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

Democracy has been mismanaged putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of marginalized people (who also tend to be climate action supporters) exercising their civil rights.

Global climate diplomacy has been mismanaged, including by allowing massive power differentials between the countries bearing the costs and countries with historic responsibility.

Philanthropy has been mismanaged, favoring narrow technical solutions instead of going whole heartedly into challenging narratives and supporting the long-term work of coalition and power building that grapples with historic inequity.

The political process has been mismanaged, allowing fossil fuel company wealth and power to influence policy.

The economy has been mismanaged allowing a few to profit while the many bear the costs of the burning of fossil fuels.

The news media has been mismanaged, starved of resources and the power to counteract disinformation from vested interests, and too often treating a stable climate as something "scientists want" instead of something everyone needs.

Educational institutions have been mismanaged, fostering divisions between disciplines as though climate can be separate from health, and the university's endowment can be separated from our shared planetary endowment.

That's not to say there's not a lot to learn about building codes and crisis management. But if we are doing an honest search for how tragedies like what is playing out in LA continue to happen, we have to acknowledge that it's not little bugs, its' deep features of current systems.

In dark times it's good to be in good company. So seeing Multisolving in this list of 12 made me happy. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/01/12-books-to-prepare-you-for-trump-2-0/

There's lots of talk of mismanagement regarding the LA wildfires. I agree that we should learn and try to improve, but where the "system boundaries" are being drawn in the search for lessons is more often than not, imo, far too narrow. A 🧵

Because those patterns you embody, even if they are small, or hidden, can be templates that systems can snap to in the future, in different times, under different conditions.

What are the implications? I think the main one is to keep going. To keep embodying an ethic that could work for the whole world, as best you can see and understand what that is.

The thing to notice is how the process works..because nothing is over and the current trajectory is colliding with earth system limits and so more chaos, transformation, and openings are coming even if we don't know what they are yet.

These rapid shifts are producing more coherence. You can see just how fast that process works. The pattern was there, ready to be more fully embodied. That's good to know, because coherence can be to anything. To justice, to care, to interconnection as easily as to domination.

There have been the (often hidden) habits of domination & supremacy (think about the #metoo scandals in news outlets) alongside outward expression of a more egalitarian ethic. That mixture is incoherence.

Coherence is when all parts of a system are operating under similar organizing principles. Those big players have been incoherent for a while.

Watching media and tech shift so quickly from what they thought they needed to be to fit their customers' desires to a form aligned with the organizing principles of the incoming administration is actually a good example of the power of the systems principle of "coherence." A 🧵

If "being realistic" is what has gotten us here, I propose we stop being realistic and instead assume that power can yield, economics can be transformed, self-governance can be pure, and people and planet can be put first.

In a way it makes sense. A society which thinks that degrading biological complexity (like an old growth forest or an ocean full of fish) and calling the process "wealth creation" might call extracting and reprocessing content from texts and artworks "intelligence."

Hot trends for 2025*
Composting
Bicycles
Libraries
Repair cafes
Wetlands
Voting rights
Plant based diets
Home weatherization
Water conservation
Sharing
Rain gardens
Green roofs
Agri-voltaics
Electric school buses
Dense housing
Walkability
Fossil fuel phase out
Peace

*If I ran the world