[9/9] This is it. This small and very old book. My final destination on this trip but also the beginning of all things utopia. Tucked away in the rare books collection of the Huntington Library is this original copy of “Utopia”, written in the year 1516 by Sir Thomas More. In it, More describes the island nation of Utopia, a fictional society where everyone is equal, there’s no poverty, war or suffering, and people exist in harmony with the natural world. More named this place Utopia as a play on words: in Greek the words ou-topos mean “no place”, but the almost identical sounding eu-topos means the “good place”. Utopia was an ideal place, but also one that did not exist. From these pages emerged one of the most controversial, exciting, and radical concepts of the last 500+ years, setting off centuries of experimentation in pursuit of the ‘good society’. Those experiments were often responding to real ills of one’s time - for More it was an oppressive feudal system, for Soleri it was environmental degradation, for Disney it was our reliance on cars and inefficient modes of living. For my PhD, I continue to track how utopia manifests today in relation to the most pressing issue of *our* time: climate change. I didn’t start this PhD knowing this would be my path, but here I am and wow it has been one hell of a ride. Climatopias coming to you in 2023, if I ever get this dissertation done! Thanks for joining this 9-part journey with me + @katefleming + @eelpicnic, and sorry for being long-winded on a social media platform that is 100% not made for the kind of attention span my captions demand 🙃 (Last photo was taken in 2016, long before I started my PhD/knew anything about Utopia. I was at the Frick Art Collection in NYC with my aunt and she told me to stand next to a painting of some bloke in a similarly patterned cloak. Only years later while deep in this work did I realize that painting was of...Sir Thomas More!!!!!) #utopia #climatopia