Climate Week at Caravan of Dreams #12 · Cleaned Transcript
September 25, 2026 · Caravan of Dreams, East Village, NY
A late-morning talk at Caravan of Dreams, recorded on the house mic. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the morning kept intact. The small-group conversations were not audible on the recording, so they appear here as their share-back, and the chatter before and after the talk is left out. Names, titles and figures spoken aloud were checked where a source exists. A misheard population figure is corrected, and John Trudell, called on the recording a founder of the American Indian Movement, appears as one of its leaders: he was its national chairman from 1973 to 1979. The speakers are named; participants are not. It is not verbatim.
Download as .txtBen · Hello, friends. My name is Benjamin Von Wong, for those of you who don't know me. I wanted to introduce the space. It's called Caravan of Dreams, the oldest vegan organic restaurant in New York City, and it's been around for over thirty years. As Climate Week was swinging around, we were thinking about what would make a really good space for bringing people together, and we decided to try to activate this one. We're not renting this space, we're partnering with them. We started maybe six months ago, hosting little gatherings here after we heard they were having some financial difficulty. We asked what would be most helpful, and they said, just come, use our space, eat our food. That would be wonderful.
As Climate Week got closer, we looked at the space and thought it needed quite a bit of love. So over a couple of weeks we redid everything. We did their flowers. We built a stage, we bought them a TV, we got these curtains, and we redid the electrical and the lighting. The whole vision was to leave this place better than we found it, so that when we leave at the end of the week, they have a brand new event space ready to host and gather people.
I think this idea of supporting hyperlocal businesses, starting where you are, matters. The space is small and very intimate, but it shows what's possible when people come together. This entire production is being put on by volunteers, from check-in to the back of house, several of whom are in the room today and gave many hours to make it possible.
One of the things that happens in Climate Week is that you spend your whole time running around with a butterfly net trying to catch the right butterflies. We thought we'd do the opposite: plant the most beautiful speakers and people in this place and let the butterflies come to us. You are some of those butterflies. We hope you mingle with one another, that Samantha inspires you, and that everyone leaves this place better than they entered it. Samantha, I'm really excited to have you here.
Sweetwater · Thank you, Ben. I'm so delighted to be here with a diverse group of people, because what I have to share is about something we hold in common: our humanity, our biology, and our belonging to this earth. No exceptions. I did the experiment of bringing myself to Climate Week to bring a story that I've audaciously called a story big enough to carry us. We're a small group, so maybe we are part of the carriage of that story into all the different domains in which we work.
Sweetwater · A little about me. I'm Samantha Sweetwater, born Samantha Jane Beers, given the name Sweetwater by water that whispered to me for over a decade before I was willing to claim it. I've been a transformational facilitator in some way, shape or form since I was fourteen, which was forty years ago. I started creating dances about the biggest questions we ask as a species. Why am I alive? Why is there war? What is love? What does it mean to come home? I was grabbing other kids and creating embodied experiences, sourcing choreography. Back then I tried to bring those practices and that way of making art to New York City, and I was laughed out of New York. There was no space for such things at that time. I'm grateful, because it put me on a very alternative path.
I was one of those kids who looked around and saw a world that did not make sense to my innate way of being. Does anyone else hold that in common? My way of approaching it was to go to nature, and to listen for something I didn't call soul at the time: the self-authenticating, nature-authenticating impulse of this organism as a co-creator in the fabric of reality. Foundational to the theory of change I'm about to present is that soul ecology has a perfect logic. When we liberate our organismic, biospiritual response to life, it naturally orients us toward care, co-creativity and reciprocity with each other and with life. Perhaps that by itself is the whole story.
So welcome to the One Life Circle, the circle of life to which we all belong, no exceptions. Let's take a moment and feel our bodies, our twenty-some bodies, sitting in this basement room in Manhattan, in a place that not so long ago was probably a marshy forest, filled with bears and birds and deer and foxes and wolves and badgers. We still have the squirrels. And the pigeons, who probably weren't here then.
