Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Twenty-Five: Library Economies and Third Spaces
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
When Ursula K. Le Guin passed in 2018, the world lost a luminary. Artist Dylan Meconis drew a 4-panel piece in tribute, which you should definitely check out in the show notes, but one panel shows Ursula standing on the Moon and looking back at Earth. The text reads: “Ursula K. Le Guin knew that in order to change the world, you first had to imagine a different world,” with the last of those words written across the face of our Little Blue Marble.
A different world.
Here on Bright Green Futures, that’s what the pod is all about: doing the imaginative work to build a better world, lifting up the stories that show the struggle to get there, talking to the people who create those stories, and discuss the challenges, not just of building the world but creating the stories themselves. Last episode, we talked about how those stories can help with the final step: moving people to action.
One of the challenges, both in fiction and in real life, is figuring out how an individual can make any difference at all in this massive undertaking of changing the world, especially when it seems like darkness is descending upon us politically and given that January 2025 just hit another record high in global temperature. One of my deepest sources of hope comes from the firm knowledge there are already millions of people working on this: scientists, activists, solarpunk enthusiasts, people just trying to live their lives and make a difference in some way.
Two of these people crossed my path recently. The first, Holly at the substack A Liminal Life, drew my attention because she linked to Bright Green Futures in a post called Solarpunk Dreams, where she takes us through her journey to build an Earthship, an earth berm type home, and how she found solarpunk values intersecting with her desire to live sustainably. We’re not going to all go live in an Earthship or off-grid—that’s not a solution collectively—but Holly is not just making real life changes to live sustainably but, crucially, talking about them so others can see.
Solarpunk: An Ecosystem of Ideas
Solarpunk isn’t just stories or people trying to live a different lifestyle—it’s an ecosystem of ideas. Seeing what others have tried, or often just hearing about the struggles, is incredibly generative. We draw inspiration from each other constantly—community isn’t just local, even if working local is a critical part of how we manifest a better world.
In her post, Holly quotes another writer, Nic Antoinette from Wild Letters, who documented the profound impact a 30 hour power outage had on their life. Nic paraphrased Wendell Berry, novelist and environmental activist, in saying:
Given the gap between the world as it is and the world that I dream of, how then shall I live?
I love that and I think it’s the essential question—not just what could the world be, in these solarpunk visions we’re dreaming up, but how can I bridge the gap? Where can I start today?
This is an especially pointed question when just surviving the day can seem harrowing.
Library Economy
Which brings me to the library—literally because I’ve been touring all the Pittsburgh Carnegie libraries and getting my passport stamped, but also figuratively because often the world trying to be born is already here in some form. When you step into a library, especially one that’s a bustling community center and a Library of Things as well as books, it’s like previewing a world to come: people working and playing and reading, surrounded by knowledge and culture, magical people called librarians who stand by eager to help, all of it supported by a communal tax, volunteers, and a general understanding that knowledge and culture are good and belong to everyone.
I’ve been a fan of libraries forever, but I’m seeing a renewed excitement about them in this moment when people are turning their focus local and asking, “where can I find my community?”
Sue visiting a 100-year-old library:
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It’s as if people are rediscovering the libraries right in their backyard, but they’re also seeing the concept of libraries with new eyes: how a library works is familiar, anti-capitalist and community-focused, and it presents a model for managing the commons, both physical and digital, experiences and goods, in a sustainable way.
I recently went to my local library to pick up an interlibrary loan and was delighted to find a very large and enthusiastic group of elders playing cards. They were having a grand time, and it was clear that much community was happening right in my back yard that I never knew about because I didn’t take the time to look.
If you haven’t been to your local library in a while, I highly recommend you get yourself a library card, and see all the ways libraries have updated to the modern era and are prefiguring a solarpunk future today.
Before I get into some of the potential of that, I have to note that I first encountered the concept of library economies from Andrewism—a youtuber who does great deep thinking about the future we want to have—and I was excited to discover he had updated his 2022 video on library economies in which he discusses how to expand the library model to share of all kinds of goods, from furniture to cars. In the updated video, which I’ll link in the show notes, he covers in detail how such a system would work, and I highly recommend you give it a watch.
Andrew also touches on the idea of libraries as third spaces, where people can gather, hold events, casually meet, and generally have a community space that doesn’t require money to be in. He doesn’t actually use the term, but I’ve been intrigued about the potential for third spaces for a while, to address loneliness, to provide climate resilience, to create community. When an extreme heat event hits, people are unwilling to go hang out at temporary “cooling centers”—those places are often unfamiliar and uncomfortable. But in the aftermath of the LA fires, we saw third spaces like bookstores and community centers become instant disaster relief depots, distribution hubs for water and diapers and clothing. These were already familiar places. And as often happens in the wake of disasters, real community building happened there… and that community building is now facilitating organization of political protests just weeks later.
