A Stark Summary of Our Challenges

Most of us are acutely aware of the environmental, social, and economic challenges I summarize below. But often we think of them in isolation and fail to see the feedback loops that prevent them from being fruitfully addressed in piecemeal fashion. We also tend to focus on what we are likely to lose rather than what we can gain from addressing these challenges. We underappreciate the opportunities that lie within them. This chapter aims to rectify these deficits. We need a holistic vision of our challenges and opportunities to motivate cultivating the skillful habits necessary for flourishing now.

Let’s begin with our environmental challenges. A defining challenge of these times is that we are approaching key “planetary boundaries,” limits to anthropogenic changes in earth systems that support human societies. The research on planetary boundaries synthesizes scientific work on earth system processes that enabled human civilizations to arise, especially those we risk destabilizing.⁸ The boundaries delineate what we know to be a “safe operating space” for the earth system. Researchers argue that we appear to be crossing boundaries for biodiversity loss and nitrogen/phosphorus pollution, while we are approaching them for climate and land-use change. The boundaries do not necessarily consist of tipping points beyond which there is no return, though that may happen. They indicate points beyond which it will be harder for civilizations to flourish. We can expect increased turbulence in earth system processes as we approach these boundaries.

Climate disruption is one of the large drivers of other changes in the earth system. It affects biodiversity, ocean acidification, desertification, and agricultural productivity. It contributes causally to an increase in “natural disasters” like flooding, fires, and droughts. Human population growth and consumption levels are the other main drivers of shifts in planetary processes. Although the rate of global population growth is slowing, the sheer number of people continues to increase dramatically—approximately eighty-two million per year. Population growth contributes to transformation of wildlife habitat for food and other resources. The resulting deforestation further exacerbates climate change, and widespread pollution contributes to further biodiversity loss. Our consumption patterns magnify the effects of population growth—creating tremendous waste, increasing destruction of habitat, and fueling grossly unjust distribution of goods and harms.⁹ The interactions among these challenges make it very hard to effectively address one without addressing others. Our standard problem-solving approaches favor focusing on a single issue, but holistic approaches are necessary to alter feedbacks between different issues.

Alas, these large-scale challenges seem remote from daily life. Because of their global nature, planetary boundaries are not readily apparent, rendering these challenges invisible. Their impacts depend a great deal on our specific situations. The wealthy have been able to avoid some negative impacts. The poor and marginalized bear the brunt of our failures to meet such challenges. This pattern will continue, but increasingly everyone will bear significant costs.

We must make the personal impacts of our large-scale challenges more salient. The following is a representative list of the ways that approaching planetary boundaries affect human flourishing, directly or indirectly:

• The rising severity and number of natural disasters create greater insecurity, supply-chain disruption, and increasing governmental costs and taxation.
• Shortages of food and water lead to more social conflict and increased cost for necessities.
• Human migration is increasing, and with it resistance to immigration and militarization of borders.
• Biodiversity losses destabilize ecosystems, leading to loss of pollinators, increases in pest species, decline of coral reef ecosystems, and increased expense for ecological restoration.
• Those who understand our situation are beginning to experience a growing sense of sadness about the relatively stable nature we are losing—what some have called “solastalgia.”¹⁰

This summary of environmental challenges highlights some of their social impacts, but the age of climate change also includes distinctive social challenges. These include declining trust in institutions and each other, increased sectarianism, aging populations, rapid social change, highly salient injustices, and rising authoritarianism. The ecological challenges arising from approaching planetary boundaries are leading to increased social conflict around how to address boundary issues. Historic injustices influence how we distribute the costs and benefits of avoiding planetary boundaries and thus exacerbate conflict. Tensions between developing and developed nations and between the beneficiaries of global capitalism and those harmed by it threaten to create feedback loops that reinforce our ecological challenges.

Our 24/7 media are major drivers for our social challenges. We are ensconced in a media environment that has an insatiable demand for controversy. The economics of most media incentivize shrill and often misleading headlines that attract more article views. Social media platforms tend to prioritize news feeds that reinforce our preferences, and increasingly we are divided into insular media environments that reinforce polarization. The media-fueled enmity reflected in the polarization around climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates how our social dynamics increase the difficulty of effectively addressing other challenges. Such dynamics decrease shared trust in institutions like government, science, and the press and erode the social touchstones that build unity across disagreement.

