A word of thanks

Thank you for subscribing to my quantum social change newsletter! It’s been a hobby and a space to share my ongoing exploration of the many ways that I believe we’re underestimating our individual and collective capacity for social change towards an equitable and thriving world.

My newsletters have been less frequent lately, but many others have been expressing what I have been trying to articulate as quantum social change and fractal change. And that’s a beautiful realization! I’m now thinking about where this newsletter might go next, and considering different possibilities. If you have suggestions or recommendations, please share your words. And speaking of words…

Words matter

What’s in a word? I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time. In earlier work, it was related to the concepts of vulnerability and adaptation in climate change discourses. More recently, it’s been about how we understand transformations to sustainability.

Our interpretations of words affect whether, how, and with whom we approach problems and solutions. Language can bring us together or it can exacerbate fragmentation and separation.

Words do more than describe reality. They shape our social reality.

Wordling

Lately, I’ve been playing Wordle, a game that involves guessing a five-letter word. One day last week I started with value and ended up with morph — a word that means “to gradually change, or change someone or something, from one thing to another.” It’s another way of describing transformative change.

I find it fun to extract a deeper meaning from my Wordle games by linking them to something I’m already thinking about. For example, this particular game tells me that “the tendency to morph words points to the importance of values.”

Words are never fixed “containers” for meaning. Meanings change, and these changes affect the quality and direction of actions. Recognizing that words can entangle us through shared contexts and meanings, we may want to be explicit about the values embedded in the words that guide our actions.

Relational bonds

In trying to understand how words shape worlds, I've been drawn to the work of physicist David Bohm. As I wrote in You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World, language and shared meaning play a significant role in connecting us:

In his book, On Dialogue, David Bohm writes that our words generate a stream of meaning that seems to flow “among and through us and between us.” He emphasizes that “this shared meaning is the ‘glue’ or ‘cement’ that holds people and societies together.” This is not, however, the classical glue that we are familiar with; it is a relational bond that connects [whole/parts] and [I/we] across time and space.

Small groups frequently co-opt words to promote agendas that diminish and exclude people and nature, rather than bring us together. When meaning is hijacked by exclusionary values, the glue is dissolved. A lack of shared meaning increases separation and social fragmentation, especially when words are morphed into something that is distant from earlier understandings.

The Politics of words

Historian Heather Cox Richardson often stresses the importance of values in politics. Her insightful documentation and analysis of transformations in the U.S. political landscape helps many of us to make sense of what can feel like senseless times.

In one “explainer” podcast, she points out that categorical labels such as “Republican” and “Democrat” are not opposites — they instead represent two different and complementary ideologies.

She traces how the meaning attached to the label “Republican” has shifted repeatedly across U.S. history, along with the values that have been prioritized. The Republican ideology emerged during the U.S. Civil War in response to Southern enslavers who held land and did not want the government to intervene in their affairs. Republican Abraham Lincoln, in contrast, sought a “harmony of interests” that benefitted everyone.

Heather Cox Richardson goes on to describe how the Republican ideology of protecting everyone’s equality in front of the law soon morphed into an era of “robber barons” who did not that to redistribute wealth. We then saw a shift back towards more progressive values in the times of Theodore Roosevelt. However, the party of “traditional Republicans” was eventually hijacked in the 1960s by a small faction of “movement Republicans” who were against racial justice and gender rights. She discusses how the rise of “MAGA Republicans” shifted the pendulum in a new direction that does not advocate democracy, but rather an authoritarian theocracy.

The point is that political identities evolve, sometimes dramatically, while retaining the same label. Heather Cox Richardson’s podcasts is aimed at helping people who are feeling lost right now to understand how words and labels can hold diverse meanings over time, and she reminds us that values matter.

Lost meaning

It’s easy to feel lost right now when it comes to climate politics. Populist parties, regardless of labels, have no interest in recognizing that there is broad global support for action on climate change, and that climate action is, in fact, popular. Moreover, there is a failure to recognize that climate change affects the security and well-being of all of us, regardless of our ideology.

Security here refers to universal access to healthy food and clean air, water, and soils, stable communities, thriving ecosystems, and a livable climate. However, the word security can also be used to justify military spending, new oil and gas developments, stricter border controls, and the curtailment of human rights. Valuable questions to ask include: Security for whom, from what, and for how long?

It’s always a question of what we care deeply about, not just for ourselves and those like us, but for all, including non-humans and future generations.

What would the world look like if values like equity, integrity, and compassion were taken seriously and used as the glue that holds society together?

Back to Wordle

Wordle starts with uncertainty and possibility. Through choices and feedback, we gradually narrow a field of potential until the solution emerges. Or many solutions, as Wordle has been translated into over 75 languages.

Quantum social change works in a similar way, as we are constantly collapsing a field of possibility and potential into choices and actions that have real-world consequences.

I’ve been using value as my starting point in Wordle to remind myself that words carry values, whether we recognize them or not. The values embedded in our words help shape our future, as they influence priorities, policies, and possibilities.

David Bohm points to the social significance of shared meaning, and Heather Cox Richardson offers us an historical perspective that shows that meaning-making does change. Our challenge now is not just to choose the right words, but to embody values and meanings that contribute an equitable and thriving world.

Can we “wordle” a world that represents “a harmony of interests” and an ethics of care? I believe so, but it’s not a game — it’s a practice.

Image: AnjaBerkut / iStock

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Uncertainty

I’m uncertain. And stuck. After two years of writing this newsletter, I’m wondering what more I can say about quantum social change. It seems like it’s now time to focus on action.

Quantum social science applies the metaphors, methods and meaning of quantum mechanics - including our uncertainty about its interpretation - to societal challenges. It represents a quality of change that’s hard to translate into words. Art and poetry often do this better than newsletters.

Artwork by Tone Bjordam

Examples

I am often asked what quantum social change looks like in practice. Can you give some examples?

Good question. I understand the importance of real-world examples, but they tend to collapse reality into classical descriptions of “they did this, which led to that, so they did this, and that was the outcome.”

This and that.

With quantum social change, what happens between this and that is what’s important. It’s about relationships and how people show up, moment by moment. It’s about our intra-actions with each other and nature. As nature. Quantum social change is subtle, not causal.

Integrity and trust

How do we identify the subtle dimensions of change processes? The clues lie in patterns, processes, and relationships. Last week I had a conversation with Kerstin Johannesson, the Director of Tjärnö Marine Laboratory at University of Gothenburg. We were on a research boat, and she was talking about Sweden’s first marine national park, Kosterhavet National Park.

She told me it was established in 2009 through a bottom-up process. Fisherfolk and community members were actively involved in the decision-making process and were offered courses in marine ecology. Researchers and policy-makers learned about what local people care about. She contrasted this with the establishment of the nearby Ytre Hvaler marine national park in Norway, which was largely a top-down process that has created resentment in local fishing communities.

My fractal antennas were up — I am always interested in self-similar patterns that repeat across scales. I was curious about the qualities that contributed to Kosterhavet’s success. I found a book chapter by Mia Pantzar that summarizes the lessons from the Kosterhavet case, both in relation to rural development and nature conservation. In between the “this and that” descriptions of what happened, there were references to values like flexibility, respect, reciprocity, integrity, honesty, and trust:

One of the local fishermen explains how his sector was initially ‘furious’ about the plans of a national park, but the fact that the municipality supported the fishermen’s position to keep the agreement from 2000, for which they had worked hard, helped change their standpoint. As fishermen, scientists and the County Administrative Board all sat down together to discuss, they realised that they all wanted the same thing: the park proponents wanted to preserve the local ways of living as part of a sustainably used national park and the fishermen wanted to ensure their livelihoods. ... Coming together brought mutual respect and understanding, enabling an open and honest dialogue — a giving and taking.

I then found a thesis by Mari Reistad comparing the Swedish and Norwegian marine national parks and the role of local participation in establishing them.

Kosterhavet was wanted among local inhabitants, as a way to bring tourists and income to the area. Ytre Hvaler National Park was decided by the government, and had no local support at the beginning. The management of Kosterhavet National Park has higher degree of local participation, with locals being part of the decision-making board in the park. In Ytre Hvaler, the same level of participation has not been achieved.

Reistad’s study found that involvement and participation bring high levels of trust and legitimacy. These are relational processes that take place over time, and they involve connecting what we do with what we deeply care about for all. It involves more than “this and that.”

Conscious strategies

The role of values is often overlooked in examples of transformative initiatives, but they’re always present. And they are consequential. In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright argues that “if emancipatory visions of viable alternatives are to become the actual real utopias of achieved alternatives it will be the result of conscious strategies by people committed to democratic egalitarian values.” (p. 28).

Wright distinguishes two routes to a systemic transformation of society: Symbiotic metamorphosis and interstitial metamorphosis.

Symbiotic transformations involve strategies in which extending and deepening the institutional forms of popular social empowerment simultaneously help solve certain practical problems faced by dominant classes and elites.

Connecting livelihoods, regional development, and conservation can be considered a symbiotic transformation for sure. But real transformations are often more subtle, or what Wright describes as interstitial. It’s about what happens in the gaps between this and that.

Interstitial transformations seek to build new forms of social empowerment in the niches and margins of capitalist society, often where they do not seem to pose any immediate threat to dominant classes and elites.

Interstitial transformations includes strategies of building institutions of social empowerment that fall below the radar screen of radical critics of capitalism. These, for example, often involve processes and practices that are grounded in integrity and wholeness. In other words, they represent a fractal approach to transformative change.

Many of the marine national parks being established around the world are contributing to interstitial transformations that are changing how we relate to the marine environment. These patterns are not always visible, but they are powerful.

The Power of the Invisible

We may not see the interstitial transformations that are underway, but they are happening. Just because something is not visible doesn’t mean it does not exist. As Dan Siegel writes in IntraConnected, “we are perceptually blind to those systems connections that are outside of our particular mental models of how the world works. We literally are unable to see what is right in front of us.”

Scientists often “discover” something that has always been there. Fractals, for example, were only discovered by Mandelbrot in 1975. Neuroplasticity was proposed long before it was recognized. More recently, scientists have discovered a new circulatory system in our bodies called the interstitial circulation system. “The existence of an apparent conduit between skin and the fascia beneath it — two tissue layers not known to connect with each other in this way — broke accepted anatomic boundaries.”

The discovery of this third circulatory system [in addition to our cardiovascular and lymphatic systems] may have profound implications for our understanding of how the human body works and how we view ourselves in relation to other biological systems.

And yet, the interstitial circulation system has always been there. As an expert in Chinese medicine remarked, “We’ve been talking about this for 4,000 years.”

Why wait?

I worry that if we wait for evidence and examples of quantum social change, it may be another 4,000 years before evidence-based science recognizes and promotes quantum social change. Considering where we are at now with the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the state of the world’s oceans, I’m ready to “realize” quantum social change through action right now, including actionless action.

So, over the past month I’ve been uncertain and stuck when it comes to writing this newsletter. I’ve been doing this and that, followed by this and that. However, after running an online course about Scaling Transformative Change, it’s clear that doing what we love, together with those who care deeply about people and the planet, is an example of quantum social change. In other words, quantum social change is love in action.

Image: ChunYip Wong / iStock

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A Listening Game

These days I’ve been thinking about the children’s game “Simon says.” The rules are simple: act only when the leader says “Simon says.” If you move without it, you’re out.

I’ve been wondering what it would mean to play a version of this game called “Scientists say.”

Scientists say that Atlantic ocean currents—known as AMOC—are more likely to collapse than previously thought.

Scientists say collapse of the AMOC would also lead to substantial oceanic carbon release and additional global warming.

Scientists say multiple climate tipping points pose risks for billions of people.

Continue with business as usual.

In this listening game, if we move forward by continuing with business as usual, we are out. All of us.

In reality, this is not a game.

Listening to experts

What scientists are saying about the Atlantic circulation is deeply concerning, and what’s more troubling is how little attention it has received. George Monbiot recently expressed some ideas about why this might be the case:

Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.

We cannot afford to “wait and see” if the AMOC behaves as the models project. As stressed by delegates at the Santa Marta climate conference, we need to act now.

We also need more research, not only to track changes in the Earth system, but to understand how to respond rapidly in ways that are equitable and sustainable.

In the United States, cuts to climate change research (and science in general) are making critical research increasingly difficult. According to Gretchen Goldman, President and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the recent firing of National Science Foundation Board Members represents nothing less than "An attempt to silence independent scientists, shut down evidence-based decision making, and keep the public in the dark.”

Goldman points out that without access to what science advice the government is receiving, it becomes difficult for the public to hold it accountable when they don’t act on it: “Firing members of the National Science Board cuts science—and the public—out of the picture.”

Expert governance

Expertise is essential for the political legitimacy of climate policies. And people want this expertise. A recent study by Daniel Lindvall and Frederik Pfeiffer on public preferences for participatory democracy and expert governance on climate policies in Sweden showed that:

climate-related expert governance appears to have greater potential [for building political legitimacy] than participatory democracy both to mitigate polarization by fostering consensus across political cleavages and to build acceptance among individuals who are typically skeptical of climate policies.

