I’ve been quiet lately and not posting much, immersed deep in a lot of projects as I am. Like being in diving gear at the bottom of the sea, I’ve felt a little bit hampered, a bit lost in the dark, but still exploring some new, fertile and interesting places. I’ve felt extra-sensitive in being with the worsening conflict and environmental trouble.
I’ve experienced a bit of rejection, too, from not succeeding with pitches through to feeling mildly misunderstood or unheard. I have coping strategies for not winning work as this is all part of the mill of independent work, which I’ve done for 25 years. But the feelings of being misunderstood and unheard are stickier.
Coming up for oxygen briefly today, I’ve been reflecting on the triggers for these feelings. Of course, it’s an egoic trait — and I can remind myself that the great majority of people, especially the most marginalised, are not heard. But, maybe it helps you if I reflect on and share about this, as I don’t think I’m alone in struggling to communicate complexity. Whenever I struggle to communicate my ideas or to have proposals accepted, I notice a conundrum:
On one hand, rigour and challenge
I am often asking for more thoughtful structures, aiming for more impact and legacy. I want to spend time on precision with terminologies, time to avoid being reactive in a state of mild panic, time to research and avoid imitation or hovering in the comfort zone. I can seem pedantic when I, yet again, remind people of category errors or omissions. I can come across as wanting to overwhelm or frighten people when I point to the huge challenges and responsibilities ahead. I take on more than I can chew, and might seem as if I am asking others to do the same.
On the other hand, open to possibility
In many situations, I ask for more openness to diverse views or possibilities, more creative opportunities, and more allowance for methods to emerge through experiment or dialogue. Because I want to observe, research and listen first, I’m reluctant to pin down a quantitative method or fix on a limited target audience if this would lose potential to include, imagine, improvise and generate ideas. I am a very creative person, thinking in metaphors, images and hypotheticals, and this can be confusing when people feel limited by cultures that emphasise straightness, immediacy and method.*
A quick aside: there’s an irony that these dominant educational, political or work cultures emphasising straightness are so abstracted from ecological reality. So, the logical, immediate, methodical requirements are not about responding to changes in the actual world, but to demands of power or groupthink or the ruts of habit (what they might call the ‘real world’). For example, a finance worker must deal in highly abstract data in an artificial system, where intuition or creative thinking is only useful for speed of taking risks to accumulate more within the matrix, and any knock-on impacts on actual ecosystems are invisible and externalised.
Yes it’s very confusing! It’s quite atypical for someone to be so exacting about inexactness, so tight about allowing for possibility. Most work and activist settings don’t want to be distracted from the task at hand by reminders to honour a wider community, or to draw on a wider set of interconnected ideas, or to pause to feel into sacred elements. It can feel like extra work to remember history, to recall what we can build upon, to look again at what’s forgotten at the margins. Pausing to think harder, to listen more deeply, or to make agreements on governance, is felt as a block to action.
It pains me to be misunderstood (and to misunderstand). It always has done. The moments in literature or drama that resonate are when authority figures misinterpret or project meanings onto others. Oooof. It’s this compulsion for making meaning with and for others that drives me to make art and diagrams, and it’s no surprise that my creative art is often called too illustrative, and my diagrams are often called too unscientific.
This graphic was an attempt to sum up my nested approach to change, after several incidents where I’ve been confusing to others, or where being misunderstood has led me into confusion.
THE GREEN CIRCLES
In environmental and activist settings, I take issue with ‘Climate’ being used as a cover-all term for the wider Earth Crisis (which is ecological overshoot and social shortfall rooted in extractive capitalism). See, for example, this post about my Earth Crisis Blinkers tool. People misunderstand me, assuming that I am saying Climate is less important than other environmental issues.
I’m asking for linguistic precision, not because I’m always pedantic about words, but because the future of human and biosphere flourishing urgently depends on a widespread and justice-driven comprehension of Earth system health and the socio-political causes of its trouble.
The rapid acceleration of Global Warming due to the destruction of carbon sinks and burning of fossil fuels is the most important environmental issue in human history. It is a ‘threat multiplier’ to all the other areas of ecological overshoot and social shortfall. But it must be tackled with a broad systemic awareness of ecology, politics, culture and psychology, and in ways that also reduce other forms of pollution and harm, including its relationship to structural racism and territorial wars.
