Month: July 2025

Thrutopian Fictions: Ways to a Better Future?

Writer Rod Raglin asks if Thrutopian fiction’s solutions-focused approaches to our climate predicaments address the real challenges. How to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices needed to get through the hardest times and towards a better future?

1,180 words: Estimated reading time = 4.5 minutes

Thrutopian is described as literature that avoids the pitfalls of both dystopian – paralyzing by depicting bleak futures – and utopian narratives – disconnected from the realities of current challenges. Instead, thrutopian stories are rooted in plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.

But do these thrutopian stories take into consideration economic realities, political expedience and an electorate that only considers their immediate needs? Do they address the reality of climate change that is already having a devastating effect on many parts of the planet?

Facing up to power …

For years, Canada has been struggling to meet the commitments it made in the 2016 Paris Agreement, involving reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The major policy initiative of federal government was to implement a carbon tax, a mechanism that puts a price on carbon emissions, aiming to encourage individuals and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. A charge is levied on fuels like gasoline, diesel, and natural gas, increasing their cost to consumers to incentivize fuel efficiency and the use of lower-carbon alternatives. 

In addition, it responded to public pressure about the environmental hazards of pipelines and introduced a strict environmental review process that discouraged further expansions.

That was until Donald Trump got elected and declared economic war on his neighbour.

In response to Trump’s tariffs and the impact on the Canadian economy, the first piece of legislation passed by newly elected Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was to eliminate the carbon tax. His rationale for axing the tax was to “make sure our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward … it’s focused on building this economy.”

Also being reviewed (and likely modified), is the government’s policy to have all Canadian car sales powered by a battery, fuel cell or plug-in hybrid system by 2035.

In addition, old plans to build other energy projects are being revived by giving provincial governments “the environmental authority to approve pipelines”.

Before you could say “what the frack!”, the BC provincial government had passed The Infrastructure Projects Act, giving itself broad powers to override existing environmental regulations and authorities and expedite approval of major projects, public and private.  “We’re not in the business of turning away investment in British Columbia,” said the premier of the province, David Eby.

Just to make sure no investment is being turned away, The Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions is undergoing a review of the policies and programs of CleanBC, the province’s climate strategy. 

How do environmental principles stack up against economic realities? They don’t.

Nearly three-quarters of Canadians supported getting rid of the carbon tax and the renewal of pipeline projects. Apparently, the threat of becoming the ’51st state’ far exceeds that of a climate catastrophe.

… and climate realities

Though wildfires are a natural part of the Canadian boreal forest life cycle, higher temperatures and drier conditions, caused by climate change have resulted in more frequent and severe fires and a longer fire season.

Showing Haze sun, a photograph by Rod Raglin
Haze sun. Photograph: Rod Raglin © 2025

This year’s fire season — the second worst since 2023 — has seen 3,092 wildfires that have consumed 5.17 million hectares (as of July 12, 2025). Officials with Public Safety Canada say the greatest fire danger is still to come and expected to be in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and southern British Columbia.

I live on the west coast, and regularly wildfire smoke drifts in from the interior, making the sun appear as an orange ball and creating a haze that burns the eyes and throat. On some days, the air quality in Vancouver is the worst on the planet, and we’re advised to close windows and stay indoors. For inland communities, it’s far worse.

While Canadians worry about how tariffs will impact our economy generally, and their livelihood specifically, it’s not an existential threat, like having breathable air.

Like alcoholics, who must hit bottom before they’re motivated to sober up, Canada appears to not be there yet – environmentally speaking. As the results of our last federal election proved, we are still a society that prefers to pay less to fill up the family SUV than contribute to the mitigation of global warming.

Writing towards a better future

In the midst of this ‘reset’ of environmental priorities has emerged thrutopian literature with its “plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.”

A quick look at a few of the titles suggests that other than the name there’s little difference between this genre and eco-fi or cli-fi – other designations that have emerged for environmental fiction since I began writing it in 2010.

