A Letter from the Future
An exercise in instructive speculative fiction and bringing abstract ideas to life.
A little bonus content this week - something different. Here’s a piece of short fiction, sort of in the style of a letter. I’m trying to pull out some of the ideas swirling around in my brain and put them in yours in a more concrete way. I engage in these little imaginary exercises all the time - taking concepts that I’ve read and applying them to my real life. Visualizing them, and thinking through the details. It helps make them feel more tangible and attainable. So here’s a brief version of that.
It was the big storm that changed things. A derecho. It wasn’t the first we’d experienced, but they were still pretty unusual back then and we weren’t ready for one this strong. It knocked out power for days, blew roofs off buildings, and ripped trees out of the ground. A whole maple tree fell into a neighbor’s house. Thank god nobody was injured.
Then a band of slow moving thunderstorms immediately followed. More than a foot of rain fell in less than 24 hours, causing severe flash floods that stranded drivers, killed two people, and overwhelmed the water treatment plant. We had to boil water for a week after just to be safe.
And then there was the heat. After the storm passed the heat settled back in. Four relentless days of oppressive, humid, hundred-degree heat, with no power, no air conditioning, and limited access to water. I remember hearing my neighbor’s baby crying at night while we all tossed in bed, unable to cool down enough to sleep. Those were long, unsettling nights.
We’d never seen anything like this before. And we knew it wouldn’t be the last time.
Eventually, the community recovered. Damage was repaired, the water was safe again. But we weren’t back to normal. After that storm, we never went back to normal.
Some of us neighbors got together to talk about what had happened and to figure out how we might be more prepared the next time. We decided we should all start storing some water and nonperishable food. A couple of the friendliest neighbors on the block began reaching out to the others, stopping by their homes or chatting them up while they were out for a walk, letting them know a group of us were planning to take some actions so the next storm wouldn’t be so… scary.
That was the birth of the little community we have today.
Food prices were skyrocketing back then. The global agricultural industry was in disarray as large parts of the planet became too hot or too dry or too unpredictably inundated with floods to grow anything. Grocery store shelves were often empty. Supply chains began collapsing, too. We realized how much stuff we bought came from places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, and India. Countries where millions and millions of people - the people who made our stuff - had to flee. Those who weren’t able to flee perished in huge numbers, paying the ultimate price for our insatiable consumption. They died from natural disasters, yes, but also starvation and disease. Dengue fever and malaria had spread dramatically, to parts of the globe it had never been before. A lot of people got very sick. Medicine was, of course, hard to come by.
With all the global turmoil making it harder to buy food, we decided we better start growing our own. We turned our front yards and backyards into mini farms. Everyone installed rain barrels and several homes even put in large cisterns, so when the worst months of drought set in, we still had enough water to keep our crops alive. We grew a lot of the things we knew were nutritious, hardy, and stored well, like potatoes, carrots, kale, and squash. We eat so much of this now we sometimes get sick of it, but we’re glad to have it. And my neighbors who are home chefs have gotten creative with recipes, which they try out for us when we have community potlucks.
Everyone grows food now. Many keep chickens, and even a few goats. And that’s just on our block.
We started connecting with folks on other blocks. As things got more and more destabilized, our little ecovillage experiment grew. Eventually a bunch of us got together and started planting fruit and nut trees in our public parks. At first the village government resisted and ripped them out. But we kept doing it anyway and they finally gave up. Now our parks are food forests.
It became harder and harder to buy stuff. Books, toys, personal hygiene items, diapers, tools, clothes. It was all so expensive. But we were busy enough surviving and building our community, we didn’t care much about the unnecessary stuff anymore. Plus, we shared lots of things. We had a shed on the block with tools, garden and farm supplies, and a lawn mower for the few lawns we had left (we do need somewhere for kids to play soccer, after all).
Speaking of kids, want to hear something wild? Cell service became unreliable and phones were too expensive, so we all got emergency radios to communicate. Eventually the kids stopped texting, and now they’re all ham radio experts!
Everyone put together well-stocked first aid kits and emergency supplies of baby items, all for community use. We pooled some money to buy a few electric bikes to share. There was even a neighborhood toy chest. And, of course, many little free libraries.