In the US and most of the globe’s largest economies, an aging population creates economic problems and makes it harder to address other social problems. The number of people in the United States over the age of sixty-five will double between 2012 and 2050, while total population is projected to grow only 27 percent.¹¹ The challenges resulting from an aging population include increasing government health-care and retirement costs, which deprive other initiatives of funding and enlarge government debt. This decreases the capacity of governments to address social needs, which in turn reinforces distrust in institutions.

These large-scale social challenges have a host of impacts on individual flourishing:

• We experience increasing anger at those who seem to thwart our progress and despair about achieving negotiated solutions to problems.
• Fear of intractable conflict and physical violence is increasing.
• Mental health problems have been on the rise, and that is likely to continue.
• Most people except for social elites will reasonably see that system structures are rigged against them, and even elites will feel like victims of system dynamics beyond their control.
• We have a heightened sensitivity to the speed of change and a diminished sense that we can control our destiny.
• Compared to the past, our social support structures tend to consist of smaller numbers of close friends and family and larger groups of acquaintances with whom we have only thin connections. Loneliness becomes a persistent problem.
• Institutions like families, schools, and governments often cannot manage the demands that are placed on them, which decreases their effectiveness and our trust in them.

Our economic challenges reinforce our social challenges, and vice versa. Our dominant economic story remains one of material progress, but many are losing confidence in rising material standards of living. Our expectations have been conditioned by seventy-five years of extraordinary economic growth that appears unsustainable given our ecological constraints and our experience of the great recession of 2008. The brutal competition of a globalized capitalism and the speed of technological change are twin drivers of economic insecurity. Globalization enabled many industries to shift factories to countries with cheaper labor and to contract internationally for services, which severely reduced well-paying jobs for those without baccalaureate degrees and weakened the bargaining power of labor.

The rate of technological innovation continues to accelerate, which provides many benefits but also spreads economic disruption across a wide range of industries. Automation and artificial intelligence threaten many jobs that once seemed like secure careers. Long-term employment in a company is increasingly uncommon, and young people are told that they will likely have more than seven distinct careers. The gig economy in which people work for numerous employers as independent contractors has started to dominate some economic sectors. Uber drivers, adjunct faculty, and writers for hire can manage their own time and workload but must do so without security, workplace health insurance, or retirement benefits. The primary beneficiaries of the above drivers are shareholders and managerial elites. As fewer people garner these benefits, the vast majority feel at the mercy of external forces that cause job loss, unsustainable debt, devaluation of once marketable skills, and social displacement. Increasing inequality, global interdependence, and the difficulty in a low-growth economy of achieving high employment levels with reasonable wages underlie the fragility of our economic situation. Our polarization prevents us from jointly crafting economic changes that enhance job security and support workers whose livelihoods are threatened by technological change. As a result, our primary political approach to addressing economic insecurity is to stimulate high economic growth and low unemployment, which fuels the consumption that erodes our planetary buffers.

The dynamics of our economy lead to many individuals experiencing the following personal challenges:

• We work harder and feel less rewarded. A chronic sense of unfairness grows.
• The economy demands more education, which currently leads many students into unmanageable debt.
• Too many of us struggle to find meaningful work that pays a livable wage and enables a dignified retirement.
• The speed of technological change places a premium on novelty, which reduces the reward for steady hard work.
• Increased economic insecurity makes us suspicious of those who might encroach on our jobs or work for lower wages.
• Our health suffers from the stress of insecurity and low job satisfaction.

But doesn’t every generation have its problems? Aren’t all these challenges best understood as problems that we need to solve? Almost fifty years ago in a now famous article, Rittel and Webber drew a distinction between “tame” problems and “wicked” problems.¹² Tame problems may be quite complicated, but they have definitive problem formulations, and eventually experts can discover clear solutions for them. Engineering problems like designing an electric car that can travel three hundred miles on a charge fit this category. By contrast, wicked problems have contested problem descriptions; often stakeholders define the problems in contrasting ways, which fit with their preferred solutions. There are no stopping rules that indicate when a solution has been reached; no amount of new data or refined algorithms will determine how to solve the problems. Indeed, wicked problems tend to involve complex social and ethical issues about which people with conflicting values will reasonably disagree. Such problems are often interconnected with other problems and are highly context dependent. They have better or worse solutions at a time, but not correct solutions. Climate change, structural racism, and political polarization are wicked problems.

