Rupert Read: How Bad Will it Get? On Thrutopias, Transformative Adaptation, & the Other World(s) Still Just Possible | Urgent Futures #41

How bad is it going to get?

This is the provocation today's guest Rupert Read makes in a recent keynote—and one that I found to be an excellent way to jump into our conversation—though it’s a bit of a decoy. It gives way to a deeper, more nuanced conversation about how we ultimately survive and even thrive in complex emerging realities.

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Given what we now know, it would be foolish to think we could reverse the harm done to the planet enough to return to a previous version of normal—but that doesn’t mean our only option is to prepare for dystopia. Instead—following the argument of Rupert's latest co-authored book, Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still Just Possible—through transformative adaptation, we might bring about “thrutopias.” Will we have all our modern conveniences and material abundance in a thrutopia? Probably not. But could we build meaningful lives, in which we deeply connect with each other and experience a shared sense of purpose, while endeavoring to realign our species with the patterns of nature? We can—that world is still just possible.

Rupert Read is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and co-director of the new Climate Majority Project. He authored several books, including This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future, and Why Climate Breakdown Matters and has been many times on the Today programme, QuestionTime, Newsnight, Politics Live, Al Jazeera, and more. He is co-author of Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still Just Possible, with Morgan Phillips and Manda Scott.

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