Surviving Collapse : Building Community toward Radical Sustainability

As environmental crises loom, Surviving Collapse makes an argument for radical changes in the ways in which people live to avoid a dystopian future. To foster readers'' imagination, Christina Ergas reveals real utopian stories that counter climate apocalypse narratives. Two eco-communities offer examples of alternative futures with small environmental footprints and more egalitarian social practices. They model solutions to the interconnected problems of rising social inequalities and environmental degradation. Each case engages in community-oriented practices, direct democracy, and ecological agricultural forms that attend to whole ecosystems. These practitioners recognize the value of whole biotic communities, human and nonhuman, and practice reciprocity.

As major environmental crises loom, Christina Ergas makes the argument in Surviving Collapse that one possible way forward is a radical sustainable development that turns the focus from monetary gain to social and ecological regeneration and transformation. Employing qualitative and cross-national comparative methods, Ergas examines two alternative, community-scale, socioecological models of development: the first is a grassroots urban ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest, United States, while the second is a government-subsidized, but cooperatively run, urban farm in Havana, Cuba. While neither are panaceas, they prioritize social and ecological efficiency and subsume economic rationality towards those ends. Featuring cases that not only allow us to synthesize their strengths but evaluate their weaknesses, Surviving Collapse reveals a multitude of varied paths toward reaching radical urban sustainability and empowers us all to imagine, and possibly build, more resilient futures.