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(via The Ecstasy of Serpents - by Tractor Beam and Sitaye)

Protopian”—a word coined by Kevin Kelly, one of our contest’s judges—means an achievable, optimistic future characterized by continuous, incremental progress rather than revolutionary leaps or a static, perfect state. Protopian stories imagine a future that is neither flawless nor catastrophic, but instead workably better than today. It’s about plausible progress rather than perfection or collapse.

Announcing The Protopian Prize | Fiction Contest 🕊️🔮

you will be astronomically lucky; you will die, many years from now, buried in sand. Mammals will discover your bones, and invent stories about you, in a future so distant the stars and continents themselves have moved.

Underground | Tractor Beam

How could anyone forget the name of a god that takes up half the world? – TK Rex

Underground | Tractor Beam

The first dimension asks whether nature is thriving and accessible to people. This includes the condition of landscapes themselves, particularly whether rural areas retain diverse, semi-natural mosaics rather than being simplified into lifeless monocultures. It also includes access to nature in cities, recognising that urban green space supports mental and physical health and regulates the climate. The potential for everyday contact with the wider living world for most of humanity offers an opportunity to reduce ‘species-loneliness’, or human disconnection from the community of fellow species that has been the norm for all our prehistory and most of our history. For a given level of economic prosperity, we think a city with tree-lined streets and safe, accessible parks is more developed than a concrete metropolis divorced from life-sustaining nature. The second dimension considers whether nature is treated with care. Here, the focus is on minimising the impacts on climate and biodiversity while a country is developing. This includes using the latest sophisticated data on long and entangled consumption supply chains and how they embody carbon emissions and natural habitat loss, as well as local greenhouse gas emissions. This analysis allows for spatially explicit tracking of the biodiversity and carbon stock implications of different commodity consumption choices. Brazil, for example, has a large domestic consumption footprint; its high-meat diet is fed by cattle ranches that eat into its savannas and rainforests. Others, like much of Europe, have displaced consumption footprints, with decisions on what to consume affecting landscapes and seascapes in remote parts of the planet. In a globalised economy, environmental damage is often displaced rather than reduced, and this dimension seeks to make those connections visible. The third dimension asks whether nature is safeguarded for the future, examining aspects such as how much natural area is protected, and how clean rivers and air are. This is not only focused on human consumption of these resources, but also on how the wider living world is affected, as in the case of polluted rivers.

It doesn’t have to be us versus nature | Aeon Essays

Poverty is manufactured.

We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way [Guardian/El Pais/Le Monde/NEEP] — THE ALTERNATIVE

About 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education. Meanwhile, global supply chains enable a vast net transfer of labour and resources from south to north. International solidarity is therefore a legal and moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south, through patterns of extraction that continue today in new forms.

We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way [Guardian/El Pais/Le Monde/NEEP] — THE ALTERNATIVE

for every 1C warmer the atmosphere becomes, it is able to store 7% more moisture. This rise in water vapour is why modern heatwaves feel much more oppressive and can prove more dangerous. The effect varies from region to region. But the UK and other parts of northern Europe are among the most affected areas.

Why humidity is making UK’s record-breaking June day feel hotter | Extreme heat | The Guardian

Climate anxiety lives in the body as much as the mind. Therapeutic tools (somatic practices, working through grief, reining in the runaway thoughts that keep you up at night, and building confidence to act) strengthen your capacity to stay present with the shifting climate reality without being overwhelmed by it. That’s not “coping” in the familiar sense of managing symptoms until life returns to normal. It’s developing the inner resources to keep showing up, keep caring, and keep acting with an open mind and heart. That kind of resilience makes sustained engagement possible.

Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still “catastrophizing”, if the environmental threat is real? [Grist] — THE ALTERNATIVE

One in particular is relevant here: the negativity bias, which causes us to register threatening situations three to five times more intensely than positive ones. That might have been useful for our evolutionary survival, but it can also have a distorting effect — especially in the age of doomscrolling, when it’s altogether too easy to overwhelm ourselves with bad news. That’s why a balanced view also requires staying current on the real progress being made: dam removals, renewable energy growth, youth litigation wins, communities building resilience. This kind of news often gets less attention, so finding it can take some effort. But seeking out these stories may help to remind you that there are answers to the problems we face. Still, these advances don’t diminish the urgency of the genuine crisis we’re facing, and for now, our climate problems are still outpacing solutions. Watching that unfold, watching the status quo persist, can be agonizing. In therapy terms, the cognitive goal has to shift from “accurate assessment” to “functional clarity.” Accurate assessment asks, “How bad is it?” Functional clarity asks, “Given what I understand, what can I do?”

Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still “catastrophizing”, if the environmental threat is real? [Grist] — THE ALTERNATIVE

For climate-aware clients, their anxiety isn’t distorted at all. It’s a healthy response to real destruction and the inadequate efforts to address it. Shifting toward “what’s realistic” isn’t what we’re after to manage climate anxiety. Instead, it’s about navigating high-stakes uncertainty by developing new skills — helping people stay grounded and functional while channeling their distress into meaningful action with others.

Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still “catastrophizing”, if the environmental threat is real? [Grist] — THE ALTERNATIVE

There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction… Hamlet is held up as an awful warning against thought without action, but no one holds up Othello as a warning against action without thought… For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion.

In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times – The Marginalian

The answer to our social and ecological problems is the same: we need a diversification of rural life, just as we need a diversification of habitat type. Clidro’s squirrels warned us that ecological monocultures soon make for social monocultures.

Welsh-Rewilding-Alliance-Report-2026.pdf

I reject development and its miscontents, discontents, un-contents I’m getting off that train to nowhere very fast. what names and namings did other worlds have for their dreams? what names do other worlds have for their desires, present past future? I want to use those names, to paint those worlds in the foreground

The Dictionary of Radical Alternatives is an extraordinarily rich & global archive of liberatory concepts — THE ALTERNATIVE

Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception in relationship conflict and emerging victorious with deeper love: The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge internally that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed. The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. Instead of coming to the other person or people with an accusation, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain, to help us understand why they have said or done those things. There is a third thing we need to do, if we can. The third thing is very hard, perhaps the hardest. We need to listen very carefully to the other person’s response to truly understand and try to correct our perception. With this, we may find that we have been the victim of our wrong perceptions. Most likely the other person has also been a victim of wrong perceptions.

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship – The Marginalian

Democratic Systems

Democratic systems tend to be slow (high latency) and to only process a narrow range of public input at once (low bandwidth). The result is that by the time a government responds to a social problem, the problem has often changed — and the response reflects the views of the loudest, most passionate, most powerful, but not the wisest. And if citizens and institutions don’t make the necessary choices — or don’t make them in time — others will make them instead.

Finding Light Through the Cracks: Reinventing Democracy with Audrey Tang

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