The difference between my books and these newer ones appears to be issues of subtlety and practicality. In my novels, environmental issues are not in the forefront but presented only as a subplot that must eventually be addressed in practical ways for the protagonist to achieve their goal. The few thrutopian titles I’ve reviewed flip this around, presenting the environmental problem foremost and the characterisation secondary. In my opinion, this approach makes the narrative more didactic than entertaining – usually a turnoff for the reader, though time will tell.

And though this new fictional category attempts to present possible solutions to mitigate the environmental crisis, I saw no evidence it addresses how to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices necessary to implement them.

This was the issue I set out to answer when researching my novel, The Triumvirate – Love for Power, Love of Power, the Power of Love. What I discovered was it’s a lot harder to create a better future than envision one – human beings notwithstanding. Political and economic issues take precedence over the environment, and it is only when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”*, do we realize we’ve made the wrong choice.

I’m sure this new sub-genre will thrive. Who doesn’t want to choose hope over despair, the positive over the negative, delusion over reality? It’s easier to suggest that we still have time to prevent the worst-case scenario even while that scenario is playing out in front of us.

This is the reality of thousands of wildfire evacuees every Canadian summer (actually, fire season is now April through October, depending on where you live) as they idle away the hours in evacuation centres worrying if they’ll have a home, or for that matter, a community to return to. 

* ‘The Second Coming’ by W. B. Yeats

Find more

Rod writes about his novel The Triumvirate in his previous ClimateCultures post, Power, Love, Religion & Climate Fiction: Life Imitating Art, discussing how a story about power, love and religion finds echoes in our unfolding climate crisis and how we try to come to grips with a hostile and uncertain future.

You can read a Writers Rebel interview with novelist Manda Scott about her thrutopian novel, Any Human Power. And ClimateCultures member Denise Baden writes about her own approach to writing to a better future in Social-science fiction or Thrutopia?

Rod Raglin
Rod Raglin
A journalist, publisher of an online community newspaper, photographer and writer of novels, plays and short stories that address the human condition and serious environmental issues ...
Read More

Worlds in Progress: a Retreat to Feed the Seeds of Imagination

Poet and artist-book maker Sarah Hymas looks ahead to the Imaginarium ‘Worlds in Progress’ retreat she is running for a second year, an open, fluid, multi-layered spacetime for writers to sow and care for the seeds of imagination.

1,225 words: estimate reading time = 5 minutes

For fourteen years I ran a residential writing course, Write Like Nobody’s Watching, in South West France. After the pandemic, my enjoyment of it had changed. Even though I had, for the previous few years, been travelling down and back by train — a two day journey from Lancashire I loved — I found being part of a process that invited people to fly (no one else came overland) for five days of writing that had very little to do with the region where often people didn’t even leave the villa increasingly problematic.

The heat in the last couple of years compounded my unease. Some years it was too hot even at 10.00 am to cross the patio to reach our outdoor workshop. We had to set up under trees and I remember even having some of the one-to-ones in the swimming pool, it was hot. I needed more and more time to retreat from the retreat everyone else was taking. So I found someone else to run the week and stepped back.

Worlds in progress: creative building & building creativity

I didn’t want to stop facilitating the space for people (and often myself) to write and dream. I loved the process of building that spacetime. I just wanted to do it closer to home, in a place that was more accessible, less expensive. I wanted the place we were in to have more of an impact on those of us visiting it. I wanted more community, less alcohol (yes, my 40-year-old self, I’m looking at you), more stillness. So when I was on a residency with Settle Stories in January 2024 in an old mansion in Giggleswick, working on their Storyful Way, I knew I’d found the place I wanted to trial a new Imaginarium retreat. One that would be more collaborative in its approach, inviting a creative investment from those coming to help build the space more explicitly than simply participating in a week of writing workshops.

I also knew I didn’t want to run it solo. Increasingly, I want to work with others, to share the stresses and joys of any project. Someone to plan with. Someone to talk candidly to. I had already run an Ancestral Imaginarium with Katherine Zeserson and knew she had experience of running residential retreats so she was the obvious choice. As well as experienced, Katherine is joyful, intuitive, creatively curious and energetic. We came up with the name — Worlds in Progress — to capture our ambition for the week to be an open fluid space of multi-layered worlds: the worlds of our transient community; the worlds we were all writing; and the worlds we would return to after sharing the week — the worlds that were often so tricky for so many of us — the worlds we’d like to nudge into different directions.

