Goodbye dystopia. Hello 'thrutopia' | CBC Climate Change News

Welcome to our weekly newsletter where we highlight environmental trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world.

Jennifer here. I’ve been reading a lot of climate fiction lately and I’m getting really interested in a new sub-genre that falls under the ‘cli-fi’ banner. It’s called ‘thrutopia.’

This week:

• Goodbye dystopia. Hello ‘thrutopia’
• The Big Picture: A new solar-powered EV hits the ice
• Canada updated its plant hardiness map — and growers are seeing their options bloom

Can ‘thrutopian’ stories help us realize a better climate future?

Picture a water-starved Los Angeles in 2077. Most of the mansions in the hills have burned down. Instead, people live in sustainable collectives in homes built with local materials. The Pacific Ocean level has long since risen to cover Santa Monica and almost no one drives anymore, but electric buses and trams cover the city.

In this climate-adapted world, an Indian American family uses new technology and a community garden to keep traditional cuisine alive. And even though commercial flights to India are almost impossible under the new flight permit system, they still manage to pass down a love of culture and of kathak dance to the younger generation.

That’s the plot of  L.A.-based writer Sanjana Sekhar’s short story, Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography, which features in Grist’s collection of climate fiction. Sekhar’s story belongs to a new genre of storytelling called “thrutopia” that imagines a pathway through the worst impacts of the climate crisis and describes what a worthwhile life on the other side might actually look and feel like.

She hopes her story challenges people to think about not only what they might lose to the climate crisis, but also what they might work to protect.

“We’re so familiar with this idea of utopia where everything is perfect and dystopia where everything sucks. But thrutopia is something else altogether. I think it’s written with the intention of helping us survive and thrive.”

Rupert Read coined the term in a 2017 piece for the Huffington Post called Why Neither Dystopias Nor Utopias Are Enough To Get Us Through The Climate Crisis, And How A ‘Thrutopia’ Could Be. 

Read, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia in England, argues the time has passed for rosy utopian visions of the future where the climate crisis gets fixed and everything goes back to normal. But he says apocalyptic climate stories don’t help much either.

What’s so bad about dystopia?

Sekhar says dystopian stories can be paralysing because they make readers and audiences feel a sense of doom or helplessness. Utopian stories, meanwhile, are subjective and might offer hope to only a certain group of people.

“Right now, we’re living in the utopia of a white, male billionaire and I’m not having a great time,” she said.

“With thrutopia … it’s about collective thriving. How do we get there through the messiness of figuring it out together?”

More examples of ‘thrutopia’

There are earlier instances of fiction with thrutopian tones. Sekhar points to a1993 sci-fi classic — Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. It’s set in a climate change-afflicted California of 2024 where water and food are scarce and expensive commodities. A few walled communities attempt to keep order and family life alive, but beyond their walls a lawless and violent survival state is emerging. The story follows a young woman trying to forge a middle path between the limitations of the old way of life and the growing chaos of the outside world.

Even though Butler’s novel predates the term, Sekhar says it has thrutopian elements because it leans on the ideas of human empathy and collective action to offer solutions amid a near-dystopian society. 

She also recommends a 2022 novel, Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. The book is formatted as a collection of fictional interviews with the ordinary people who, by the 2070s, have managed to found a completely new type of society following climate and governmental collapse. This new world includes collective climate action but also an elevator to space, a three-hour work day and an army run by a council of grandmothers.

Thrutopia is coming to the screen

This genre is not only for books. In the U.K., Lucy Stone founded Climate Spring, an organization that provides funding and advice to writers and producers. Stone says the goal is to get more good quality climate storytelling into entertainment media to help audiences imagine alternatives to our current system.

“The fossil fuel industry has kind of used popular culture and storytelling to seed that idea that … fossil fuels are the backbone of the economy,” she said. “And if you take it away, our quality of life is going to decline. And of course, the opposite is now the case. The more we’re locked into fossil fuels, the worse our lives and our futures are going to be.” 

Climate Spring is supporting production of more than 100 films and TV shows she hopes will make it onto screens in the U.K. and elsewhere. 

One of them is an animated short film called Tuk Tuk by Neeraja Raj, named after the ubiquitous petrol-powered vehicles used as taxis across India. The film imagines a futuristic “solarpunk” Mumbai where energy has shifted to renewable sources and a family is trying to revolutionize transportation by building an electric tuk-tuk.

There are, of course, some challenges when it comes to doing speculative climate fiction well. Stone says writers need to avoid sounding preachy or making climate change the exclusive focus of their stories, both of which can make audiences tune out.

“A really beautiful love story set in a thrutopian world that shows the world we’re trying to head towards might be even more impactful and powerful than a story set now where characters are talking about the climate crisis.”

Despite the challenges, Stone says  it’s worth the effort to tell quality climate stories about the future of this planet because stories can inspire real world change.

“We know a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders point to and talk about science fiction and how films and stories that they’ve loved have inspired them to then create that world in real life.

“We know that’s the power of storytelling. It prefigures where we need to be as a society.”

— Jennifer Wilson

Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here. 