Their findings are valid across ideological differences. However, they also note that in relative terms, expert governance isn’t popular among respondents who don’t believe in climate change as well as among those who don’t trust climate scientists.

Many people do want to listen to scientists. However, if the media is hiding important news about climate change (as Monbiot writes), and if governments are silencing scientists (as Goldman writes), then we do have a problem.

Science matters

While writing this newsletter and thinking about why science matters, I received a call informing me that I have been elected into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The mission of the NAS includes advancing science, strengthening public understanding, and providing independent advice to government. It’s an honor to be part of the NAS, especially at a time when science is under attack.

I am wondering how I can meaningfully contribute not only to a broad understanding of science, but to a deeper way of connecting science with society. It makes me think we need a different kind of listening game.

The science of listening

The new listening game has to go beyond “scientists say” and include listeners as equal and active agents. Drawing analogies to quantum physics, in Quantum Mind and Social Science Alexander Wendt writes about entangled connections between speakers and listeners and the importance of context:

In quantum mechanics measurement is what brings about a wave function’s collapse, which is an inherently contextual process that involves first deciding what particular question to ask of nature and then preparing the experiment in such a way that it can be answered; if these steps are done differently, then a different result will be obtained. Similarly, in language what brings about a concept’s collapse from potential meanings into an actual one is a speech act, which may be seen as a measurement that puts it into a context, both with other words and particular listeners.

Wendt points out that the process starts with a speaker’s decision to try to communicate one meaning over another.

But while communicative intent (analogous to the physicist’s question and experimental design) structures outcomes in a certain way, the meaning that is actually produced (where the “particle” lands) depends also on the listener, whose understanding will depend on how what is said interacts with her memory of words and their associations (which may differ from the speaker’s).

In essence, speakers and listeners connect through language and shared meaning. AMOC and tipping points may not trigger word memories. In fact, people may associate AMOC with “running amok” or behaving without control in a wild or dangerous manner. Could such associations shape how risks are interpreted?

The challenge may be to find a way of expressing the risks that listeners can relate with. Metaphors matter.

If listening is a science, maybe scientists need to listen better.

A listening campaign

Perhaps we can take inspiration from the newly-elected Hungarian Prime Minister, Peter Magyar. His success was in part tied to a “listening campaign” to understand what matters to Hungarians and how they see the world.

Science advice and expert governance must connect with what people care about. Science communicators know this and have drawn attention to the mismatch between science communication and everyday understandings. Rather than guessing what will resonate, we need to practice listening. We can start with a simple question: What do you deeply care about — not just for yourself, but for everyone?

When we connect with what truly matters to people, we open a space for seeing things in new ways.

Communicating meaningfully about what matters may be the challenge of our time and is critical to promoting the adoption of independent, authoritative, trusted scientific advice.

People love being listened to. And we can all become better listeners. After all, as William Stringfellow writes, listening deeply is “a primitive act of love.”

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Image: Kristof Lauwers /Shutterstock

It’s beautiful

“Hard to admit, but it was still beautiful.”

This sentence touched me. It’s from Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, which takes place in 2119. The protagonist Tom Metcalfe’s observation about a dramatically-altered English landscape reflects his nostalgia for those “resourceful raucous times, when the sea stood off at a respectful distance.”

This takes place after the Derangement; when people are looking back from the future and thinking about a past that “seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.”

The image of the Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman on April 2, 2026 reminds us that we live on an exquisite planet that is, in fact, whole, precious, and teeming with life. And full of problems that can be solved.

What if we could still rescue and recover all that we love about this beautiful planet — today?

Axial revolutions

We know what we need to do, but we are not doing it. The problem is not a lack of knowledge. The problem lies in our perspectives.

What does it mean to shift perspective? Back in 2012, I participated in a European Science Foundation project called RESCUE — short for Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth (RESCUE). I was co-leader of the working group, “Towards a Revolution in Education and Capacity Building.”

The working group agreed that this could not be another “circular” revolution — nothing more than continuous motion around an unchanging (and even unrecognized or invisible) axis. Round and round we go, creating an illusion of progress.

It sounded all too familiar.

Instead, we saw a need for an axial revolution that challenged unquestioned beliefs, assumptions, and paradigms. Such a revolution would address not only institutional reforms and curriculum changes, but also interior shifts in consciousness and meaning making. This revolution would help us to identify our blind spots and respond differently to environmental and social challenges.

The revolution that our working group was calling for was unconventional and daring. We invited leaders in research, education, and capacity building to engage in reflexive processes, potentially disturbing their own ‘‘axes’’ to come up with new ways of addressing the challenges posed by global environmental change.

What we learned is that transformation is both a revolutionary and evolutionary process. It involves more than endless cycles of planning, doing, checking, and acting. It requires that we shift our perspective and adopt a different point of view.

Source: O’Brien et al. (2013) “You say you want a revolution? Transforming education and capacity building in response to global change.” Environmental Science and Policy

Axial revolutions are not new. In fact, in The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental, sociologist John Torpey distinguishes three axial ages: a moral one that left a profound mark on human self-understanding (around the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE, or Before Common Era); a material one (beginning around 1750); and a mental one that is taking place today (see Table 1).

Source: Torpey (2017). The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental. Rutgers University Press.

If the axial shift is already underway, how can I contribute to it? How can we all be part of it?

Recovery

Revolutions — whether circular or axial — involve more than rescuing ourselves from environmental and social damage and destruction. We also have to restore and regenerate the conditions for life to thrive. We need to recover.

The word recover means “to return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength.” Moving forward at a chaotic and uncertain time is easier when we are healthy, mindful, and strong, both individually and together.

This past week, I co-led a workshop in South Africa for restoration ecologists and others participating in the RECOVER project, which is a research initiative focusing on co-creating nature recovery maps to guide conservation and restoration efforts in Norway and South Africa.

cCHANGE was invited to help participants to develop their capacities for navigating and shifting social and political systems based on their inner capacities and universal values, so that we can meet sustainable development targets and care for people and the planet. This represents a paradigm shift away from the binaries and dualisms that separate us from each other and nature.

Becoming aware of our paradigms means noticing “the thinking that produces the thinking.” And this is where quantum social change comes in. In an entangled world, our thoughts and actions always influence the whole. We matter.

Uh-oh. Does this mean it’s time for me to shift my own axis? Again? Maybe this axial shift is about recovering the things that matter to me.

Recover attention. Recover focus. Recover imagination. Recover courage. Recover joy. And recover purpose.

Moving forward

Despite retiring and moving into “preferment,” I find myself going round and round, perpetuating my old ways of working. I’m still listening to the voice of reason, which tells me what I should be doing, what I could be doing, and what makes the most sense. Classical me.

This rational voice pays little attention to what I want to be doing. Which is to engage with and experience quantum social change. I want to nourish a “you matter” movement that helps us to recognize the connections between mind, meaning, and matter — and to understand why small changes make a big difference.

So how do I walk the talk in an “axial” way? For this, I need to move forward in a different way. Shifting patterns calls for both space and time. As Karen Barad points out in her work on agential realism, space, time and matter are not separate — we can instead think of our actions in terms of “entanglements of spacetimemattering.”

My first axial shift will be to recover attention and focus. Those who are recklessly destroying the world do not deserve more attention than those who are working for a better future. I will consume news with great discretion and spend more time reflecting on what matters. In times of chaos, stillness matters.

From Scraping to Thriving

The current “mental” axial revolution is significant, and the good news is that everyone can take part. We all have important roles to play. And now is the time to play these roles.

McEwan’s fictional portrayal of the current era from a future perspective makes it clear that if we continue with largely circular revolutions, we are likely to experience the situation described by the novel’s main character, Tom Metcalfe:

Round we go. Each time we fail, or calamities overwhelm us, we will come back from a slightly higher place. Rising and falling, we would continue to scrape through.

Scraping through is very different from thriving.

Rescuing and recovering the world out there is important, but the axial revolution is fundamentally about shifting our own mindsets and connecting with each other in new ways so that we can evolve together, both individually and collectively. I’m ready for the revolution. Are you?

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Just a reminder that the audio and pdf version of my book, You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World is now freely available to all. Please share it as a small contribution to the axial revolution!

Image: NASA/Reid Wiseman

Responsibility

The scale of destruction that we’re seeing around the world continues to be astounding and heartbreaking. We are abusing power and acting as if some people, places, and ecosystems do not matter.

Why on Earth are we blowing up the global carbon budget? The Guardian has been reporting on the environmental consequences of the US war on Iran, including how it is “draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined.”

I am tempted to write “they” rather than “we” because — well, it’s not me, right? I mean, I can’t imagine bombing anyone or anything.

Still, I have to ask myself: What does this insanity mean from the perspective of quantum social change? If we are relationally entangled with others and we are not separate from the systems we complain about, what is my responsibility in this?

Caring about oneness and system integrity means including those who seem fragmented and disconnected from the whole. When part of the system is sick, I can choose to distance myself and ignore it, or point to the bad “others” and fight them.

Or I can acknowledge the sickness, choose healthier alternatives, and work to shift the structures and relationships that perpetuate dysfunctional systems and their unethical outcomes.

I can be response-able.

Goodness

To realize an equitable and thriving world (not as a utopia, but as a lived experience), we need to scale the good stuff. Kindness. Care. Generosity. Compassion. Love. For all — not just for some.

Caring about people who don’t care is not always easy. And we need to do this in a time of crisis.

The climate crisis does not have an on-off button. We must instead address the underlying causes of the problem while simultaneously adapting and transforming ourselves and our societies.

Oh my goodness, there is work to be done.

Where do we begin? I’ve been reading A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, who reminds us that, based on past experience:

large-scale historical change often involves moments of crisis, tensions, and confrontations. Environmental catastrophes are, of course, among the factors that may help accelerate the pace of change.

Okay, so how do we accelerate the pace of change towards a just and sustainable world? At a global scale?

Scaling differently

Maybe we need to take a completely different approach to scaling.

Maybe it’s time to break from the crisis model of change and recognize that good ideas, innovative projects, and promising initiatives will scale faster when we shift the patterns and relationships that perpetuate the status quo.

What if we were to go beyond the view of scale as a size or interval — as in small-scale or large-scale, or short-term or long-term — and instead focus on patterns and relationships that consistently support wholeness and integrity, right here and now?

This involves a shift in our perspective, not the least a shift in how we view ourselves in relation to the whole.

As many readers of this newsletter know, my view on scaling has been influenced by Dr. Monica Sharma’s work on Radical Transformational Leadership. Back in 2008, when I first came across her article on “Personal to Planetary Transformation,” this line caught my eye:

Wisdom is sourcing action from the deepest place within ourselves and generating appropriate action for meeting challenges.

If inner wisdom is a missing piece in scaling, we may have been looking for the solutions to our global crises in all the wrong places.

We’ve been searching “out there” for the behavioral nudges and managerial tweaks that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve invested in new technologies that will help us continue along the same trajectory in a cleaner and greener way. We’ve worked for political commitments and policy changes that will make a difference at scale.

“These may be important, but they are incomplete,” argues Monica.

We are leaving out our inner capacities and thus failing to integrate the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation. We ignore the ways that beliefs, values, worldviews, and paradigms shape our perception of both problems and solutions.

And we focus on blaming individuals, rather than addressing the systems that produce harm — including the paradigms and practices that disconnect us from ourselves, each other, and nature. Then we wonder why we continue to reproduce and legitimize the very patterns and dynamics we seek to change.

We are not realizing our full potential for scaling transformative change for an equitable and thriving world.

And this is exactly what I want to explore in practice.

Offering: A 6-week course on scaling

I’ve been fascinated with the concept of scale since I first started learning about and doing research on issues like climate change, deforestation, globalization, and transformation. It’s a red thread that runs through my research. However, now I’d like to turn my attention to scaling in practice.

This month, I’ll be offering a six-week online course on Scaling Transformative Change through cCHANGE. Each week will start with a short lecture on a key theme related to scaling (including fractal approaches), and through activities, dialogues, and breakout sessions, we’ll explore what this means in practice. Optional readings will also be available. Over the six weeks, we’ll consider how scaling relates to quantum social change, and why you matter more than you think.

This course may be of interest if you are:

• Working for change but feeling discouraged and stuck;

• Wanting to move from concepts and ideas to real-world impact;

• Wondering how to scale while also acknowledging the importance of context and values.

The course begins on April 22 (from 16-18 CEST) and we are opening a limited number of places for this first run. If it resonates with you, please join us! You can read more and register on the course website.

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Image: Smile Studio / Shutterstock

Geography

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” joked Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

As a geographer, I can think of more fun ways to teach it — not just “what is where,” but the social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental dimensions of place, including the qualities that make us both unique and part of a larger whole. One key lesson is that context matters.

The current global context reflects a stunning ignorance of world geography. At a time when one in three people can no longer safely go about their daily lives year-round due to climate change, and nearly a third of species face extinction, remarkably little attention is being paid to reducing risk and vulnerability.

And yet we hear that America’s so-called “God Squad” is deciding the future of the critically endangered Rice’s Whale in the Gulf of Mexico, balancing the imperative of conservation with an insatiable appetite for oil, while ignoring renewable alternatives. Really?

