Books Seeds of Story

Futures Like Flocks of Starlings: adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy

Rethinking our approach to movement-building and societal change, inspired by Octavia Butler…

By Ruthanna Emrys

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Published on October 6, 2026

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Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.

This week, I cover adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, a book about movement-building, mediation, and collaboration inspired by the works of Octavia Butler. It’s a blueprint for social transformation, and one of my go-to texts for both running meetings and writing hopeful futures.

What It’s About

Emergent Strategy doesn’t summarize in the same way as a more linear book, and I’m not going to try. I would say it’s a book from an alternative universe, but really it’s a book for such a universe: a practitioner’s guide to collective, non-hierarchical organization, where the organization is in service of building a world where its practices are more common. So I’ll combine summary and commentary, here, weaving them together the way that brown weaves guidance and anecdote and poetry and practical action.

Where this column centers around non-fiction that inspires science fiction, this book connects in both directions. It’s actively drawing on the science fictional conversation as well as the activist conversation. Brown is inspired by the Earthseed movement from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and by Butler’s general approach to imagining future possibilities. Early on she quotes Butler’s Dawn, saying that humanity suffers from the combination of intelligence and hierarchy. In Dawn this is a fatal flaw, addressable only through hybridization with another species. In Parable, though, a small group seeks to overcome it through their own practices, finding ways to survive immanent dystopia.

But hybridization doesn’t have to be genetic, or imposed by aliens. Lessons from other species can be incorporated into humanity’s efforts to survive its flaws. Brown invokes mushrooms, dandelions, starlings, whales as models for collaboration and survival. Mushrooms, as Sheldrake tells us, are networked with each other and with surrounding organisms. They give and take and trade strength for strength. Mycelial networks work deeply under the surface, hidden except for where they break out into spectacular fruiting bodies. Likewise human organization isn’t all about the big splashy outcomes—the giant protests, the showcase projects, the new inventions—even though those things are important. The underlying connections don’t just make those fruits possible, but are important in their own right. They’re especially important when we’re trying to escape rigid hierarchies: the fruit draws the attention, but the mycelial network is the alternative.

I think most often about the starlings. Flocks of starlings make some of the most beautiful patterns in nature (though the competition is fierce). Their murmurations have no one leader, just ever-varying shapes that emerge from shared instinct, understanding, and mutual response. Humans, too, can learn to attend to the cues coming from those around us, and use them to shape group actions. Unlike starlings, we probably also go in with specific goals, deadlines, and those damn hierarchies—but top-down, pre-planned organization can be brittle in the face of a changing world and changing contributors. Listening to our in-the-moment interactions, and adapting in response, makes our work more resilient.

These aren’t just metaphors, but an offering of biomimicry as an approach to human collaboration. They fit in with Kimmerer’s integration of Indigenous and Western knowledge-ways, where different approaches braid to create new questions and methods. The goal is to get the sort of syncretic advantages in teamwork that Kimmerer gets in plant biology.

Buy the Book

Emergent Strategies

adrienne maree brown

Buy Book

Emergent Strategies

adrienne maree brown

Buy this book from:

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• Target

Proving that you can geek out about anything if you try hard enough, I’m a meeting nerd. Emergent Strategy is one of the books that got me there—that made me consider not only how to organize meetings that could never have been emails, but how to organize meetings that facilitate starling-like shifts of direction. Meetings that are poetic, that recognize the people in them as full humans with something to share beyond this week’s data analysis. My mental shelf holds book pairs that complement each other, and that suggest something more in combination than either alone. Emergent Strategy’s partner, in my head, is J. Elise Keith’s Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization. Brown is activism-oriented, focused on moral and physical survival, and building structures that lift up marginalized voices and marginalized worldviews. Keith is business-oriented, assumes management hierarchies, assumes American-style companies and deadlines and pressures. It’s also all about making sure that everyone in a meeting knows what the meeting is for, running the meeting to meet that goal, and getting clear outcomes that feed into what everyone has to do next. Combine that with brown’s work, and you get goal-focused organization that also attends to the cues that bring problems, solutions, anxieties, areas of unexplored excitement to the surface. You might even make your organization more Earthseed-ish.

