I love this approach but I often wonder (and often feel nervous about) whether there’s enough time for it. I mean, the polycrisis is obviously going to be a collective endeavor, but given that we have so many wars, pandemics, genocides, species extinction on massive unseen scales, to say nothing of the daily grind of treadmill-like labor and fossil fuel extraction this entails… and the fact that we also live in a world of billionaires who horde their wealth for personal use. Is changing the conversation really the tool? Sorry if I’m feeling a little jaded these days… 
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@AndrewGaines - certainly food for thought, Andrew. The crux of the matter is changing behaviours to create the desired environment of a healthy planet and economies that support it and society.
While I applaud your work, and enjoyed your article I think the challenge is persuading enough ordinary people to change their mindsets and strongly desire the better world. Only then will there be a groundswell of political pressure to change the system.
You say there are millions of movements. As in many areas of life, the Pareto effect comes into play. We don’t need to persuade every movement to collaborate and articulate a shared vision, just those with the largest influence. I’d start with the global ones and identified around 55 or so who could get the ball rolling. Let’s say there are 100. If the leaders of each identified those closest to them in focus and philosophy and say, reached out to just five each, in no time we would have visible clusters of highly influential movements for the rest to rally round.
To change the economic and social systems the first imperative is mindset change. I argue that it must be positive to create the desire for change. Fear has only got us a little way, but most ordinary people naturally latch on to messages saying it’s someone else’s problem, and in any case they can’t do anything about it, so nothing changes.
We need to take a leaf out of the Transition Network’s philosophy to highlight the positive, not just the negative, to give people hope and belief.
'We have a massive problem, but…there are solutions, evidenced by XY and Z etc.
Transition Network | www.orbissacri.org.
I’ll be in touch again soon, as I make my third attempt to encourage regenerative movement leaders to collaborate and communicate effectively.
All the best
Jeremy
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@AndrewGaines Thank you for sharing this! I agree that the economy needs to be put on a diet (I call that degrowth, because that is what it is), however I do not think it is “economic hara kiri”, quite the contrary. It will be the phasing out of the capital-owning class, yes, but it will be an expansion of wellbeing for the vast majority of humans. It is the greatest thing that would happen in human history.
I think that focusing on the positive is a good strategy, but this does not mean defocusing from the bad, which the capitalist way of organizing the economy. If folks are not told point blank that rich economies would have to shrink on average, they would not believe the “positive” visions of the new economy. We should not sweep under the rug: colonialism, inequalities, the shareholder class etc. etc.
Change the thinking happens first with those most persuadable, so that is where the message should be delivered first. I advocate for full honesty. This is how moral progress and social progress happens, this is how we phased out slavery, we obtained universal suffrage, marriage equality etc. etc. All these were quite unpopular with the cultural status-quo in previous generations. Even slave owners framed emancipation as a “bad thing” because (oh no!) it was about them losing property. So yes, in the new economy the elites will “lose” the vast majority of their property and that is a very very good thing.
How the message is delivered is another conversation. I support a multifaceted approach from data-based op-eds, addressing moral questions, unpacking the models for the new economy, short-form content with accessible language for wide audiences etc.
I’ve been following this conversation, and to be honest, this is the same conversation we’ve been having for decades. These approaches have all been in place actively for decades. They haven’t worked because they can’t.
We’re running away from the very clear calculus that we can’t save the planet. And that the very idea that we could is megalomaia of the most epic proportions. We assume that we exist outside the ecosystem rather than being an explicit and embedded part of it. We are simply an element of the planet’s behaviour. There is nothing unnatural about what we are doing right now as a species. It’s not destroying the planet, it’s the planet transforming itself.
You are correct that it’s the thinking that has to change, but the strategies offered aren’t new thinking. it’s the same thinking. It does exactly what the current neoliberal-dominated colonial-imperial paradigm does: we assume the WE KNOW and other don’t. We assume that that presumed higher knowledge should hold sway and be adopted by everybody (dominance), and that if they only listened to us, everything would turn out fine (we have absolutely zero data to back that up. We have never attempted any progressive “solution” at scale. They are all entirely untested theories).
The truth is that we’ve past the 12th hour where we could reverse climate change and avoid climate disaster by a good decade. And there is no viable pathway for changing hearts and minds on the scale required even if there weren’t a corporate mega-communication-machine drowning out/co-opting our messages with several million times the resources, reach and capacity.
Even Donella Meadows states clearly in her article that those who have embodied the highest leverage point of being able to transcend paradigms have ALWAYS been shunned by the sociseties of their time. In fact, they most often die horrible deaths at the hands of the people they sought to help. Because they will always be seen as aberrant to the traditions of that society.