The world feels increasingly unstable. The lyrics humming in my head lately come from a song on the Grateful Dead’s Shakedown Street album — “I need a miracle, every day.”

So when an invitation arrived to visit the Vatican, the timing felt … well, like a miracle.

Faith

The invitation was to a meeting to develop a Global Alliance for integral ecology, as described by Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si. It was held at Borgo Laudato Si, part of the Pope’s summer villa, now transformed into a center for sustainability education open to people of all faiths.

As some of you may recall from an earlier newsletter, I was not raised as a Catholic. However, during some soul-searching I discovered I had been gifted a lifetime membership in the Society for the Propagation of the Faith—unless, together with my father, I was dismissed a lost soul and a hopeless case.

I don’t think of faith as belief in doctrine, but as confidence that transformation is possible—not because it is probable, but because it is possible. For me, this is neither wishful thinking nor fatalism, but a conviction that something beyond what we can see can be made real through our choices, actions, and relationships.

From this perspective, faith is a recognition of agency—that we can act in ways that nourish and sustain the planet so that all life can thrive.

Integral Ecology

Some years ago I read Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman. This book introduced a more comprehensive approach to environmental change—one that includes interior dimensions like beliefs, values, and consciousness. It reminds us that while everything is connected, “some things are more connected than others.”

Laudato Si, published five years later, echoes many of these themes, emphasizing responsible stewardship and the need to integrate social justice into ecological thinking. It underscores the “interrelation between ecosystems and the various spheres of social interaction,” reminding us that “the whole is greater than the part.”

It also insists that “intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but a basic question of justice.”

This is not rocket science. It feels more like quantum science.

Quantum resonance

Because we see the world through lenses shaped by our interests and experiences, I’m struck by the resonance between Laudato Si and quantum social change.

To experience a quantum leap to a just and sustainable world, people need to feel that they matter:

Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and responsibility are recognized and valued.

When people feel they matter and act on shared values, they can disrupt patterns that perpetuate injustice:

An integral ecology is also made up of simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness.

Integral ecology also calls for a different approach to scaling:

Time and space are not independent of one another, and not even atoms or subatomic particles can be considered in isolation. … Given the scale of change, it is no longer possible to find a specific, discrete answer for each part of the problem.

Change scales because we are entangled—through language, shared meaning, and something that transcends a mechanistic worldview: love.

We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknownst to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread.

Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.

I know I’m reading a lot into a Papal encyclical, translating it into my own understanding of faith as a force that works through individual, collective, and political agency.

Yet a common thread runs through Laudato Si, and many other traditions:

everything is interconnected, and … genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.

Adopting this perspective, we may not see the impacts of our work right away, but we can trust that we are part of a larger whole—and that transformation is underway.

Wisdom

My visit to the Vatican left me feeling unexpectedly hopeful. Perhaps it helped that I took a few days off from the news, but it is more likely because I met people who are working for social change, climate justice, democracy, human rights, and ecological integrity based on universal values. Laudato Si reminds us of the power of people who care:

While the existing world order proves powerless… local individuals and groups can make a real difference. They are able to instill a greater sense of responsibility, a strong sense of community, a readiness to protect others, a spirit of creativity and a deep love for the land. They are also concerned with what they will leave to their children and grandchildren. These values are deeply rooted in indigenous peoples.

The importance of Indigenous worldviews and values struck me last night when I joined a virtual gathering led by Indigenous Elders and Wisdom Keepers to celebrate the New Moon. Organized by Kaiāulu, these ceremonies weave together diverse Indigenous cosmologies into “a living, globe-spanning tapestry.”

A Lakota elder reminded us that while we have many opportunities to create change, without love, prayer, ceremony, dance, and song, we cannot thrive. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, she said, and we are given the gift of waking up every day and opening our eyes to say thank you for this life.

Then it dawned on me: I don’t need a miracle every day. Extraordinary events occur all the time, expressed by people who care about the global good and our entangled future.

Miraculously, we can all contribute to a paradigm shift that matters.

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Images: Karen O’Brien

This matters

We’re waking up, day after day, to news about the violence, destruction, abuse, and corruption unleashed by a small group of deeply disturbed people. It’s exhausting and heartbreaking. Some days this dysfunctional world leaves me almost speechless, muttering only four-letter words.

Intellectually, I understand where the dysfunction is coming from. In my heart, I know we can do better than this.

Over the past weeks, I’ve been thinking about how [I/we] can contribute to a world where we respect and protect the rights of humans and nature, grounded in a recognition of oneness and an ethics of care.

I imagine a world where damaged people receive help before they hurt others, and where those who have been harmed receive the restorative care and justice they deserve.

A world where children go to school to learn how to use their creativity, intelligence, and imagination to thrive together. A world where they do not face gun violence and bombs.

In such a world, love would be the four-letter word of choice.

What do we need to do to make this world a reality? And how do we do it before it’s too late, especially at a time when it feels like it is already too late?

It’s time

I’ve been thinking about these question for a long time.

Five years ago, after I finished You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World, I was not sure what to do with it. I self-published the book, but a quiet voice in my head said:

Wait. You will be ready in five years.

So, now is the time to make that quantum leap.

A quantum leap

The premises of quantum social change are simpler than they sound:

Non-linear. Small changes can make a very big difference.

Non-local. Change doesn’t only happen through direct physical interaction. It also spreads through shifts in meaning, values, and consciousness.

Changing patterns, not people. When we focus on shifting the habitual assumptions and actions that shape our lives, we reconfigure relationships and open space for agency, possibility, and potential.

Small groups, big difference. When people act with integrity and wholeness, they create coherent patterns that others can align with.

Every person matters. As entangled parts of a larger whole, each one of us is both substantial and significant.

When we are in integrity—as in whole—we generate fractals of change. These are self-similar patterns that are context specific, yet replicate across scales when they embed and embody universal values. Buckminster Fuller once wrote that “we are pattern integrities.”

Quantum social change involves consciously shifting patterns so that humans and nature not only survive, but thrive. Unfortunately, the stories dominating the news right now demonstrate a complete lack of integrity. They create nothing more than fragments and destruction that threaten our present and future.

The Future

If we want to create what Buckminster Fuller describes as a world that works for all of life, we are going to have to shift some patterns in ourselves, our communities, and our systems. This means both breaking old patterns and generating new ones. One small step at a time.

What patterns can I shift, starting today?

I can, for example, shift my pattern of keeping things to myself. I feel awkward about sharing things, especially on social media. I’m not sure why — maybe because deep down, I’m happy in my bubble. I really don’t want to be visible. Hmm, I may have to explore this in relation to quantum bubble theory.

This week, as part of my “pattern shifting,” I’m going to share a few things that matter to me:

• A conversation I had with David Tynfield for his excellent Science for the Anthropocene – Learning to Fly podcast.

• The PDF and audiobook of You Matter More Than You Think. You are welcome to read or listen to it—and share it with people who matter to you.

• An invitation to join a six-week course on Scaling Transformative Change that I am offering together with cCHANGE. You are warmly invited to participate or share it with someone who might benefit.

• Some personal news: I recently accepted a part-time position as Zennström Visiting Professor of Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. I’m excited to collaborate with researchers, staff, and students at UU on scaling transformative change for a just and thriving world.

• An interesting article that someone shared on how we internalize and embody patterns: How Embodiment Transforms Systems Change: “Embodiment reveals how many of our responses are conditioned by past fear, survival strategies, family dynamics, and intergenerational trauma. If we do not interrupt these patterns, they will continue to shape our systems as much as they shape our lives.”

These are small things, but they interrupt a deep and persistent pattern. We all know that patterns of sharing and caring can send ripple through our economy and society. Transformations rarely begin with big things.

And today, on International Women’s Day, I’m especially grateful for the countless women who embody an ethics of care and courageously and persistently shift patterns, every day.

Gravity

Given the gravity of the current global situation, we need powerful solutions that contribute to a world where we can all thrive. Love might be the solution — Buckminster Fuller compares it to gravity:

“Gravity is inherently integrative: it pulls together. And to me, there’s a good possibility that love is what I’d call metaphysical gravity. It really holds everything together.”

What pattern could you shift to contribute to quantum social change, and to help create a world where we greet the news each day not with “sh#*!” but with love?

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Artwork: Tone Bjordam

Only joking

What’s the difference between a joke and a lie? I asked my father this question when I was seven or eight years old. He’d caught me lying about something, and I responded that “I was only joking.”

I can’t remember his answer, but I got the point. Honesty matters.

Still, it can be difficult to distinguish between jokes, lies, and disguised intentions. After all, joking about something can be an effective way of softening the blow of an insult, and it’s a good way to create confusion. Jokes can also be cover-ups for lies, or used with an intention to manipulate outcomes or hurt others.

Writing about the difference between jokes and lies, Rachel Klein notes that “When you keep saying a joke that’s not true until it hurts someone, it’s not a joke anymore; it’s just a lie.” For example, recent jokes about an imminent U.S. invasion of Greenland or the annexation of Canada are not funny. They hurt. So do social media posts that attack or diminish people. They are not funny at all.

The razor’s edge

When we are confronted with countless lies every day, it’s easy to feel like we are living on the edge. We are, in fact, dangling from a dangerous precipice that includes the possibility of triggering irreversible climate tipping points that take us to a “point of no return.” No joke.

While true jokes playfully suspend reality, most lies strategically distort reality. Both jokes and lies test the boundary between “what is” and what we agree to treat as real. Rachel Klein writes that:

Moments that test our understanding of the edge between jokes and truth, on stage and in life, are a reminder of the razor’s edge between reality and imagination, between truth and lie, upon which comedy, and humanity, rests.

The razor’s edge between truth and lies becomes especially dangerous when confusion is deliberately seeded by people who have forgotten the meaning of honesty. Honesty, defined as adherence to the facts, sincerity, fairness, or straightforwardness of conduct, is closely related to integrity. Wholeness.

Bill McKibben wrote about lying in a recent newsletter, reflecting on the consequences of electing “a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it.” These lies have succeeded in wiping out climate regulation in the United States, which has profound consequences for the global environment. The impacts of climate change affect us all.

Navigating the edge

How do we navigate the razor’s edge between reality and imagination with honesty and integrity, especially when it feels like much of the world is swimming in a sea of lies? This is an old question. In fact, the term “razor’s edge” comes from the Katha Upanishad, a Hindu text on spiritual enlightenment that has been translated as:

Arise, awaken, and attain the wisdom from the wise.
This path, the wise say, is as difficult as walking on the sharpened edge of a knife.

Navigating this path is not about wobbling along in a state of indecision. It’s about connecting with our deepest values and holding the paradox of oneness lightly: we are one and we are unique.

Our individual experiences are interpreted through our bodies, our brains, and our imagination. We have the capacity to see ourselves as either separate or belonging to a larger whole. Or both.

How can we simultaneously embrace unity and diversity, recognizing that we are both separate and one?

Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m guessing that the answer comes down to awareness, equanimity, and love.

What if?

If the answer is love, could it be that the hate and hurt that are spreading around the world are the outcomes of a big lie? Could it be that either/or and us/them thinking has contributed to the mess we’re in?

I’m reminded of the first lines of poet Lemn Sissay’s beautiful performance of What if?

A lost number in the equation. A simple, understandable miscalculation. And what if, on the basis of that, the world as we know it changed its matter of fact? Let me get it right: What if we got it wrong?

‘What if we got it wrong’ is a question worth asking today, when the stakes are high and the need for just and sustainable transformations is urgent.

Last week, while sorting through papers, I came across an article by political scientist Alexander Wendt — one that he wrote in response to critiques of his quantum social theory. His speculative inquiry is based on the possibility that we have been wrong about the nature of our social world.

His response to critics emphasizes the mind-body problem and the role of consciousness in the social sciences. He points to the dangers of taking a classical approach to our social world based on separation and dualism if reality is, in fact, quantum.

Wendt’s argument is that the mind-body problem and consciousness pose serious problems for classical social science:

applying a classical grid to a quantum reality could also negatively affect social life itself. … [T]hat would be unfortunate - even tragic - at a global level if it reduced our creativity and capacity to cooperate in times of crisis. And likewise at the individual level, where producing classically rational actors means repressing the socially entangled free and vital beings that we truly are in favor of an alienated, deterministic, and mechanical simulacrum.

A classical “us-versus-them” and “humans-versus-nature” reality is detached from a quantum reality that recognizes the concepts of entanglement, uncertainty, nonlocality, and potentiality based on our inherent oneness. This detachment, Wendt claims, is a recipe for mass neurosis.

Good questions

The danger here is not that classical reality is “wrong.” It’s that insisting on it as the only reality locks us into separation, competition, and control at precisely the moment when the world is calling for cooperation, care—and love.

Children love to ask good questions, and most eventually learn the difference between jokes and lies. Surely adults can do better, too. Climate change confronts us with simple but uncomfortable questions: are we willing to be honest about a reality in which we are both unique and entangled? Can we hold multiple perspectives at once and navigate the razor’s edge between them?

Honesty is linked to integrity and wholeness, and when we look at the state of the world, we should be able to do better than this — not least for our children’s sake. Honestly.

