History Gives Kristen R. Ghodsee Hope for the Future

I was riding the train home to Maine when I finished Kristen R. Ghodsee’s latest book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. I found myself teary-eyed and tingly with hope, an increasingly rare emotion in our age of pandemics, climate catastrophe, political paralysis, and widespread loneliness. I immediately reached out to Ghodsee, who just happened to be coming through Maine to visit friends. We met for coffee in Portland as a summer thunderstorm swept through the city. The following is a conversation about her fascinating, optimistic exploration into human progress. 

Nick Fuller Googins: Last summer was the warmest in human record. Maui burned, wildfire smoke consumed New York. It feels like there are so many reasons to despair, environmentally, economically, politically. So why write about utopia now?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Let’s face it, there have always been reasons to despair. Humanity had the Black Plague. We had slavery. We had serfdom. What makes us capable of surviving and thriving is our adaptability and flexibility. Our creative impulse. So it’s precisely because we’re in a terribly despairing moment right now that we need utopia more than ever.

NFG: Is that what you mean when you write about “the other 1%” as essential for our survival?

Exactly. The other 1% is the utopian 1%. The dreamers on the margins. They are often liminal people. They’re poets. They’ve been shamans. Medicine people. Every historical epoch and culture has