Climate Week at Caravan of Dreams #3 · Cleaned Transcript
September 21, 2026 · Caravan of Dreams, East Village, NY
Ten five-minute talks with the Denizen community, recorded on the house mic. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk and microphone trouble smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. It is not verbatim. Speakers are named; people speaking from the floor are not.
Download as .txtStefanotti · They have worked so hard in this space for so many days, so please give it up for Ben and the team. About six years ago I was looking for friends to talk about things like deliberative democracy, universal basic income and the culture of capitalism, and a lot of you came to the table. Climate Week always challenged me, because it tried to fix the climate within the systems that brought the climate crisis in the first place, and there were very few sessions about how to transform those systems at a deep structural level. That is the conversation we started exploring with Denizen about six years ago.
Most of you know the language of the polycrisis and the metacrisis, so we are speaking the same language. The polycrisis is the interlocking crises at the surface: climate, widening inequality, the degradation of democracy. The metacrisis is the crisis underlying that, which is institutional, cultural and spiritual. It encompasses political and economic institutions, and also how we show up for ourselves and in our relations. My premise is that the metacrisis lives within all of us. There are ways, conscious and unconscious, that we show up in the world and perpetuate the systems we seek to change. So what does it look like to instantiate a society that yields the outcomes we want? Not widening inequality patched with wealth taxes, not a warming atmosphere patched with carbon taxes, but an economy that is not itself the source of the externalities a captured government is supposed to address.
Tonight we go on an arc that starts at the level of the individual, moves to the relational and organizational, and then into institutions: what new economics might look like, what alternative forms of finance might look like, what the cultural side of the equation looks like and how change happens. We close on where we go from here. Five-minute talks, a break halfway through to turn to a neighbor and harvest, and then the more systemic pieces of the puzzle. With that, Rosie von Lila.
von Lila · I study and write about human flourishing, and make art about it. To flourish means to grow and prosper. It does not mean everything is great all the time. Six years ago, on a Zoom call during the pandemic, I told a friend who had been very successful in publishing that I had three ideas for a book and what connected them was human flourishing. I had never spoken those words. He shouted through the screen: that is what your book is about. Clueless, I asked how to write it. He said, you have to ask human flourishing what it wants to say, which is a very San Diego, California answer. So I opened a document and wrote that question, and I wrote it every day for five months until I had 35,000 words. I knew on day three that if I was going to have anything to say about flourishing I had to practice my own, to experience it and have integrity in it. That is what I have been doing for six years.
About six months in I discovered there is a whole academic field of flourishing, rich and alive. I took every academic measure I could find, because I wanted to practice, and what I discovered was that they did not show me what to do next to grow my flourishing. So my sweetie and I created a tool for ourselves, the Practical Flourishing Assessment: a way to look at my life and identify what to do next. David and I used it for a year, our friends wanted to try it because we kept talking about it, so we led workshops, then public workshops, then I was invited to present to the NYPD, and then to the US Army. The Army said, this tool looks like it will add to resilience, but we need data. So we ran a research study, and NYU did an evaluation white paper on it. The top three things the tool accomplishes: it helps grow a sense of agency, it helps people try again after they fail, and it gives people confidence that by taking actions aligned with their flourishing and their goals, they can accomplish their goals.
There are many definitions of flourishing and I offer a practical one, in three parts. Most of the areas of your life are working sufficiently for you; the assessment identifies eighteen areas. You have healthy coping skills to make it through tough times. And every day you are growing in some way and endeavoring to be your best, meaning you are growing your character. If you take one thing away tonight, let it be this: you exist to flourish. That is why you are here, before you return to stardust. Flourish comes to English from old French, from a word meaning to grow, prosper and blossom. The growth we speak of is the growth of consciousness, of awareness and perception. When you become more aware of life and of your flourishing you begin to make choices aligned with it. Over time we call that maturing, or wisdom, and you end up with a life that works. Last week at Hatch a slide showed wisdom and love and the categories of flourishing on one side, and on the other a mega-list of existential adversities. When life is chaotic, Margaret Wheatley advises us to be of service. Flourishing is a practice. It is partly your relationships and partly your contribution to the world. My website is vonlila.com, and after nine years off Instagram and railing against Meta I have an account with four posts and ten followers, which I will be loading with flourishing.
