SU J. Sokol on Sustainability
Hosted by Nina Munteanu
August 15 2026 - 13
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The Sustainability thread is a thematic series of articles, curated by Canadian SF author Nina Munteanu and sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces in the series appear twice a month. Query Nina Munteanu about appearing on the thread at nina.sfgirl@gmail.com
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My guest today is Canadian artist and author Lynn Hutchinson Lee.
Interview with Su J. Sokol
My guest today is Su J. Sokol, a speculative and hopepunk author whose writing on topics of social justice celebrate community and hope. Currently living in Montreal, Quebec, Sokol is a
social activist; her stories explore identity, resistance, and belonging in a changing world.
y guest today is Canadian artist and author Lynn Hutchinson Lee.
Nina: How would you define sustainability and what do you consider the key components to be sustained?
Su: Sustainability, simply defined, is the ability to continue. If a way of life is harming us,
harming others, and exhausting our planet’s land, energy, and resources, then continuing on
this path will lead to a literal dead end.
What needs to be sustained is the planet itself and all of its living creatures: people of all
nations and economic classes, non-human animals, plant life, air and water and minerals and
energy, and all things that allow life to continue.
Nina: What does the phrase of our thread title "Sustainability Before Ambition" mean to you and how does it affect you: how you live, what you write?
Su: When people talk about ambition, earning a lot of money is often a component. Ambition
can take other forms, though, like wanting to be well-known and to be recognized as someone
doing good and important work. For a writer, such ambition can translate into the desire to be
published by a big publisher, to win awards, to be read widely, to be invited to literary events
around the world.
My “day job” was as a community lawyer and advocate. It was never my ambition to get a job
at a big firm or a corporation, thus saving me from the stresses of doing soul-crushing work.
Instead, thinking about my potential social impact, I could sleep at night. This made it
sustainable for me to keep on doing a type of work that was frankly difficult throughout my life.
While earning only a modest salary, sustainability before ambition also means things like
commuting to work by bike and métro, repairing things instead of replacing them, and buying
clothes at thrift shops.
As a writer, sustainability before ambition means writing what moves me and not
compromising on my values even if that risks rejection by agents and publishers looking for
safer, less “radical” books. It means approaching indie publishers who are interested in recycled
paper, ecological inks, union labour. It means not supporting Amazon.
Avoiding the kind of cognitive dissonance that results from work that is incoherent with one's
beliefs can lead to a more sustainable life, with better mental and physical health. Trying to
nourish my creative soul and shaping my ambitions into reasonable goals and expectations
(while still letting myself dream) feels key to leading a more sustainable life.
Nina: In your community, what do you see as the major barriers and facilitators of sustainable
living?
Su: When I lived in New York City, I biked to work only occasionally; when I immigrated to
Montréal, I began to bike regularly. There were so many more bike lanes here, and they tended
to be safer and more pleasant to use; even biking on streets where there were no bike lanes
was relatively safe when compared to the streets on New York City. Likewise, the Montréal
métro was cleaner, quieter, and faster than the New York City subway system, and although
this had not made a difference in how often I’d taken the subway, it could for people who own
a car or are less dedicated to mass transit.
The recycling system here is also more developed and supported, and as a result, it facilitates
recycling. On the other hand, in European cities such as Paris, there are well labeled, colour-
coded bins all over the place to indicate where to put food waste, glass, paper, etc. In much of
North American, there are many places where there are no such bins, leading some people to
put an item that could be recycled into the trash bin instead, or even simply littering. Trust is
also a facilitator for sustainable living. I have heard many people say that they believe the items
they put out for recycling end up going to the waste dump, and this is used as an excuse to not
comply with recycling rules. If what they say is true, this needs to be corrected, and if it’s not,
the city should be addressing these rumours.
Other facilitators of sustainable living include the large numbers of thrift shops, barter groups,
opportunities to bring clothes and household items in for repair, local organic farms and their
city members (CSA's), organic and vegan food (though there could be far more, in restaurants
as well as food stores), places to donate food and clothes to others, bike lanes and a good
transit system (though it needs to be even more accessible), closing streets to motorized traffic,
some laws that protect the environment (though we obviously need far more), work and
housing cooperatives, and green alleys (ruelles vertes), to name a few.
