Notices by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin✨ (bethsawin@spore.social), page 3

My #Earthday wishes for this book and you, its possible reader, (with a few spring photos just for the sake of joy) a 🧵about what I tried my hardest to offer as I wrote...

(If you don't have time for a 🧵, but want to keep up with the book as I know more about release date and events pls sign up for the Multisolving Institute newsletter here: https://multisolving.org/#newsletter)

For the overwhelmed - I hope the book offers a way to think about change, about scale, about emergence, about steering through crises and uncertainty. If there's any of that wisdom in the pages h/t to my three most important teachers Donella Meadows, Joanna Macy, and my garden.

For those hungry for #systemsthinking I've done my best to share what I know about that. If you've always been interested in systems but maybe have been put off by lots of math, charts & diagrams you might like that my book is high on systems concepts but low on systems diagrams.

Among other things climate change is a time tax, I mutter, as I scan the dog and myself for ticks after a simple walk in the spring woods. 😠

Hey new followers, welcome!

We can walk away from systems that don't serve us, including social media systems! We can experiment with reestablishing networks after they are disrupted too - that's a good thing to know how to do in these times.

Things you'll find me posting about:

#climate
#health
#equity
#resilience
#multisolving
#systemsthinking
#gardens

If departments, jurisdictions, and disciplines are just ideas, then there is nothing immovable about them. We can make these borders more permeable and conduct partnerships across them. We can even redraw them to include more of what matters in a single project or investment. That’s the premise of multisolving—using one investment of time or effort to steer toward several goals at once. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/multisolving_making_systems_whole_healthy_and_sustainable

It may be that the college students, who learned in elementary school that the government wouldn't keep them safe from shooters or keep them safe from a pandemic or hand them a livable climate, also learned that they keep each other safe, and that no change is scarier than change. May clarity and courage be contagious.

I believe this: Because life is self-organizing and regenerating, even the very tiny shifts we make away from harm and towards sustenance of life open up possibilities that compound upon themselves.

I'm curious: are there tools where you can paste a profile photo and get a likelihood that it's an AI generated face? Over on blue sky I'm being swarmed by accounts with no posts and no profile photos, and a smaller number with photos, but if feels like there's something off some the photos. It's getting weird on this ol' internet.

Maybe 2024 will be the year that more and more people will grapple with the challenge that it is features, not bugs, in current dominant systems that give us everything from plastic particles in our tissues to a warming earth to sacrifice zones and poverty.

And I expect you to clap for me. And I expect good press. And I imply that citizens who are distressed by this are alarmists or over-reacting, or naive. Rings a little different that way doesn't it?

I agree that I have a responsibility to address this problem. And so I make a one time pledge of 80 cents. And, I don't give you the 80 cents today, I promise that I will eventually give you 80 cents.

To put that in everyday terms: say you (the global south) have an ongoing and worsening leak in your roof that I (the global north) caused by crashing my remote controlled helicopter toy into it. That leak costs you $400 each year to cope with.

As far as I can tell there's an estimated $400 billion needed every year in developing countries for coping with losses caused by the burning of fossil fuels in rich countries. At the COP, rich countries pledged a one-time commitment of $800 million.

I think people's confusion between hundreds of millions and hundreds of billions is making for more "good news" headlines about #COP28 than might happen if the numbers were translated into more familiar terms.

Even if the centers of power don't acknowledge it, even if the flashy events don't acknowledge it, the world has always been and always will be an indivisible whole. No one wins if other peoples or other species sink into climate devastation.

Let's use our cleverness to take care of one another, rather than market the pursuit of survival as an opportunity for profit.

Today would be a good day to invest the trillions spent on war and violence (within and between countries) on ecological restoration, human development, and basic needs. Imagine squandering wealth (the temporarily captured energy of a nearby star, transmuted into human and ecological effort) on destruction instead of nurturance.

I feel like the older I get and the deeper into global overshoot of ecological limits we get the more I feel like uttering apparent paradoxes all the time. Such as

Everybody slow the heck down, it's an emergency!!

or

If you keeping looking for support where the money is, you'll only be able to support ideas that make sense to those with the money.

And so on.