The first invitation of the One Life Circle, ritually speaking, is to turn outward as a circle. I won't get us up, because we're in tight quarters, but imagine us standing in a circle facing outward: a circle of humans standing together inside the circle of life. We welcome in all the beings and energies and histories and intelligences of the land we're inhabiting, including the Lenape people of this land, and the original ecological intelligences that are still somehow the pulse of this place. Without any of those trees here, we are still breathing air that was metabolized by other life forms. And with every exhale, we offer something reciprocal back. Now, in your mind, turn back into the circle, our human circle nested inside the circle of life, and enter this space together as human beings. Welcome.
Sweetwater · The kind of story I'm talking about is not a human-crafted story. It is a pointing out of the way things actually are. We're at a civilizational threshold, and I'd say a species-wide, biospheric threshold, where civilization must figure out how to align itself with the biosphere, and the creators of civilization have to figure out how to coordinate that. If we're not telling a story that big, we're probably telling too small a story. The story of carbon drawdown is a great story, but fundamentally we're talking about reconfiguring our relationship to life itself and how we do value. That means choosing stories that reflect the way reality works: we are already in reciprocity with life, already interdependent, already embedded and embodied within it. I call that a non-arbitrary story. "I think, therefore I am" is arbitrary. It amplifies the abstract dimension of our cognition over the embedded, embodied one.
I had to bring in my favorite ancestor. This is John Trudell, looking very boss. He was a leader of the American Indian Movement, and I got to spend a little time with him before he passed. He was one of the great communicators of all time, and what he was communicating is what it is to be a true human. He was so good at it that the FBI kept an enormous file on him, because they perceived his rhetorical capacity as that dangerous, and over the course of his life terrible things were done to him. He said:
The great lie is that this is civilization. It is not civilized. It has literally been the most bloodthirsty, brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That's not civilization, that's the great lie. Or if it represents civilization, and that is truly what civilization is, then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.
Sweetwater · This quote lands with a particular gravity right now, as the forces of fascism rewrite civilizational narratives to justify outsourcing harm in extremely brutal ways. It can be dangerous to war over what is or is not civilization. But what this interrogates, usefully, is the question: is it civilized if it outsources harm to other human beings and to the planet? That's the question Luke Kemp asks in Goliath's Curse. He classifies the thing commonly called civilization as Goliath, a dominance hierarchy, which I think is a really useful distinction.
Sweetwater · How many of you have been to Dear Crisis events and know the metacrisis frame? Good. If you're still pointing toward business as usual, you may be in for a rude surprise fairly soon. We have a cascading series of compounding crises. We're in a pickle, and every aspect of the pickle is amplifying the sourness of the pickle in every other direction. What I offer in True Human is that the fundamental cause of those systemic dynamics is our separation from nature: our perception that we can do humanness apart from biospheric process, that we can outsource harm and not have it come back to us. In some ways separation is a neutral stage that a creature like us tends to enact when we build environments and dominance hierarchies and get more involved in abstraction than embodied relationship.
But one way or the other, we've crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries. We're hovering in critical spaces with existential technologies: AI, nuclear, drone warfare. I keep hearing people say we're going to live in a more technologized world, and I think, to believe we can go further into the digital and abstraction and not go insane is insane, because we're already going insane. We have epidemic levels of depression, suicidality, anxiety and addiction, and on a biophysical level a fertility crisis and other health crises. I'm fundamentally a technological optimist, but the only meaningful technological optimism is one that restrains how much tech we use and create, and refines how we use it. I think we've reached apex separation. But I also see people pushing back: leaving social media, leaving their phones, choosing analog luxury. These are natural, embodied strategies of choosing sanity and reclaiming our humanity. You can feel the difference between a hectic zone of the city and the bank of the Hudson, or between this room with the fan on and with it off.
