Learnings from Blue Earth Summit 2023
“Saving our planet is now a communications challenge. We know what to do, we just need the will”. David Attenborough said this in 2020 — and two years later, scientists at the UN’s IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) rallied that it was “now or never” to act on climate breakdown. The climate crisis has always been a crisis of culture, too. Since the Industrial Revolution, and probably even before, we’ve been losing something — a connection to a part of ourselves that’s intrinsic to life itself. We can talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs all we like, but all of those wants and desires are dependent on the health of planetary systems — and, consequently, so are we.
Everything starts with language.
In a panel on storytelling and ecolinguistics, Tom Mansfield of Pale Blue highlighted this quote:
“I live on earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.” — R. Buckminster Fuller
When we talk about “fixing” climate, we allude to a singular action, one which can be completed, ticked off and forgotten. But health is a systemic concept — a process which is ongoing, full of moving parts working in cohesion with — or against — one another. In an age of climate breakdown, there’s a need to reconsider our understanding of our place within nature — a part of it, not apart from it. Just as we ourselves are transformed from “things” to “happenings”, we must shift away from the “object” of climate change.
Ideas need freedom to thrive.
Thoughts coming out of a session with The Bioleadership Project:
The world we live in, and are a part of, is complex, not complicated. We’ll never know the ultimate outcomes of our actions, but we know where they come from.
The design principles of business are destructive. Extractive. Exploitative. We need something different.
Ideas are only able to do good in the world when you set them free. As someone who works in the creative space, this resonates — the commodification of ideas always results in conflict, be it internal or not. Defend them, but decouple from your ego.
Embracing cycles of death and rebirth. Business as is grasps at rigid structures, but much of it no longer serves us. There’s a need to let it fall away, and make room for something new. Composting, taking time to regenerate and flourish. Understanding that organisations which fall apart are not failures — maybe they have achieved what they were meant to? Why are we designing things to live forever? That’s not how nature works.
Work with your own personality.
Wisdom via Dan Webb, founder of Everyday Plastic and The Great Plastic Count. Pretty simple, but resonates.
