Future Reading List
Tier 2 books identified as relevant but not prioritized for the current phase. For the full prioritized reading plan, see Master Reading List.
Nonfiction
Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer Reciprocity framework, gift economy, indigenous ecological knowledge. Connects to Usufruct, heritage library, and the philosophical case against extraction-based relationships with land. Strong for recruitment narratives and manifesto language.
Bolo’Bolo — Hans Widmer (P.M.) Speculative design for autonomous communities of ~500 people federated into larger networks. Engages the Dunbar’s number question and community self-governance more concretely than most utopian theory.
Farming While Black — Leah Penniman Practical guide to liberation on the land. Essential if Wellspring includes food production. Important for the racial justice dimension of land access in Durham.
The Permaculture City — Toby Hemenway Permaculture design principles applied to urban settings. Relevant to site design, especially green space and food production integration.
Re-enchanting the World — Sylvia Federici The commons, reproductive labor, and feminist critique of enclosure. Adds a gendered labor dimension the vault doesn’t yet have — who does the maintenance work in community, and how is that valued?
Retrosuburbia — David Holmgren Practical guide to retrofitting suburban infrastructure for community and resilience. Applicability depends on site selection.
Lo-TEK — Julia Watson Indigenous infrastructure and design. “Technology doesn’t have to mean high-tech.” Connects to Open Source Ecology.
Exploring Degrowth — Liegegy and Nelson Deeper engagement with degrowth literature than the Andrewism note allows. For internal thinking, not public-facing materials.
Fiction
Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson Institutional and political mechanisms for addressing climate change at global scale. Features cooperative banking, alternative currencies, and CLT-like housing structures. Connection is atmospheric rather than structural — the scale is global, not village.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built — Becky Chambers Solarpunk novella about finding purpose after the big problems are solved. Captures the emotional register of a society that works. Relevant to the question of meaning within a functional community.
Parable of the Sower / Earthseed — Octavia Butler Community-building under collapse. Strangers choosing each other, building governance and mutual aid from scratch. Darker than solarpunk but more honest about the difficulty of trust among strangers. Directly relevant to Intentional Community Failure Modes.
This list was generated March 2026. Books may be promoted to full vault notes as the project’s needs sharpen or after they’ve been read.