So it's time to meet separation by creating more intimacy and belonging. The term I want you to take out of here is that we're in a planetary crucible. It includes our eight billion people, the planetary boundaries, AI and existential tech, geopolitics. And it includes the fact that in 2020 we crossed the threshold where there is more anthropogenic mass on the planet, more non-biological stuff that we've made, than biomass. This is one of the scariest things to me. We don't really understand the hard thresholds, but broadly, anthropogenic mass is not biophilic, and there is not an infinite trade-off available. We pulled a lot of things up out of the crust of the planet that life doesn't have any use for. It's important to be sober and honest about that.
So the question is whether we meet these rigorous details in a mature way. This moment is calling us into relational maturity. There was a great example yesterday, in the biodiversity talk, of meeting grief as an invitation and calling joy forward in the context of grief. If you're building systems: are they accounting for their outsourced harms, for the other people and other lands they touch? Ultimately it's a question of whether we create governance systems that refine our metabolic imprint on the planet: transport, food, energy, in a very basic way. How can we redream in alignment with planetary systems, energetically, metabolically, aesthetically, psychosocially? It sounds kind of impossible.
From the room · No, it's possible.
Sweetwater · I love that response. Thank you.
Sweetwater · Daniel Schmachtenberger and I used the term civilization 2.0 for about a decade, which I find unsatisfying now. It may not be called civilization, and I've chosen not to name it, because we'll have to come up with that together. In 2020, a month after the COVID lockdowns, I had a dream. Let's take the view that we are not the only Gaia in the universe, that Gaias are rare and exceedingly precious. A Gaia is a planet where water has collaborated with matter, a local sun and the ingredients of previously exploding stars to boot up life out of chemistry.
First you get the progenote. There's never one common ancestor, by the way. There are trillions of vesicles. I spent six months following Dr. Bruce Damer around the world, with the origins-of-life chemistry, and it's still happening at Yellowstone. There was ecological niche construction, and this wild thing happened, like when a lake freezes all at once, and suddenly there were ecologies of replicating vesicles. We don't really know how progenotes became cells, or how single cells got organelles, or how multicellularity happened, or brains, or wombs, or eggs. But that's what a Gaia does. We're not the only one, but we're super rare, and I have been told that this is the most precious thing in a universe, and that the sound of one of these Gaias extinguishing itself, because of a creator, preserver, destroyer species like ourselves, is the saddest sound in a universe.
In the dream I was walking on another of these planets with one of its residents. Her name happened to be Sophia, go figure. We had just greeted a storm, thanked it and invited it to be kind. And she said to me, with her mind:
The civilizing impulse of true humans is to harmonize the forces of nature.
Sweetwater · I woke up from that dream changed, and the book exists because of Sophia. If you write nothing else down from this talk, take a picture of this slide, and be with it as code, or as sutra. A good story, as Tyson Yunkaporta reminds us, is one that we live together. These words can help us ask: are we harmonizing with nature? Am I harmonizing as nature? Are we in an orientation of civility in what we're doing here?
Sweetwater · A good story tells what, why, how and who, and makes them dance together. The what: we are a creator, preserver, destroyer species, a particular class of organism that evolves on a planet like ours and engages in extraordinary coordination, abstraction, story and technology. There's also our neoteny, the slowness of our development, and our bipedalism. We have the most visually biased brain of any organism, which biases us toward abstraction rather than embeddedness in our ecologies. Whales are embedded in an environment of sound. Most four-legged animals are embedded in smell and vibration through their paws. In the lion leadership codes, the lion stands with all four paws on the ground, sensing the whole ecofield. That's the apex predator code, and it's one of the codes we're called to walk into. We have the power of gods. Obviously we don't have the wisdom. So how do we cultivate the wisdom to regenerate the beauty of the world we inhabit?