Wade · Good evening. What an honor to be up here with all of you in this place. Born from research with the Lo-TEK Institute and a personal practice of embodying mother, or care, wildly, Care Wildly NYC builds new worlds through oneself, community and city support. Our every breath is a gesture toward what life could be. Systemic change begins inside, right here. When we listen to the more-than-human world, Mother Earth talks back. Like water, become a life-giving source: flow where you are needed, bring renewal wherever you go, and what you give returns to the whole. Every day I grieve our violent separation from Mother Earth, and I also celebrate, because we are where everything begins. Tonight I invite you to inhale her abundance and taste the quiche. Remembering our bonds with Earth heals our bodies and souls.
Under the care of the Lenape, Manhattan was the most biodiverse corridor in what became the United States. Abundance came through deep reciprocity with nature. How do we invite living systems back? How do we heal from generational trauma disguised as progress and learn to adapt with nature again? Many communities and agencies in New York are already driving urban regeneration. Harlem Grown has fourteen urban farms across fifteen city blocks, and in 2025 alone supported 30,000 families and distributed over 213,000 pounds of fresh food. Imagine scaling food sovereignty across all five boroughs.
Care Wildly NYC goes beyond parks. It targets 5,000 acres of vacant lots, plus unshaded streets, sidewalks and bus stops that can be 14.5 degrees hotter without shade. Our Earth is the answer and she is asking us to dream bigger. Native plants transform streets into edible sanctuaries for wildlife and neighbors alike, and it is already happening: Meatpacking streets are bench gardens now, and Astor Place has crops of kale, three sisters and pumpkins growing right now. Regeneration is good for business. Transportable, self-watering planters let us test improvements for street safety, heat resilience and flood prevention. A four-by-eight planter holds over 400 gallons of water, which we desperately need with the flooding we have now. Care Wildly prioritizes communities that need parks and welcomes social services, because this project is meant to help reverse the historical burden of environmental and social injustice. World-making requires love, kindness and care. New York faces interconnected crises of extreme heat, flooding, mental health and affordability, and one in four of our children faces food insecurity today. Possibility grows from the bottom of ecosystems, and when we start to let go of top-down systems, the change starts. Care gardens teach us self-care. The funding stack on this slide accelerates the regenerative transition. So tonight, dream bigger, and realize: what if you are where everything begins?
Haggarty · I am a somatic coach and executive coach, and I awkwardly help companies reduce workplace drama. There is a lot of drama in corporate America; you know how it feels. My work is product and industry agnostic, which is good news, because everything I say here relates to what we can do for climate change and for our own health on this planet. The invitation I bring is the idea that activism can be conscious, and often it is not. Sometimes there is reactivity. Have you ever felt righteous about your issue? Wanted to blame someone and just spiral? A mini meltdown? If you have not melted down about the state of the planet, I am more concerned. We welcome the meltdown. We welcome the reactivity. It is part of our shared humanity; it means we have a heartbeat. How we use that energy is the biggest indicator of what we will then create, how we might actually unite people, and how we feel when we lay our heads on the pillow at night. No matter how pure your intentions are, our presence is the transmission. Presence is what changes the room and the conversation, even in this very moment.
So a simple presencing activity, to drop further into the collective power here. Keep your eyes at a downward gaze for a few seconds. Give yourself the gift of being with your body and with this field, these powerhouses of vision and passion in the room. We will take six collective breaths. Inhale. Exhale. And on the last exhale, make some sound. Notice what you notice, in the room, in your body, and in what is now possible from a different level. The most brilliant, beautiful, passionate idea on the planet, if it does not come from presence, makes more drama.