We have been so successful solving tame problems that it is natural to assume that social problems can be treated analogously once we have enough data about how people behave. Behavioral psychology and classical economics seemed to promise to tame social problems, but alas that promise cannot be realized because of the variability among humans interacting with the complex socio-ecological systems they inhabit. Most of our important challenges are wicked problems that can only be managed in ways that are temporary, contested, and context specific; they will not be “solved” in the traditional sense. We are stuck with them or the negative effects of dealing with them.

By highlighting our challenges above, I have inevitably created a bleak picture of the times in which we must try to flourish. But that picture is also very one-sided. Tremendous opportunity accompanies the disruptions we face. We also have the benefit of the many forms of progress that have characterized the last hundred years. We live in a time of great change, which opens up avenues for creativity that in other ages might have been less available. The importance of addressing these challenges opens many opportunities for living a life full of purpose. The cumulative efforts of many will determine how we collectively move through the turbulence of our times. We cannot know whether the net result of our activities in this century will lead toward a sustainable and just society or toward some less desirable alternative, but we do know that what we do matters a great deal. Before turning to a more detailed treatment of the opportunities we might grasp, I describe a model that provides a picture of how these challenges and opportunities fit together.

Navigating the Adaptive Cycle

If we try to address the above challenges in a piecemeal fashion, we become overwhelmed by their number and our difficulty working through wicked problems. We need a unifying picture that helps us to understand the complex dynamics of our times and leverage large-scale change that addresses many problems simultaneously. I have found that resilience theory’s model of the adaptive cycle provides such a picture and reveals the kind of opportunities available in our times. It also illustrates why our cultural norms might not be well adapted to our challenges and why it is important to strengthen different skillful habits. This picture provides a promising explanation of why after a long period of rapid growth, our accumulated resources and institutions have become brittle and ineffective—why we need massive change, and why it is so difficult to achieve.

As illustrated in figure 2, the adaptive cycle consists of four phases that complex social and ecological systems typically go through—growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. Once we see how these phases work in a simplified ecological example, we can move to a more complex social example that better reveals the structure of our current situation.

The adaptive cycle arose out of ecology, and its four phases are most easily explained by means of a simplified biological example.¹³ In the growth phase (r), resources are readily available, and organisms compete intensely for them. The structure of the system becomes more complex, but it is still highly flexible, adapting quickly to changes in its external environment. Consider a fire-prone ecosystem like Yellowstone National Park. After a forest fire, early succession species grow quickly where their seed stock has survived in the soils. The available energy fuels intense competition for sunlight, nutrients, and water. After a while, young trees begin to lock up more energy in the system; the forest begins to return. Numerous dead trees and branches drop to the ground, providing cover for animals and also providing the tinder that can fuel another fire.

When the forest matures, its growth slows, and large amounts of energy are stored in the biomass of the forest. Now the ecosystem has entered the conservation phase (K). Much of the energy available to the system (e.g., sunlight and water) is used to maintain its structure, which tends to become increasingly rigid. The system becomes highly interconnected but also less flexible. Despite occasional disturbances like a wind event or an insect invasion, the forest grows slowly and retains its identity, which is defined in terms of stable processes that maintain its structure. It becomes an old-growth forest.

In the absence of frequent fires, the forest litter builds up and makes stand-changing fires more likely. Eventually, a large disturbance may push the forest over a threshold in which it loses key structures and functioning. A bolt of lightning hitting a dead tree can then lead to stand-changing fire—a crisis from which the forest cannot rapidly bounce back. The system has now entered the release phase (Ω), where energy locked in the wood is released back into the system as heat, ash, and gases. In this phase, the feedback loops that maintained the old structure are no longer operative. Organisms that survive the fire now interact with a novel environment. Release can be fairly shallow, where the system retains some of its prior identity, or it can be very deep, where the prior structure and processes collapse. In either case, rapid chaotic change becomes the norm for a time.

