I love a good podcast. I can listen while in the garden or the kitchen, the two spaces of my summer life. This season, I have been participating in a podcast club; together, we are listening to and studying the work of Joanna Macy through the podcast We are the Great Turning. And since a single media source centering climate change is not nearly enough, on July 20, 2024 — the opening date of Octavia Butler’s prophetic Parable of the Sower — I also began listening to adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon’s podcast Octavia’s Parables. Then needing even more immersion, one rainy weekend, I binged the Apple TV series, Extrapolations.
My brain is swirling with the lessons and intersections and play between these programs and our work. I find myself thinking about the just transition, how far away it seems, how impossible given the state of mis- and dis-information and the lack of political will to untangle ourselves from fossil fuel dependence. And then I ground myself in this idea from Macy that, in the uncertainty of the future, we can choose to believe that something good will happen.
Uncertainty does not have to spell doom. We can actually choose to believe that all of the organizing, all of the building of community, and all of the small ways we are making change will eventually lead to a positive outcome. We can follow Lauren Olamina’s journey to seek a new future, and take away lessons about mutual aid and adapting to our emerging circumstances with the resources at hand.
Extrapolations begins in the year 2037, during COP42, a time not that far away that doesn’t initially look all that different from the present. I realized through this series that the future crisis, if we don’t act now, will not look like a sudden apocalypse. The extreme changes will be gradual enough that we could (as we are now) accept this minimal appearing loss of life. Yet mass extinction and upheaval is still very real. I am reminded that we really can’t afford to wait, we must organize for the just transition now.
I love that popular media — podcasts, fiction, movies, and television — are gifting us ways to reimagine our future. The clear thread through most of these sources is that the government and other institutions are not coming to save us. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Are you ready? I hope you will join us in imagining a future full of life, a just and abundant world beyond the climate crisis. To imagine it is the first step in making it a reality.
Susan Phillips
Executive Director
