(2021-06-28) Steffen When Shit Gets Real

Alex Steffen: When Shit Gets Real. The heat has come. In Portland, Oregon, it was hotter (108ºF) Saturday than it’s ever been there. .

That green and rainy corner of the world is baking in greenhouse sun and drought.

All this is, the National Weather Service informs us, “unprecedented.

Discontinuity is best seen from above. The faster change is happening, the more important it is to try to see the big picture.

This last week, a draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment was leaked. It hit hard

Our public debate does an extremely poor job of reporting how far into the planetary crisis we’ve already passed—but it does an even worse job of seeing the enormous torque now pent up in human systems. That torque has grown as institutions, communities and enterprises have ground up against the crisis and attempted to remain unchanged. (status quo)

how inevitability huge, disruptive changes will be unleashed by the release of that pressure

Personal climate foresight, we might call it—this skill we need, to make sense of our own lives as we move into deeper and deeper discontinuities.

Our estrangement is worsened by our worldviews. Most of us have been taught to think of the planetary crisis as an issue (or set of issues) rather than an era.

Many thousands of smart people make their living suggesting what we should do. Most of those actions serve agendas; they were professionally designed to grow audience, get the public climbing a “ladder of engagement,” and mobilize public commitment—which in practical terms usually means getting folks to reach for their credit cards

Most of us are trying to grasp a vastness of epoch-making change through messages designed to reach people who care, but only a little

Advocacy and activism are not wrong, obviously.

Nor are movement-building strategies wrong-headed.

We have a model for how change is supposed to happen—an orderly transition. It is no longer possible to achieve that orderly transition, to combine action at the scale and speed we need with a smooth transition and a minimum of disruption. We have already failed to create the future most advocacy still seeks to bring on.

Our actions cannot now be optimized, disruption cannot be avoided, and the world isn’t going to become predictable again

This is the moment for boldness. It’s critical, though, to be honest about who is actually able to be bold in the real world that we have right now.

The future we get will largely be decided by how well a few million people do their jobs in the next decade.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who can do things, who can apply intelligence and skills and connections and power to make shit happen.

To unlock insight into the world we’re living in, it helps to remember that we’re in a new era, surrounded by systems designed and built in the old.

None of these systems are stable. Many display economic fragility and ecological brittleness. Their beneficiaries—including the experts and professionals who manage them—are temporarily holding back a flood of disruption with denial and dead weight.

Fast interests are increasingly competitive with one another.

If we succeed in accelerating change quickly enough, we won’t reverse the catastrophes the last five decades has saddled us with, but we may well snap forward into a global boom of sustainable prosperity and systems ruggedization that not only enables us to be largely successful within discontinuity, but leaves billions of people better off than they are now.

The Snap Forward (my forthcoming book, written with Justus Stewart) is a guide to grokking when we are and asking the right questions about climate and sustainability strategies for the real world.

We don’t experience life at a systems level, though.

Acceptance of discontinuity is the beginning of wisdom, these days. Shit is getting real, now

The critical question in all our lives is not what this crisis closes, but what it opens. For this is not the end of everything, but the beginning of a new world—the one each of us will inhabit for the rest of our days.

This email is the first in a series. In the next four newsletters, I’m going to share how I think about:

WHAT IS PROFESSIONAL ACCELERATION?

WHAT IS PERSONAL RUGGEDIZATION?

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL REGROUNDING?

WHAT IS GOOD PARENTING IN A PLANETARY CRISIS?