In the reorganization phase (α), clusters of organisms establish themselves, forming novel small communities, many of which will fail. Experimentation and uncertainty are high and success elusive. If different species have been introduced since the last major fire, or if other elements in the system have changed (e.g., much of its soil has eroded), the reorganization may result in a very different kind of system after the fire. Rapid innovation and competition will ultimately lead to another version of the growth part of the cycle. The depth of release and the variations in reorganization trajectories determine how much of the system’s identity is retained as the adaptive cycle continues.

The adaptive cycle plays out on larger and smaller scales at the same time. Large-scale systems tend to move through the cycle much more slowly than smaller-scale systems. To use this model, we need to envision a nested set of systems, like a set of Russian dolls, with each system being affected by the systems that it includes and by larger systems that include it. For example, a changing climate will affect which tree species will do well after a forest fire in a region. A developing theoretical framework explains the dynamics of the adaptive cycle as it applies in different settings. When the pattern of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization is applied to social systems—human communities or organizations—it must include both the intentions and the skills of community members. Figure 3 shows a more complex version of the adaptive cycle as applied to a socio-ecological system.¹⁴

In this diagram the phases are labeled somewhat differently, but we can see how the ecological model is adapted to social systems like organizations and communities. The oscillating line moving through the growth and conservation (status quo ante) phases illustrates that small systems within an organization are going through their own adaptive cycles while the organization as a whole grows; progress is never linear. For example, a new sustainability studies department at a college may grow rapidly, assisting in the overall growth of the college, while the chemistry department shrinks.

If an organization grows enough, it begins to standardize practices, hire more middle-management staff, and build structures for solving routine problems. It gradually enters the conservation phase. It builds up reserves that help maintain its structures through minor crises, but at the same time the growing bureaucracy can become rigid and less capable of adapting to external pressures. Decision-making processes can become cumbersome, and competing groups of stakeholders can make it hard to solve problems. Often, though, the conservation phase is long and productive, stimulating incremental changes that keep the organization functioning well and that create pride and high morale. For example, the iconic film and camera company Kodak moved through a rapid growth phase in which it introduced the first inexpensive camera, the Brownie, which made cameras into household items. It created a huge market for its film and film-processing chemicals. Kodak had over a fifty-year run in the conservation phase, innovating and creating products people admired. The company even invented an early digital camera, but digital competitors eventually innovated more effectively, and Kodak did not fully anticipate the implosion of the analog film business. Once it lost the film revenue, it was on the way toward release. Kodak declared bankruptcy in 2012.

A key threshold for an organization like Kodak is having enough revenue to innovate in ways that generate future growth. Once the larger-scale system moved toward digital photography, Kodak was caught in a downward spiral. As figure 3 illustrates, a strong organization in the conservation phase can handle many crises without crossing a major threshold. But if it is weakened enough that a crisis pushes it across a threshold, it enters release. Now it loses structures that would enable it to bounce back quickly. This chaotic phase often involves loss of faith in leadership and rapid changes in hierarchies of authority. New leaders must arise to fill the vacuum, and new relationships must be built within the organization as old hierarchies become irrelevant. Release also involves loss of standardized procedures and a much greater reliance on improvisation.

In apocalyptic environmental literature, release is often associated with total collapse or transformation into a dystopian nightmare.¹⁵ While this is a possible result of crossing a major threshold, it is not the most common consequence, Often, release is less severe, and parts of the prior culture are preserved but in a different form. Even where a culture dissolves, its people migrate elsewhere and join other cultures. My disagreement with the apocalyptic framing of our situation is about the probable consequences of a major release, not about the likelihood of some release occurring.

Indeed, release is not always bad, though it typically involves a great deal of uncertainty and stress as standard rules and roles break down. In a dysfunctional organization, where incremental positive change has been systematically blocked, a crisis that pushes it into release may be a necessary prelude to reorganizing with a healthier organizational culture. A global pandemic, an economic depression, and a ruthless authoritarian regime can be very resilient and thus hard to change. In such systems, we may deliberately push a system over a threshold into release in order to create space for reorganization. In such a case, resilience theorists describe the release and reorganization process as a system transformation. Often sustainability is viewed as prolonging the conservation phase indefinitely by keeping a valuable system from going over a key threshold, but some argue that sustainability requires system transformation that cannot be achieved without going through release and reorganization. In general, the more fundamental the changes one seeks, the more likely the system needs to go through at least a mild release and reorganization.