In my last two minutes, another somatic invitation. A quote from my friend Jordan Dann, a psychoanalyst with incredible books and resources out in the world, on fear and rage. This is what it means to turn toward, to move inward rather than past or attack what is outside, to let outrage become consciousness, consciousness become relationship, and relationship become conscious action. Zero in on the middle: to let outrage become consciousness. That is possible. Rage, like a mother bear protecting her cubs, is a primal energy saying stop, no, something is not of service. Is there any anger or rage or even irritation in the room right now? Yes, over there. Let it out. Is there any fear about what might happen to this planet or this city? Raise your hand if it is present. So for a few out-breaths, be with the sensation of fear. Do not let it have you; be in right relationship with it. Because fear, my friends, only tells us what matters. If we work in partnership with that fear, our relationships, our business plans and our initiatives shift dramatically, and we sleep a hell of a lot better.
García Arbeláez · I am Colombian, and I have spent fifteen years of my life in the service of life. I want to tell you the story of the past three years building an organization called Myzelio, which emulates the intelligence of the mycelium network, and where we say we are not consultants, we are magicians. It is the story of how to build inner coherence, which we really need facing this polycrisis. Three years ago I was working for a Fortune 500 company leading sustainability and innovation, very passionate, trying to change the system from within, and I had no inner coherence at all. I was absolutely burnt out, and frustrated with the incremental change approach and the absence of any systemic change from within. When you start asking yourself those questions, I do think the universe listens and shows you the way. One of my mentors invited me to a Buddhist retreat. The monastics of Plum Village tell you the way out is in. I would go further: the only way out is in, because you cannot change the world if you do not change yourself first. On that retreat I also saw that I needed to build my tribe, and a tribe is the people who share your grief, because grief is the other side of love. I am very action driven, so six months later, when I got my green card, I left my corporate job and built this tribe with my partners in magic.
A tribe in service of life and of systems change, because most initiatives remain at the level of structure, and we need to change the living system, which depends on power dynamics and ultimately on changing mindsets and hearts. We need to relate in a different way. So we created Myzelio, named to honor the mycelium network, the underground fungal threads under the forest floor that connect worlds; some call it the internet of the planet. At the beginning we asked what this even was. The main learning is that clarity does not come before action. It comes from action. We navigate between two worlds: helping organizations within the system transition toward something more regenerative, and working with others trying to cultivate and birth new systems. We cannot do that unless we create a new system ourselves. So we built a company that is really not a company. It follows its own rules and paths and finds its own core values together, and at the core we want to be a fractal of the future in the present, because nothing will happen in the future that is not already happening today. Inward is where the magic begins, but not for our own sake; it goes outward. Our purpose is a space for a group of super talented people, like Camila here, to dream, to unlearn, because we have so much colonization in our minds, to learn, heal and grow, so they can experience a new form of relating, elevate consciousness, receive their gifts and put them at the service of life. Humans are a constellation, so we work in a multidimensional way, inspired by the geometry of the seed of life, to develop each person. It has to be embodied. We need to feel what it means to live in brotherhood and sisterhood while working toward a regenerative future.
I promised Ben five minutes. One final quote, from the choreographer Martha Graham, which I keep as a mantra. There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. What we aim to do at Myzelio, with our magicians, is help them open the channel so they can fully manifest their gifts and put them at the service of life.
Stefanotti · Notice that everything we have talked about so far is relevant to everyone in this room. When you hear systemic change it sounds lofty, out there, how could I possibly affect it. But Denizen's vision, which is everyone's vision, is humanity flourishing in harmony with life on Earth, and if we cannot attune to ourselves we cannot flourish; that is what Rosie's assessment does. Elisa talked about being present rather than reactive, and I think the throughline that cuts so many of us is righteousness, which is an othering, and replicates something we want to change. Then how we find our tribe and build organizations and teams to do this. So let us take five minutes with the person or two next to you: what struck you, what was insightful, what questions you have. Then the second half turns to the pieces that are more outside of each of us.
