Language can only take us so far, of course. Thus by definition it is a utopian science fiction story."
It’s a kind of science fiction story in the form of a lexicon, and it postulates and helps to create a future culture more articulate and wiser than we are now. So this book’s profusion is an accurate foretelling of what will come.
Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge-lots of them. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are.
Each of thirty suggested loanwords-from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance-helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.įrom Apocalypso to Qi, ~*~ to Total Liberation, thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that challenges and expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual map that so many activists, policymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.Īs author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in his foreword, "So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like? As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of policy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution.
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