Notes on people and planet
Introducing In the Balance
Welcome to In the Balance, a newsletter about behaviour, ideas, justice, and their links to planetary crisis. It aims to inform, inspire, and challenge you to seek and make the transformations we need.
Rapid breakdown in the Earth’s systems and its impacts on human societies will not be felt equally by all: they reflect the inequality of the status quo. Ongoing extraction of natural resources and exploitation of people go hand in hand. These patterns are produced and reproduced by bafflingly complex systems. That makes a concerted, deliberate transition from one state to another a tall order. However, systems are made up of parts and their interactions - and, for now at least, most of those parts are humans with the ability to decide, create, and interact.
In the Balance will unpack both individual and collective responsibility in the age of systemic change. Many campaigners point to the role of huge corporations and corrupt governments in driving disaster and argue that most people should not be blamed: they didn’t choose the system they live in. Only a miniscule fraction of people in the world have a significant enough interest in the status quo to make delaying action a rational individual choice. Yet the fact remains that many people not among that privileged few are still cautious or lukewarm about the transition ahead, both in terms of how to mitigate and - increasingly necessary - to adapt to a new reality.
Do people not see the scale and timeframe of what is happening? Why, even at the brink of apparent catastrophe, does a change of gear so often feel out of reach?
Tipping the scales
Many strategies to drive that shift are already in play: popular demonstrations, legal action, awareness campaigns, political engagment, community organising, voting. These also cut across and are activated by concerns over inequalities of class, ethnicity, gender, ability, age and so on. Hope is found by believing that, through some social alchemy, these elements will produce genuine economic transformation.
Of course, technology also has a role to play. Breakthroughs open up new possibilties and capabilities without which there is no viable pathway forwards, given the urgency of the situation. However, tech can also quickly be captured by narrow interests and pressed into service of the very power structures and attitudes that reinforce the problem. Failure to acknowledge this has earned even many green industry leaders a bad rep among activists. Trust is often low between different groups pushing for change.
What of finance and public policy? Capital typically flows to priorities that can easily be expressed through market valuations, driving debt and consumerism. Governments typically act in ways that serve the interest groups they rely on, often thereby disempowering the majority of their citizens and needlessly tightening public purse strings. The question to ask is how each lever available can help either to work within these constraints, as a short-term tactic, or to break free from them.
Fundamentally, however, our ways of living must move away from practices of domination, exclusivity, and harm, and towards those of cooperation, communion, and respect for each other and the natural world (of which we are part). Some of the world’s communities have preserved ancestral ways of providing mutual support and care. Most societies must rediscover these principles and reconfigure systems around them, robustly enough to use exquisitely modern technologies for the good of all.
In the Balance will turn over these puzzle pieces and try to fit them together. Crucially, while the transition can lead to a place of greater wellbeing, some of the steps on the way might be unpalatable, at first. We may need to give up or find alternatives for some ways of living that are easily taken for granted. Wrong-doers might need to be compensated to prevent them from doing further harm. Healing requires forgiveness. Without taking these choices head-on, the forces of discord will remain in control.
Can weighing up what’s at stake once more help to find a way through?
Finding balance
Each post will explore a place, market, or movement. In each of these contexts, the mental frameworks and interactions of people involved are as important as the grand agreements and deals that make the headlines. As HBO reminded us through the words of Logan Roy, “law is people, and ‘people’ is politics.”
If that interests you, and for a sense of what has inspired this newsletter, check out some of the resources below. And subscribe for more examples and leaders shining a light on the alternatives.
The Wellbeing Economy Alliance does fantastic work to push for an economy “in service of life”. It convenes a broad community of organisations and individuals all striving for the same goal, and has produced seminal guidance on public policies and business models that put social and environmental value at their core. Take a look for a glimpse of what things could look like.
‘Social tipping points’ that could bring about accelerated positive change are gaining important traction in research (the linked article by a group of European academics uses the Fridays for Future youth climate movement to illustrate). Add to this the appealing idea, supported by robust analysis from SYSTEMIQ, that certain technologies could suddenly become commercially available en masse. How do these effects join up?
Groups like the Climate Justice Alliance showcase how to put those ideas into practice by centering community action. Worldwide, local people are joining together to push back against injustices imposed on them from outside. Yet the alliance also rejects some of the technologies most favoured by businesses with capital to invest. What does it take to foster solidarity within and between communities at a much grander scale, and what will that mean for conflicts over resources that will shape the systems of the future?
Intriguingly, for a relatively formal and bureaucratic organisation, the United Nations Development Programme ran a series of ‘awareness-based collective action’ dialogues (in conjunction with the Presencing Institute) to engage staff in “deep listening, mindfulness and focusing on the interpersonal and relational dimensions of systems transformation”. What can these perspectives achieve if adopted in high places?
I would also invite you to consider how you fit in:
What is one thing you do every week that gives you some power over our shared future?
Please do share In the Balance with anyone in your life you think could benefit from reading it. Thank you for being here.