Why would we do that? Sophia offers that sapience exists to serve sentience. That phrase came to me in a very expanded state and blew my mind. We called ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise ones. Self-named. In this frame, wisdom is not wise unless it tends the continuity and emergence of life. That puts wisdom back into time, draws it out of the transcendent, and says the proof is in the pudding: tell me after two thousand generations how that went. How about after two? It says the planet is a sentient process and all of life is sentient. It cuts right through the glamour of Enlightenment rationality. When you take God out of the world, you can do anything you want to the world. That's a great ethical move if you want to colonize the world. It's also a great move if you've been colonized, because you can make God portable, but once God is portable it's easy to colonize other people. I'm currently struggling to communicate this one to my more right-wing friends, and I'd love to invite us into that inquiry: how do we communicate that being a feeling being, who feels others, is the foundation of our humanity?
As earthlings, as Gaians, our purpose as a species is not to get to the top of some self-created pyramid, but to orchestrate a human world that hums in harmony with life's song. Hums in harmony is poetic, and it's also technical, because it points to vibrational alignment. For the purpose of beauty, abundance and biodiversity for all.
How? The how is relational. It's embodied. It's place-bound, or place-sensitive, though place-bound can get narrow: if we're only hyperlocal, you can create order locally and outsource the disorder and still not notice. Place is our whole planet at this point. So the meditation on place includes what places are being affected by your choices: the electrons amplifying my voice right now, the water that comes to Manhattan so miraculously and leaves it so miraculously. Restraint-infused. Intergenerational. Kindred. Designed and embodied according to the mind and body of nature, the way the redesign of this room drops us into cave and nature and texture that feels good to our bodies. Eco-cosmic: grounded in the earth and expanded in the cosmos. And in the dance between grief and praise. I think for everyone in this movement, it's time to become exquisitely good at practices of grief, and to gather together in them, because we're going to need to hold others in them. And daily praise, moment-to-moment gratitude, for the miracle of drinkable water in Manhattan, or the electrons making all of this possible. The mundane miraculous that is constantly all around us.
And who? Us. As commoners, as cosmolocals, as citizens, as kin, as bioregionalists. And walking in solidarity with living Indigenous people, and as neo-Indigenous people reclaiming our belonging to place and our duty to protect and guard life, so that we don't leave our Indigenous friends alone in that.
Sweetwater · So this is a story that moves us from the top of a pyramid we created back into a circle. From separation into communion, or homecoming, or belonging. From domination to partnership, collaboration, co-creation. From finite games, measuring our worth in numbers, dollars and likes, to participating in reciprocal processes. In our world, status flows to those who win finite games. But there are many societies where status flows to those who practice greater reciprocity, repair, soul integrity, beauty in art. For the culture creators here, that's a good one to hack. A real ceremony is an infinite game. A good dinner with friends is an infinite game. Storytelling is an infinite game. How can we move clout there in our local cultures?
It's a story from being the controllers to being the custodians. In the most audacious, beautiful vision of this going well, the Anthropocene is a little blip, and then we move into something we could call the symbiocene, or the ecozoic. We'll figure out the name when we get there, but it's us aligned in symbiotic process. We are no longer owners in this story. We are guardians, or stewards. And we are not so much heroes as we are kin.
This is from the last chapter of my book. Imagine a significant enough minority of our species, combined with just enough capital and coordination capacity, scaffolding together a migration from an extractive economy to a collaborative economy, to what I'm hesitant to call regenerative, since we use that word in a technically sloppy way, so let's say a custodial or life-centric economy. That coordinates us as a species, somewhat consciously, in care for this one planet, in a complex society, whether we call it civilization or not, consciously harmonized with the biosphere. Tech becomes a soul-nourishing exoskeleton, as opposed to a soul-sucking one. That would be a stage of social evolution that has never happened before. We know individualism and tribalism. What the prosocial movement is working on is how to coordinate groups of groups. If we coordinate groups of groups in alignment with the planet, with watersheds and biodiversity and each other, that's a stage never reached before: the creator, preserver, destroyers at our optimal evolutionary status. That would be a phase of becoming Gaian.