The reorganization or “innovation” phase (as it is labeled in figure 3) in an organization involves looking for a different way of operating that works effectively within the larger context and has the potential to lead toward a new stable pattern of growth. Here entrepreneurial activity is very important. The freedom to experiment is crucial, but if it is carried on too long or if insufficient investment is made in promising experiments, an organization can become stuck in the reorganization phase and never return to growth. Kodak appears to be in this situation. Its bankruptcy was not the end of the company. It retained its movie film and chemicals business, which continue to be somewhat profitable. It is a much smaller company today than it was twenty years ago, however, and it has not yet found a new growth engine.

This very brief overview of the adaptive-cycle model gives us a glimpse of how complex systems are likely to behave over time. Although it is difficult to know for sure how to apply the model to a specific context, it is very helpful to estimate where a community or organization we care about is on the cycle. That tells us what kinds of dynamics we can expect and how to understand its challenges and opportunities. So how should we understand where we are in the cycle? For our smaller-scale communities—for example our bioregions, cities, towns, and workplaces—we need to research their histories, their current capacities, and their likely thresholds before formulating our estimates. We have to keep in mind that these communities are affected by what is happening on larger scales, such as in our country and our global community. At these larger scales, we have access to a great deal more data and more scholarly debate about relevant considerations. Thus, our estimates may have a stronger basis, though it is doubtful that we can all arrive at consensus about such topics. Our estimate must be conditional and open to change with new information.

On the global scale, several considerations support the hypothesis that we are in a late conservation phase nearing key thresholds that could lead to severe release.¹⁶ First, as we saw above, we are close enough to planetary boundaries that we live under the threat of undergoing serious release that would cause massive disruption for large swaths of the human population. Though the climate change threshold of approximately two degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels is highly salient, more obscure thresholds associated with biodiversity loss, land-use change, and nitrogen pollution are equally serious threats. Second, on more regional scales, some ecosystems are already entering release, including anoxic zones in the ocean, some commercial fisheries, permafrost systems above the Arctic Circle, and glacier systems around the globe. Many other regional ecosystems seem headed toward release, including African ecosystems structured by elephants, some coral reef systems, and the Amazon rainforest system.¹⁷ Release on regional scales can trigger release at larger scales.

Third, over centuries the Global North has seen a high level of growth. This growth often involved colonial activities that unjustly burdened the Global South, but it also resulted from massive technological changes. Currently the amassing of resources among the wealthy and the strengthening of rules that protect wealth suggest movement into a conservation phase. Our relatively weak international organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund have not proved sufficiently successful at helping us work together to manage the threat of crossing planetary boundaries.¹⁸ Fourth, international funding to help the Global South develop without using fossil fuels has been woefully inadequate, which places a large portion of the global population in an unjust and untenable position. This is bound to result in more environmental degradation. The failure of institutional processes to prevent the rapid approach to major thresholds is a symptom of being in the late conservation phase near the edge of release.

The evidence for being in a late-stage conservation phase seems even stronger when we look at the scale of the United States. Over the last 150 years, the country has seen tremendous growth in prosperity and capacity to address issues. After becoming an economic powerhouse and contributing to victory in the two twentieth-century world wars, it became a global leader. At some point in the last century, its growth phase shifted toward conservation. Key structures started to become more hierarchical, rigid, and cumbersome. They lock up in private hands considerable resources that are not then available for addressing challenges. Wealth has become concentrated in a smaller set of people. Despite the expanding role of government and rising standards of living, a recent Pew Research Center report indicates that “the public sees an America in decline on many fronts.”¹⁹ Increasing political polarization, decreasing trust in governance bodies, and a fragmented media have made it very difficult for the country to address its challenges politically. These trends suggest risks of crossing thresholds that would shift the identity of the country are increasing significantly. Some forms of severe release, such as widespread violence or an authoritarian revolt, are championed by subsets of the population. Even if the US were to manage its conservation phase effectively, its efforts may be swamped by larger-scale failures to address planetary boundaries, or by global economic depression, or increasing global violence.