A Network of Third Spaces
So there’s a huge potential here for creating a commons space that serves many purposes. Maybe even a network of spaces, some in each neighborhood, as I’m finding with these older Carnegie neighborhood libraries. They’re tiny, embedded within a neighborhood, but also connected to the larger library system. I was delighted to discover I can check out books at one library and return them to another or put one on hold to be picked up at a third. That larger integration, with couriers traveling between the library hubs, opens up all kinds of possibilities for the flow of goods. Plus they provide third spaces within walking distance for a lot of people.
Of course that only works in a more-dense communities, but that’s also something I’ve noticed about my current city of Pittsburgh: much of the build-out of the city happened in an earlier era, before cars and suburbs were ubiquitous. Although there’s a lot of poverty now, the bones of the city are great: it’s got those 15 minute neighborhoods already set up, left over from an earlier, less car-focused time. That includes these neighborhood libraries, also from an earlier time when billionaires built public buildings with their name on them rather than trying to hack into and dismantle government services for the rest of us.
I can imagine a solarpunk future where the local library is the center of the community but also a link to a larger system of exchange. It could be an all-purpose community center that provides third spaces for casual meetups, park spaces and farmers markets, climate resilience and disaster relief, as well as physical goods reuse and exchange.
Libraries of Things
Already today, Libraries of Things exist in our regular libraries that supply games, tools, bakeware, musical instruments, wifi hotspots and video games, even passes to museums and streaming. A librarian friend said they had everything from induction cooktops to fishing poles, and the philosophy behind it was to get things that were useful to the community but cost-prohibitive or used too infrequently for individuals to justify the expense. If you combine that concept with Buy Nothing groups, where goods are circulated free of cost through the community until they reach their end-of-life, you start to really unlock things.
The library could be a central hub where exchanges happen—it might lend out short-term-usage things like cameras and tools, or facilitate transfer of longer-use items like bikes or tables or clothing. The library becomes a true community hub if you circulate enough people and goods and events and experiences through it.
But that’s the future. What about today?
Well, if your library doesn’t loan out tools, now is a great time to suggest it. Library funding is tied to circulation, so while you’re there, pick up an armload of books. You can literally grow support for the library simply by using it. Or run for library board and change it from the inside.
You can also start your own third space—community gardens from reclaimed empty lots, tool libraries from a shed in your front yard, or just grow your own garden and work out an exchange with friends or take the surplus to the food bank. I saw a tumbler post about a guy who offered to mow his neighbor’s front lawn if he would let him grow veggies in the back. This was so popular the whole block signed up. Now he has a block-long backyard community garden and enough food to start a farmer’s market.
Get creative. Start with the good bones of your community that already exist. See what other people are doing and grow from there.
I’m incredibly serious when I say the most radical thing you can do right now is build systems of care outside of capitalism—boosting the library model in your community is a fantastic start.
When we think we can’t have any impact, that there’s no solution to the giant problems facing our world, it helps to not just work local but think structurally: what are the seeds of a new world already growing right in my community and how can I nurture that, expand it, not just stop the harms that are being done, but build something better.
A library economy wrings every bit of usefulness out of things, reducing environmental harm while also creating community around our shared need for resources. In a time of increasing precarity and uncertainty, this builds the kind of resilience we need to survive.
Sounds like solarpunk to me.
Also: libraries are a great way to fight fascism
As author Chuck Wendig said in a recent post, “We need the art. Shit is bad, and we need books, and music, and paintings.” Sharing the art that resonates with you is one way we help each other get through the hard times.
Send this episode to a friend who might be struggling with the world right now.
Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. Also check out the new Academic Studies section.
LINKS Ep. 25: Library Economies and Third Spaces
Nothing is Inescapable comic by Dylan Meconis, Jan 2018
Solarpunk Dreams: A Liminal Life substack, Feb 2025
The Existential Crisis of a 30 Hour Power Outage: Wild Letters substack, May 2024
A Library of Everything, Andrewism (2025)
If you want to belong, find a third space, Vox, May 2024
Closure of ‘Third Places’? Exploring Potential Consequences for Collective Health and Wellbeing, Jessica Finlay et al. Health Place. 2019 Oct 14
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