Check out our podcast and radio show.  In our latest episode: Twelve-year-old Kiké Dueck once had such bad climate anxiety that they didn’t want to eat or go to school. But then they found a solution. Kiké got involved in lobbying Regina city hall for greener transit and even joined a legal case to try to stop Saskatchewan’s support of coal plants. Kiké is not the only child taking the government to task — and to court. In fact, Kiké is part of a group led by What On Earth’s mental health columnist, Abhay Singh Sachal, that teaches young people how to understand their emotions about climate change and channel them into organized activism and community action.

What On Earth drops new podcast episodes every Wednesday and Saturday. You can find them on your favourite podcast app or on demand at CBC Listen. The radio show airs Sundays at 11 a.m., 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Check the CBC News Climate Dashboard for live updates on record-breaking weather and current conditions across the country. Set your location to find out how today’s temperatures compare to historical trends. 

Reader feedback

Michael Cox responded to Nicole Mortillaro’s story last week on what to look for in a used EV: “The story … states if a battery is near 70 per cent [the expert wouldn’t recommend buying it], which seems odd: either the writer meant ‘below 70 per cent’ or the quote is wrong and ought to be ‘if 70 per cent or better I would buy it.’ I don’t know the facts but it reads very odd.” That’s a good point. Johnny Beckett, an EV expert and co-founder of EV Network, who was interviewed for the original story, said in a followup email, “I would not recommend buying used below 80 per cent. If the seller … cannot provide an accurate [state of health] measurement of 80 per cent plus, I would pass.”

Another reader, Dan, wondered about used EVs that have been in an accident. Beckett said that as with any other automobile purchases, you should get a Carfax report, which provides a history on a vehicle, including accidents. “Any customer should be avoiding any vehicle that has any disclosed structural damage.”

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca (and send photos there too!)

The Big Picture: A new solar-powered EV hits the ice

This is a photo of the new blue Electric Ice Explorer, a pilot project launched this week by U.S.-based tour operator Pursuit Attractions and Hospitality in Jasper National Park in Alberta. The all-terrain vehicle is designed to take tourists on the Columbia Icefield Adventure on the Athabasca Glacier, alongside 20 similar red diesel-powered vehicles.

The roof of the electric version is topped with solar panels. They’re “bifacial,” meaning that they can collect sunlight on both sides — from both the sun overhead and the sunlight reflecting off the glacier. The unique EV was built by Manitoba-based Noble Northern.

Because the alpine location is off-grid, the vehicle will get all its power from the solar panels and regenerative braking as it moves downhill. It’s designed to offer six 90-minute tours per day for four days, then charge for three days before coming back into service. 

Pursuit says the EV will provide a quieter ride than its diesel counterparts, “allowing guests to be more present with the landscape around them.”

Unfortunately, tourists won’t be able to specifically choose to book this particular vehicle — if they want to ride it, they just need to be lucky. 

— Emily Chung

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• The next UN climate report will not include the worst-case scenario future in previous reports, known as RCP 8.5. U.S. President Donald Trump said that was an admission by the UN that it was wrong about climate change. Here’s what climate scientists say it really means.

Canada’s updated its plant hardiness map — and growers are seeing their options bloom

The Victoria Day long weekend is widely considered the start of the gardening season, and this year, gardeners have new information about which new types of plants might survive outdoors in their area.

“The main reason for that is the climate is changing,” said John Pedlar, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.

Pedlar is one of the researchers who recently updated Canada’s “plant hardiness zone map” for the first time in a decade.

It’s a tool used by nurseries and everyday gardeners to determine which plants are most likely to survive in a particular climate. 

The data comes in the form of a map and factors in everything from rainfall to winter temperatures and wind conditions.

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) released the updated data last July.

Plant hardiness zones are areas that largely have “similar climate conditions,” Pedlar said. They range from a stark 0A, where practically nothing grows, to the lush 9A. 

“Since plant survival and climate are so closely intertwined, it stands to reason those areas also have fairly similar plant composition as well,” he said.

While the biggest changes to the map were in Western Canada, places like Almonte in eastern Ontario increased by a full zone.

Other growing areas around communities like Kemptville and Smiths Falls rose by half a zone.

That means gardeners may now be able to grow cherries, pears and even some varieties of apricots that previously wouldn’t have survived, Pedlar said.

Ottawa and Kingston did not change, remaining in Zone 5A.

Gardeners, greenhouses adjusting

At Robert Plante Greenhouses in east Ottawa, inventory has had to be updated regularly to keep up with the changing climate.

“There are more and more types of plants that you can plant for sure in our area,” said manager Colin Matassa.

Matassa said staff are trained to know which plants will work in which zones, but it’s also easy for gardeners to figure it out themselves.

“In all our perennials, shrubs and trees, they all have information tags on them. It’ll say the zone on the back, whether it’s Zone 5, Zone 4 or Zone 3.”

The May long weekend, Matassa said, is typically the greenhouse’s busiest week.

Christine Dobson of Ottawa was among the dozens out perusing their selection Sunday, shopping for planters and perennials after recently redesigning her family’s yard.

“We wanted to find a balance between the look that we were aiming for … but also being true to the climate that we live in.”

While updated hardiness zones create opportunities for gardeners to experiment, Pedlar said it also reflects broader climate change.

For now, the changes to the map remain minimal.

“It doesn’t mean Ontario is suddenly going to start growing bananas.”

— Cameron Mahler

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, criticisms or story tips, please send them to whatonearth@cbc.ca.

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Editors: Emily Chung | Logo design: Sködt McNalty