THE RED CIRCLES
I’ve suggested that we can only really engage with individuals, and have been told that this doesn’t accord with indigenous and collectivist thinking. I didn’t intend to dismiss the essential interconnectedness of humans with other beings, or the power of collectives.
I mean that all groups are formed of individuals, each with different frames, motivations and feelings. Behind each faceless institution or corporation are people with potential for more embodied and ethical motivations. If we want to create change in organisations, we do this by working with key individuals who are agents for change.
Despite our individualistic society, people are actually not seen in their differences. They are discouraged from breaking away from social pressures to be positively deviant.
If people are asked to conform or erase their desires when pulling together for a higher purpose, they will still need some freedom and self-expression, and will need support for their different abilities to contribute. A rights-based approach to engaging individuals increases their capacities to work with mutuality and to form collective structures.
THE BLUE CIRCLES
This zone is about action and how we prioritise responses. I’m often heard to say that there is too much focus on immediate, short-term, simple and technical steps to mitigate harm (especially when they are focused on decarbonisation). I’m misinterpreted to be suggesting there is no point in taking steps to decarbonise, or that people should struggle to do even more than the heavy sustainability duties they are already taking on.
I’m suggesting a shift in perspective with two factors:
- Facing the accelerating impacts of the Earth Crisis, everywhere and now, so that there is a shift in purpose — caring for each other and preparing for disruption.
- A ‘Regenerative Flip’, so that rather than getting bogged down by relatively low-impact actions to reduce your footprint, find the most impactful, multi-solving and regenerative tasks which can decarbonise (or reduce pollution & waste) AND restore biodiversity, increase local food supplies, tackle social isolation and so on. The central circle is ‘stop harm at source’, which includes decarbonisation. Yes, this is an urgent priority, but not if decarbonisation (etc) actions are limited, incremental, or green-washing in their approach. If these actions are taken with wider awareness of rights, and prioritising the restoration of ecosystems and Earth systems, it’s more likely that harms will be stopped at source.
THE YELLOW CIRCLES
In the Cultural sector, the two big camps are Arts and Heritage. If you see these practices camped along a ridge, a crowded peak is the contemporary Arts, generative, experimental and imaginative. At the other end, and descending into several valleys, is Heritage, which includes keepers and regenerators of intangible & diaspora cultures and of wild ecosystems, as well as of the collections and built structures of colonising cultures. And around these are all kinds of applied, commercial and ordinary forms of culture, some of which we might call Design. The wider landscape beyond is culture in the broadest sense, the forms that have arisen from interactions of place with the lifeways of people (and other beings), and the narratives or codes that create the DNA of culture.
When I’m in a setting that reflects any of these camps, I’m always pointing outwards to include the others. In Heritage settings, I want to bring in more imaginative arts-led interpretation and storytelling, and these suggestions are usually welcomed. When I’m in an Arts sector context and pointing to include museums and heritage, I feel the suggestions are less welcome. I need to be understood that I believe in honouring and supporting the wider ecosystem that feeds the Arts, and I believe in protecting heritage and learning from history. But I am mostly passionate about the generative, queer and extraordinary expressions of the Arts for enabling imaginative activism.
TO SUMMARISE
That we can focus our actions while still broadening our thoughts to the wider picture.
That strategic environmental responsibility is about rigorous crafting of interventions that dynamically engage the four focus areas of action:
- urgently stopping harm at source
- engaging individuals as agents of change
- tackling climate change as a threat multiplier
- integrating the Arts and imagination
…while looking to the bigger systemic ripples of change.
That movements for change need a combination of people and work strands that favour the macro & theoretical level and others that favour a targeted practical focus. Each needs to respect and learn from the other. Training, education and media need to help people shift the zoom of their focus from macro to micro.
In the diagram, the yellow Cultural ripples are a little off to the side. Arts and Culture should be invited into the frame and resourced so that it more directly engages people, stops harm and helps in coping with impacts.
