“I explored what the future could be like if we let everything fall apart. I wanted to take things a little farther, to see how people put things back together again”Janet McNaughton, St. John’s, NL
Newfoundland author Janet McNaughton’s speculative fiction “challenges readers to think about the kind of future they want to create for those who come after us”[1]. Her award-winning novel The Raintree Rebellion, set in 2370, follows 18-year-old Blake Raintree, who has been adopted into a new family after surviving a devastating event known as the technocaust. Blake accompanies her adoptive mother, Erica, to Toronto, where Erica serves on the Justice Council tasked with addressing the aftermath of the technocaust. While in Toronto, Blake embarks on a journey of self-discovery, forgiveness, and the quest for belonging.
Published in 2006, this more hopeful sequel of her dystopian novel from 2000—The Secret Under My Skin—emphasizes the importance of collective action and solidarity. Cooperation between diverse groups enables communal learning, environmental stewardship, and social justice. In The Raintree Rebellion McNaughton imagines and demonstrates how meaningful changes towards a hopeful, equitable, just and sustainable future are possible, even if only far into the future and after hard work.
Current trends of groupthink, populism, and nationalism threaten the collaborative progress made in recent decades towards a more inclusive, socially just, equitable, diverse and sustainable future. Rather than uniting us based on what we share as human beings these trends tear us apart based on (perceived) differences. They ignore common challenges like climate change, economic inequality, and cost-of-living crises that require collaborative and creative approaches to problem-solving.
On the other hand, communal values, reciprocal community building, and the need for “leadership on the commons”[2]have contributed to the recent revival of the cooperative movement in many regions of the world, including Newfoundland and Labrador[3]. For example, cooperative values and principles have guided us in co-creating and co-developing Killick Coast North Seniors Co-operative and other co-ops in rural Newfoundland[4]. The fact that cooperatives and communal values are also featured by several authors in award-winning novels about the future suggests that many readers and writers imagine and hope for a more collaborative and collective future.
Hope for the future indeed transpires at the end of McNaughton’s The Raintree Rebellion. The novel ends with protagonist Blake Raintree’s final statement as victim of the technocaust in front of the Justice Council: “The past is over. I have more important things to say, about what I’ve learned since I came here, about letting go of hate.” Blake takes “a deep breath and free-fall into the future”.
[1] Janet McNaughton in https://www.janetmcnaughton.ca/janet-mcnaughton-books/raintree-rebellion.
[2] Singh, D. P.; Thompson, R. J.; Curran, K. A. (2021). Reimagining Leadership on the Commons. Shifting the Paradigm for a More Ethical, Equitable, and Just World. Leeds, UK: Emerald Publishing. See also the influential book by the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009: Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[3] In 2024 seven new co-operatives have been added to the eightyfive co-operatives registered provincially (equalling a growth of more than 8%); see https://nlfc.coop/about/history/ and https://cado.eservices.gov.nl.ca/Company/CoopMain.aspx.
[4] see https://kcnseniors.coop, https://killickecovillage.ca, and https://sunrisefuneral.coop for the co-operatives I have been involved in co-creating. I have described the development and implementation of KCN Seniors Co-op and Killick Ecovillage Co-op in more detail in: Mengel, T. (in print). From Concept to Implementation—Co-operative Community Designs for the future. In: Creativity Matters, Issue 3 (in print). Atlantic Centre For Creativity.