Some barriers include insufficient numbers of items that are made locally, too much emphasis
on catering to motorized traffic, putting the availability of housing at the mercy of landlords and
speculators, insufficient laws and policies to protect the environment, corruption and a general
practice of facilitating corporate greed, and weak enforcement of rules related to sustainability.
While nations have the power to create their own laws and policies, enforcement of these laws
and policies is important too. Moreover, public education can make an important difference in
encouraging a more sustainable way of life. Yet, we are living in a system which privileges
capitalism and extractive industries. This, unfortunately, is a significant factor limiting
sustainability.
Nina: Do you think it is possible to achieve sustainability within a capitalist system?
Su: Achieving sustainability under capitalism is like swimming against the current wearing
weighted boots. I believe that there are several reasons for why achieving sustainability within
a capitalist system would be extremely difficult. First of all, capitalism only understands value in
terms of economic or market value. So, for example, beauty and the natural world have no
intrinsic value except insofar as people are willing (and able) to pay for it. Even estimating
purely economic costs and values under capitalism is flawed, as it does not consider the costs
to future generations. It also externalizes other costs; for example, the health costs of polluting
a community is not considered a "cost" even though there are real economic and other costs to such things that are measurable—for instance, the loss of economic activity of people who have
become ill or died, the cost of dealing with contaminated water and air—in addition to other
costs that cannot be calculated numerically.
In my first year of law school, we learned about a case where a person had contracted her land
to a mining company, and the contract clearly stated that no strip mining would be allowed.
When the company strip mined anyway, she sued them and asked for compensation that
would be enough to restore the land to its previous condition. The court refused, saying that it
would be too costly, that the land wasn't worth the investment required. This way of looking at
justice and value seemed strange and wrongheaded then, and it still does now, but it elucidated
for me how the values of capitalism have contaminated not just "the market" but our legal
institutions, our ideas of right and wrong, and even our relationships to one another.
Capitalism is based on the idea that people are naturally competitive, short-sighted, and
narrow-minded. Yet, given the opportunity, people are also cooperative and empathic, and
capable of appreciating love and beauty for its own sake. Even within a capitalist system,
solidarity, unselfishness, and care for the future and for others outside our smaller communities
is possible. These things can give us hope.
It is also possible to change the capitalist system to another one that works better for the
world, leading us to an easier path towards sustainability.
Nina: Do you feel that authors can play a role in encouraging a sustainable lifestyle? Do any
particular writing genres play a more substantial role in establishing a narrative of
sustainability?
Su: I believe that artists of all kinds can play a role in helping to create a better world, including
encouraging a more sustainable lifestyle. Writers, in particular, can use storytelling to show us
truths about ourselves, our communities, and our world. Note that while I use the plural for
“ourselves” and for “communities,” I use the singular for “world.” That is because we all share
one world, and what someone does in their own little corner can affect the lives of others far
away, particularly if you live in a country with more resources and power.
Writers of speculative fiction also create stories featuring alternatives worlds, practices, and
social and political structures. These stories can help us to imagine other ways of living, and this
is important because if you can’t imagine a different, more sustainable world, you can’t build
one.
As an activist, I am a strong believer in diversity of tactics . Applying this way of thinking to the
question of sub-genres, I believe that each have their potential strengths in helping to
encourage a more sustainable lifestyle. Dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction can highlight
negative trends and help us to avoid bad paths; utopian fiction—of which eco-fiction is a large
part—can help us to see a direction that might be promising; hopepunk, which in many ways is
a combination of the two, presents the gritty reality of our world, especially for marginalized
communities, and shows how we might work together to create a path of hope. Fantasy, and
science fiction involving different planets and realities, near-future stories, alternative history,
solar and soil punk: all these genres and more can constitute ecological fiction and encourage
more sustainable living.
Nina: How was sustainability achieved (or not achieved) in a world that you (or another
author) created? Was it inspired from a real example?
