It’s hard to write about the future — but that can’t stop us

In 2014, Ursula Le Guin gave a speech at the National Book Awards:

“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.”

As a journalist, it’s easy to write about what’s not working. I — and you too probably — could write ten books on all that isn’t working. Unfettered capitalism and immoral lobbyists and tax breaks for billionaires and centuries of sexism and racism and classism festering in every aspect of our world.

But what would work? What would a more just society look like? If you and I put our brains together, could we come up with a not totally shitty version of capitalism? I often write about the need for a more sustainable future in order to avoid the worst of the climate crisis…but what would that sustainable future look like? Sometimes when I see the lines of cars sitting still on the freeway or watch a server clear plates still full of food from a restaurant table, I realize that every aspect of our lives is tied into an entitlement for convenience and an…