, practical, and deeply hopeful. It also isn’t homework, it’s brimming with joy – and excitement.

I was recommended this book as a teenager by someone I deeply respect and admire. I’ve come back to it a lot, most recently from a hospital bed with an epidural in my spine. I think the book lifted more pain then than the drip.

Resurrection was the last novel Tolstoy wrote and it led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s a complex quasi-love story about a beautifully flawed protagonist’s struggle to give away all the land he owns out of a tangle of duty, guilt, and a wide-eyed love for his fellow human.

In 19thC Russia, that’s extremely complicated: economically, socially, ethically, spiritually. It’s about why anyone can claim to ‘own’ anything, what fairness looks like to different people, and whether it’s possible to enjoy life while rampantly battling to perfect yourself (short answer: no).

The novel plays out on vast tracts of peasant-farmed land, dank, brutal prisons, and the gaudy depressive anhedonia of elite dining rooms. It inspects the heart of hypocrisy, finding peace in chaos, and learning to listen to truths that speak from a quiet place. A tonic.