Anyone want to surface something for the group?
From the room · I have studied flourishing for thirteen years, so I was interested to hear it. The challenge now is getting the science and the support out through social media.
From the room · It is somebody's birthday. Everyone on three.
From the room · What resonated was living the values of the future today.
From the room · I liked the humility of the talks. We need hope, and who are we asking for hope?
From the room · I am a systems architect and have been studying where the problems come from. A fascinating thing about civilizations is that they start where they would like to end, and then they deteriorate. Greece and Rome both began with very egalitarian, democratic institutions and lost them. So watching where we are losing it might be the useful thing.
Binns · I am sustainability director for a municipality in New York's lower Hudson Valley, where I coordinate with environmental leaders across the region. Tonight, some strategies we have experimented with to build community resilience. Why community, why now? As a climate doomer for decades, I often reflect on how to have the biggest impact addressing environmental issues, resilience, and, thank you Rosie, flourishing. I have landed on place-based community as a way to address all three. When we talk about emergency preparedness we focus on federal agencies and individual preppers and skip what I would argue is the most important middle layer: our neighbors, who are in fact our first responders. Connected communities fare better in a catastrophe because we know how to look after each other and the environment, and people with strong social relationships live happier, healthier and longer. I now see resilience as three nested layers. Institutional systems establish the frameworks. Interdependence connects us with one another and the more-than-human world. Embodied capacity helps us remain grounded under stress. At the institutional level I have worked on policy, climate action plans, clean energy programs, participatory budgeting, flood resilience and more, which I can tell you about another time. Tonight is the less familiar, equally essential strategies.
Communities become resilient when people establish interdependence: exchange systems, mutual aid, little free pantries. This one I just had built for a friend; it is an elegant way to give and receive anonymously. Buy Nothing groups offer thriving local marketplaces for free things, and are the only reason to be on Facebook as far as I am concerned. These everyday exchanges do more than circulate goods. They create trust, familiarity and social cohesion. It is how I met fellow beekeepers who now look after my bees when I travel, and how I met somebody with an extra snowboard who now takes my kids snowboarding. We also work with neighborhoods to meet up, map their strengths and vulnerabilities, establish communication channels, and in the process learn who and what we might rely on. Stewardship days get people outside caring for the local environment together, and working shoulder to shoulder we learn how our wellbeing is bound up with the forests, wetlands, pollinators and watersheds that sustain us.
Gamification is an excellent way to lighten my heavy topics. People are loath to face emergency preparedness but love to face off with zombies, so now we practice survival skills and assemble go-bags to the sound of screaming laughter. It really works. That game worked so well we turned it into a month-long Earth Month scavenger hunt across six municipalities, with hundreds of teams completing thousands of missions, creating a subculture of stewardship across the rivertowns. It turns out that competition with points and prizes gets folks to do literally everything the environmental groups have ever wanted: composting, participating in local governance, donating instead of throwing away, learning local ecology, visiting little-known secondhand and refill stores, taking public transportation, planting trees. Players still gush about how much they have learned about and love our region.
Inspirational talks provide a shared language and pathways forward, but we have to be mindful not to leave people more overwhelmed than empowered. So we now design our gatherings around participation and embodied experience, not unlike Ben. We create space for people to share what is weighing on them, then sing and move together. Possibly our most popular offering is an ecstatic dance class with rhythm, ritual and somatic release. Participants say they feel more at home in their bodies and have found a community where they feel safe and belong. Physical flow states offer reprieve from anxious thoughts and, with practice, restore a sense of agency, much needed in these dark times. Perhaps most profoundly, we practice deep listening: slowing down, letting people speak without interruption, making room for a new collective understanding to emerge. Similar practices are on the rise in other participatory forums, like warm data labs, citizens' assemblies and plant medicine ceremonies. Being truly heard can ease isolation, restore dignity, calm the nervous system and help people make meaning from difficulty. It builds trust and deepens our capacity to understand, co-regulate, care for and act on behalf of one another. I now incorporate it in nearly everything I do. It not only builds resilience, it enriches us. So in designing resilience, I design for resonance. What kind of community do you want to join? I long for communities that are capable, connected, embodied, accountable and alive. If we build the communities we want to inhabit and stitch them together, we may yet create a movement capable of meeting this moment in history, and together we may just bring about the great turning.