We cannot save the world. We shouldn’t be trying to. The world is just fine. She is going through her teenage awkward phase, and we are the acne.
We will either mature with her, or we will vanish. We haven’t even been on the planet long enough to leave decent fossils behind. We are so steeped in the neoliberal anthropomorphic arrogance of our upbringing that even in this activism we see ourselves as the center of this story. We’re not. We are probably the least essential organism on this planet when it comes to the ecosystem. All metrics say that the planet’s health improves if we were to just vanish. Why would we think that WE are the answer to the problem WE are creating? We can’t be, and we aren’t.
We need to focus almost exclusively on that change of perspective and change in thinking. Otherwise we continue to fumble about in this panicked futility that we have been spiraling in for decades with no systemic results to speak of. As Bayo Akomolafe says “Our approach to the crisis is a part of the crisis.” And yes, it always has been.
I would recommend the book Hospicing Modernity Hospicing Modernity – Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
as well as the whole of Gestruing Towards Decolonial Futures collective’s work.
This world is crumbling. We must accept that there is no saving it. We need to grieve what we are losing and nurtur what is growing in its place. There IS an ecosystem of folks who are TRYING to think differently. Who aren’t trying to fix what is unfixable, but are invested in imagining something beyond it that grows out of the truth that we are simply a part of a biointelligent meta-metabloism that is the planet. We will never be “smarter” than the systems that gave us the conditions for our supposed intelligence to be possible in the first place. We have to orient from the fact that we ARE land, and that our bodies never have forgotten that. We have been operating too long in trauma states from trying to live a lie of separation when everything we’ve ever discovered with our science tells us that we are entirely interwoven and enmeshed in an interdependent whole.
What does our economy look like when it is based on this? That can only be done locally, with the body you are in, on the land you are on. It can only be done in small nodes of committed and connected folk willing to do the uncomfortable work of facing the lie and its horrible repercussions head-on, and forming new coherences based on the truths we discover when we heal from this generational trauma of falshood. The truth is that we don’t know what we are doing. We can’t. We’re using the same thinking that got us into this mess and tying ourselves up in even more knots.
The truth is that society, as we know it, will collapse, and there’s not a simgle thing any of us can do about it. The calulus is very very clear on this. We should already be looking to rebuilding on the other side of whatever karmic calamity we have ensured for ourselves with our very human behaviour.
It’s time to grow up and stop pretending that we’re in charge. We’re not.
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I asked a highly intelligent taxi driver what he thought about climate change. His answer was extinct: we are fucked, and cited rising fossil fuel use in India and China and melting of the Antarctic ice sheets.
There’s no question that our globalized will continue to painfully unravel. We will descend to a steady state economy one way or another. However, perhaps we can soften the descent.
Personally, I am passionate about giving this our best shot. Stable Planet Alliance has a robust platform for mobilizing collective will for change, at least in the Anglosphere. Are you willing to consider moving from commentary to action to affect public consciousness?
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I didn’t come to this conclusion from the sidelines. I’ve been embedded deeply in this work for decades and have first hand experience that it simply does not work, like, at all. I have founded non-profits , run festivals and events, and have a spoken word career dedicated to preaching from the rooftops. It doesn’t work.
Massive infrastructural change could happen this way if we had the resources of the neoliberal colonial machine, and we didn’t have that machine working directly against us reinforcing the very behaviours we’re hoping to change, but in our current curcumstance, it is futile and a waste of energy and effort that could be put to better use in stratgies with at least a chance of having something new emerge.
I don’t think we should be polishing the brass on this Titanic at all, We should be looking for a floating door to cling to while it sinks around us.
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Private Fraser in Dad’s Army was more succinct: ‘We’re doomed’.
I prefer and believe in the wisdom of the palaeontologist, mystic, and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s perspective :
“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.”
Let’s not give up, nor fall to the gloom of the arrogant know it alls
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Honestly, do yourself a favour and pick up that book I mentioned. What we need most of all right now is clarity about how wrong-headed our approaches have been to this point.
I think this conversation is perfect evidence of what I’m talking about. I’m here trying to convince you that the path you are on is futile and you are still committed to what YOU think is right. That’s what is happening across the board because that is the nature of the neoliberal arrogance of KNOWING. I’m doing it too - I’m convinced that this book will help you see MY point, and I’m futily trying to get you to intake that information that i think is important for us to move forward. But you aren’t budging, you’re pot-commited to your point of view, and so is everyone else. We don’t even all agree on this platform where we are the MOST likely to find folks who are aligned with our cause. It doesn’t work. It never has and never will.