“Biomimicry” is one of the book’s touchstone words. “Fractal” is another: emergent strategy emerges at multiple levels. It’s your own reactions as an individual, but it’s also small teams working together, and the big organizations and movements that those teams are a part of. Eventually, it’s the world the movement is trying to make. Our existing dystopias preserve themselves through this type of fractal structure: authoritarians shape institutions that condition groups and individuals to maintain assumptions that are necessary for authoritarians to thrive in the first place. Organizing to undermine these assumptions, and offer new ones, undermines dystopia and provides a taste of what we’re fighting for.

In college, I spent some time in anarchist circles, which I eventually left because of how frequently “no leader” meant “everyone listens to the loudest guy in the circle.” Brown recognizes that just removing formal hierarchical structures, when your contributors were raised amid racism and sexism and kyriarchy, will simply result in informal hierarchical structures. Even if you aren’t a full-on anarchist, the idea that we could teach ourselves new structures is important. New structures that can continue to grow and change are even more important.

I’ve been talking mostly about the philosophy of emergent strategy, but the book is also full of practical guidance—for definitions of practical that come from the book’s world. Flipping through (as I often do), I find at random:

• “A protocol for those who are most comfortable approaching movements from a place of critique, AKA, haters”
• A discussion of meditation, why brown resisted trying it for a long time, and what she gets from it now
• An assessment sheet for organizational adaptive skills
• Agenda templates for emergent strategy meetings, and exploration of online collaboration tools
• A case study event planning outline that includes “Forget to set up a proper orientation for the note-takers, hi-jinx ensue”

In other words, it’s grounded, built on experience, and willing to admit and learn from error. Which is, all on its own, a good model for collaboration.

The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories

Learning from the biome. Any of the biomimetic models here might provide a good shape for a story. I drew heavily on both the dandelions and the starlings for A Half-Built Garden, though the dandelions showed up more on the page. If you’re writing about a rebel cell, a starship crew, a heist ensemble, what happens if they work together like mycelial networks or a flock of birds? What sorts of conflicts, failures, and successes could come out of these models? A book about meeting facilitation is also a book about all the ways collaborators might not get along smoothly—especially if they’re trying (not always successfully) to get away from the organizational principles of the evil empire.

Shape god.To write science fiction is to risk starting a religion. Some of these are built deliberately, and some turn into high-control groups (a.k.a. cults) that are better avoided. But the world is full of people dissatisfied with their spiritual options, who find more promising shapes in water-sharing ceremonies or Bokononist non-sense or the Utopian oath. Butler’s Earthseed religion is becoming one of the most deeply explored by modern activists in Black Lives Matter and similar spaces. That makes Emergent Strategy a good model for stories about how religions emerge from unexpected sources, how they change over time, how they support new kinds of work, and how they’re shaped by those who work within them.

Dynamic utopias. As solarpunks and hopepunks try to imagine better worlds, brown provides an important caution: “Compelling futures have to have more justice, yes; and right relationship to the planet, yes; but also must allow for our growth and innovation. I want an interdependence of lots of kinds of people with lots of belief systems, and continued evolution.” Utopia is often dismissed as a rigid stopping point: if you’ve found the right way to live, surely any further growth will take you away from that golden age. This is a different model—change as not only (per Butler) divine and unavoidable, but a desirable part of good lives: “We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person.”

New Growth: What Else to Read

Building on Emergent Strategy’s link between science fiction worldbuilding and real-world-building, I love Rob Hopkins’ How to Fall In Love With the Future and Andrea J. Ritchie’s Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies. Complementary ideas are also found in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. If you’re trying to make change in a relatively traditional organization, Brian David Johnson’s Science Fiction Prototyping offers useful tools. Brown’s follow-up books, particularly Pleasure Activism and Holding Change, are well worth a read.