I think we need to push edges, very delicately, on what the Overton window will hold. There's just been a whole thing about pro-human AI, and it was pretty much determined by everyone involved that to have Steve Bannon at the table, they had to use human rather than planetary. But if we keep putting humans on top of the pyramid, we'll still ruin ourselves. So where can we bring in the language of planetary, earthly, collective flourishing in a way that bridges to the more than human, particularly in cross-partisan and transpartisan spaces? This is a planetary homecoming, if we do it. To me that's the story big enough to carry us beyond climate, through the polarization we're facing, and to help us choose better when we face the forks of selfishness, nihilism, greed, narcissism and fascism. It feels so much better to come home than to wall off a home at the expense of everyone else. And that choice won't scale well. Thank you for your listening.
Sweetwater · Grab two or three people, and explore two questions. How does this story support, refine or interrogate your work, or the value propositions you're currently working with? And how is your life and work already instantiating this story? Focus on whichever one is hard, or easy. I know everyone's tired after an intense week. We'll take six minutes, and I'll tell you when three have passed.
[Small-group conversation. It was not audible on the recording.]
Bring the sharing to a close, thank your people, and come back into the circle. The energy was really palpable. Can we get two share-backs?
From the room · Just how challenging it is to square the circle, as individuals who live in this civilization and have to pay rent. Some of the pro-social things we want to be doing don't pay the rent. A lot of us are doing them out of the goodness of our hearts, or pro bono, and it's hard to square.
Sweetwater · Hugely. Complicity is part of the pattern. If we bring Vanessa into the room too, her frame of hospicing modernity is really helpful. As we scaffold the things being done in this room, we are scaffolding that opportunity. We're hovering at those potentials. We're not there yet, but the complicity is real. Anyone else?
From the room · I'm not sure this answers the question, but what really resonated was when you talked about harmonizing the forces of nature. As an artist, my work has always focused on harmonizing the relationship between people and the natural world through my visual language. This is something I could really focus on, finding ways to express it through my photography and my work. It was very inspiring.
Sweetwater · Through greater beauty, like you. Beauty is a currency in the creation. It's good in and of itself, and it's an additive currency: there are things humans bring into life that are our own flavor of exquisiteness in the symphonics of creation. Art is part of that reciprocal singing, and when it's offered in praise of life, life likes to respond. You can do a micro-experiment of that: walk through Manhattan and acknowledge some of the trees. You may feel them respond. Life craves to be seen, loved, nurtured. We have a Western idea that language is always divisive. It's not. Language can be invitational. It can be a co-singing, a weaving of wholeness.
Sweetwater · There's how we bring these things into our work in the world, and there's what it looks like for us as individuals. We've been trained by modernity, by the civilizational operating system we're nested inside, to see ourselves as individuals, and the developmental arcs offered to us, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, other psychological maps, the hero's journey, are frameworks for the development of a mature adult that are hyper-individualistic. So what happens when the developmental journey is a journey of restoring relationality, one that begins in community, is nurtured by community, and is about our trustworthiness in community?
One way to frame that arc is as a kinship journey: the developmental arc of a relationally attuned human being doing the work of finding their place as a trustworthy, mature, wild, free adult. I won't go through the whole list today. I'm about to publish the paper on it, so this is a taste. The kinship journey begins with rupture: a sense of things not being well, disconnection, alienation, depression, climate grief, metacrisis angst, or an organizational defunding caused by trolls who took over the government. It begins when you realize the disconnection is a problem, and that problem pushes you into a developmental process.
Part of why I bring this in is that the first three stages are ones we're all going to go through, and people around us will go through, and as leaders and organizational stewards we'll need to facilitate people in them. If no one is there to hold you in rupture, or if people ideologically oriented toward hyper-separation are there to hold you, you'll go in a nihilistic, narcissistic, fascist, autocratic, highly self-interested direction. If someone holds you, and invites you to reckon with separation, which might mean reckoning with capitalism, or the promise of endless progress, or an American dream no longer promised to you, or human supremacy, and to engage it in a way that includes encounter, that changes things.
