by Isabel Cavelier

The climate community becomes atomized. We permeate the entire system, silently subverting how it works from the inside. We still nurture the organizations that have traditionally made up the “climate community" (who play and will continue to play a role, especially in public accountability). But we morph into something bigger and bolder: a mission-impossible team that hacks into the mainstream. We become CEOs of all the oil companies, we become presidents of banks and of countries. We become board members, managers, editors-in-chief.

At the same time we knit together strong communities in every locality. This means working at large scale to enrich the nascent movement of regenerative community-creation, in cities as well as in the rural areas. We prioritize the strengthening of community bonds and empathy.

We will do this at the same time, but it will be hard to see or recognize that it is actually happening. It will be as radical a change as the one that I witness between my great grandmother's life and mine. Only it will probably take a lot less than a century, now that we live in the Great Acceleration.

Many more organizations in the environmental space become dedicated to this community building. Funders rally behind the exponential building of local communities based on the premise of mutual care and regeneration.

On that basis we will foster a global ethic of care for all otherness. Meaning otherness that is far in terms of physical distance: think someone living in the other end of the world who you've never met; in ideological distance: think the most radically different person ideologically to you (a climate denier), and in biological distance: think a mosquito. This otherness is harder to care for, harder to be empathic to, harder to love. But the harder, the more intense, potentially. Hopefully!

Once the initial door is open to radical empathy, hospitality and love, we can travel any distance without any effort. But this must all, to the deepest possible extent, be done totally and absolutely in an egoless fashion.

The vision for this future needs to be more vividly expressed, created and nurtured. And even if there is not really such a thing as a truly shared or universal vision, we need a chorus of voices calling for it, using similar words. It doesn’t have to be the same tune.

This future feels powerful, beautiful, enticing, intriguing, and full of hope.

It’s a future in which we choose to live in loving abundance rather than dying on a decaying planet.