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Image: Milje Ivan / Shutterstock

Galskap

Galskap. This one-word Norwegian subtitle could be attached to every news story I’ve listened to this past week. It means madness.

The essence of madness comes through in other languages, too. It’s Wahnsinn in German. Locura in Spanish. Folie in French. What we are witnessing in the United States isn’t an ordinary political conflict; it’s madness in every sense of the word.

Madness can refer to thoughts or behaviors that are foolish, reckless, or dangerous. It can be an informal description of a severe state of mental illness. It can also describe an intense anger or rage. What we are seeing is a case of exceptional madness.

A Mad World

Madness used to be a word I took lightly. For example, I remember watching an old film called It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. This 1963 epic comedy is about a group of people who meet and compete with each other to find a large amount of money buried in a state park in California. The quest brings out the worst in them, and when they eventually get their hands on the treasure, the suitcase opens and the money falls out, scattering bills into the wind.

It’s a satirical story of greed, and how the promise of easy money makes people do reckless things, at a high cost. Using humor, the film conveys a lesson that, unfortunately, not everyone has learned.

Mad Libs

Pluralistic societies have always been able to tolerate a little bit of madness. The word liberal refers to someone who respects opinions and behaviors that are different from their own, and who is open to new ideas. This openness is parodied in Mad Libs, a game where one person asks another for words to fill in the blanks of a story, which is later read aloud.

For example, I asked one of my sons to send me some adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, country names, and a number. I then plugged these words into one of the speeches given last week in Davos. Here is an abridged version of the Mad Lib speech:

Just over one year ago, under the hazardous Democrats, we were a heavy country. Now we are the greenest country, anywhere in the world. … The USA is the kebab on the planet. And when America bounces, the entire world booms. It’s been the history. When it goes wonky, it goes wobbly, the whole… I’m helping WWF, and until the last few days when I told them about Peru, they loved me. They called me ‘brother’ right, last time. … So, with all of the burgers we expend, with all of the blood, sweat and tears, I don’t know that they’d be there for us. They’re not there for us on Bangladesh, that I can tell you. Our scimitar took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So, Ghana has already cost us a lot of money. … And I’ve now been working on this bowling ball for one year, during which time I settled 99 other wars.

This made me laugh, reminding me that such nonsense can be funny, at least to the eight-year-old in me. It’s harmless when it’s a word game, but dangerous when it’s a form of governance.

When the elected leader of a democracy plays Mad Libs with the world, it truly is a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Exceptionalism

How do we confront this exceptional madness? Many of us are feeling a justified sense of anger and rage. I’m angry that the old paradigm of separation, domination, colonization, extraction, and oppression is being supported by one political party in the United States. This outdated paradigm reflects a hierarchical worldview that considers many people and nature to be expendable.

This worldview breeds exceptionalism, rather than acceptance.

The other day I read a journal article by political scientist Hilde Eliassen Restad titled Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: US Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism. She describes how the founding of America was based on Enlightenment principles and missionary ideals and used first to expand across the continent, then around the world: “American nationalism became universalistic, with the United States representing a model for the world.”

Restad writes that “the belief in American exceptionalism has been a powerful, persistent, and popular myth throughout American history, and furthermore, it has been used in formulating arguments for ever more internationalist and expanding foreign policies.” This exceptionalism, she argues, has always been the American identity:

American exceptionalism itself entails the belief in the special and unique role the United States is meant to play in world history, its distinctiveness from the Old World, and its resistance to the laws of history (the rise to power and inevitable fall that has afflicted all previous republics).

Restad emphasizes that American exceptionalism is not a truth claim, but an ideology: “The United States is exceptional as long as Americans believe it to be exceptional.” And many have believed it.

Growing up in the U.S., I was encouraged to believe it. After all, the story of American exceptionalism was everywhere. America was a democracy; a melting pot with a system of government that separates Church and State; a country with a solid Constitution and a system of checks and balances; a model for all nations to follow. And so on.

For some, the illusion of exceptionalism was always clear. For many, the belief in American exceptionalism has now been shattered.

We are seeing that exceptionalism is a story that, when taken literally, can lead to collective madness.

Principled Outrage

So how do we deal with disillusion and anger? Madness in response to madness leads to—well, more madness. And we don’t need that.

In Radical Transformational Leadership, Monica Sharma makes a useful distinction between destructive anger and principled outrage:

Destructive anger is a reaction that damages and diminishes self and other. Our ability to regulate our anger—not suppress it— is necessary for mindful implementation. When we fly into a rage, are triggered, or need to be right in order to make the other person wrong, it is our emotion that is in charge. As a result, we are unable to source our full potential: there is no space to generate transformation.

In contrast, principled outrage isn’t an emotion; it’s a space from which people are called to act on behalf of the universal values and principles that they stand for, not only for themselves, but for all, whether it’s equity, justice, compassion, dignity, or oneness. It’s about taking a stand for what matters.

Mattering

Remembering that we matter in every moment, we can shift the patterns that reinforce old structures and generate new ones that are more equitable, ethical, and sustainable. In his work on quantum social theory, Alexander Wendt suggests that “social structures are continuously popping in and out of existence with the practices through which they are instantiated.” In other words, structures are created when people enact them, and they persist when people reenact them. This gives us power, agency, and a responsibility to act with integrity.

Madness is not humorous, it’s dangerous. This is a moment to take a deep breath and think about how we can use principled outrage to act with integrity for the benefit of all, including future generations. It’s the time to direct our principled outrage toward strategies and actions that not only resist the madness, but create the goodness. This isn’t about viewing ourselves or anyone else as exceptional; it’s about realizing our collective potential to transcend madness.

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Image: Alexis Antonio / Unsplash

The new world disorder

“We take the world as it is – not as we wish it to be.” This statement by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is understandable. I mean, pragmatism makes sense when one’s southern neighbor is creating chaos and confusion in the world. As the Guardian puts it, “Carney himself said the [trade] deal between [Canada and China] reflected the need for cooperation and partnership in a more ‘divided and fragmented’ world.”

Like Canada, many countries are trying to adapt to what Carney calls “a new world order.” More accurately, however, it’s about adapting to a new world disorder.

Sigh.

A dysfunctional world is neither healthy nor sustainable, and it’s definitely not attractive.

Fortunately, “the world as it is” can be transformed in an equitable and ethical manner to benefit all, rather than a few. We all, in fact, can contribute to realizing “the world as we wish it to be.”

To do this, however, we may need a different approach to social change.

Who are we?

But first, who are we? Humanity — as in all of us — lives in a world of diversity that includes different beliefs, practices, and preferences. How great! After all, who would want to live in a monoculture world? Homogeneity or sameness is not only boring and gray, it’s impossible to achieve.

We are born under different conditions and grow up in different contexts and circumstances. We also have different personalities, priorities, and passions. We pursue different dreams, even if we can’t always remember them.

And regardless, we all matter.

Non-humans also matter. The air. The ice. The soils and the slugs, the birds and the bugs, the trees and the toads, the rivers and the … roads? Well, you get the point. They too matter.

We — as in humanity — have been slow to take in the wisdom of oneness. Sages and elders have provided guidance on how to relate to each other and the world. They have pointed us to wholeness, integrity, and the importance of “right relations.” We have not listened well.

Instead, we have abused power, interests, and identities to perpetuate “the world as it is.” We forget that the world we see is a reflection not of reality, but of our interpretations of reality. We seldom question these interpretations, and sometimes forget to ask any questions at all.

For example, we might ask: Is the world classical, or is it quantum? Is everything already determined, or do we have free will and agency? Are we separate from each other and from nature, or are we part of an entangled, intraconnected whole?

Quantum physicist David Bohm warned us back in 1980 of the “extremely great danger of going on with a fragmentary process of thought.” We should get this by now: Fragmented thinking creates a fragmented world. Chaotic thinking creates a chaotic world.

Can preferment thinking create a preferred world?

Welcome to the age of preferment

Preferment has been on my mind lately. It’s my alternative to retirement; a recognition that now is the time to do things differently, and to consciously create a world where we all can thrive.

A few days ago, I celebrated my retirement from the University of Oslo with a seminar and a preferment party. Dr. Dan Siegel, who first introduced me to the concept of preferment a couple of years ago, sent me a lovely “welcome to the age of preferment” video, and I’m happy to share it here:

Metaphors matter, and I find preferment to be a wonderful alternative to retirement. It combines choice, agency, and potential. It is more than a frivolous excuse to dismiss some things and prioritize others. It comes with a responsibility to act with integrity, on behalf of the whole. Donna Haraway writes that “it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with.” Think about it: preferment opens up possibilities.

In You Matter More Than You Think, I suggested that “A convergence of crises may encourage people to deliberately adopt metaphors that contribute to new patterns of thought, opening up the potential for more equitable and inclusive ways of responding to global change.” To walk the talk, I am deliberately adopting preferment and I’m focusing on promoting, accelerating, and scaling transformative change for a just and sustainable world.

Thinking in terms of what we prefer, not only for ourselves but for everyone, invites us to embrace and embody concepts such as equity, justice, integrity, oneness, and potential. These values are foundational to the world as we wish it to be.

Reminding ourselves

At this confusing and chaotic time, we’ve been led to believe that there is little we can do to change the world. Bullies will bully, appeasers will appease, and tyrants will kill. Seriously?

We need to remind ourselves that this “as is” world is not a given. We have the potential, in every moment, to create a different story. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes:

The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

I, too, prefer the untold story. The life story already exists, and it’s being actualized by people all over the world. Yes, we are still writing this story, and we don’t know the ending yet. But we do know that in writing it, we are contributing to the world that we wish for.

We enact the world that we prefer when we connect our actions with our deepest values — what we care about for all. In this nondual, entangled space, we can individually and collectively make a difference. As Dan Siegel says, this is not the time to withdraw. It’s a time to stay connected and focus on the world we want. After all, we’re in the age of preferment.

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Image: Ashley Inguanta

Enough madness

“Enough is enough,” said Greenland’s Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, in response to the U.S. administration’s threats to attack his country. I think most readers of this newsletter will agree with him. We’ve had more than enough of this madness.

The current geopolitical situation reflects an outdated paradigm that threatens us all. The question is, can we move beyond a classical, reductionist paradigm of disconnection and domination and consciously live together with integrity in an entangled, intraconnected world?

The links between politics, power, oil, and minerals are clear. It’s painful to watch politicians and their patrons and sycophants amplifying some risks for strategic gain, while ignoring others. To be specific, the risks of war and climate change.

This situation made me think about a talk I gave at the Our Common Future under Climate Change conference in Paris, which took place in 2015, some months before the COP21 meeting — the one that gave us the famous Paris Agreement.

The topic was managing climate change risks. Risk, as defined in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Glossary, is “the potential for consequences where something of value is at stake and where the outcome is uncertain, recognizing the diversity of values.”

This talk feels relevant to the situation in Venezuela, Greenland, and other current threats to international security. The point of my presentation was that we were pursuing an outdated approach to risk and addressing the wrong problem.

An old game

When I was growing up during the Cold War, there was a popular board game called Risk, which some of you may have played. Risk is a military strategy game, where the goal is to occupy every territory on the board and in doing so, eliminate the other players. A high value is placed on competition, strategizing, conquering, and as with most games, winning. The game represents a classical, realist approach to managing risk.

Let’s look more closely at this “global domination” approach to risk. The Risk board depicts a political map of the world that is divided into forty-two territories that are grouped into six continents. In the game, capturing a territory depends on the number of attacking and defending armies. A battle’s outcome is decided by probabilities based on the roll of dice.

The rules of this game neither endorse nor prohibit alliances or truces – in other words, collaboration. However, according to the Wikipedia description, “alliance making/breaking is considered to be one of the most important elements of the game, and it adds human interaction to a decidedly probabilistic game.”

Adding human interactions to a decidedly probabilistic game becomes even more important if we consider climate change; they introduce possibilities for individual and collective action to change both the game and its outcomes.

Climate risks

Climate change is about risk and probability, but unlike Risk, it’s not a game. As a threat amplifier, it represents a significant challenge for managing all types of risks: we are responsible for these risks, and human actions and interactions play a decisive role in the outcomes.

For example, the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report included two maps showing what global temperatures could look like by the end of this century. Here we see two potential scenarios that were published in the 2014 Synthesis Report: a 2°C warmer world with substantial mitigation and a 4°C warmer world without additional mitigation.

The maps do not include representations of sea level rise, changes in precipitation patterns, the loss of biodiversity and important ecosystems, the uneven social distribution of consequences, and the displacement of people and communities.*

The choices we make and the risks that we take are not just about carbon dioxide and how it will affect temperature, precipitation, and other variables. Risks are also linked to socioeconomic conditions and to changes that shape the context in which we both create and experience risk.

Let’s be clear: the extractive, oppressive, and opportunistic actions that we are seeing today multiply the risks.

The challenge of adaptation

The capacity to adapt is influenced by the rate, magnitude, and timing of climate change, including changes in climate variability and extreme events. Adaptive capacity is also influenced by socioeconomic conditions, including wars.