Encounter is really important. Let's go for a walk on the Hudson and listen to the river, and let the river give us permission for some tears, for living in a bigger flow of life. Or let's sit in Central Park and lie on the grass until our bodies relax and we remember we are not unsupported here. It can sound magical and woo and complicated. But remember, we're telling non-arbitrary stories now, and they include everyday opportunities. Have you sat with your back on a tree for a while? Life is here to support us, reflect us, connect us, remember us to our embodiment, our creativity, our capacity to grieve and feel and celebrate. How we facilitate rupture is going to be make or break in how this goes.
We have to ask who we are as people attempting to reverse-engineer an intact culture. One definition I'm focused on: a culture that tends the human community and the human relationship with nature and technology in a sustainable and beautiful way over many generations. We're all now tasked with that design question, and it starts with how we meet rupture.
I'll leave you with the very first phrases of Sophia's first download in the book. What you are, my friends, each one of us, is the potential for greater harmony, beauty and abundance in life. Who you are is a unique note in the symphony of soul, a contributor to the ecology of consciousness that is life as God. You can leave that last piece, but that's the way I see it. If this spoke to you, I run a six-month online learning journey through True Human, called the Kinship Journey, where we deepen into these frames and their embodiment, with practices that support you personally and organizationally. It's a really cool global community.
Sweetwater · I'd like to close with a ritual. Can I have five more minutes of your precious time? This ritual came to me very spontaneously, but it's a non-arbitrary pattern that exists in a couple of other lineages. Red is life, in many Native American traditions and elsewhere. It's the thread of the blood, the thread that takes us from the womb into a body and out into death, the life force of an animal we eat. These threads are threads of commitment to the one life we all share.
Only if you're willing, only if this feels true to you: this is a ceremony of commitment. I'll pass out the thread. Take one if you desire to be committed to life. Then turn to someone and ask, will you commit me to life? The grace of this practice is that you cannot do it alone. We cannot be committed to life alone. We have to be committed to it together, bound to the one life we all share. When you tie the thread on someone else, say, may I commit you to life? I now have two; I'm collecting them on my left arm. Don't take one if it feels like too much. And if there's someone in your life you'd really like to share this with, take an extra. The first time I did this ceremony, an Indigenous couple recommitted their marriage in a midnight ceremony on the floor of a barn in northern Washington State. So this is a little magic for our climate time, to ground us in what brought us to Climate Week in the first place.
[The threads are passed and tied, in pairs.]
Thank you for the attention with which you engaged this practice. It felt very powerful. I'm a fan of open-sourcing such things, so if this speaks to you as a ceremony you feel called to share, please share it. Please name the provenance, as with any place where we seek to be in good relation with other lineages and traditions.
Sweetwater · I feel called to say one last thing. I've heard a lot of people in the metacrisis, galaxy-brain world badmouthing the impulse toward new traditions lately. It comes from a reasonable frustration with new age nonsense. However, we're in a turning-of-worlds time. I'm a creator of lineage, and my work is dedicated to creating a minimum viable practice space to keep weaving with other lineages, traditions and languages, and to make room for emergent lineages. Spirituality, and what we might call religion, the organization of practice at scale, has to respond to different problems than it has ever responded to before. If we undermine the impulse to attune to what the sacred calls us to be, do and become together, we undercut one of our fundamental roles in this creation song, and something that needs to be at the base of a viable culture: tending the sacred, what we might call spirit or love or soul. So if you hear anyone saying that, you might say: we're in a time of evolving gods. You might want to check your epistemic hubris at the door, and be open to what none of us yet know.
Thank you for your time, your listening and your hearts. I look forward to walking together on this path. The restaurant is open if you'd like to stay, and there's a connection corner up to the left for group conversation. Find a spot that feels cozy and keep deepening with each other.