On the one hand, [Buckminster] Fuller’s philosophy of change seems too hopeful now; it’s fair to wonder whether we have time for it. But on the other hand, his metaphor of the trim tab isn’t just about how small actions can catalyze big effects. For Fuller, the idea of the trim tab was about a fundamental change of self, not just behavior — not acting like a trim tab, but being a trim tab. In other words, if one always sees oneself as the low pressure on a big system, one’s effects can be profound. Thinking of this as Fuller did, I realize that, yes, our individual choices still matter, even in light of half a century more of climate change than he experienced, because they begin to remake who we are and how we live.

… utopia necessarily needs to walk hand in hand with the bleakness of our current plight. Because utopian thinking is not about escapism, it is not naive and it is not blind to how bad things actually are. It is the other interlocutor in dialectical opposition to the abyss we’re on the precipice of and without it, we’d be lost.