Yet you have no solution. Just give up, eh?
There is no solution. That’s the point. That is the neoliberal colonial mind set - that this has an answer that we candetermine according to our own anthropocentric paradgims that we just made up a few centuries ago with zero basis in reality.
I’ve already suggested a path forward. You ignored it, just like folks are ignoring our messages. You areliterally proving my point.
An inarticulate solution. What’s your fixation on colonialism? Are you a communist bot, perchance? Indeed, it is a closed and arrogant mind that closes down debate.
Ai written and oddly can’t find you on Linkedin
Context:
I have a business called Second Wind Liberation. Here’s our basic abstract:
" At the root of the polycrisis is the myth of separability - the idea that we are “individuals” inherently separate from each other, other living things, and the world, instead of beings embedded in a biointelligent meta-metabolism that contains and sustains us.
If we learn to listen to our “soma” - the sum of our mind, body, spirit, relationships and environments - we can learn to live in the connected reality that multiple ways of knowing and being, including science, tell us is the truth of our existence. Attuning to our soma means concurrently attuning with each other, other living beings, and the world around us in an embodied way that reclaims our inherent connection to one another.
“Our response to the crisis is part of the crisis” Bayo Akomolafe
This learning is at the root of a practice of liberating ourselves from the myth of separability so that we might address the polycrisis, not from a place of panicked crisis, but from a deep groundedness in the truth of the world. We can re-learn to trust the land to recover from our treatment of it, and work with it in a process of care for our soma.
Our work is to reclaim a deep resonance in community with each other, other beings, and the world around us that will be the soil of new growth, of life renewed, of a world regenerating, of our soma healing, regulating, and aligning with the biointelligent meta-metabolism it is inherently a part of"
As Second Wind, we are working with the David Suzuki Foundation to establish the Wellbeing Economic Alliance of Canada. We are in a working group phase, working toward fromalizing ourselves as an entity unto itself.
Both myself and my business partner, Dr. Gillian Maurice come from a Decades-ong relationship with the Transition movment, and we beginning work with some groundbreaking facilitation processes out of the UK for place-based community organizing.
As a HipHop and spoken word artist, I have been active promoting these ideas in verse to audiences large and small in the poetry and festival scenes.
I sepnt a decade running a non-profit called “Nudge” that was based on system-thinking dance parties specifically oriented to introduce patry-goers to progressive concepts subversively.
I ran a local organic restaurant called trhee eXhibit cafe in Kitchener during the first Copenhagen summit and had live updates posted on our walls. Our baristas would give out free samples of our green smoothies in the office buildings convincing suits that it was a better option than their non-fair-trade coffee habits.
The resume is long, but the only point I’m making is that I’m not new to this, I’m not commenting from the sidelines, It has been the central focus of my life for decades, and I am still deply embedded with some of the best and brightest minds in Canada on exactly this work.
And yet it still doesn’t matter. Your first responses are to propose that I am “giving up,” "or I should “consider taking action.” and I get it, you are frstrated. We all are. We should be. But this is my point. Message=ing does nothing. I’ve been trying to convince you unsuccessfully with my messaging and vice versa. It doesn’t work.
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Wait, what? That’s your response? That I’m fixated on coloniialism, must be an AI communist bot and am closed down to debate? I must not exist because I have an opinion different than yours and am not checks notes ON LINKEDIN!!??!! (I am on LinkedIn, I just don’t ever use that account or platform).
This is exactly what I’msaying. You read my messaging, and not only found a million - literally insane - ways to dismiss and dminish my decades of experience on the front lines, but even suggested that I am just a bot and don’t exist.
So exactly how is any messaging from anyone getting out there and making a difference. What we get are exactly responses like this -dismissals and dminishments. Called “commies” and worse. My point couldn’t be made any more plain.
Meassaging doesnt’ work. You have proven that so clearly it is heartbreaking.
Give me the link to your website
I couldn’t find it on search.
Also: I’m a professional writer. I’ve never used AI in my life.
Coming to this conversation in bad faith isn’t going to get us anywhere. What I offered I offered from a depth of experience and a hope that folks would recognize what is so obvious from the data. Messaging doesn’t work.
Odd it can’t be reached, I rest my case.
Yes, because backend website issues are unique.
I get it. I’ve called what you think you know into question so now you’ve adopted an adversarial tone reminiscent of toxic social media instead of engaging in a civil manner. Fine. Then just don’t respond? This is obviously not a conversation that you wnat to have. Our website being down isn’t proof of your weird theory that I dont’ exist.