Parable of the Sower is obviously an important companion text—well worth reading if you haven’t yet. Many of the stories in Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older’s We Will Rise Again have aspects of emergent strategy in their future protests. Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is a not-quite-novel from a less linear, less hierarchical world, and suggests precursor ideas to the ones explored here.

Share your starling flights in the comments![end-mark]

The post Futures Like Flocks of Starlings: adrienne maree brown’s <i>Emergent Strategy</i> appeared first on Reactor.

This article by Felipe Ávila originally appeared in the September 27, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

It has often been said that the War of Independence was a movement led by the criollos, who culminated and capitalized on that process. It has been claimed that the popular sectors were not clear about why they were fighting and only followed their leaders, or chiefs, who came from the elites of New Spain.

However, it is necessary to stress that the Independence of Mexico was a great popular revolution that was made possible by the participation of tens of thousands of men and women from the poorest and most marginalized popular sectors; who rose up in arms to fight not only for the Independence of Mexico, but to build a more just and egalitarian society, putting an end to slavery, to tribute and to the division into castes by social origin and skin color. That is why they followed and fought alongside Hidalgo, Morelos, Guerrero and many other insurgent leaders, because these leaders knew how to understand their feelings and aspirations.

The poor people identified with them and formed a community that made possible the triumph after 11 years of war that destroyed the foundations of the colonial regime.

Those who swelled the insurgent ranks were above all Indigenous people and Afro-descendants, called negros or mulatos. The massive participation of entire peoples and communities was a cry of freedom and rebellion to put an end to an oppressive social system that was imposed on them by force, that destroyed a good part of their culture, that murdered many of their warriors and priests, that raped their women, that prohibited their religious practices, took away their lands and imposed on them a new political order, as well as new laws, institutions, tributes, language and religion.

Those who suffered most from those abuses and humiliations were the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, who managed to survive through constant everyday resistance, many times hidden and other times open, with rebellions that sought to improve their living conditions and defend their culture, their traditions, their communal organization of labor, their traditional authorities, their lands, forests and waters.

The Independence of Mexico would not have been possible if the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities of the south of New Spain had not kept the libertarian flame burning after the execution of Morelos in December 1815. In the most difficult years of the insurgent war, when its main leaders had been killed, the resistance of the Indigenous people and Afro-descendants of Tierra Caliente, of La Montaña and of the Costa Chica and Costa Grande of what is today the state of Guerrero, as well as of the sierras of Puebla and Oaxaca, kept up the struggle and could not be defeated by the royalist armies, whose number reached 40,000 soldiers in those years.

In that southern region, the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities had supported Morelos in his military campaigns and had swelled the ranks of the Galeana brothers and of Vicente Guerrero. They were communities and peoples with a great identity and collective cohesion. The young men joined the insurgent armies, while their fathers, mothers, grandparents, uncles and siblings helped and committed themselves to the insurgent cause in different ways.

The whole people was with them. That is why the royalist troops could not put an end to that resistance. For that reason, they often burned villages, executed their inhabitants en masse, imprisoned the women and deported the men who were not in a condition to fight.

Vicente Guerrero was the most important insurgent leader of that period. He had stood out for his bravery and military and organizational ability, and for the backing he had from the Indigenous, Black and mulato communities of the south of New Spain. African blood ran through his veins. He had made the ideals of Hidalgo and Morelos his own.

He was a firm supporter of Independence, but also of establishing equality among all, without distinction of ethnicity, wealth or skin color. The abolition of slavery and of the division into castes, together with absolute independence from Spain, were his main banners, and he had the unconditional support of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, who saw in him one of their own.

Guerrero’s army was made up mostly of Black and mulato men who made possible the triumph of the insurgent cause. Among them was Juan del Carmen, a mulato from Tlacoachistlahuaca, born in 1790, who joined Guerrero in 1811; he reached the rank of colonel and took part in several of the main military operations in La Montaña and the Costa Chica between 1812 and 1817. Guerrero held him in esteem and made him his lieutenant.

