Books

I would search for non-fiction Solarpunk. Check out The day the world stops shopping by J.B. MacKinnon or Sixty Harvests Left by Philip Lymbery or The Carbon Almanac: It's Not Too Late or The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World by David R Boyd or Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettesse

Also join us on slrpnk.net!

Braiding Sweetgrass - great all around read

The Most Dangerous Book - FASCINATING and really inspiring, one of the most important stories of resistance in the 20th century in my opinion.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff - Podcast about inspiring badasses from history that don't get enough attention, Magpie the host is awesome and each episode usually has good nonfiction recommendations for reading on the subject!

edit I misread thought this was about historical nonfiction, I'll have to think but there are definitely lots of nonfiction books that talk about how the are genuine reasons to be hopeful about our future, because the things that holding us back aren't what is physically impossible or not...

For fiction, either robot and monk or the wayfarer chronicles by Becky Chambers.

This might seem like the opposite of what you asked, but it might just help you: "Burnout - the experience of political defeat" by Hannah Proctor. We all know the cycle: capitalism/imperialism/patriarchy causes a crisis-->raised consciousness-->revolutionary action-->partial gains-->violent reaction-->temporary stability-->new crisis It will only end with the worldwide victory of the revolution. As long, as the cycle goes on, we will keep experiencing both victories and defeats. Of course this can be tiring and it can lead to burnout, especially for very active comrades like yourself. The book is about acknowledging that, collecting accounts of different kinds of defeat and about "anti adaptive healing". But only you can decide, if it would be too triggering right now to read it.

Here's are some quotes from the book:

I started this book with the conviction that it was important to acknowledge the emotional toll of political defeat. I wrote this book because I felt suspicious of rhetorical appeals to hope that failed to account for the difficult emotional realities of political defeat. I finished this book reminded that experiences of political struggle can also change people positively and in lasting ways.

As winter turned into spring, I received a message saying there was an immigration raid happening near my flat in Glasgow. I went with my flatmate to Kenmure Street where people were milling around an immigration enforcement van surrounded by cops. Someone was underneath the van to stop it driving off, we were told, with the two detainees inside. Over the course of the next few hours the crowds grew. I emailed to cancel my psychoanalysis session and stayed on the street. I saw people I hadn’t seen for months due to Covid-19 lockdowns and met others for the first time. Strangers shared water and snacks. Someone let me into their flat to use their bathroom. It seemed as if the cops were about to kettle the crowd or charge into it at any minute. Rumours and photos of the cops’ activity on neighbouring streets circulated. As more and more people arrived, the atmosphere grew thick. We waited. We remained together. We gossiped. We shouted: ‘These are our neighbours, let them go!’ After hours on the street, the rumour rippled around that the people in the van would be released. Shortly afterwards, they were. They emerged waving. In that moment, when the crowd erupted and the row of cops shrunk back, it was as if the darkness of all the previous months spent in isolation had suddenly lifted. Three days later we took to the streets again to protest Israeli air raids on Gaza City.

Asked in a 2016 interview to respond to Raymond Williams’ dictum that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, Mike Davis rejected the premise that it is necessary to have hope in order to fight to overthrow capitalism. In this book I have tried to make the case that the damaging psychological consequences of engaging in that fight should be acknowledged and can be mitigated. But the fight will not be painless, requiring something like despair of the intellect, hope of the will. Davis can have the final word:

‘Hope’ is not a scientific category. Nor is it a necessary obligation in polemical writing … I manifestly do believe that we have arrived at a ‘final conflict’ that will decide the survival of a large part of poor humanity over the next half century. Against this future we must fight like the Red Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely

I hope you can give yourself permission to take time and space to heal, you deserve it. Let me close with these words by Huey Newton:

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.

I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism.

The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact.

Humankind by Rutger Bregman is really positive

Becky Chambers brand of cozy SciFi might be up your alley

Same here, man!

I can start advising for Factfulness: a book showing how our perception of geographical reality is lagging behind and quite some elements are better than we recover them to be. It starts being a bit old itself, unfortunately, since it’s from 2018, but it was a pleasurable and uplifting read.

Blueprint for a Revolution by Matthew Miller is a surprisingly hopeful recipe for how to make change.

Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki

Inheritors of the Earth by Chris D Thomas

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/453652/not-the-end-of-the-world-by-ritchie-hannah/9781529931242

I find Simard pleasant to read. When the Forest Breathes is her most recent afaik.

Against the Machine by Kingsnorth is top of my to-read pile. From the blurbs and leafing through it it seems to end on a fairly positive note.

Those hopeful ends they like to add to non fiction books age really badly. After a few years its basically a list of things that either fizzled out or got coopted or crushed by the system. At the end i just feel worse than if they didnt try to end on a positive note.

Have you already heard the good word about dialectic materialism? I find hope in historical materialism. Yes, I realize, I sounded like a cultist right now, but joking aside, understanding the historical process helps a lot. It's all a process and capitalism definitely won't last forever. Anyway: Luna Nguyen has put in a lot of work to translate and add detailed comments and illustrations to "Curriculum of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism Part 1 - The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism" and "Part 2 - Historical Materialism" and is currently working on part 3. These are current, in use, up to date course books that students in Vietnam use to learn about this philosophy and science. The ebooks are free on the website I linked. I bought both of them and have already used the illustrations to explain dialectics in my book club.

It's not a concrete hopeful vision of what the future will definitely look like, because that would be antithetical to dialectics. Theory and praxis feed off each other and we can only find out by going there. But thinking dialecticaly really does help:

• it's not ultimate defeat, it's just the current moment. The negation is only ever partial and will itself be negated, a seed is carried on, that will bloom.

• It's not all or nothing, change is gradual until it suddenly happens all at once (quantity to quality)

• contradictions and crisis fuel growing class consciousness and the coming revolution. You don't need hope to scientifically understand, that the inevitable contradictions of capitalism are unstable

• your actions matter, they inspire people around you and inform our understanding (unity of theory and praxis)

You're just the "feels good" type of progressive.

Hope for the future is built from mud, tears, sweat, and blood.