Going back to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group II presented an analysis of regional risks based on both research and expert judgment. It considered the risks over three time scales: the present, near-term, and long-term. Long-term scenarios included both 2°C and 4°C warming.

The figure shows dramatic differences between present, near-term, and long-term risk scenarios. It also highlights the potential for additional adaptation to reduce risk (depicted as hatched bars).

The 4°C scenario shows some very high risks with no potential for further adaptation: mass coral bleaching and mortality, the loss of polar ecosystems, and heat-related mortality in Asia. Even the 2°C scenario poses high risks for many impacts without additional adaptation.

Although Carbon Action Tracker estimates that “current policies in place around the world are projected to result in about 2.6°C warming above pre-industrial levels,” they also point out that “[t]here remains a substantial gap between what governments have promised to do and the total level of actions they have undertaken to date.”

Climate change and geopolitics

Whether in terms of Venezuela’s oil or Greenland’s minerals, if the U.S. and other countries insist on playing the game of global domination, people and nature will end up as collateral damage.

It seems pretty clear that U.S. military action in Venezuela is part of a larger strategy to exploit and burn fossil fuels while deterring the production and consumption of renewable energy.

At the same time, the administration has been defunding and dismantling climate change research institutions like NOAA and NCAR and apparently has plans to continue weakening the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). With climate change as a backdrop, this is a reckless game that is dangerous for everyone.

Adaptive challenges

We are faced with much more than the challenge of adapting to climate change. There is no doubt that this is important, but it’s often approached as a technical problem that involves building higher bridges and sea walls, breeding drought-tolerant crops, improving early warning systems, promoting innovation, and so on.

As Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues wrote in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, adaptive challenges are different: they include technical dimensions but primarily draw attention to the beliefs, values, and worldviews we hold, individually and collectively. These shape our identities, interests, and loyalties, as well as how we approach risk.

Adaptive challenges are personal, in part because they require reflecting on our individual and shared beliefs about how the world works and how we relate to each other, our environment, and the future. They are also political: they involve challenging traditional notions of power and recognizing the significance of human interactions and collaboration in managing risk.

This moment

This moment calls for us to stand firmly for equity, justice, dignity, and compassion for all, and to take actions — both small and large — that change the game. This is ultimately a question of what kind of power we believe in and what we truly believe matters. Fortunately, more and more people are recognizing the real risks and, like the prime minister of Greenland, saying “enough is enough.”

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*The IPCC Sixth Assessment Working Group I report updated these maps with more recent data.

Image: Tina Rolf / Unsplash

Midnight

The year is over. At the stroke of midnight tonight, I’ll retire from the University of Oslo and become a professor emerita. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, emerita describes “a woman who no longer has a position, especially in a college or university, but keeps the title of the position.”

That makes me smile. Titles are lovely, but what does it really mean for me to retire from a secure university position that I’ve enjoyed? Can I embrace the uncertainty and focus on what I truly care about now? I see this not as an ending, but as a shift in how and where I place my energy and focus.

Driven

For decades, I’ve been driven by a deep concern about climate change, biodiversity loss, and global inequality. The intensity of this concern has no doubt driven people close to me crazy.

The fire was lit when I started graduate school in 1988, back when the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere was 351 ppm (parts per million). I had no science background, but a crazy desire to learn everything I could to address global environmental problems.

At the time, Professor Diana Liverman was doing a project on global warming in Mexico, and she hired me as her research assistant. This led to a master’s thesis on the impacts of global warming in Mexico. Then, motivated by a fascination with tropical ecology and biodiversity, I did my PhD under Diana’s supervision on the relationships between deforestation and climate change in the Selva Lacandona of Chiapas, Mexico.

These formative years fueled decades of research on the social and human dimensions of global environmental change. I’ve never felt alone; researchers, practitioners, activists, and policy-makers from all over the world share this commitment and drive. Yet despite an amazing community of people working around the world to create conditions where both people and nature can thrive, we have not yet been able to “bend the curves” on greenhouse gas emissions and the degradation of nature.

On December 28, 2025, CO₂ concentrations at the Mauna Loa Observatory were measured at 428.22 ppm. An increase of 2.89 ppm from one year ago.

This is not good news. We are not meeting the adaptive challenge of climate change.

Together, the work goes on

So what now? Climate scientist and Episcopal deacon Lisa Graumlich recently published a beautiful solstice sermon on Substack that emphasizes the sacred nature of climate action.

Lisa underscores that we are making a long-term, collective commitment to the future: “The cathedral builders knew: we build for what we love, across time we’ll never see, with others whose names we may never know.”

Her words resonate with me at this moment of personal transition. It feels like a sacred moment, not because the work is finished, but because it is taking new forms.

Not surprisingly, I interpret Lisa Graumlich’s solstice sermon as an ode to quantum social change, which has been a thread running through these newsletters. She stresses that “we need each other. We were never meant to do this alone. … we are one body. What hurts one part hurts the whole. What heals moves through the whole.” From Lisa’s Substack:

Everything is connected. Everything belongs. We are woven together in a web so vast and beautiful it can only be called holy.

And what we do together matters.

Across time. Across species. Across the thin boundary between heaven and earth.

I encourage you to read her post on “Thin Places: Climate Change and Seeing Earth Whole,” and I look forward to her future newsletters about the intersection of climate science and spiritual practice.

Preferment

At the stroke of midnight, I’m not retiring, but moving into preferment—a reorientation of how I place my energy, attention, and care.

It feels like a metaphorical quantum leap: moving from a “fixed” position into uncertainty, indeterminacy, and entanglement. Rather than resisting that uncertainty, I want to embrace it, trusting that new possibilities will emerge if I am open and attentive.

In this next phase, I’ll have the space and time to focus my energy and attention on quantum social change — a conscious, nonlinear, nonlocal approach to social change that is grounded in our oneness. I’ll be working with cCHANGE on scaling transformative change in society and remain connected to research and education, but at a slower, more deliberate pace.

To shift into “preferment,” I’ve been letting go of items that I have held on to for decades. Books. Reports. Articles. Business cards. This classical clutter has to go. Although each one holds a positive memory or has contributed meaningfully to my thinking, they represent the past. And I’ll always be entangled with the people I’ve met and the books and papers I’ve read.

It’s all part of a metamorphosis, as Irish poet Anne Pender writes in the poem below that sits on my desk. I’m reminded that I carry the lessons, connections, relationships, and care that have sustained me over decades, as I shed old skins and enter a formless future.

Transformation is never done alone; it moves through all of us, as we are entangled across space and time. My hope is that this midnight marks a sacred step forward for me, and for all those I am entangled with — past, present, and future.

Metamorphose

“My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed
into new bodies…” – Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 1.

Skins shedding, soft surfaces emerging,
letting go of holding on
as I freefall into a formless future.
No blueprints, only that whisper of a knowing
beyond the imagined boundaries of my mind.

But still I hesitate.
What I feel called to do makes no sense
in a world on fire,
yet the yearning is unyielding,
a tantalising taste of joyous being.

Maybe sense only becomes sensible
when the step forward is taken,
the path only formed by the walking.
Let courage be my compass, then,
leading me on through the turbulence

to the beckoning calm beyond.

Anne Pender, 2025

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Image: mbbirdy / iStock

Rest and relaxation

’Tis the season - for colds, coughs, and flus. So instead of writing, cleaning out my office, exercising, or preparing for the holidays, I’ve been resting, relaxing, recovering — and reading.

I just finished a book that has left me reflecting on social change: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas. This 2019 book presents a sharp critique of “do-gooders” who want to change the world, whether in the name of poverty, climate change, or any other virtuous cause. As someone interested in transformative change, I was curious about his perspective.

Giridharadas writes about a widespread and pervasive approach to social change and philanthropy that strategically circumvents the root causes of social problems. Rather than addressing the systems that produce the problems in the first place, attention is focused on mitigating the outcomes in ways that do not challenge the status quo. For example, instead of decreasing inequality by increasing wages, we create programs that reduce poverty, such as establishing food banks or providing free lunches. These actions respond to a symptom (hunger), while reinforcing the status quo (inadequate wages and lack of job opportunities).

The status quo

Giridharadas refers to an elite group benefitting from the existing state of affairs as MarketWorld, which is:

an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the world of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks.

Giridharadas is critical of the language of “win-win,” where nobody has to sacrifice anything, and where free markets and voluntary action are emphasized over public institutions, democratic processes, and the law.

One chapter of Winners Take All focuses on academics, especially intellectual thought leaders who “have given rise to watered-down theories of change that are personal, individual, depoliticized, respectful of the status quo and the system, and not in the least bit disruptive.” This left me reflecting on my own complicity in what Giriharadas refers to as a charade.

A charade is an empty or deceptive act or pretense. It’s something that is insincere and inadequate, yet claims to be the answer. Academics have both an opportunity and a responsibility to challenge the pretenses, question the status quo, and ask what’s missing. Taking the science of global environmental change seriously, am I doing enough to disrupt inequitable and unsustainable patterns, or am I perpetuating climate action as a charade?

Climate charades

Climate responses that prioritize private efforts and technical fixes over collective, public system change function as charades: claiming to be the answer, they preserve current systems and constrain alternatives. In fact, many voluntary commitments associated with the 2015 Paris Agreement are being actively undermined by actors interested in preserving current systems. For example, The Guardian reported that over 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the Conference of Parties (COP) events over the past five years, far outnumbering the delegates from many countries that contribute very little to climate change, yet are experiencing the negative impacts.

At the same time, more and more investors are supporting risky geoengineering technologies such as solar radiation management, which is aimed at reducing the amount of incoming sunlight. A growing body of scientific research suggests this is a deeply problematic solution, and many researchers (myself included) have signed a call for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. Among the many concerns, it “risks becoming a powerful argument for industry lobbyists, climate denialists, and some governments to delay decarbonization policies.”

These examples differ in scale and domain, but they share a common feature: they protect existing power relations while appearing responsive. Meanwhile, rising temperatures and extreme events are affecting people and nature around the world. Al Jazeera wrote last week that “Indonesia reports 1,000 dead and close to 1 million displaced from rains as a report points at the threat posed by climate change and ecosystem decline across Asia.”

To end the charade, we have to shift systems and structures based on the values that we care deeply about, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. The three spheres of transformation framework recognizes people not as objects to be changed through elite philanthropic projects, but as subjects or agents of change who can draw on their inner capacities to design for systems change based on values such as equity, integrity, oneness, and compassion.

Respond and realize

This approach to social change is based on Monica Sharma’s “conscious full spectrum response” model. In Radical Transformational Leadership: Strategic Action for Change Agents, Monica reminds us that “the strategies for responding to problems are different from strategies to realize our full potential to generate alternatives.” Monica’s approach to social change is broader and deeper than the efforts of the elites described by Giridharadas. And it’s radical because it gets to the roots of today’s interlinked crises.

Winners Take All emphasizes that many are responding to current problems without generating alternative systems. This contrasts with strategies that focus exclusively on alternatives, assuming that practical problems will solve themselves. Instead of focusing on one or the other, Monica emphasizes the importance of simultaneously responding to problems and realizing our full potential based on universal values.

Radical Transformational Leadership describes a tested approach to quantum social change that is grounded in our inherent oneness. Working with this approach in Transformational Leadership for Sustainability programs has shown me, again and again, that doing things differently really does make a difference.

Strategic Actions

What originally drew me to Monica Sharma’s work on Personal to Planetary Transformations over fifteen years ago was her recognition that everyone has the capacity to source strategic actions from deep within to shift systems and cultures. One does not have to be a so-called “elite” leader to lead transformative change.

I’ll be retiring from my permanent position at the University of Oslo in two weeks, while continuing to engage in academic work and shifting my focus toward fractal approaches to scaling transformative change for a just and sustainable world. I’ll be working with cCHANGE to promote transformations that matter in society — and I’ll write this Quantum Social Change newsletter more regularly!

If this way of thinking resonates, I look forward to exploring it together in the new year.

Image: Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash

The world is watching

It’s no surprise to read about the outcome of the Conference of the Parties (COP30) meeting in Brazil, which includes “a voluntary agreement to begin discussions on a roadmap to an eventual phase out of fossil fuels.” Huh? Urgency is not the word that comes to mind when I read this outcome.

Despite countless calls for unity, nations remain divided over fossil fuel phase-out roadmaps, described by Vicky Sins as “the bridge between political ambition and real-world transformation.” Stressing the importance of multilateral unity, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago reminded negotiators that “the world is watching.”

As part of the world that was indeed watching, I’m left wondering how the delegates interpreted unity.

Unity refers to oneness, or the quality, state, or fact of being one. It’s about being whole and in integrity. Although over 80 countries supported the development of plans to move away from coal, oil, and gas, many of the delegations seem to understand the concept of being one as “a state of being separate.” Unity for them seems to be a matter of each nation defending its own separate interests over a shared interest in the wellbeing of all.

Community

Calls for unity on climate action failed to produce a strong agreement, despite Indigenous voices making it clear to delegates that “the health of our lands, waters, and skies are inseparable from the health of our communities, our economies, and our shared future.” The final agreement did not take seriously the concerns of global youth and their collective call for justice, resilience, peace, and equity through community-based initiatives. Both of these groups hold unity as a way of being, not as a rhetorical goal.

