Anticipatory Community and the Climate Future

The climate movement has no shortage of plans. What it lacks are frameworks for how communities actually build the capacity to face what's coming — not reactively, not through top-down compliance, but through shared, justice-rooted practices of becoming that can hold together when everything else fractures. My research develops one such framework: anticipatory community.

Anticipatory community names what happens when a group of people — a neighborhood, a congregation, a watershed, a coalition — begins to practice the future before it arrives. Not prediction. Not preparedness in the narrow emergency-management sense. Anticipation is the disciplined, creative, embodied work of cultivating regenerative ecological virtues, resilience infrastructure, and prophetic engagement with converging crises in advance of the moment when those crises foreclose possibility. It asks a deceptively simple question: do we expect the best of each other or the worst of each other when the ground shifts beneath us? And it insists that the answer depends on what we practice now.

This framework emerged from my doctoral research at Union Theological Seminary (Ph.D., Religion and Ecology, 2020), where I combined constructive ecotheology with ethnographic fieldwork at the Govardhan Eco-Village in Maharashtra, India — an intentional community where Hindu devotional practice is put into co-creative collaboration with regenerative technologies to build scalable models of ecological resilience. What I found there was a community that had already answered the question most climate policy is still struggling to articulate: how do you root adaptation and mitigation in the living values, traditions, and relationships of a place, rather than imposing technical solutions from above? The Eco-Village's model of symbiotic development — integrating community infrastructure within the organic rhythms of indigenous ecosystems and neighboring village economies — became the empirical ground for a broader theoretical project.

But anticipatory community is not an abstraction confined to one case study or one dissertation. It is a lens I've carried into every professional context since.

In my work with the City of Ann Arbor's Office of Sustainability and Innovations, I applied the anticipatory framework to municipal climate action — helping to articulate why A2Zero is not merely a government program but a community-wide practice of co-created resilience, where the plan is living, the data is transparent, equity is structural, and every resident is invited into the work. In conversations with frontline climate justice leaders in New York City, I've explored how anticipatory community translates into concrete infrastructure: churches becoming cooling centers and resilience hubs, qualitative research serving as technical assistance for community-led planning, and narrative strategy as an essential tool for movement power. In my public scholarship, I extend the anticipatory lens into the political economy of attention, the rise of climate authoritarianism, and the question of how progressive movements can operate within the conditions of digital culture without losing their grounding in embodied solidarity.

My intellectual debts are interdisciplinary and deliberately so. Larry Rasmussen's ethics of Earth community, Robin Wall Kimmerer's indigenous ecological epistemology, Catherine Keller's political theology of the earth, Donna Haraway's sympoiesis, and Karen Barad's agential realism all inform the ecological and philosophical foundations of this work. The political dimensions draw on Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism and loneliness, Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey's concept of the undercommons, Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective's mapping of ecofascism, and the tradition of anticipatory practice found in movements from the Zapatista autonomous municipalities to the mutual aid networks that proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The theological frame spans Caitanya Vaishnavism and the Franciscan tradition, with attention to Thomas Berry, Leonardo Boff, and Pope Francis.

What makes this research constructive — and what I believe makes it useful to the climate movement — is that it refuses the false choice between rigorous analysis and practical engagement. Anticipatory community is simultaneously a scholarly contribution and a working method. It offers climate justice organizations, municipal governments, and philanthropic institutions a language and a practice for the thing many of them are already doing but lack the vocabulary to name: building prefigurative alternatives to crisis that center frontline leadership, ecological justice, and the regenerative capacity of communities to shape their own futures.

Anticipatory communities are a bulwark against the real dangers of ecofascism and climate authoritarianism as our planetary crises intensify. They provide this not through utopian withdrawal but through the patient, prophetic, and fiercely creative cultivation of regenerative practice, justice-seeking, and radical intimacy with the living Earth.

I continue this work through published scholarship, public writing on my Substack, multimedia documentary production, and applied community engagement. I am currently developing projects at the intersection of anticipatory futurism and community-level ecological practice — exploring how communities cultivate what I call anticipatory resilience: the capacity to read emerging conditions of ecological, technological, and political disruption and to build what must exist on the other side.