Of course, it is possible that the US will be able to navigate global disturbances and return to a high growth phase or at least maintain its conservation phase into the foreseeable future. The same could be said for global governance pertaining to planetary boundaries, although our current evidence suggests otherwise. What looks like a release phase may quickly return to a conservation phase that retains the structure and major functions of the pre–release phase. Alternatively, a minor transformation of system elements may lead to renewed growth, as when a company introduces a new popular product line that shifts the focus of the company without changing its fundamental identity. Uncertainties about the application of the adaptive cycle to a given system can be used to stimulate fruitful debate among stakeholders about the dynamics of the system in question. Such debates typically lead to gathering more data about the system and critically examining the values that play a role in system identity characterization. While we might wish for models to be clearer and more certain, we must be content with more provisional understandings that are strongly enough supported to guide action.

If we are struggling to avoid major release, it behooves us to reexamine the cultural assumptions that have brought us here and to consider whether the skillful habits we emphasize are best suited to our situation. Each phase of the adaptive cycle has characteristic kinds of challenges and opportunities, and research is beginning to identify competencies needed to navigate each phase.²⁰ The entrepreneurial skills emphasized in reorganization and growth phases are less central to the highly structured conservation phase, though still important on small scales. The ability to collaborate across diverse groups is less central to the growth phase and less reinforced in the silos of the conservation phase, but both are crucial for managing wicked problems associated with major thresholds, and necessary for successfully navigating release. As we look at the opportunities that characterize our situation, we should keep in mind the skillful habits that would enable us to make the most of them.

Grasping the Opportunities at the Edge of Release

Our apparent position in the late conservation phase on both global and regional scales highlights two general groups of opportunities: those related to the goal of remaining in the conservation phase and those associated with preparing for and navigating release and reorganization. Both kinds of opportunity are associated with resilience. To maintain the conservation phase, much resilience work involves building reserves and redundancies that will help to prevent an increasingly rigid system from moving across a key threshold. Walker and Salt define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks—to have the same identity.”²¹ But sometimes we cannot prevent release and may even try to manage release to achieve some transformation. In such cases, we must understand resilience as “the capacity to successfully navigate ALL stages of the complex adaptive cycle.”²² Each kind of resilience involves distinctive opportunities.

Numerous opportunities lie in identifying system thresholds, communicating with affected populations, and building buffers that keep a community away from problematic thresholds. The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative is just one example of large communities around the world grasping the opportunity to expand our knowledge about how to strengthen urban resilience. For example, the greater Miami area resilience planning effort wrestled with how to withstand rising sea levels and increasingly severe hurricanes. Sea level along Miami’s beaches has risen four inches since 1992, and it is expected to rise another three to seven inches by 2030. Over fifty-three thousand dwellings in the greater Miami area are less than three feet above mean high tide. No threshold has been identified for when such dwellings may be unoccupiable, but hurricanes Andrew (1992), Wilma (2005), and Irma (2017) have already caused tremendous human suffering and billions of dollars in losses. Other stresses affecting resilience, including aging infrastructure, income inequality, and traffic congestion, are also addressed by the fifty actions described in Miami’s Resilient 305 strategy. Miami cannot stop sea level rise, but it can restore coastal wetlands, build reef defenses, reduce CO₂ emissions, put in place development restrictions, and plan better for storm surges. These buffers reduce the likelihood of catastrophic impacts from flooding over the medium term, and they create opportunities for a wide range of meaningful work and citizen engagement.

Systems research is crucial for avoiding major thresholds. For example, we will need to invest more in determining where critical thresholds lie and what cost-effective practices will keep us from crossing thresholds. We have learned a good bit about potential economic thresholds beyond which a major recession may lie. Experts at central banks know how to stimulate the economy to keep it away from that threshold, as many nations did during the COVID-19 pandemic. But we have no idea whether there is a threshold for distrust of government beyond which a state becomes effectively ungovernable and hence unable to solve its problems. For many systems, our knowledge of key thresholds is in its infancy.

Technological innovation is a common approach to developing threshold buffers that enable us to reduce our negative impacts on the system. This has been one of our standard approaches to resilience, and it contains a wide array of opportunities, from designing new technologies to developing markets for them and maintaining them. For example, to reduce the likelihood of crossing climate change thresholds, we can improve solar and wind energy technology, enhance battery technology for electric vehicles, and create smart microgrids. The rapid development and production of COVID-19 vaccines have shortened the pandemic and enabled us to approach herd immunity with less death than would have happened otherwise. Here technological development helped us to transform a negative system—the pandemic—by pushing us across the herd immunity threshold. Technological innovation alone won’t enable us to fully address wicked problems effectively, but it is likely to be part of the solution.