Axelrod · I am going to put my drop spindle aside, because it is not a systemic solution. I could talk about personal life design all day, and personal choices make a huge difference, but organizations, when designed well, are crucibles for personal transformation. I am a worker-owner at LIFT Economy, an impact consulting firm whose mission is to transform our economic system so it works for everyone with no one left out. How do we do systemic change in a moment when it feels like I need to attend to every one of my individual actions, how do I live my values? We have ten principles for the move from the extractive economy to the next economy, and two feel particularly salient right now, in this age of AI: sharing ownership, and democratizing governance. There is all this talk about the promises of AI, and we will not touch any of it if AI enters the existing ownership and governance structures. It will just exacerbate the current inequality and the current power. What we do at LIFT is equip institutions with the mechanisms to embody shared ownership and shared governance.
Think about housing for a moment. How do you meet the human need for housing right now? Individual ownership has become the primary pathway for most people in the so-called United States. Now imagine a clean slate, where you can attain housing in a multi-stakeholder cooperative where your cost of living goes down month after month simply because of the structure of ownership. That is what is happening with a client of ours, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. It is owned by the tenants, by the workers, by the investors and by community members, and the investors have no outsized share of ownership or say in decisions, because the goal is to decentralize power and resources, not concentrate them. Replicate that across the ways we reimagine our cities, the way we structure landscape design companies, corporations, construction companies. And imagine if in those communally owned, communally governed institutions, with a vocation and a salary that meets your needs, you could also be practicing personal growth, cultivating a new way of being in the world, learning through conflict with your coworkers how to go home and do it again in co-housing, overcoming the divisions and polarization that separate and isolate us. That is one way we structure different institutions, and it is part of the calling of our Next Economy MBA community, now 800 alumni of a nine-month program on all these frameworks, tools and strategies, very real ways to transform how we finance and structure institutions. Cohort seventeen starts next week with seventy people registered. I feel so motivated by this room. I love you all.
Nussbaum · What I am talking about is how we might fund the regenerative economy by dismantling the extractive one, which would be very cool if we could pull it off. Why I am motivated: as we face these multiple catastrophes and move into the next system, I do not feel, and I think many people do not feel, that we are moving as quickly as we need to avoid the worst devastation. By many calculations we are trillions of dollars short of the investment the regenerative economy needs, and the philanthropic resources dedicated to fighting extractive actors pale next to the corporate resources on the table for the fossil fuel industry and the agricultural system. We need ways to combat that. An inspiration has been the spontaneous coordinations of capital over the last five years. Spirit Airlines went bankrupt recently, and a TikToker said there should be a people's bid on it, and got 330 million dollars in commitments in about two weeks. In 2021 there was the GameStop saga, in which billions of dollars were mobilized by retail investors. Many people were trying to get rich, but I do not think it would have happened without the wish to say something to Wall Street. There have been many other instances. A term I just came across is hyper-politicization: we live in a time of over-polarization and under-institutionalization, so people are really polarized but do not have many levers to pull, and we see these spontaneous things happen that we could potentially harness. In the US alone there are 51 trillion dollars in savings and retirement accounts. That is a lot of money that could be mobilized and coordinated.
