Our realities are shaped by the physical world we inhabit; whether that’s the nature that surrounds us, the humans we interact with in community, the food made accessible to us, or the stories that reach us, filled with knowledge our own realities or those far away. But just as much as we absorb these inputs from the outside world to shape our understanding of it, we are also exerting our own inputs into the realities of others. We all contribute to a greater understanding of the physical world which surrounds us, the Topia we exist in. In this lunar cycle, we will examine the different Topias, from the more familiar types found in literature, Dystopia and Utopia, to the more generative and less well-known genre of Thrutopia and Ourtopia.
The dystopias we familiarize ourselves with in literature have long warned us of the dangerous potential of humanity to create worlds of incredible suffering. But where does the fiction end, and reality begin? At least 90% of oceanic fish populations are overexploited. There are microplastics in every human body, in every mother’s breast milk, as well as our hearts and in our brains. Only 4% of Earth’s remaining mammals by biomass are wild beings – 96% of mammals are humans and our livestock. The dominant culture has created a dystopia for every non-human being, and for most human beings too – yet our dystopias look different, and will continue to unfold differently. In this EcoGathering, we’ll discuss our dystopia, driven in large part by the human population-consumption dynamics in this dominant culture.