Su: “I stretch my gaze west, towards the piece of sky that’s visible beyond
the urban landscape. There’s a greenish-brown stain around the edges,
but it’s still beautiful, still fills my heart with the hope I always feel looking
at the morning sky. Like the City’s beginning again. Likesomething good
could happen.”
This is a quote from the first chapter of my debut novel, Cycling to Asylum, which came out in
2014 but was recently republished by a new publisher under the title, Invisible Line, along with
its sequel, Five Points on an Invisible Line. In the future New York City that I present in this book,
sustainability is a casualty of a political system that rewards ambition and greed, indifference,
social and economic justice, and oppression. But for some, a hope that fuels and is fueled by
activism and solidarity is still alive, at least at moments.
Rather than talk about what happens in that book, I will talk about my most recent manuscript,
currently out on submission, which also looks at hope, solidarity, and personal responsibility to
try to help heal the world. It considers the multiplicity of paths towards sustainability and away
from a world shaped by ambitions fueled by avarice. This novel manuscript, titled Seven/Seven
Time, also takes place in a near future. This is a future or alternative world where people are
faced with food shortages and fertility problems stemming from climate chaos and ecological
destruction. My main character, Seth, grew up on an organic farm in Québec and, estranged
from his parents, lives in Montréal where he struggles to feed himself and his tight community
of friends, all the while wishing he could leave the world a little better than he found it. Into the
scene walks Seven, a mysterious young man from elsewhere and who has an odd affinity to
trees. Seth promptly falls in love with Seven and brings him to the Trois Sœurs farm cooperative
where he sometimes works, and along with his best friend, Serais, tries to solve the mystery of
a new illness that has hit Montréal. He also tries to solve the even greater mystery of who and
what Seven really is.
At the end of the story, sustainability is much closer than it's ever been. This occurs as the
result of a huge coalition of organizations and individuals that began as a partnership between
the three “sisters” who began the Trois Sœurs farm cooperative and the city dwellers who
support them. It grows to include most family and cooperative farms in Québec and an ever-
growing network of food security and other social justice organizations, urban activists,
anarchists, artists, teachers, students, urban guerrillas and gardeners, and other groups and
individuals. Together, they not only live a more sustainable lifestyle, but go on to become a
major influence on law and policy as it relates to agriculture, food security, and the
environment, and also in other areas including housing policy, the criminal justice system,
education, and economic justice.
Although their influence is, by the end of the story, still mostly provincial, there is hope that the
movement can spread further and affect sustainability in a larger geographic area. While the
need for sustainability is planet-wide, even smaller achievements can spread—by example if
not organically.
I was inspired to write this story by my involvement in Community Supported Agriculture
Projects. CSA’s can be much more than an alternative socioeconomic system for growing and
distributing local, organic food; it can also serve as a model for community and for solidarity
between urban and rural environments, with effects that go far beyond food and farming. My
story also grows from the fact that I am an urban gardener and wannabe forager, fascinated by
nature and its beauty and complexity, but for all that, solidly a city person.
BIO: Su J Sokol (xe, xyr) is a writer of speculative and queer fiction and the author of four
novels. Xyr debut novel, Cycling to Asylum, now republished as Invisible Line, was long-listed for
the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, optioned for a film,
and translated into French. Sokol’s other novels include Run J Run, Zee, and Five Points on an
Invisible Line, the sequel to Invisible Line. Sokol’s short fiction and essays have appeared or are
upcoming in various magazines and anthologies. An activist and lawyer originally from
Brooklyn, New York, Sokol has made a home in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke for more than twenty
years. When not writing, editing, mentoring, bringing evil bureaucracies to their knees, or
smashing borders, Sokol participates in science fiction and other literary events.
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Nina Munteanu is an Canadian ecologist, author, editor and writing coach, notably but not exclusively in the realm of Speculative Fiction (SF/F). In addition to nine published novels, Munteanu has written short stories, articles and non-fiction books, which have been translated into several languages throughout the world. Munteanu is a member of SF Canada.
Nina Munteanu on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninamunteanu/
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach. https://ninamunteanu.me/
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