And speaking of pooling resources, early on we made the big decision to come together as neighbors and fund several homes on the block - the ones easiest and most inexpensive to convert - to be fully electrified and equipped with solar panels and batteries. That meant they were ready to function off the grid and provide energy the next time we lost power. Which started to happen pretty regularly as the rolling blackouts and brownouts set in. Thank god we thought of that early. We were glad we had somewhere to refrigerate food and cool off.
This sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? We did these things over many years. It took time, for sure. We were lucky we had the resources to do it.
As global instability got serious and major economic contraction took hold, Illinois and other states finally began instituting some degrowth strategies. Those strategies spread quickly, even to the federal level, as they proved to ease the impact of a shrinking economy. It helped that we finally had a generation of politicians who were, mostly, willing to confront the crisis we were in.
We codified a right to repair and banned planned obsolescence, so companies couldn’t keep making items designed to stop functioning after a few years. And if they did break, anyone could repair them, not just a “certified” technician with proprietary parts. We put limits on certain types of advertising. No more credit card or Coke commercials. No more ads for United Airlines or Sandals Resorts. Most people couldn’t afford these things anymore, anyway. The tourism industry was collapsing. The advertising industry collapsed, too (good riddance).
The transition was really tough, but resulted in something really great. We cut the work week! As we shrunk the economy to be focused on socially useful goods and services, like medicine, care work, and renewable and circular technologies, there were fewer jobs. But instead of people being out of work, we instituted a 20 hour work week. So now we share the workload of one job, and have much more free time.
Plus, people got so angry about what was going on, we finally ate the rich!
Okay, we didn’t really eat them (though, things were dire enough for a while it might have come to that). We just taxed them into non-existence and redistributed that wealth to income and housing guarantees, free public transportation, and free healthcare. We also finally stopped subsidizing fossil fuels and pouring billions into defense, and that freed up even more money. Our lower salaries didn’t matter so much because we still had access to the things we needed.
For so many generations we had been convinced to live our lives based on the idea that the wealthy were entitled to keep hoarding private property, and the rest of us get paltry public services and scraps. But, we now subscribe to the idea of “private sufficiency, public luxury.” We’ve got what we need at home, but when we step out into our communities we’ve got access to a whole world of things: community farms, food forests, community-based arts and entertainment, public pools, public transportation. Some things we own. Most things we share.
It took a while to get here, though, which is why our neighborhoods had to come together to care for each other in the meantime. We took turns watching kids while parents worked, repaired and built things, hunted, planted, or harvested. We shared food, water, and shelter, and made lists of who had which skills so we knew who to turn to in an emergency. When my neighbor’s son fell off his bike and gashed his knee, he didn’t have to go to the hospital, which was overwhelmed with sick patients and malnourished climate refugees. Our neighborhood EMT stitched him right up.
So much about our world has changed, it’s hard to sum it all up. Daily life looks so different now. People are still suffering, especially in the Global South. Our village welcomes more refugees every day. But at least we’re prepared now. At least we’ve got our priorities straight. At least we’ve become a community again.
And what of the planet? How’s the ‘ol climate doing? I wish I had good news, but it’s still getting hotter. Huge parts of the world are uninhabitable now. So many species of plants, animals, and insects have vanished. We just assume they’re extinct, but we can’t keep up with cataloging them all. Weather is often extremely violent and unpredictable, crop failures are a constant threat, and communities that don’t have resources and contingency plans like ours still experience a ton of hardship.
We don’t really know where things will go from here. Some parts of the world that are lucky, like ours, are slowly starting to re-stabilize. But the future is uncertain. We are surrounded, always, by death. We make space for grief.
That said, believe it or not, we like it here. Life is slower. We pay more attention to the world around us now. We spend a lot more time with friends and family and less time working (even accounting for the increased manual labor we all do).
And you know what was great? We didn’t beg our elected officials for most of this. We didn’t wait for fossil fuel companies to be put out of business. We just got together and transformed our neighborhood and our lives. One block at a time. No permission needed.
We appreciate all that we have so much more than we ever did.
We are, all of us, more connected and more alive. Funny how emergencies can do that.