If you stand at English Bay in Vancouver, looking out to the Salish Sea, and beyond that to the Pacific, particularly amidst a stormy, autumnal twilight, it can feel as if the archipelagos of Point Grey and Horseshoe Bay are two gates opening onto the edge of the world. By now, the orange rays will have long since burst into a pink haze of clouds, and the emerging night will envelop the seemingly unsuspecting ships, which soon too will disappear over the edge and, their international adventures all but clandestine to the average onlooker, perhaps never to return. When I stand looking out at the horizon, usually holding my bike and on the way to an evening meeting, I can’t help but be carried away with the alternative existences: distant cultures across the Pacific; indigenous cultures still holding on amidst the rolling tide of capitalist modernity; journeying cultures of sailors embarking on ever new adventures; subterranean cultures of orca swimming out to more abundant seas.

There in front of me linger dreams of elsewhere and other. Behind me the reality of the city grinds on: the lawyers’ lights go on in Downtown’s scrapers, the construction workers clock out from their Sisyphean existence for the night, and the homeless scurry for the safest spots. I know that my childlike dreams are not real, or perhaps only represent half-truths. But that brief moment of calm, wondering about the alternatives that lurk on the horizon, refuels my soul as I remount my bike and head off on a ride through the rain for my meeting with people fighting a seemingly insurmountable tide of social and economic change in the city.

This book is about the alternatives on the horizon that keep these folks going: their imaginary anchors in the storm. I first got thinking about alternatives on the horizon as a source of inspiration for resistance in London, UK. I was intrigued by the way some of the activists I spoke with harked back to a Christian past in developing their critiques of contemporary materialism and instrumentalism by which they felt themselves to be surrounded.