As If We Were Staying: How We Build a Flourishing Future in a World That’s Falling Apart

Summary

Inspired by his experience co-founding Solar Punk Farms and studying the resilience of living systems, environmentalist Spencer R. Scott helps us connect to a more hopeful way of life.
In an age of social fragmentation and ecological emergency, many of us feel a profound disconnect—from the land, from our communities, and even from our own values. How do we find the hope and determination to live on this planet as if we were staying?
Inspired by the solarpunk movement’s insistence that life must come before profit, biologist and environmentalist Spencer R. Scott weaves memoir and scientific inquiry to chronicle his journey from biotech research to the co-founding of Solar Punk Farms, a queer regenerative farm and educational center rooted in place. Drawing on his background in biology, Scott reframes capitalism as an environment many of us have unconsciously adapted to in order to survive—and documents what it means to step out of that protected interior and re-enter ecological reality. Re-adapting to reality, he finds, is both life-affirming and destabilizing. Community and collective action emerge not as ideals, but as the conditions that make survival—and joy—beyond capitalism possible.
Bridging scientific understanding and lived experience with optimism and lyricism, As If We Were Staying is an invitation to meet our precarious reality together and begin building futures worth inhabiting.