Notices by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin✨ (bethsawin@spore.social)

One thing deleting tweets from 2009 onward taught me was that if you do something for a few minutes most every day for a long time that will produce a very large body of work. Let's use our minutes well friends!

Even when powerful forces act like it is not true the world remains whole, interconnected, and indivisible.

I'll start - I heard recently about a group of parents who block off the streets near a school once a week so that kids can ride their bikes to the school. They call it the bike bus.

Actions that protect the climate while also connecting us to one another in solidarity are now more important than ever. What are your favorite ways to build community while reducing emissions?

When a society breaks stuff faster than it heals stuff you get the world we've got.

When a society heals more than it breaks, well...that is a world we could have, with discernment, mindfulness (and a wholly different economic system).

Is it cost effective to save ourselves yet?

Climate change isn't only a threat multiplier it is also an inequity exposer.

I don't think enough people understand that it's not just roads, bridges, housing, and water systems that aren't designed to current climate conditions - it's mental health systems, insurance systems, emergency response systems, agricultural systems, medical education systems,

Funders seem (mostly, there are always exceptions & these folks are dear to me & in service of an emerging better world) to want to fund "winners," invincible heroes ushering in a shiny new world in an exhausting but somehow upbeat rush.

Anyway today I'm the only one on our a team having a "normal" day. My colleagues, spread across the southeastern US are dealing with power outages, internet outages, debris, a chemical fire, flooding impacting them, loved ones, and their communities.

Kids home from school. Relatives staying over. Worry for the future. Loss.

We climate workers are people too. Soft and vulnerable as anyone else. Hearts breaking. Filled with worry. Or putting down our laptops to deliver supplies or shelter others.

It so clear now: our interventions need to be climate proofed if we are to be useful. Our work needs to be designed for the very destabilization it is trying to prevent the worsening off. And taking care of the world has to mean taking care of each other too.

I can tell you that trying to do so, to figure out what "climate proofed climate work" is makes you look odd. Downright weird. And it seems to makes the fundraising part exponentially harder.

When you stop doing that which everyone (mostly) is doing but which you think can't continue under the coming destabilization you step out of a lot of opportunities

When you instead put your energy into infrastructure you think could be sustained through destabilization - newsletters, pdfs that could be used even w/o power very simple tools, an actual three dimensional artifact, a book of al things - some opportunities close down.

When you design tools that you think have the best chance of helping people who are more in more in crisis, in confusion, who you can't fly to or who don't have much money or time, or who have to start and stop their work, your tools look less shiny and more simple.

That idea didn't land well. (Understatement alert!) This is an example of a place (there are many others) where I feel constantly trapped between saying what I'm really thinking and planning and saying what feels fundable.

When I launched Multisolving Institute I always made a point to tell funders that we were deliberately choosing timelines for our goals that would require less than a constant full on sprint to accomplish.

I anticipated our team (all teams) would be increasingly impacted by climate destabilization and we (everyone) would need to build in more slack to be able to cope.