Using Futurist Tools to Re-Envision the Real World
Three years ago, amidst the pandemic, we moved to a new neighborhood that happens to be down the street from a small college campus. In 2020, the college shut down–like not lockdown shut down, but went under and left its grand facilities and manicured lawns in place. The impending closure was announced in early 2020 before the first lockdowns, so it wasn’t a cause of the pandemic. But for the better part of those three years, the space that once held so many dreams of academic endeavors was in limbo. Eventually it was sold to the University of Oregon to serve as their Portland campus, however for my entire time in the neighborhood, I’ve walked my dog and kid through the student-less grounds and it became the focus of my apocalyptic imaginations.
Before the fate of the campus was determined, I’d peek inside the gleaming windows of the library at the center of the quad. Books still lined the shelves and there was a table set at the entrance, ironed tablecloth and all with a plastic stand and a printed sheet inside that read “Student Visitor Day.” As I did my peeking, my imagination would turn to a completely different vision, that of the building twenty, thirty, forty years from now. Abandoned for decades, rain leaking through the roof, the blocky library lounge chairs torn faded and strewn about along the musty, soggy carpet. The floor-to-ceiling windows would be broken and graffiti-stained. As I turned around to look at the manicured grass of the quad in front of the library, I’d picture shoulder-high grass and weeds, the concrete path would be barely visible and the other buildings overgrown with snaking vines.
Britt Wray found folks with similar visions as mine during her research for her amazing book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She noted that climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar called this “climate vision.” Wray described scenarios of people’s climate anxiety manifesting in actual visions of apocalyptic climate disasters–tornadoes zooming in their direction, rising flood waters happening in the street they’re standing in. This is kind of what I was doing, although perhaps more accurately calling it “apocalypse vision.” It’s probably something that happens to a lot of “preppers,” something that can be both motivating and terrifying.
These apocalyptic visions still come to me, but they came more often before I started this project in earnest. Before I started thinking more actively about hopeful scenarios. That was my goal for this project is to actively find my way out of the climate grief and to find hope for the future while also working to create a better future. And some time over the last year, those visions shifted.
Especially before U of O bought the campus, there was a lot of speculation amongst the neighbors about what it could be. It was kind of a feeling of excitement and held a sense of a blank canvas. Of course, the obvious option would be another college would buy it. That’s what it was built for. But what if it could be different?
What I re-envisioned at first was the grass, that huge expanse of water-sucking turf. Couldn’t it be more useful than a place for a hypothetical student to sit down on a rare sunny day in the spring or fall? What about a community garden? What about rows of tomatoes and lettuce and squash and all of the things that could serve the greater community? And then those dorms next door. Couldn’t those be turned into communal housing? Couldn’t the library serve as more than a place of study and be more of a space of community and connection?
As I asked these questions–sometimes aloud in conversation with folks and sometimes in my head as we walked through–an idea started to grow. This could actually be one of those transformed spaces that represents the kind of utopia we need in the future. Higher education has, as long as it has existed, been a mechanism of inequity–long keeping out marginalized people and still being far more expensive for people without generational wealth. Also, as the climate changes and society along with it, it seems like one of the first things that could fall as the world changes. So what if we could recreate it here and now? What if we could turn something representative of the past into something that is for a better future?
Alas, that is not what the future holds for that specific space. Come this fall, students will again be on that campus. I’ll admit, it’s at least nice to know the place will be used again. And I wasn’t expecting the vision of the college as a center for cooperative living to actually come to pass. But it’s an incredibly useful tool to reimagine what the future can be for which I finally have some language for.
Writer, teacher, and attorney, Tyrese Coleman helped put these visions of mine into writerly terms in a class she taught early this spring for an organization I co-founded for writer moms, Scribente Maternum. She introduced the term speculative nonfiction. Yes, speculative NONfiction which is a lesser-known tool of writing. Speculative fiction, however, is a well-known genre that is kind of an umbrella for science fiction, fantasy, and other types of literary fiction with some fantastical elements. I didn’t even know or think of speculative nonfiction as a thing before Tyrese introduced it.
“Speculative nonfiction is writing in which actual or verifiable material is not at war with material invented, extrapolated, speculated, or fantasized,” she told us in the course. “This is the futurist kind of person.”
This is exactly what I was doing in this project was channeling the futurism into the way I saw the project and what I was doing. Tyrese continued, “Invention does not negate actuality, but it expands the truth and its uses.”
Tyrese putting what I was already doing into literary terms like this was kind of mindblowing for me. Now, one need not see something in literary terms in order for it to be true for you or for it to be valuable, of course. But I process the world through my writing. It’s why I write this newsletter every week because it’s the way I’m able to bring together my thoughts in one place. So to view this act of reclaiming a narrative of a physical space and putting it into those terms felt like pieces of a puzzle coming together.
As such, I’m now seeing my work through the lens of speculative nonfiction. Writing is a really useful tool to reshape an existing place in your mind. I’ve moved into creating some AI images through Midjourney to help make that vision even more real in my mind.
Now I see the work of environmental justice activists and advocates making real the things that they want to see in the world as speculative nonfiction. And that abandoned college campus, that is my first act of speculative nonfiction and not the last.
Question for you all: is there something like that college campus that brings out your imagination about what the future could hold?