Australian journalist Sarah Wilson’s most recent book is called “I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World.” In this work, Wilson offers two seemingly contradictory views of our future. On the one hand, the world as we know it is collapsing under the weight of its complexity. We are living in a time of rising social and economic inequality, of increasing resource shortages and diminished agricultural fertility. Our politics are marked by ever deeper polarization leading to seemingly endless conflict and war. Wilson sees the coming collapse as the quite predictable result of believing in infinite growth. As the Romans and Mayans saw their civilizations crumble, we will see the same. It’s a grim forecast.
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On the other hand, Wilson tells us there is much we can do if we are willing to change and that whether we change or not, nature will recalibrate and find balance. She tells us that research indicates that the two central determinants of the speed and likelihood of a civilization’s collapse are inequality and polarization. And these we can do something about.
While Wilson has written about a wide array of subjects, she says that in every work she strives to bring complex science into the public realm. This reminds me of the work of my Wyoming neighbor McKay Fleck, formerly a federal employee who now serves as an energy policy advisor for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Devoted to safeguarding critical wildlife habitat, along with hunting and fishing areas, the group works to protect clean air and water, maintain wetlands and safeguard migration corridors that connect winter and summer habitats.
With a longstanding commitment to both social justice and the maintenance of healthy natural habitats, Fleck took part in a recent Homeward Bound program in Tanzania. Homeward Bound is an Australian organization supporting global initiatives to teach leadership skills for women and nonbinary individuals with backgrounds in STEMM — science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. The program is not so much to help STEMM-trained women and nonbinary people advance in their fields as it is to increase their presence in social and political settings, to bring to both STEMM and politics the capacities and experiences of those who have been historically excluded from these settings.
“Our current global leadership patterns are not serving us anymore,” Fleck told me. “It’s clear we need to think in new ways and maybe STEMM-trained people have something to add to how we address social and political challenges.”
When I asked what’s at the heart of training in STEMM fields, Fleck said, “We are asked to be analytical, to be objective, to face problems somewhat less emotionally. We try not to bring preconceived notions to our work. Here’s an example: in one of our Homeward Bound distance classes, participants from Australia, Europe, the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa were asked to watch our teacher on the screen for five minutes and afterward describe what we saw. Some people said things like she was bored or she was distracted. But others simply said what happened — she looked to the left then to the right, she looked at her watch three times, she looked at her phone.”
Fleck noted that STEMM training emphasizes observing without attributing meaning, without imposing our preconceived views on events. In social and political settings this means without prejudging what another person says or thinks.
In Tanzania, Fleck and 60 other people from around the world came together after a year of weekly online classes to spend 10 days in person addressing topics they’d all been concerned with — energy stability and resilience, water resources, microplastics and ocean acidification. Meetings were organized around current global problems, but sometimes really productive things seemed to happen randomly as a result of being together in person. Two participants from Australia were talking. One worried about the lack of healthcare resources in her area. The other was a physician. The end result was the creation of a rural medical service with circuit riding providers.
We all know that sometimes just being together and seeing what happens can be as productive as a well-planned program. It makes me think the side effects of being together are part of every well-planned program.
Fleck ended her talk with me by speaking about how closely related the traditional lifeways of the Maasai people she met in Tanzania were to those of her Northern Cheyenne community here in the Northern Rockies. It brought back something the journalist Sarah Wilson emphasized in her book — whatever we do to solve the dilemmas we face requires collective sensibility, collective planning and collective action. Wilson’s work in writing and Fleck’s habitat protection work on the ground remind me that we’re in it together and only together will we find our way toward productive change.