Community is at the heart of unity. The Latin roots of community derive from the word communis, which means common or shared. The prefix com- means with or together. If the goal is to move towards a shared sense of being together with this planet, we need strategies that develop, promote, and empower communities that embody unity and diversity.

A growing number of communities recognize that climate change, biodiversity loss, global inequality, and conflicts are driven by underlying patterns that include the prioritization of short-term, material gains and the concentration of wealth. Can we transform these patterns by building unity through community?

Books, books, books

While thinking about the relationship between unity and community, I started sorting through the hundreds of books on my office shelves, trying to figure out which ones to give away. It’s a difficult process because each one has a memory attached to it. Or so I thought. When I got to the B’s, I noticed a book that I hadn’t seen before, and it looked like it had never been opened. Where did this come from? How long have I had it?

I opened Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block and started reading. This book, published in 2008, explores the creation and transformation of the collective:

The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.

It’s perfect timing, as I’m working on a non-academic book about fractal approaches to scaling transformative change. Block emphasizes that it’s “only when we are connected and care for the well-being of the whole that a civil and democratic society is created.” To realize this, he outlines five strategic principles for building and transforming communities, which are quoted or paraphrased here:

1. The essential work is to build social fabric because when citizens care for each other, they become accountable to each other.

2. Strong associational life and coming together to serve the public interest is essential and central. Connections for a common purpose are the primary constituency for transformation.

3. Alternative futures are created by citizens who use their power to convene other citizens; we need to shift our beliefs about who is in charge and where power resides.

4. The unit of transformation is the small group. This means we have to worry less about scale and speed, and focus on valuing our uniqueness.

5. All transformation is linguistic, and a community is essentially a conversation, and transformations are about creating new conversations.

These principles feel critical at a time when the social fabric is fraying, when associational life is being reduced to social media, when small groups struggle to feel relevant, and when public conversations have become increasingly polarized.

It’s interesting to think about these principles of strategy in the context of multilateral climate negotiations. The negotiation of text on climate action is linguistic; it’s influenced by small groups of actors; and it’s contested by associational groups committed to the interests of people and the planet, now and in the future. Unfortunately, the distribution of global power still allows the interests of a few to influence the future of all.

To successfully address climate change, biodiversity loss, and global inequality, the fabric of our communities has to include nature. We need to create spaces, places, and resources to come together or associate on behalf of a common purpose: the survival and well-being of humans, ecosystems, and species. Empowered citizens empower others when they recognize that they matter in every moment, and that even small changes can make a big difference. Both alone and together we can design policies and engage in practices that care for the whole. This involves challenging who is in charge and where power resides.

Individuals are communities

Interestingly, Block’s focus on building and transforming communities downplays the roles of individual transformations in social change:

we have learned that the transformation of large numbers of individuals does not result in the transformation of communities… individual transformation comes at the cost of community.

I’m curious about Block’s conclusion. The outcomes, of course, depend on how individuals have been transformed, and the values they stand for as they engage with family, friends, communities, and systems, including ecosystems. If we think of individuals as citizens with agency and capacities to engage others for social change based on values that apply to all, then individual transformations have the power to become community transformations. It’s all part of the same unity.

Just as the community of bacteria in my gut are me, I’m also my communities. From a quantum perspective, individual change, collective change, and systems change are entangled processes. When we transform our patterns, the world transforms too.

As an example, a decision to eat an organic, plant-based meal influences not only me, my family, and my friends, but also restaurants, food systems, farmers and farmworkers. It may feel negligible and insignificant, but it supports growing communities committed to regenerative agriculture, conscious food systems, plant-based foods and more.

Unity is not just rhetorical; it’s fractal. It can be expressed through every choice, conversation, and community. It’s worth remembering what Christiana Figueres, who led the climate negotiations resulting in the Paris Agreement, wrote in The Future We Choose:

We can no longer afford to assume that addressing climate change is the sole responsibility of national or local governments, or corporations or individuals. This is an everyone-everywhere mission in which we all must individually and collectively assume responsibility.

The 31st meeting of the UN Conference of the Parties will take place in Antalya, Turkey in 2026. Rather than holding our breath for governments to embrace unity, assume responsibility, and take rapid action on climate change, we can build communities that embody unity and transform power relations.

For now, I’ll get back to sorting books — I’m only on the Cs. The first book I see is Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Opening it, I land on Chapter 10: The Unity of All Things. Hmm, this sorting project is going to take time.

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Image: Jeremy Perkins / Unsplash

Wordless

What can I say? There has been so much crazy news lately and so many opinions and insights are being shared that I’ve been feeling … wordless.

Wordlessly watching the recent U.S. election results come in, I found myself thinking about our shared potential for quantum social change, including how vital it is to show up, speak up, and act for what we care about.

Antonio Guterres has been persistently calling for a quantum leap in ambition and a change in direction to meet the climate challenge. As the UN Secretary General told two journalists interviewing him about the forthcoming COP30 meeting in Belém:

It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon.

His persistent calls to step up action tend to get drowned out in the media, most recently by Bill Gates’ Memo arguing for a strategic pivot on climate action. Gates feels that we should instead focus on investments that have the greatest impact on human welfare.

That sounds good, right? Or maybe not. Like an environmental Rorschach test, responses to the Gates Memo reveal different ways of thinking about climate change and its solutions. Since Gates can influence the climate discourse and funding flows, it’s important to look closer and consider where he’s coming from— and what’s missing from his argument.

At the risk of being wordy (and nerdy), I want to look more closely at the discourse expressed in the Gates Memo. As Robin Leichenko and I write in Climate and Society: Transforming the Future, a discourse is:

a system of representation that is made up of norms, rules of conduct, institutions, and language that influence and legitimize certain perspectives and meanings over others. Discourses include explicit and implicit values, judgments, and contentions that define the terms of discussion around a particular issue, as well as what is included and excluded from analysis and debate.

Discourses have power, and clues to climate discourses lie in the language and texts used to frame problems and solutions. Words matter, and so do memos.

Whose truth?

Let’s look more closely at the three “tough truths” that Gates shares with us in his memo and consider “what’s missing?”

Truth #1, “Climate change is a serious problem but it will not be the end of civilization.” Yes, but it’s also a threat multiplier that undermines human security and degrades nature. Climate impacts are changing coastlines, displacing communities, increasing extreme events, endangering species — and the list goes on. It’s already an existential threat for many people and species. Small changes can make a big difference, and even a half a degree of warming represents dangerous climate change impacts and threats to survival for those who are most vulnerable and have limited capacity to adapt.

Truth #2, “Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate change.” Indeed. Temperature is a much better measure of our lack of progress. Global average temperatures today reflect past emissions, not current progress, due to lags in the climate system. Carbon dioxide molecules can remain in the atmosphere for centuries, which is why cutting current emissions matters. Additionally, stopping emissions won’t immediately cool the atmosphere, as the oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat; this heat will be slowly released back into the atmosphere, continuing to warm the planet for decades or longer. Progress on climate change can be measured by emissions reductions and by the health of forests, soils, oceans, coral reefs, ice sheets, ecosystems, and people. This means that vulnerability reduction and adaptation are also part of the “progress” picture.

Truth #3: “Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.” Actually, health and prosperity are the best reasons to take action against climate change. The “develop first, then deal with climate change” argument has been around for decades, and many have argued that equity also has to wait. Most people who aspire to health and prosperity have contributed the least to climate change. Many of us who do enjoy health and prosperity have done so at the expense of others, including future generations. A recent study by Morrison and colleagues on wealth inequality concluded that policies that 1) directly regulate the most carbon-intensive forms of status consumption (such as private jet use) and 2) limit the influence of the wealthiest in politics, are effective ways to reduce emissions. Hmm…

What’s missing?

Bill Gates has “discursive power,” and to me, his truths align closely with what Robin Leichenko and I describe as the dismissive discourse on climate change. This discourse covers a variety of views that trivialize, deny, or minimize climate change as a problem that is linked to humans and their activities:

Instead of outright denial of climate change, the dismissive discourse can also support the notion of climate delay, which includes a variety of strategies to justify inaction or avoid mitigation activities.

To be clear, Gates is not denying climate change; but he does appear to be fortifying a dismissive discourse that influences political and cultural debates about climate change policy and action, and affects how climate change is portrayed in the media and in many educational settings.

So what’s missing? Three gaps stand out when I read Gates’ list of truths:

1. Awareness and attention to global tipping points, as emphasized in the recent Global Tipping Points 2025 Report and articulated in the Dartington Declaration: Tipping the Future:

Every fraction of a degree of additional warming increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping points. These include the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that would radically undermine global food and water security and plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters.

Gates misses the point that mitigating climate change is the best development strategy when it is coupled with transformative changes that are equitable and sustainable.

2. Recognition of the limits to adaptation. It may be possible for some people and communities to adapt to climate change, as Gates suggests: “Some outdoor work will need to pause during the hottest hours of the day, and governments will have to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events.” There are, however, barriers and limits to adaptation, and research shows that these are contextual, dynamic, and often linked to social inequities. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is critical to successful adaptation, and for some this means adapting to the very idea that we are influencing the global climate.

Gates overlooks the fact that climate change affects what people care about, including the social and cultural context, introducing subjective limits to adaptation.

3. Placing people at the center of climate and development strategies. Finally, Gates argues that “we should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature, and that our success relies on putting energy, health, and agriculture at the center of our strategies.” There is no doubt these sectors are important, but imposing strategies on people turns them into objects of development, not agents of change. Adaptation is a social process shaped by systems, values, and power relations that influence vulnerability and the capacity to act. People and their relationships matter.

Gates fails to acknowledge that development as usual is not enough, even in the name of maximizing human welfare. We need different approaches to securing human welfare in the context of climate change, and to move away from either/or dichotomies.

The dismissive discourse is powerful — not for what it says, but for what it does not tell us. Interestingly, DeSmog reports that “Bill Gates’ charity has donated more than $3.5 million to a think tank run by the Danish academic and climate crisis denier Bjørn Lomborg.” In short, the Gates Memo is being treated like “big news,” when in fact it is an old story, recycled and adapted to the current political context.

Good news

The good news is that other strategic pivots are underway — pivots that value equity, justice, inclusion, and compassion. For instance, Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, did not campaign on the issue of climate change, yet he recognizes that “climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns.” Caring for human welfare, climate justice, and the well-being of nature and future generations is at the heart of quantum social change. People power matters more than we think. This may be a tough truth for Bill Gates to swallow.

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We dissent

Yesterday was a big day for peaceful protests against authoritarianism and fascism in the United States. Over in Norway, I’ve been listening to a song called “We Dissent” — a modern protest anthem for No Kings Day. Feeling inspired, I started thinking about what this means in practice.

How do we dissent from current policies and practices that contribute to climate change and biodiversity loss? Can we collectively dissent from a dominant and deadly paradigm that fractures and fragments societies to the benefit of some but not all—and, in doing so, save and strengthen democracy?

Political agency

Some years ago, I published an article in Ecology & Society, together with Bronwyn Hayward and Elin Selboe, about the multiple ways youth express their political agency through climate activism. We were interested in the diverse ways they express dissent both within and outside traditional political processes.

We defined dissent as a conscious expression of disagreement with a prevailing view, policy, practice, decision, institution, or assumption that exacerbates climate change. Recognizing that youth dissent can be expressed through actions ranging from symbolic acts to political mobilization, we developed a typology that distinguished three types of dissent: dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous.

Our typology was not based on the motivations or intentions of youth, but rather on the ways youth dissent(ers) could be perceived from the perspective of those with political power. Here is a brief summary of the typology, drawn from our paper:

Dutiful dissent is expressed through ‘joining’ activities that support existing and emerging institutions and social norms to express resistance to dominant practices, such as fossil fuel production and consumerism. Through participation in established cultural practices, political institutions, and decision-making processes, young people may engage and interact with technical, managerial, and political elites. This type of dissent adheres to the “script” of current institutions, hegemonic powers, and economic systems. Though it involves working within the system, it should not be confused with pandering to the status quo.

Disruptive dissent questions and seeks to change existing political and economic structures, including norms, rules, regulations, and institutions. Disruptive actions explicitly challenge power relationships, as well as the actors and political authorities who maintain them, often through direct protests and collective organization. Disruptive dissent raises awareness about the underlying drivers of climate change, and it draws attention to the justice and equity dimensions. It is sometimes expressed through official organizations and NGOs that are considered “radical” or “alternative,” but it’s also an essential feature of most social movements.

Dangerous dissent involves a type of political activism that defies business as usual by initiating, developing, and actualizing alternative actions, ideas, discourses, practices, tactics, alliances, and technologies that inspire and sustain long-term transformations. Dangerous dissent refers to the degree of threat that these alternatives pose to established power elites and investments over the medium and long term. As with disruptive dissent, it doesn’t recognize existing institutions and power relationships as fixed or given. It’s “dangerous” because it generates new and alternative systems, new ways of doing things, new types of economic relationships, and new ways of organizing society, questioning what to others appears to be inevitable.