A third group of opportunities involves developing policies and public/private partnerships that incentivize behavioral changes to help us avoid thresholds. The quickest way to change the behavior of individuals working within a system is to shift policy, hence the battles around such government policymaking as a carbon tax or vehicle fuel economy standards. But policies can also be promoted through nonprofit organizations and businesses and implemented through partnership arrangements. Whether we are concerned about the health of our oceans or the loss of biodiversity, achieving racial justice or reducing income inequality, the opportunity to influence policy is ubiquitous in times of significant change. Take the diversity, equity, and inclusion work that became a crucial part of higher education as a more diverse array of students attended schools. Student advocacy and public protests highlighting racially unjust practices have deepened and broadened this work, stimulating numerous policy reforms. Corporate human resource offices have offered training and adopted policies to embed more inclusive practices throughout their organizations. A great many people have grasped the opportunity to advance this work, but much more needs to be done if we are to avoid the system dysfunction that injustice creates in our society.

A fourth set of opportunities addresses behavioral threats to our communities that we cannot alter through policy. Education, moral suasion, and artistic expression often build support for major shifts in cultural norms. As congressional gridlock, entrenched interests, and insufficient public concern have limited the ability of the United States to adopt powerful national climate policy, schools have played a key role in educating youth about the mechanics and costs of climate change and the actions that must change to mitigate it. Authors and artists have dramatized the impact of climate destabilization. For example, Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic artist, created Ice Watch, in which he transported huge blocks of ice that had broken off a Greenland ice sheet to London, Paris, and Copenhagen, so people could witness them melting away and contemplate the impact of our collective actions. The emotional impact of dance, theater, music, and poetry are as important as the information from the sciences in motivating us to shift entrenched but dangerous behavior patterns.

Turning to navigating the release and reorganization phases, we find many opportunities that are rarely celebrated because the prospect of release is so unpleasant. Yet it is even more important to grasp the potential upsides of system transformation and the skills that enable people to successfully navigate the transformation process. We cannot know whether we can avoid severe release at a global scale, but we do know that the challenges at this scale are sufficiently great that they will cause many smaller-scale systems to go into release. Most of us are likely to experience the chaos of release close to home. We must hone the skills to make the best of it.

Release provides an opportunity for people with little leadership experience to become emergent leaders and to have a large positive impact on others’ lives. When leadership hierarchies from the conservation phase are distrusted and become ineffective, others must take matters into their own hands. Within the resulting chaos, courage, creativity, and equanimity matter. Those who have the ability to focus on what is most important and to move people to action can rise. Those who can improvise action without rules and procedures and those who are calm when things fall apart are best able to marshal the resources to move a group through release. We may immediately think of people who become heroes, like the first responders during 9/11, but often such emergent leadership is more subtle.

Consider the example of Prescott College, whose board of trustees declared bankruptcy in 1975, voted to close the college, and sold off the campus to cover bills. Prescott had been founded eight years before through a Ford Foundation initiative to create a college that would provide the kind of experiential education necessary for the next century. A group of faculty and students refused to let the college go under. They pitched in their own resources and started holding classes in a hotel basement. They focused on the immediate survival of their community. Leaders emerged, and they improvised a form of community governance, while they tried to acquire the legal rights to the Prescott name and the resources to operate a college. The story became national news about “the college that would not die.” Eventually, they rebuilt a healthy institution but with a much less hierarchical structure and without many of the frills associated with modern higher education. The faculty of that time recall the anger, the stress, and the pain of the crisis, but they dwell upon the empowerment and the creativity of those days. They stepped up to save a form of education they deeply loved and made a large difference in many lives. We often do not find such opportunities without a good crisis.

The interpersonal opportunities of release have benefits that can last a lifetime. Individuals in releasing systems are highly vulnerable; they must depend on others, which puts a premium on quickly strengthening relationships. Tight bonds are formed through shared struggle and mutual aid. Navigating release also involves gathering resources from new places, often in partnership with outside organizations. Crafting viable partnerships from a position of vulnerability exercises skills useful in many other contexts. A shared crisis is an opportunity to combat the loneliness that many find in an intensely individualist society.

