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

AUTOSTRADDLE Most Anticipated Queer Books of November 2026

"As If We Were Staying is more than a memoir; it’s an antidote to despair—a vision for how to commit to hope on a planet where the outlook feels increasingly dire."—Ari Shapiro, journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Best Strangers in the World

Inspired by his experience starting Solar Punk Farms and studying the resilience of living systems, biologist Spencer R. Scott helps us envision our collective future in a more hopeful way.

In an age of ecological emergency and social breakdown, 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 our vision of the future must be galvanizing, biologist and environmentalist Spencer R. Scott chronicles his journey from biotech research to the co-founding of the queer regenerative community and education hub, Solar Punk Farms. Weaving memoir and scientific inquiry, Scott reframes capitalism as an environment we’ve unconsciously adapted to in order to survive and documents the internal and external process of re-adapting to the realities of our ecological world. Only through community and collective action, he finds, can we make survival—and joy—beyond capitalism possible.

Bridging science and personal experience with optimism and lyricism, As If We Were Staying is an invitation to meet our precarious reality together and begin building a future worth inhabiting.

"To read this book is to experience a blossoming. As If We Were Staying is the story of a life coming ever more alive and growing ever more entangled, in service of life itself. Intimate, insightful, and wholly invigorating—what a gift."—Katharine Willkinson, author of Climate Wayfinding