I’ve spent my life obsessed with utopias, knowing from a young age that the human world is unnecessarily cruel. Utopias aren’t a delusion, nor a destination; they’re navigation tools. As an activist-researcher on climate, new economics, and mental health, I experiment with practical routes to radically better worlds. It’s a prefigurative stroke of luck that the pleasure and connection we long for are vital for creating radical change. I nearly died in 2019, after a suicide attempt tied to the dire state of the world. Rebuilding myself, including learning to walk after losing both of my legs, forced an epistemological and ontological reckoning. Now, I’m more realistically hopeful than ever.
I wrote
Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future
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.
Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, The Three Ecologies argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences between all living systems. A powerful critique of capitalism and a manifesto for a new way of thinking, the book is also an ideal introduction to the work of one of Europe's most radical thinkers.
This edition includes a chronology of Guattari's life and work,…
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.
Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempting this task-most analysts argue that any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations is utopian. Erik Olin Wright's major new work is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and…
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.
From trauma educator and somatic guide Kimberly Ann Johnson comes a cutting-edge guide for tapping into the wisdom and resilience of the body to rewire the nervous system, heal from trauma, and live fully.
In an increasingly polarized world where trauma is often publicly renegotiated, our nervous systems are on high alert. From skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety to physical illnesses such as autoimmune diseases and digestive disorders, many women today find themselves living out of alignment with their bodies.
Kimberly Johnson is a somatic practitioner, birth doula, and postpartum educator who specializes in helping women recover from all…
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.
In the tradition of Octavia Butler, radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want.
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This…
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.
This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution. She is found guilty on a technicality, and he determines to overturn the verdict. This pitches him into a hellish labyrinth of Russian courts, prisons and bureaucracy, in which the author loses no opportunity for satire and bitter…
Charlie Hertzog Young became a climate activist in his early teens. His journey led him onto airport runways and into the halls of power, but also to a serious mental health breakdown. He had to rebuild himself physically and psychologically, before focusing his efforts on collective mental recovery in response to a planet in crisis.
Spinning Out explores how climate chaos and the failure of those in power to tackle it are causing an inevitable mental health crisis across the globe. With testimony from dozens of activists, organisers, and researchers across every habitable continent, Spinning Out is a celebration (of other ways to be) and a manual for anyone who wants to fight for a better world, while avoiding burnout and despair.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