Sunrise. Photo: Sarah Hymas © 2025

Our first Worlds in Progress Retreat ran in January 2025 with ten other people who work, create and play with text somehow. We offered sitting, singing and flexing every morning, for those who wanted. We suggested loose mealtimes to suit however everyone liked to eat — sorting ourselves out for breakfast and lunch — and to fit around whatever was the occupation for people’s days. We invited people to share their creative practice during playshops later in some of the afternoons. These were attended by maybe two thirds of the group, those who wanted a break from their own head, or wanted to explore what they were writing in a different way, or who fancied some playtime. We offered one-to-ones to anyone who wanted to chat about anything they wanted. We had cooking teams for the evening veggie meal and lingered long over them with chat and laughter that often took someone (or two or three) out into the January nights for further exploration of our wider world in progess. We were blessed with an astonishing week of snow and ice (far, far from the temperatures of the last year I was working in France when it reached 55° in the sun).

Ingleborough. Photo: Sarah Hymas © 2025

We wrote and researched. Even I wrote for a couple of hours every afternoon, beginning a new long-form piece that had been cooking in the recesses of my imagination for a while. We made new friends. We found commonalities. We were given space, we gave space. We learnt new words, new ideas, and felt safe enough to share ignorances, unknowns, uncertainties and silly things. In short, we did — for those five days — construct a world we wanted to inhabit and nourish and sustain.

Nurturing the seeds of imagination

Some people came with a sense of fraudulence. The original call out was for ‘text-based artists’ — for anyone whose creative practice worked with text in any form — and the word ‘artist’ triggered people’s doubt they were one — who were they to call themselves such? But the artistry that was seeded and flowered and continues to be shared from that week is clear to me. The careful crafting of love and generosity, the sharing, the giving and receiving of intention, and the relishing of beauty and preciousness in life. That confidence was felt across the board, it seemed. It was such a delight that everything came together to make this new form of Imaginarium such a blissful retreat experience.

It takes time for seeds to germinate. The seeds of our imagination don’t come in packets that explain when or where to sow and how long they’ll take to flower. The seeds of our imagination need various soils and weather conditions to nourish them. Our intuition knows these conditions. And perhaps these seeds aren’t too particular or tender. Perhaps they are. Nothing can tell us how long until harvest. We need to water these seeds with faith (by which I mean the fertile mix of trust and confidence), and a selective choice of positive actions (with a sprinkle of learnings).

And perhaps most importantly we need not to over-tend, not insist on a timeframe. Nor over focus, but to encourage with a light touch, accepting other shoots may grow in the soil we’re feeding, that rogue seeds are already in there. All life begins in the dark. The unexpected is inevitable. As a creative spirit it’s easiest to welcome whatever appears and ask: Who are you? How can I help you grow? How can you help my growth? In what world can we thrive?

Seeds of imagination: showing a germinating seed. Photo by Sarah Hymas.
Germination. Photo: Sarah Haymas © 2025

If you’d like to know about the next Worlds In Progress Retreat that’s happening in January 2026, then head over to this page. We ask for ‘Expressions of Interest’ (by the end of July) to be sure that what you’re wanting is what we’re offering.

Find more

The January 2026 Worlds in Progress retreat will take place at Woodlands, near Giggleswick, North Yorkshire. You can read about The Storyful Way, the project with Settle Stories that Sarah worked on in residency at Woodlands.

In her previous ClimateCultures post, On a Writer’s Imaginarium, Sarah reflects on the various forms of imaginarium she has created over the years as online or offline cross-genre shared spaces to support creative writing.

Sarah Hymas
Sarah Hymas
A poet, performer and artistbook maker focusing on the sea, its ecosystems and its interdependence with people, and the impacts of climate change and pollution.
Read More