One way to do it is something we are calling an activist investment trust. Imagine any area of the extractive economy where there is an extractive incumbent, a better regenerative alternative, and some lever we can pull, regulation, a corporate campaign, whatever, that can be funded. We create something publicly purchasable on a brokerage, like an ETF, that strategically bets against the bad companies, invests in the regenerative ones, and takes the profits that would typically go to a firm and invests them in the lever. A flywheel. It would not be one thing; it could be many, but that basic construct we believe can work. This is the Collective Capital Lab: an incubator and hub that spins out campaigns and legal structures attacking this from different angles. First, every time one of these spontaneous coordinations happened it hit the same regulatory hurdles and fizzled, which makes sense, because it was spontaneous and aimed at one thing. So what does it look like to catalyze this with longer-term visions and solid containers where people participate in longer-term movements? One idea: the WNBA is the only sports league that still allows collective ownership, and it is expanding in 2030, so what does a community bid for a WNBA team in 2030 look like? We are working with a beloved media property looking for a mission-based steward, on an exit to community under nonprofit stewardship with governance from its members. We are exploring massive activist art projects, capitalized with a community around them. Second, building the legal and financial templates to make all this work. The first thing any attorney says is that it will get sued almost immediately, and it probably will, but in coordination with counsel we are going to figure out the ways and do it. We have run our first pilot with a corporate campaign, and it worked and was legal. And lastly we are prototyping funds. One is about krill overfishing and targets a private equity firm. I would love to talk to anybody here who wants to be involved. Raise your hand if you have already heard about this project: those people are part of the conspiracy.
de Rosen · Do not look at the title; I am going to talk about something different. In the spirit of protest I will use the first fifteen seconds of my time to do nothing and rebel in a little silence. That is the contrarian in me. Now imagine a patch of bare soil. Close your eyes if you want. Over time, almost anywhere on the planet, that soil, thanks to the rain, will grow into a mature ecosystem. Rain falls and creates pockets of moisture, the moisture attracts microorganisms and mycelium and helps germinate seeds, the seeds grow into plants, which attract insects, herbivores, carnivores. This happens spontaneously. We do not have to design it. Think also about what happens to rivers when they are undammed. We know from the removal of the Klamath dams in the Pacific Northwest that it took days for salmon that had never swum in that river to find their way there. Nature makes its way. I say this because if we leave nature alone it reaches states of high complexity and produces high levels of material abundance that the other beings in the ecosystem can use, including us. So what if we designed our economies the same way? Why can't our economies do that?
There is a simple reason, and many views; I will invite you into one. Imagine that bare soil again. If the water has no place to land, it erodes and slides off. Think of rain as capital, as money. Our current economic system is largely extractive: money goes in, it does not stay, it goes right out. The promise of regenerative finance is that by creating divots in the soil, little containers, capital falls and stays long enough for a seed to be exposed to water and grow, and that thing grows and benefits other beings. Hence regenerative. Sounds easy, so why are we not seeing it everywhere? Three reasons, out of many, that I came up with this afternoon. At a planetary level it is still easier to extract; our soil is not totally denuded yet, so with a short-term mentality and a quick buck in mind, you can still just extract. Second, it takes tremendous social, intellectual and emotional capital to coordinate human beings and get over the egos to make these systems possible. Third, we have to pay people to do this work, and it does not generate income immediately. It takes time.
Three things we need, which apply to all of us, including me, and which I struggle with. They are not certainties; they are doubts. For project leaders on the ground: a good idea is not enough. Be strategic about finance. Money is your friend, a tool, and we have to get over the vilification of money as evil. For funders and wealth holders: think at longer time horizons, beyond the quarterly cycle, consider multiple forms of return, not just financial, and take risks. Third, for everyone: accept that no one has this figured out. I work in this field and I am trying to figure it out. It is a series of experiments. I will close with two doubts, because I love closing on doubts, against the polished positive version. I do not doubt that regeneration is possible. It happens everywhere; look at the sidewalk cracks in New York. What I doubt is our capacity to coordinate, consistently and with compassion. And I doubt our capacity to make this fun and not a niche subject. So I am holding a question: how do we make this tantalizing and irresistible? Zombies, maybe.
