As If We Were Staying: How We Build a Flourishing Future in a World That’s Falling Apart

Inspired by his experience starting Solar Punk Farms and studying the resilience of living systems, biologist Spencer R. Scott helps us envision our collective future in a more hopeful way.

In an age of ecological emergency and social breakdown, how do we find the hope and determination to live on this planet as if we were staying?

Inspired by the solarpunk movement’s insistence that our vision of the future must be galvanizing, biologist and environmentalist Spencer R. Scott chronicles his journey from biotech research to the co-founding of the queer regenerative community and education hub, Solar Punk Farms. Weaving memoir and scientific inquiry, Scott reframes capitalism as an environment we’ve unconsciously adapted to in order to survive and documents the internal and external process of re-adapting to the realities of our ecological world. Only through community and collective action, he finds, can we make survival—and joy—beyond capitalism possible.

Bridging science and personal experience with optimism and lyricism, As If We Were Staying is an invitation to meet our precarious reality together and begin building a future worth inhabiting.