The troops of Guerrero and Juan del Carmen had a broad knowledge of the terrain: rugged sierras, deep ravines and the bravery of the guerrillas made them unbeatable. One tactic that worked for them was to establish fortifications in towns or villages high in the sierra. Mothers, wives, children and relatives of the combatants took refuge there. They set up small factories for munitions and cannons; they had blacksmith shops, carpentry shops; the civilian population helped with different tasks.

The royalist armies, which outnumbered them in soldiers and weaponry, could not defeat them. Thus the resistance was sustained between 1815 and 1821. One of the main forts was on the hill of Xonacatlán, where Juan del Carmen had 300 combatants. In March 1817, the viceroy sent a strong military contingent against that small fort. It took them a month to defeat the rebels. Juan del Carmen died on March 3.

It was a great loss for the insurgent cause. Guerrero stated that it was not for lack of courage, but for lack of food and water, that they had been defeated, and he erected a memorial in the church of San Pedro in Xonacatlán, in honor of Juan del Carmen, where he is still remembered today.

Felipe Ávila
Director of the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico (INEHRM).

• 

  Mañanera

  People’s Mañanera September 28

  September 28, 2026

  President Sheinbaum’s daily press conference, with comments on workers’ rights, social programs, constitutional reforms, Ayotzinapa, and the UN.

• 

  Analysis

  Afro-Descendants in the Independence

  September 27, 2026

  “Guerrero’s army was made up mostly of Black and mulato men who made possible the triumph of the insurgent cause,” writes Felipe Ávila, director of Mexico’s National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions.

• 

  News Briefs

  Hurricane ‘Polo’: Mexican Navy Deploys Nearly 3,000 Personnel in Support of Baja California Sur

  September 27, 2026

  Now a Category 3 and expected to make landfall Monday as a Category 2, the storm has prompted 111 temporary shelters and port closures from Nayarit to Los Cabos.

The post Afro-Descendants in the Independence appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.

(Image: gr.wa.gov)

“We encourage folks to learn how to identify ash trees and learn the signs of EAB. And if you have an ash tree that you’re worried about, contact an arborist to have it assessed.” (Image: @friendsoftrees)

A little over a month ago, the first Emerald Ash Borer, Agrilus planipennis, was found in Washington State. This is devastating news, because this invasive metallic green beetle is essentially a death sentence for the ash trees of the Pacific Northwest. It may have been inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t mourn the future losses and do our best to slow the expansion of this true disaster.

For those not familiar with the story of the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), there’s a boatload of information about them online (including this, written by yours truly). However, here’s a brief recap. These little beetles were accidentally introduced to North America from Asia and were first noted in Michigan in 2002. For the past two decades they have been tearing through North America’s ash trees, both wild populations and urban street trees are being devastated by the beetle, which has no environmental controls outside its natural range (trials of biological controls like using parasitic wasps have been largely unsuccessful). Thus far, there are no permanent solutions to EAB, even insecticides are only somewhat useful.

When I call Emerald Ash Borers one of the worst invasive species in the United States, I’m not just being dramatic — millions of ash trees have already succumbed to them across the country. This topic deserves an update on Pikes/Pines because we know this will happen in the near future — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the climate crisis all will too, but they all feel different. We’ll see ashes decline and disappear from our urban and wild landscapes in the near future.

For now, the trees of Capitol Hill are safe, but with detections in both Vancouver, BC and now Vancouver, Washington we are hemmed in and have a pathway of both urban and wild ashes leading right to us. To their credit, the Washington State Department of Agriculture and the Washington Invasive Species Council have been pulling out all the stops possible, spreading the word, providing sound scientific information, and establishing a quarantine that aims to stop untreated firewood from entering the state. There are also pathways for both municipalities to gain assistance for urban forest planning and for citizens to contribute by reporting sightings.

To this last point, without a pair of engaged citizens, we might not yet know that EAB had made it to Vancouver, Washington. They found the beetle on their windshield on August 3rd in a small community just north of Vancouver, and after deciding it was likely the invasive pest, captured it, and got it to the State. While no one was astonished by the discovery because they’d been in the Portland area for several years, it could have been months or even longer before any other means of detecting the beetles proved fruitful. Citizen involvement in reporting potential sightings (there are several lookalikes), could be key to helping municipalities to plan for EAB impacts.

