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If you're new here, welcome to Growth Imperatives, an ongoing curation of found ideas that deconstruct the current world of design, and ask how we can envision a new one.

This week, I wanted to share some articles examining existing power structures and why it's so hard to change them. From mindsets to technology to protests to mapmaking, these articles might help you separate the real from the unreal.

Culture is key to climate action

An insightful exploration of why it's so hard to change minds and actions, where everyone can be useful in the climate crisis, and what being "untethered" means for respecting nature.

While I don't think staying in your hometown automatically means you have a closer connection with the nature surrounding it or necessarily use it as a "prism [to] bend all decisions through," I do think Scott is on to something when he says we often move to new cities for economic opportunities, and that rational relationship lets us more readily disconnect from climate harms that may visit us.

Read more about that below:

One of the larger projects of our modern society and economy is a project of dislocation and disconnection. The more we can untether people into individual units, the easier it is to mobilize them for maximal utility to the market. Most of us are not people of place, we are people of a market. Many move away from our hometowns, we follow opportunity to college or for a job to maximize our economic/career opportunities. Most people do not use their place-based identity as the prism they bend all decisions through, and most people do not integrate into the places they inhabit.

That’s no one’s fault, it was the logic of the system that pushed us into a stream laid out before us. The untethered, after all, are often the “winners” of our economic system, mobilizing to capture value anywhere it can be found regardless of invisible expense to others or the planet. However, the untethered are the losers of the next system, the system that will emerge from the logic of climate change. This new system that will require resilience, which like a spider’s web only claims it’s strength through an interwoven network of strong relationships.

The untethered have a harder time seeing and feeling the harm climate change causes, and abandon any pain that does surface more readily. The untethered will minimize their personal discomfort, moving or shielding themselves from harm, doing little to reduce global risks in the process. In contrast, the place-based can feel the pain but also the benefits of digging in for something they love.

Read → Emergencies, Frameshifts and What They Tell Us About Our Place In The World by Spencer R. Scott

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

[T]echnology is intrinsically political. So what might look like a perfect technological solution to an environmental problem is *always* something messier, more imperfect. Every such solution creates winners and losers, even if they’re not immediately obvious. So whether or not “tech will save us” really depends on which “tech” and which “us.”

→ Jo Lindsay Walton in Pause

We deceive ourselves that our online paltry protests are effective because it allows us to believe we’ve done the work; because the *real work*, as the subconscious believes, comes at a cost we’re not willing to pay if we don’t have to. This level of self-deception is what billion dollar tech companies know how to exploit, because we largely are appeased by the type of symbolic feedback we can receive on these platforms, and it allows us to avoid the real work, and stay on their platforms. ... The power structure of our world doesn't care much what you’re posting online. It cares what you are spending your entire life force on, how your job and total behavior align in opposition to the oppression.

→ Spencer R. Scott in Once You Get the Message, Hang Up the Phone

Brandon Letsinger believes that one of the most important things that bioregionalists can do is to create new types of maps. “Maps are not neutral,” said Letsinger. “They are created with agenda and purpose. Quite often, they are created by national governments or economic entities that have their own interests. The ultimate purpose of the map will be to make money for the company or to express its [political] interests.”

Bioregional mapping depicts “everything that's left off of Google Maps and other traditional maps,” said Letsinger. The idea is to create maps that give the land a voice by charting the presence of wildlife, migratory patterns, water flows, and other notable ecological phenomena as they intersect with human communities and their cultures.

→ David Bollier in Cascadia and the Global Resurgence of Bioregional Activism

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

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