The three types of dissent can be summarized as reformist, oppositional, and propositional. However, the lines between dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent are fluid rather than fixed, and many young people shared stories with us about how they engage either simultaneously or sequentially with all three types.

Source: O’Brien et al. 2018

Political dissent

The typology may help us to understand how social change unfolds and how to engage with dissent against authoritarianism, fascism, and threats to democracy in the U.S. and other countries in three ways:

First, it identifies different and complementary ways of expressing political agency:

all forms of political dissent suggest a belief or presumption of agency, that is, the ability of individuals to imagine a different future and a sense of purposeful expression of opinions or actions that are at variance with dominant or commonly held beliefs.

Second, it supports critical reflections on which strategies work in different contexts. For example, when disruptive dissent truly threatens key economic interests or post-political formal politics, it often leads to silencing, exclusion, repression, or criminalization. Dangerous dissent tends to be more subtle and less visible, bypassing entrenched systems by promoting equitable and sustainable alternatives.

Third, it highlights the transformative potential of people who may dissent in different ways and to different degrees, yet are nonetheless part of a larger movement that’s contributing to a world that works for everyone. Physicist David Bohm expressed this beautifully in quantum terms:

The essential feature in quantum interconnectedness is that the whole universe is enfolded in everything, and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.

Delightful dissent

I was in Portland, Oregon on September 29th, just after the Trump regime announced that it would send in troops to calm the unrest. Curious, my friend drove me by the ICE facility to see what was going on. We passed a small group of peaceful protesters, plus a few journalists. A yellow chicken stood out in the small crowd. Who would have guessed that days later, the chicken would be joined by frogs, bananas, mushrooms, and all sorts of other characters protesting in the name of freedom and democracy?

It’s inspiring to see people everywhere engaging in “Delightful Dissent”—a way of expressing disagreement through values like peace, justice, equity, integrity, joy, and humor. When we engage with social change based on values that apply to everyone, we contribute to a larger pattern or field. Dissenting from what we do not want to see in the world simultaneously offers an opportunity to express what we do want.

Engaging in this manner reminds us that other ways of being together are possible. It also shows that we can work within existing systems to simultaneously oppose and transform them. Delightful dissent, whether dutiful, disruptive, or dangerous, can be a powerful way to defend democracy and advance sustainability for all. And I believe it is a key feature of quantum social change!

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Photo by Kim Steere (October 18, 2025, Boston, MA)

Climate Change

I’m back in Sarasota, Florida, visiting my mother. The start of the Florida hurricane season has been unusually calm this year, which is good. The political situation in the U.S., on the other hand, is like a Category 5 disaster.

Much can be said about this moment, and many experts are sharing wise words about what can be done to counter authoritarianism and avert environmental and human rights catastrophes.

It’s what is not being said that concerns me.

Freedom of speech and access to information are being drastically curtailed in the United States. Take climate change, for example. The Department of Energy has insisted that employees avoid terminology that is misaligned with the regime’s “perspectives and priorities.” This includes not only the words climate change, but also sustainability, decarbonization, emissions, carbon footprint, and green. Yes, green!

“Countries are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” said Trump in a recent speech to the United Nations.

Countries are not on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda. It’s the greedy energy agenda that is dangerous and destructive. We are in this situation because so many politicians, businesses, and individuals with vested interests in fossil fuels and factory farming have spent decades avoiding or blocking climate action.

Information still matters

What’s weird is that the media is doing very little to help people understand and respond to the risks and impacts of climate change. Media coverage of climate change in the U.S. decreased by 25% between 2023 and 2024. This was not helpful, given current efforts to dismantle access to public information about climate change as part of a “denial by erasure” strategy.

We know that information alone is not enough to ignite concern about climate change. Participatory approaches and dialogues that enable people to discuss what it means to them have been shown to be more effective than efforts to inform or convince people of its importance. It’s clear that stories can convey strong emotional impacts. Still, if the media does not help us connect the dots, the dialogues and discussions may never take place. Information still matters.

For example, last week six houses on the Outer Banks of North Carolina collapsed into the sea. Videos documented the collapse in real time and showed the waves tossing around the debris. The news stories about collapsing houses described the power of the ocean battering the coast, blamed storms and hurricanes, and highlighted personal stories and emotions of sadness and loss.

The Outer Banks, like many barrier islands and coastal zones, are already vulnerable to a multitude of processes that will be exacerbated by sea-level rise. A study by Sean Vitousek and his colleagues found that “future sea-level-driven coastal recession is expected to increase significantly in tandem with accelerating rates of global sea-level rise.” More specifically:

We find that 63 to 94% of the shorelines on the U.S. South Atlantic Coast are projected to retreat past the present-day extent of sandy beach under 1.0 to 2.0 m of sea-level rise, respectively, without large-scale interventions.

However, with the exception of one NBC report, the articles and videos I saw did not mention any relationship between storm surges, accelerated erosion, and sea-level rise associated with climate change. Even a story in the Washington Post that was in the “climate” section of the paper did not mention those two C words.

This is frustrating because the linkages between climate change and coastal erosion on barrier islands are quite clear, as emphasized in a report by the US Environmental Protection Agency. It’s dangerous because, as Kate Yoder writes in Grist, ignorance can serve political ends.

Yoder quotes science historian Leah Aronowsky’s description of the removal of climate information from government websites: “If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there’s nothing to even debate, right?”

If journalists don’t make the links, people won’t discuss the links. It’s another way to quell climate action.

Sigh…

Reducing “climate anxiety” is often cited as a reason for cutting federal funding for climate change initiatives, including research. Unfortunately, “denial by erasure” adds to my climate anxiety. The images from North Carolina’s Outer Banks are disturbingly etched in my mind for several reasons.

First, it brings back memories of some fun college “beach weeks.” We would drive from Williamsburg, Virginia to Nags Head, North Carolina to party, play, and watch the sunset from Jockey’s Ridge dune. Staying in those wooden beach houses on stilts was a big part of the experience.

Second, it reminds me of talk I heard some years ago by Professor Rob DeConto, who has been studying the impacts of melting of Antarctic ice sheets on sea level rise. DeConto’s recent research shows that long-term global mean sea level rise depends on the timing of mitigation (i.e., the sooner the better), and all scenarios exceed one meter by 2500. No scenario shows recovery of the ice sheet.

Finally, it makes me think about Peter D. Ward’s description of the consequences of sea level rise in The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps:

The effects of one meter of sea-level rise will be massive; three meters will be catastrophic. Incursions of salt into the water table will destroy most of our best agricultural land, and corrosion will devour the electrical and fiber-optic systems of coastal cities, as well as our roads and bridges. Amsterdam, Miami, Venice and other cities might have to be abandoned.

Ward’s book was chilling to read when it was published in 2010, especially his descriptions of the noxious gases that will be produced when vegetation is submerged, and the enormous pollution that will result from coastal flooding of industrial infrastructure.

Denial by erasure is an unacceptable response. The lives of millions of people depend on what we do now. As Peter Ward wrote back in 2010, “There is hope, if we act now. But the train is leaving the station. Perhaps forever.”

The Karma Effect

So what do we do now? At the end of Rob DeConto’s talk, he mentioned that the Atlantic Coast of the United States would experience early and severe impacts of sea- level rise — I believe he said it was because large amounts of water will be displaced as the gravitational pull of the melting Antarctic ice sheets weakens. He called this the Karma Effect.

Karma is often described as a principle of cause and effect, whereby thoughts, intentions, and actions create future consequences. Karma is neither fate nor punishment. It’s information about entangled processes and relationships that demand our conscious awareness and attention. Karma is feedback.

From the perspective of quantum social change, we are not separate from the reality we experience—now or in the future. As participants, our attention, choices, language, and actions matter.

Like waves on the ocean, we shape conditions on this planet — coastlines included. The Karma Effect invites us to engage consciously with cause and effect, and to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions.

Free speech and access to information are vital to responsible action. Scientists have recently proposed an interpretation of quantum physics that treats information as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. According to the quantum memory matrix framework: “The universe does not just evolve. It remembers.”

It’s important to recognize that climate action and political action are intertwined, and both must acknowledge karma: what we do makes a difference, and we matter more than we think. Speaking of good karma, I’d like to thank Jane Goodall for inspiring me and so many others to persevere for a just and sustainable world. She will be remembered!

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Fall Equinox

Today is the autumnal equinox, when day and night are in balance before the shift towards shorter darker days, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. As the sun’s path crosses the celestial equator, it marks the start of our astronomical fall.

Reading the political news this week, it feels like we are entering into a different kind of fall. One that feels highly destabilizing.

To help myself get through the fall, I’m reading Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. Despite today’s precarious political situation, he suggests that “we are also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history.”

A Mission for the World

McKibben is talking about the potential and promise of solar and wind energy to reorganize the world in a more just and democratic manner. Recognizing that we are in a desperate race to cut greenhouse gas emissions, he sees the renewable revolution as far more than a technofix: “It could be a unifying mission for a divided world.”

McKibben is not sanguine about the challenges we face. Instead, he’s realistic and committed to helping people to understand the possibility of this moment. He acknowledges that “Big Oil will do almost anything to stay in the burning business, because their reserves of oil and gas are currently worth tens of trillions of dollars” but also points out that solar and wind power are much cheaper than energy from fossil fuels — and better for the planet.

I love Bill McKibben’s exuberance over the renewable energy revolution. Reading his book, I see that market logic may be the downfall of coal, oil, and gas, at least if we stop subsidizing them. But he also points to one of the biggest obstacles to the rapid adoption of solar and wind energy: people.

Local opposition is powerful and McKibben talks about the role of inertia and vested interests, including how misinformation and disinformation have been used to deceive people. He points out that “Change is always easier, cheaper, and less traumatic when it comes more slowly—that’s the most basic political reality.” Unfortunately, we don’t have time for this. Instead, we have to deliberately transform ourselves and our societies. Quickly.

Adaptive challenges

Rapid change involves adaptation, and this brings me back to a question that I’ve thought a lot about over the past decades: How do we adapt to changes that we are responsible for? Some years ago, I led a research project about the Potential of and Limits to Adaptation in Norway (PLAN). At the end of the project, we published an edited book called The Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change.

Adaptation, we contend, has to be redefined to include not only adapting to observed and near-term impacts of climate change but also adapting to the idea that humans are capable of transforming systems at a global scale.

In the book, we drew on the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges, as distinguished by Ron Heifetz and his colleagues in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.

Technical problems are those that can be diagnosed and solved by applying established know-how and expertise. They usually call for improved skills, better procedures or management, increased allocation of resources to a problem, more innovation, or new types of governance. Even though technical problems are often complicated and difficult to address, it’s possible to identify, develop, and apply the required skills. It’s not a lack of options that blocks solutions to technical problems but rather issues such as costs and political priorities.

This technical framing sounds an awful lot like the current approach to the renewable energy revolution. It’s an approach to renewable energy transitions that’s been successful in some cases and contexts, and these are worth celebrating. For example, in Uruguay, it took only five years to decarbonize the grid, and at the same time created 50,000 new jobs. Yet, activating a solar revolution in the United States and many other oil-producing nations represents more than a technical problem — it’s also an adaptive challenge.

Adaptive challenges call for new ways of perceiving systems, relationships, and interactions, and they often require changes in mindsets, priorities, habits, and loyalties. The solutions to adaptive challenges don’t follow clear, linear pathways. Heifetz and his colleagues emphasize that “adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.”

Shifting mindsets

In The Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change, we emphasize that successful adaptation fundamentally confronts our relationships to both individual and collective change, as well as our relationships to each other, to nature and to the future:

Confronting the adaptive challenge of climate change involves acknowledging that the problem is both systemically conditioned and socially constructed, which calls for new ways of engaging with the interlinked political and personal dimensions of climate change. This is quite different from technical and managerial approaches that tend to normalize the drivers and impacts of climate change or make them appear inevitable, then promote adaptation through better technology, more knowledge, or improved know-how, skills, and management practices.

Addressing the adaptive challenge of climate change, we wrote, “often involves engaging in difficult discussions, dialogues, or self-reflection that can potentially surface beliefs that are limiting, ‘facts’ that are taken for granted, assumptions about others, and ideas about what is possible or impossible.”

In other words, many systemic changes require more than structural or operational redesign: they require transformations in mindsets and ways of being.

Managing disequilibrium

In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Heifetz and his colleagues include a figure that I’ve found helpful in approaching adaptive challenges. The figure depicts how adaptive challenges relate to our sense of disequilibrium over time. As disequilibrium grows, we reach a threshold of learning — a productive range of distress where we can handle adaptive challenges. If the disequilibrium is too high, we may go beyond our limits of tolerance, where there’s a tendency to either treat the challenge as a technical problem, or avoid it altogether.

Our productive range of distress is not static — it shrinks and lowers when we are struggling with health problems, economic uncertainties, violence and conflicts, relationship issues, loss of family and friends that we care about, or concerns about climate change and biodiversity loss. Or when we have too many worries to handle at once.

When the disequilibrium and distress is high, we need to support and help each other with courage and compassion. We need conversations, communities, and practices that help us engage with adaptive challenges, and notice when we are avoiding them or approaching them in a technical way.