Don’t just go around squashing insects that look like they could be EABs – if you see something try to collect it, take photos, and report it. If you are wrong, no big deal. But squashing and walking away is of zero benefit. PC: Washington Invasive Species Council

For now the only option may be to turn to pesticides injected into healthy, uninfested ashes. The cocktail of chemicals used as a preventative treatment for EAB requires planning, professional application, and continual reapplication to be even somewhat effective. For the average homeowner with an ash, this might be out of the financial question. For municipalities like Seattle, starting to treat as a way to forestall millions of dollars worth of costly, dead and dying hazard trees hitting the budget all at once, it is likely the best option.

Sadly, we benefit from decades of EAB impacts elsewhere – research has demonstrated the efficacy of the various approaches. Allowing trees to become infested is a guarantee for tree death. According to the EAB Resources & Management Guide for Washington State, “the United States has collectively spent over $900 million in street tree management costs in the last 30 years due to EAB.”  Because we understand the beetle’s biology, their specific impacts on different ash species, and how treatments have worked, Seattle stands to weather the storm, even if the ash trees don’t ultimately make it long term. One thing that’s clear is that aside from pesticides, another preventative measure is discontinuing the planting of ash trees.

If efforts to stop accidentally spreading wood infested with EAB larvae are successful, it could be years before we see them on the Hill. Studies have estimated that the beetles naturally disperse at a rate between 1.6 to 12.4 miles per year, depending upon conditions and available hosts, (which are numerous — there are river valleys and wetlands full of ashes between here and Vancouver, Washington). So maybe we are at least ten years out from touchdown — assuming the beetles haven’t already inched closer than we’ve realized, which is entirely possible.

iNaturalist records of Oregon Ash, Fraxinus latifolia, between Portland and Seattle. (Image: iNaturalist.org)

Losing street trees is a shame, but the real horrific future is one without our native Oregon Ash, Fraxinus latifolia, the only one we have. Trying to imagine our riparian ecosystems without Oregon Ash is gut wrenching because EAB impacts are not just about impacts on trees. Oregon Ashes are vital members of wetland and riparian communities across their range, they are food and shelter for countless species. Indigenous peoples have deep relationships with this tree as well. (The decline of other ash species across the US has taken a heavy toll on various cultural practices most notably in the case of their use in basketry.) We aren’t just losing a tree, we are losing a point of connection, a member of complex communities. It’s hard not to feel helpless knowing that while we might be able to run around and inject street trees to keep them going, we’ll never be able to save entire forests full of Oregon Ash. The repercussions are yet unknown but in places with high densities of ashes (like so many lovely rivers and lakesides across Western Washington, including the watery edges of the Washington Park Arboretum), could see large changes in water and soil chemistry, increased invasive species presence, and declines in native fauna that rely on the trees.

Ecological horrors have already been inflicted upon our region, but I find it very difficult to just sit and bear witness to an essentially inevitable wave of beetles approaching us. I also think it’s important to realize that this isn’t about demonizing the organism, invasiveness is a symptom of globalization and capitalism — the beetles aren’t evil, they are just beetles being beetles. Knowing all this, our job is to stay vigilant, report potential sightings, and stay up to date. There is a strong chance this won’t be the last time I write about Emerald Ash Borers, which is ironic because I have never met one in person. Unless I am somewhere in Eastern Asia, I truly hope I never do.

How to report

• Online at invasivespeciaswa.gov
• The Washington Invasives app available for free on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
• Email screenshots, links, and as much additional information as possible about reports made on social media or other platforms such as iNaturalist or Nextdoor to invasivespeciesinfo@rco.wa.gov.
• Preserve physical specimens as you are able by placing the insect in a plastic bag and freezing it. You may also place it in a vial with ethanol or isopropyl alcohol. Please write your name, the date, and where the insect was sighted (GPS coordinates preferred) on the container.

