In Conclusion: Bridging to What is Next
Polycrisis and Just Transition – Part 5
Image description: A young man sitting on a pedestrian suspension bridge above a river gorge, with dramatic mountains and glaciers in the background. The location is the Austrian Alps. Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash.
This has been a rather long and at times theoretical series of posts. I commend those of you that have stuck with me. I am very grateful to those of you who pointed me to these important perspectives and resources. Here are some hopeful thoughts from good thinkers about healing, building momentum, and “breaking the spell.”
Indy Johar hints at where we need to focus (read the full essay here):
The system demands that we speak in its terms—growth, yield, productivity, capital efficiency—and the more fluently we speak them, the more we become its reflection.
Attempts at reform—impact investing, ESG, responsible capitalism—often end up reinforcing the labyrinth…the wealth system is not just an economic order; it is an epistemic enclosure. It defines what can be seen, measured, and valued, and in doing so, it defines what can be ignored, externalized, and destroyed.
To break this spell, we [need to] to change the theory of where value occurs. We must ask where generativity—the creation of the conditions for life—actually happens, and why it is rendered invisible by the current architecture of wealth.
Value, in truth, does not originate in ownership or exchange. It emerges in relationships, in the regenerative capacities of ecosystems, in the tacit coordination of societies, in care, in learning, in the integrity of shared infrastructures. These are the living substrates of any economy…
The task, then, is not to re-organize wealth but to re-anchor value in these generative fields and to build the accounting, institutional, and legal architectures that can recognize and sustain them. Once this realignment occurs, wealth and capital will have no choice but to follow. Like a river forced to find a new course, capital will flow toward the sites where real value is being produced—where the future is being made possible.
When Johar lists the real sources of value, I think of community-based organizations. It is thus our charge to reinvent these organizations to better support the things that truly have value.
Islands of coherence
Another approach for bridging to a brighter future is healing work—healing from individual, collective, and generational trauma. If we can work on healing, we can begin to create islands of coherence—healthy spaces that can grow and lead to systems change. The Collective Change Lab puts it this way here:
Most of our world problems are collaboration and relational problems — across cultures, with the earth, and if we are to form the relational containers we need for the solutions to arrive, we must start to work with the trauma that keeps us apart and fragmented…
If enough groups become islands of coherence in a sea of chaos, they will form a greater field of coherence even if they do not physically meet. Like the mycelium and mycorrhizal network beneath the ground, this coherence will enable — and in fact compel — a new movement of change…
The big movements of life are made of countless small movements, including ours.
May it be so.