Shohadaee · I came in on a red-eye, my luggage got lost, and I just moved house, so I am happy to be here sharing what I took as an opportunity to pull a fresh harvest for you. Art has always changed the course of history, not just through iconic work but by changing what people feel, see, question and imagine. I have spent twenty years at the intersection of art, design, science, environmental justice and social and systemic change. Preparing this, I was feeling my own exhaustion, and recognizing that pulling something together while feeling it and knowing these crises are multiplying is very much part of the story. Systems change is not an idea we communicate once. It is a practice of continuing to become something different together, which is what we have been talking about all night. The climate crisis is a systems crisis, and we are gathered this week because the systems producing it need to change. The systems are not abstract machines outside us. They are created and maintained through institutions, relationships, behaviors, stories, technology and ideas about what matters. The climate crisis is not only about policy, tech and carbon. It is a crisis of culture, of relationship, of imagination and design, and what we have been conditioned through colonization to desire, extract and ignore is shaping the living world.
Audre Lorde: poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so that it can be thought. Art makes invisible systems visible. It helps us perceive and feel what information alone cannot. Design and design science let us intervene in the patterns that shape our lives, and ontological design reminds us that what we shape shapes us back. Culture is where these patterns repeat, contest, transform and live. Art, design and culture are how people understand change, how we develop the capacity to participate in it and begin practicing another world before it exists. They are a cross-cultural language for systemic change. And regenerative culture is a practice. It is not a destination or a perfect state, as I say from my loving exhaustion. It is seasonal. It asks us to notice what is emerging, what must be protected, what needs rest, what is ready for compost and what wants to be born. It is vital, because our ability to respond to crisis depends on the strength of our relationships, our resilience and our communities. It requires courage, interrupting familiar, profitable, comfortable patterns that are not life-giving. Sometimes enlivening, sometimes messy, painful and exhausting. Regeneration ultimately means tending the conditions through which life can continue.
Design Science Studio, which I co-founded with Faith Flanagan, over here, with amazing humans in this room, partners like Jenny, advisors like Rosie, and Kevin Rowell over there, is a community of practice and an educational, cultural incubator building the capacity of the creative community. Each of us is a trim tab to create a world that works for all of life. Since 2020, 460 creatives across fifty countries have explored how creativity is infrastructure for regenerative change, and the ecosystem has supported more than 350 projects being born. At our recent Interdependence Summit, the fourth annual gathering, we created a temporary prototype of regenerative culture at the former Solar Living Center, the first place solar was ever sold. We built an earth altar, shared organic food, music, project prototypes and practices of reconnection, explored art and transmutation, and wrote a collective declaration of interdependence. It was not a performance of perfection. It was a protopian practice ground, feral and beautiful and alive. Regenerative culture cannot remain an aspiration. We need places where interdependence, belonging, care and repair become embodied practice.
So I invite you to become a co-author. Culture is participatory. We are creating a Climate Week edition of the regen·era Times, the newspaper we published at the summit, a collective record of what has been seen, felt, questioned and imagined here, and what it will take to make these futures possible. Contribute an obituary, an article, a prayer, a provocation, a spell for the world you want to bring into being. Tomorrow at eleven, here, we interrupt the doomsday story and rewrite it through possibility. On Thursday with Eva Frye and the MOTH program we explore biodiversity law and the rights of nature. In closing: art has always changed the course of history, and the question is what we use it to help people notice, love, protect and become. Choose something you refuse to stop loving. Become its guardian. Give it a story, an image, a sculpture, a gathering, a policy, a practice, a place in the future. We will not do this perfectly, but we can make the systems we inherited visible, compost what no longer serves life, and courageously practice what comes next. Regenerative culture is not a place we arrive. It is something we tend, season by season, relationship by relationship, choice by choice.