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With the right icebreaker, even people who have known each other a long time can find a glimmer or two of newness. Icebreakers offer people an informal way to open up about themselves. They can put people into the right frame of mind for a productive retreat. They help shake off the chill of an early Monday morning meeting. Why are they often the first thing to come out of a packed meeting agenda? Some ideas why:

• "They're a waste of time." Icebreakers don't have to be throwaway questions. An engaging and fun question keeps people from tuning out as soon as they sit down or sign on.
• "I see these people every day. We already know each other." Icebreakers help people connect to each other as human beings with opinions. They can break people out of the boxes or cliques they came in with. There's almost never a right answer to an icebreaker question. Unless of course the question is "what's the best season?" and the correct answer is "Fall" (or "cardamom" if you misunderstand the question).
• "We don't have time for games." Icebreakers can ease folks into working on the hard stuff. Connect the icebreaker to the day or meeting's purpose. This gives people a lower-stakes way think about and engage with the themes ahead.

I group icebreakers into two categories: relationship-building and purpose-building. Sometimes an icebreaker can be both. Here are some ideas for icebreakers that you're free to adapt for your next gathering.

relationship-building questions

(for people getting to know each other)

Preferences/Trivia

• How do you like to treat yourself after a long day (or week)?
• Picture yourself wearing a name tag that says “ask me about (blank).” What would the (blank) be for you?
• Who is a person you admire?
• What's your favorite meme (or emoji)?
• What does this season we’re in (or entering/leaving) symbolize to you?

Introspection/Goals

• What’s an intention you have for the year ahead?
• What’s new in your life this year?
• What’s something you want to help make happen [with this group] this year?
• Who is a person that's been on your mind lately?
• How do you typically learn new things? What is something new you’ve learned recently?
• What’s an experience that shaped how you approach this work (or perceive the world)?

purpose-building questions

(for people to make meaning of the work ahead of them)

Establishing rapport with new groups

• Watch Taiye Selasi's "Don't ask me where I'm from, ask where I'm a local" with the group or send beforehand. Introduce yourself and tell us where you're local to.
• How did you travel to this meeting today?
• What brought you here today?
• What motivated you to sign up (or join / agree to attend)?
• What does [doing this work] mean to you?
• What do you hope it will feel like when we’re done?

Temperature check with a low-trust group or before a weighty topic

• What's a word (or emoji) that represents how you're feeling today?
• Trust is an important part of our work. How do you see or would like to see trust-building happening?
• Share the book 7 Forms of Respect before the meeting or watch this video together. Which of the Forms of Respect feel most important for you to receive right now?'
• Think of a time you felt welcomed (or another group value)—how did that feel? What actions by others allowed you to feel this way?

Deepening the meeting's theme

• For a group of food bank leaders. Describe for us one of your favorite foods. For folks on the call, raise your hand if you have some of the ingredients in that dish at your food bank right now.
• Adhering to group agreements. Review the group agreements together. Which of the agreements do you find the most challenging to keep? Which one is the hardest to notice in yourself or others?
• Keeping group values present. Review the group's values together. Which value do you want to hold or represent throughout this meeting? Which value do you think is most important as we begin this work?
• At the start of a long project. How do you like to celebrate when you achieve something big?
• For groups with a lot of ideas. What would make your participation today meaningful? What do you hope we get done today?

a good closing (icemelters?)

I like to end meetings with another opportunity for group sharing. These questions can help people start to make sense of the time they spent together. Closing actions or commitments can keep momentum going into the next meeting. Here are a few I love using.

• What’s one word you’d use to describe the day (or how you’re feeling)?
• What’s something about our time together that you’d like to acknowledge?
• What’s one action you’d like to take before we meet again?
• What is one topic you think we should address in our next (or a future) meeting?
• As we leave today, what’s something you’re curious about?

Every meeting is about more than the business we discuss. As someone who works from home most days, I relish the in-person time I have with my colleagues. Icebreakers and thought questions can help bridge those moments.

Let your icebreakers be more than wasted air time. Treat your opening activities with meaning and intention. Thank your participants for sharing time and space with each other. Help people find another reason to value their work and the people who do it alongside them.