Exploring sustainability’s islands and niches with Thomas More and Niklas Luhmann

This essay examines why it is appealing to locate solutions to world problems in small places like community gardens or ecovillages, describe them as islands or niches and associate them with the utopian, especially to transformative research in the context of sustainability. To this end, the essay returns to Thomas More’s Utopia and focuses on its built-in paradoxes, paying special attention to the fact that the island of Utopia was artificially created by means of a channel. Employing Niklas Luhmann’s notes on utopias, the essay then traces what function the distancing of utopias from the real world has. Finally, drawing on Luhmann’s systems theory, it is shown what view these islands and niches allow, and to what one is necessarily blind to from there.

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