Rushkoff · I like being at the end. The question is the end of what: this little night, our civilization, or the whole shebang. The first time I was invited to a polycrisis-type event was four or five years ago. I was supposed to fly out to give a talk, and instead my mother-in-law got pneumonia and it looked like it was going to be it, and because I was the most available I was the one at the hospital doing the round-the-clock watching. At two or three in the morning I was sitting there thinking, why am I the one stuck here with this dying body of a woman in a coma, when I should be in San Francisco with the activists, intervening on behalf of everything. Cursing my fate and the people who did not show up. And I started noticing her body doing this thing, taking a longer time between each exhale and the next inhale, as if it was trying to stop and then coming back involuntarily. Something compelled me to put my hand on her wrist, in case some part of her was conscious. I have done all these things, been on trips, but I felt as big a hit as any: her soul or consciousness or whatever it was accessing my nervous system to make that passage, to let go. I knew at that minute that this is what doulas do. Death doulas offer their nervous system to help metabolize this passage. The moment I was cursing as the thing taking me away from making a difference was the most difference I had ever made as a human being on this planet. It flipped my work from being an agent of change to an agent of care, from someone intervening in what is happening to a doula, a death doula for this thing, and hopefully a birth doula for what comes next.
As I thought that way I realized the thing that is dying is not the Earth. It is not even our civilization. The thing that is dying is an anti-civilization based on conquest, domination, and the ends justifying the means, and we have to let that die. The trick is how to let it die as painlessly and with as little damage as possible for all of us. And when I look at the ways to do that, through local resilience, through knowing our neighbors, do you know the ten bodies closest to yours when you are asleep at night? Learn their names. They are your co-metabolizers. As we do that to soften the blow, we sow the seeds for growing the next thing. Those are the very things everybody up here has been talking about as the way to do the regenerative thing. So whether you have given up on this or are fighting for it, what you are doing is the same.
Tonight I am actually supposed to be at Yom Kippur. This is the Jewish high holiday, and I decided to come be with my activists instead. But when I think about Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, the main prayer, the big thing we do, is the Unetaneh Tokef. It is a crazy prayer: on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will live and who will die, and you worry, am I going to live or die, and it says that is going to happen, your fate is sealed. And then it says: but. Through repentance, charity and good works, we can lessen the severity of the decree. So whatever may be baked into collapse right now, I offer that through compassion, through charity and through good works we can lessen the severity of the decree, and co-metabolize whatever this is, together. Thank you, Denizen.
Stefanotti · Thank you for bringing us back to care. I always think of Rosie when that comes up. In the earliest days, when hundreds of people were suddenly coming to talk about systemic change, some of us wrote a couple of paragraphs about what it was about, and we talked about envisioning a society that was just and regenerative, and Rosie insisted that caring be the third adjective on the list. So I appreciate that Doug closed with that, and that we center care. Center relations over transactions. You are not an instrument for the metacrisis. You are a human who needs sleep, who needs love, who needs fear. Center our relationality as the foundation for the things we do. And Alexa has a community of care for people doing environmental work; find her afterward. Systems change starts from within. Care for yourself first and foremost, then you can care for the people around you.
Ben · This is the final event of our first day, and I realized I never explained why it was important to do this. Why take a week to host 25 events with a group of volunteers and see where it goes? We had so many beautiful metaphors tonight, and for the most part what we have been doing for the last year and a half is tilling the soil of New York City, finding out who lives here asking the same questions and coming up with pieces of the answer. What I hope was exciting was hearing how much care the people in this room have to do something, from wherever they happen to be. Our hope was that, having done the work to till the soil, to understand, to cohere as a small group here, we could see what happens when experts from outside town come and plant new seeds in it, so that when you all leave, we have something to birth and work on together. We are where we are. We have the skills we have and the people we know, and that is what we get to work with. It is not always easy or right or perfect. Most of the time it gets harder the closer you get with people, and the relationships get deeper. For me, today, one of the things that was so wonderful was knowing I could be back here running around trying to figure something out while in the front of house there were all these folks taking care of check-in, building little experiences, the name tags, the little corners of connection and delight. So much care went into welcoming people in. I hope you felt it too.