Inspiring One Another

A view of Earth taken by an Artemis II crew member through the window of the Orion spacecraft, April 4, 2026. Photo by NASA/Handout via Reuters

WELCOME TO THRUTOPIA recently celebrated its first anniversary. The project was born from our shared belief that literature is a critical resource as we try to navigate our way through a period of existential crises.

Sharing these works is our way to build a community of dreamers, creators, changemakers, and world builders. We appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read and subscribe. We hope that our efforts have inspired others to create and share their work.

The project has been a major source of inspiration for those of us involved. Sometimes, that inspiration is as simple as the energy that comes from being in community with like-minded souls. Other times it is much more concrete, as this month’s post demonstrates.

It’s my pleasure to share two pieces, the first an essay, the second a poem inspired by that essay, from two of the creators who have worked hard to sustain Welcome to Thrutopia.

Enjoy

Joe Tankersley

By Elisa Rathje

what if we regarded insecticide, herbicide, pesticide through the ethical lens we apply to homicide? everything we need to know is in the name. in a moment when biodiversity loss is as much an existential threat as its flashier cousin, carbon emissions, part of our paradigm shift into a life-affirming, reciprocal, needs-based economy and all that that affects throughout the biome, is to recognise in our very language and laws, in the small work of living in a place, where we are committing crimes against life.

if this sounds extreme, perhaps it is because the shift that must happen is once again deeply patterned in viewing our ecologies and economies as necessarily competitive, not collaborative. if, for a plant, a body, to be healthy it must have beaten away competition until it is alone and all there is, a monoculture, then success is indeed murder.

we see this thinking in antibiotic overuse, in mono-crops for miles, in fear of contamination and infection. yet if we see instead that none of us is one but that each of us hold billions within us, living cultures living within living cultures, microbially balancing all the time, in infinite exchange, well.

if we see that life on our skin and in our gut and on our leaves and in our soil and drunk up, inhaled, exhaled on the wind, it is all an enormous collaboration of life-giving communities and processes, well.

then our diversity is our resilience.

then like my body the garden is a neighbourhood, a community. our response to crisis need not be anti-biotic but pro-biotic. imbibing not poisons but wild fermentations, fermenting change.

then it is resistance, reinvention, to trust in the resilience of a system we are but a part of. to pause the impulse to kill off what threatens the houseplant, the garden bed, the farm crop, and instead to observe what the system needs. if our needs are met, does our well-being thrive? it seems like that is a pattern we could live by.

in our thriving we need not cause the destruction of all else. it is in mutual thriving that we reculture a world that we can all live in.

By Ana Salote

Pesticide, insecticide,
herbicide, homicide,
ecoside, femicide,
youcide, mecide, wecide
Your side, my side,
war and peace side,
flower and beecide,
right side, left side,
life’s side, death’s side
Okay Earth: On which side is wisdom?
Mother answers: A sphere has no sides.