Once a community has stabilized after going through release, it must find a reorganization strategy that promises to lead to a new growth phase. The Prescott community needed to reorganize its governance and physical structures and some of its educational offerings, but it retained its educational vision. Effective reorganization after a profound release requires community members to experiment rapidly with alternative ways to move forward. They must find the resources for the experiments, often shifting directions when experiments do not yield positive results and reframing their vision of success. They must be comfortable with fluid structures. The danger in this phase is that the group cannot converge on a good strategy for regrowth. Eventually funding for experiments will dry up, so it is crucial to choose a clear direction in a timely fashion. The opportunities here include crafting useful experiments, accessing information from outside sources regarding what might work for the community, and crafting powerful narratives for a reframed vision. In some cases of transformation, the general direction of reorganization is clear, especially where some negative state of the community is driving the move to cross a threshold into release and reorganization. But often the direction of reorganization remains obscure; those who are comfortable with action under uncertainty flourish.

Greensburg, Kansas, was hit by an EF5 tornado in May 2007. This rapid release leveled 95 percent of the city and killed twelve people. The rebuilding of the city illustrates some of the opportunities and challenges in reorganization. Like other rural communities, Greensburg had been struggling, but it was not ready to give up after the tornado. The city council chose to see the storm as an opportunity, and they elected to rebuild the city in a way that might attract more growth. True to its name, it became a “green” city. Residents rebuilt all municipal buildings to LEED Platinum standards, mostly with funding from disaster relief. There was a fair amount of skepticism initially about the ideas, especially novel ideas like LED street lighting, rain gardens, and low-flow toilets. The energy efficiency of its schools, medical center, and other municipal buildings now saves the city over $200,000 annually, which helped to convince many. Though city leaders shared a broad vision, they knew they were learning as they went. They tried an experiment of installing municipal wind turbines, but these were too expensive to maintain, so the community shifted to purchase power from a utility-scale wind power producer nearby. It created a new industrial park designed to attract green companies; but this experiment still stands empty. The city received excellent publicity, and many residents stayed and rebuilt their homes. Greensburg achieved a stunning reorganization but has not yet been able to turn this into growth in jobs or population. City leaders have had to reframe their vision and learn to focus on their successes, not the failed experiments.²³ Their courage and innovation have kept this tiny city on the map.

Perhaps the most rewarding opportunities that come with reorganization involve joining with others to move toward a positive vision. The pain of release is past, creativity is welcomed, and the capacity for rapid progress is high. The success of experiments can easily be turned into powerful narratives about forward movement—about the next growth phase. If indeed rapid progress toward sustainability will require significant forms of release, then preparing for heady days when a sustainability transformation kicks into higher gear is an opportunity many can joyously embrace. Imagine different versions of the Greensburg story popping up everywhere. Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future provides a compelling narrative of how this might come about fairly soon.²⁴ In such a reorganization, people from many different backgrounds could find ways for their skills to contribute to the massive change.

We have seen that uncertainty and socioeconomic turbulence are elevated during this age of climate change. The challenges are daunting, but the opportunities are exciting. Perhaps most daunting is the sheer number, scale, and complexity of our global challenges. Given our recent track record, it is easy to despair of surmounting these challenges. If they are taken individually, we will almost certainly fail to meet many. But sustainability requires us to look for key leverage points that can address many challenges with one move. We must find approaches that enable actions to be unified, easy to communicate, practical for ordinary people, and focused on addressing root causes, rather than symptoms. It is my contention that shifting the skillful habits our culture emphasizes is a promising leverage point.

We can flourish individually now whether or not we approach sustainability. What is required is that we effectively engage with at least some of the opportunities we find. My characterization of the opportunities in the age of climate change has inevitably been schematic and selective. To move beyond broad categories of opportunities would require much more detail about specific challenges and the context in which they are engaged. This overview is sufficient for us to glimpse some of the skillful habits each of us will need to navigate the phases of the adaptive cycle that shape our lives. Recall that these habits include mindsets and emotional capacities, not just behavioral skills. To flourish in this time, our patterns of thought, feeling, and action will need to be reasonably aligned with the challenges and opportunities we face. These patterns—character traits—are not novel. Most of us have them to some extent, but they are underdeveloped. As we will see in the coming chapters, the skillful habits we need to flourish individually will also be crucial for leveraging the sustainability transformation.