Change is underway

Transformative change for a just and sustainable world is urgent, and fortunately a mindset shift is well underway. For example, ecocentric views are spreading and have the potential to create a profound shift in our ways of being in and relating to the world. Such views recognize human-nature interdependence, and acknowledge the limits of technical responses.

Paul Hawken describes this beautifully in Carbon: The Book of Life: “Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is crucial but insufficient.” He calls for a mindset shift that puts life at the center of all of our solutions.

The climate movement is alive and growing, but it cannot succeed unless we see the planet as a living entity, one and the same as earthworms, lichen, and lemurs. Life must be at the center of all we do or we will not live here much longer.

Hawken asks whether compassionate, effective, and brilliant communities of action can emerge from the chaos that we are experiencing now, emphasizing that “The word community is essential to solving the crises we face.” I could not agree more!

The Revolution

Our planet revolves around the sun, and as Bill McKibben argues, so does the future of humanity. In objective terms, humanity has about a billion years left on Earth before changes in solar activity render our planet uninhabitable. But the way we are currently treating the planet and each other, we risk cutting that back by orders of magnitude. As inhabitants of planet Earth, we all have a role to play in the revolution.

The word revolution refers to going around and around, like a wheel or the hands of a clock. It can be a cyclical experience that brings us right back to where we started. Revolution can also mean a change in a political, socioeconomic, or technical situation. As in the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, or the quantum revolution. However, the type of revolution we need right now involves shifts in ways of thinking about or visualizing something. It’s about embracing a new paradigm.

With darker days ahead, I’m reminded that fall in the Northern Hemisphere is spring in the South. The challenge is to hold both perspectives and focus on the light. After all, we’re in the midst of a solar revolution — a fresh chance for civilization.

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Image: Francesco Ungaro, Unsplash

‘Preferment’

‘Send.’ I hit the button this week and sent a letter to make it official that I will retire from the University of Oslo on January 1, 2026. In that moment, a wave of possibility collapsed into a particular reality.

I’m making a conscious decision to scale back so I can move forward. I want to focus my energy on fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability (FAST Sustainability) in society. I will enter “preferment” rather than “retirement” — preferred work, greater focus, and more time and space for fun.

It wasn’t an easy decision. I love teaching and research, and it’s been rewarding to collaborate with wonderful people from all over the world. Part of me would be happy to continue with my “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach to work, but a multiverse approach is no longer aligned with the difficult reality we are facing — a world where polar ice is melting while social polarization heats up.

It’s time for a different approach.

Destiny vs choice

To prepare for my “quantum leap” into preferment, I’ve been reading Connie Zweig’s The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul.

One of Zweig’s key points relates to an important shift in focus as we get older: “Our tasks now require us to move our attention from the exterior world to the interior one, from the ego’s role in society to the soul’s deeper purpose.”

Hmm, what is my soul’s deeper purpose? To discover this, I decided to ponder it while meditating, running, and cleaning out clutter.

I started my “soul searching” by decluttering an old file cabinet with lots of memories, including newspaper clippings about climate change from the days before the internet. One article from February 1989 tells us to Plan Now for Climate Warming, Scientists Say; another from April 1990 warns that warming is underway: Team of Scientists Sees Substantial Warming of Earth.

I found an article written in October 1989 by Donella Meadows, The greenhouse effect: left, right and center, where she listed seven conclusions that around 99% of scientists already agreed with back then, including:

7. Only a small amount of climate change is inevitable. The greenhouse effect is talked about too much as a matter of destiny and too little as a matter of choice.

More than 35 years later, this remains an important point. The changes we are experiencing now were not inevitable or destiny — they are the results of previous choices. We are in a decade that matters, and what we choose to do now will have implications for decades, centuries, and millennia to come. No pressure here!

Lost Souls

As I dug through files and piles, I came across a letter sent to my father in 1986 by a religious organization in Philadelphia called The Society for the Propagation of the Faith. He had left the Catholic Church as a young man, and in 1966 my grandmother paid $100 (equivalent to about $992 today) to this organization for his perpetual enrollment in the Society.

The letter informs him that he is officially classified as a lost soul, and then it berates him for steadfastly rejecting the grace of Almighty God and remaining outside the fold. And then it gets mean:

We endeavored to transfer your case to the Society of St. Jude (which specializes in hopeless cases) but they declined to accept you. They said that some cases are more hopeless than others.

The Society considered refunding my grandmother her money, but then rationalized that “she would only waste the money on some other bizarre cause.” After explaining that his name is being deleted from all prayers in their 749 mission areas, the letter ends with some good will:

We hope that this sudden release will not thrust you further into the clutches of satan. Perhaps your good mother will light a candle for you now and then.

The 1966 letter to my grandmother explains that Perpetual Members, living or deceased, receive the spiritual benefits of remembrance in 15,000 masses annually, and in the prayers, good works, and sacrifices of over 200,000 missionaries.

Perpetual for this Society turned out to be 20 years. What I hadn’t noticed the first time I read the letter, years ago, was that the enrollment was for “Mr. and Mrs. James Edward O’Brien and Family.”

In other words, I was (or perhaps still am?) a member of The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, without knowing it.

Reflections

What does this have to do with my role-to-soul quantum leap? This week I’ve been reflecting on the significance of these letters.

1. First, I’m thinking about how challenging it can be to deliberately step out of a group, an identity, a mindset, a paradigm, or an institution (including academia).

This is true for those who leave the group or paradigm, but also for those who remain within. Whether it’s a religious, economic, cultural, or scientific paradigm, it’s easy to conclude that “nonbelievers” and “leavers” are lost souls, misinformed, irrational, immoral, or just making stupid decisions. To have an open mind and ask questions, rather than give answers, takes courage.

2. Second, I’m wondering how many of us are part of a Society that we never consciously signed up for. We tend to accept social and cultural norms as a given, rather than consider whether and how they relate to what we deeply care about — not just for ourselves, but for all, including nature and future generations.

I didn’t grow up with religion, but did grow up with plenty of love, laughter, and kindness. My mother says that my father laughed when he received the letter, as I did the first time I read it. But the letter seems less funny now, when many are no longer concerned with transcending ideologies and -isms and instead we see more support for cruelty, hate, and “othering.” Living with difference and diversity takes kindness.

3. Third, in terms of my soul’s deeper purpose, I’m thinking that I do, in fact, want to work for the perpetuation of the faith. Not faith as in a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, but faith as confidence that we can transform ourselves and our societies for a just and sustainable world. Not because it is probable, but because it is possible.

Quantum leap

Maybe I’ll keep a bit of my Everything everywhere all at once style, after all. The movie, with the same name, draws on quantum concepts like entanglement, superposition, and the multiverse, and it has an important message for us all. Google AI, of all things, summarizes it nicely:

The central lesson … is to embrace kindness and find meaning in the face of life's chaos and perceived meaninglessness, demonstrating that even in an indifferent universe, love and compassion offer profound significance. The film suggests that by choosing to see the good in others and accepting life's complexities, particularly within family relationships, one can navigate the overwhelming possibilities of existence and foster genuine connections.

It comes down to a matter of choice, and our choices matter. Where do we want to go? Who do we want to be? What do we want to do?

We can choose to contribute to a society that propagates not faith, but the principles of transformative change for a just and sustainable world:

• ensuring equity and justice;

• embracing pluralism and inclusion;

• fostering respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and

• promoting adaptive learning and action.

Alternatively, we could choose to label those who are different from us as hopeless cases and accept the future as destiny.

I would prefer that we retire hopeless choices and instead consciously, collectively, collaboratively, and courageously generate quantum social change!

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Making a difference

Yesterday I voted. This was my first vote in a Norwegian parliamentary election since I became a citizen in 2021, and it felt meaningful. Especially at a time when the world needs leadership on policies related to climate change and biodiversity loss, human rights and well-being, and peace and global sustainability.

Norway, a country with 5.572 million people and a sovereign wealth fund worth about 20 trillion NOK (about 1.9 trillion USD), is in a position to lead with integrity. Considering the latest research on the potential collapse of the Atlantic current, this is a position Norway should embrace.

This year’s election reminds me that small actions matter. Tiny, incremental actions are often dismissed as trivial or insignificant. Yet together they form patterns and pathways that shape the future. Transformative change is not an event but a process. Each idea, decision, action, and vote represents a quantum of action.

Principles are foundational

I was talking about this last week at the Transformations Community/Earth System Governance conference. The conference, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, was an engaging event that brought together researchers, practitioners, activists, and artists. This year, there was considerable focus on values, emotions, and the inner dimensions of transformative change.

In a plenary discussion focusing on the failure of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we discussed how they have emphasized outcomes, rather than the process and quality of change. However, it’s clear that we won’t realize SDG 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries without taking equity and justice as the starting point. As one of the principles of transformative change, it must be foundational to all actions and goals.

Hitting home

This was exemplified recently in a breaking news story from the Norwegian Public Broadcasting agency (NRK). Investigative journalists have uncovered the role of Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company, in handing over data to Myanmar’s military junta so that it could locate, track, and murder citizens fighting to restore democracy after the February 1, 2021 military coup.

People who are fighting for justice, democracy, and freedom were betrayed by Telenor. According to documents obtained by NRK, approximately 1,300 mobile customers had their digital data handed over or their phones blocked at the request of the military government. Telenor knew that nearly 500 of its customers could face arrest if their sensitive data were shared with the authorities.

“We had no choice”

The CEO of Telenor’s Myanmar operations at the time has defended the decision as regretful, yet claimed it was their only option. “We had no choice.” Is that so?

Decisions have consequences. When we perceive limited options, we operate within a narrow solution space that often translates into business as usual. Telenor, a Norwegian company with 18.2 million subscribers in Myanmar, was worried that their employees in Myanmar would be punished for not handing over data to illegitimate authorities.

What if they had chosen instead to honor the trust that was foundational to their customer relationships, standing firm for both the security of their employees and with all citizens of Myanmar? What if the Norwegian state, which owns 55% of Telenor, put pressure on the military regime and rallied international support for Myanmar’s legitimate National Unity Government (NUG)?

Options are often linked to familiar, comfortable patterns that are the easiest to follow. However, such patterns also tend to perpetuate the underlying causes of many of the problems we are experiencing. Three deeply rooted social and cultural patterns identified in the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment are: 1) the disconnection and domination over nature and people; 2) the concentration of power and wealth; and 3) the prioritization of short-term, individual, and material gains. While appealing to trust, in practice Telenor reinforced the patterns of domination, concentration, and prioritization that underlie many of today’s crises.

People trusted that Telenor would maintain its integrity. Yet the path of integrity takes courage — both to do difficult things, and to do things differently.

Trust quantum mechanics

While “nerding out” after the conference, I noticed a video on YouTube titled Something Strange Happens When You Trust Quantum Mechanics. The video, published by Veritasium, has already been viewed over 12 million times, so I thought I’d check it out. The host starts out with a confession:

As a 42-year old who's spent most of my life studying physics, I must admit that I had a big misconception. I believed that every object has one single trajectory through space, one single path. But in this video, I will prove to you that this is not the case. Everything is actually exploring all possible paths all at once.

He argues that “the fact that we see things on single, well-defined trajectories is, in a way, the most convincing illusion nature has ever devised. And the way it works all comes down to a quantity known as the action.” According to the principle of least action, every possible path contributes to the outcome, but most cancel out through destructive interference (when the peaks and troughs of multiple waves oppose and negate each other). Those closest to the path of least action, however, interfere constructively. They reinforce one another, and that’s the path we see in our everyday, classical world.

The video traces some key breakthroughs in physics that have helped us to understand how and why actions matter. Max Planck, for example, discovered that energy is quantized — directly proportional to frequency, with the constant of proportionality known as Planck’s constant. This constant represents a quantum of action. Because of the quantum of action, classical mechanics is simply what emerges when almost all possible paths cancel out, leaving only the path of least action reinforced.

The point is simple: most paths vanish, but the ones that align reinforce each other, shaping the reality we experience.

All paths exist at once

Quantum mechanics has metaphorical lessons for social change; one is the recognition that all possible paths exist at once. What we experience as “the path” or “our only choice” is not inevitable or determined; it emerges from interference, or from the ways we amplify some patterns so they endure, and disrupt others so they fade.

Our choices, however small, are like quanta of action. They may seem insignificant, but they shift patterns, sometimes destructively and other times constructively. When actions align with the IPBES assessment’s principles of transformative change — equity and justice; pluralism and inclusion; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relations; and adaptive learning and action — they reinforce each other. Such constructive interference creates visible, coherent pathways to our shared goals.

A Quantum of Action

Voting in an election is a small action, but when there is trust in the electoral process, the outcomes can lead to constructive actions that benefit all. Without trust, destructive interference creates the illusion of “no choice.”

My next quantum of action will be to cancel my Telenor subscription, in solidarity with people in Myanmar who are fighting for justice and democracy.

When our choices and actions align with values such as equity, integrity, pluralism, and inclusion, they build trust and shape our future. Trust is the process of choosing integrity over interests, again and again, knowing that every quantum of action matters.

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Image: Barbara Burgess / Unsplash