SUE's Blog

It’s 2050, and the world is right-side up again. We were living backwards and upside-down for centuries, forgetting that we’re part of nature, treating other humans like trash, plundering the planet we call home. I can hardly believe it, but all that has changed. Now we live in patchwork cooperative communities stretched across most of what used to be the United States.

What was the shift that moved us from opposition to cooperation? It was the realization that no one is coming to save us — that we have to take care of each other. The climate crisis was the main driver, a series of environmental disasters and economic collapse exacerbating a political crisis that reflected a loss of faith in governing structures. In response, a cultural shift combining several currents led to a rejuvenation of empathy. The mode of transformation? An expanse of networks, like mushroom mycelia, that started at least partly on Substack, through which the new culture spread, took root, and blossomed.

The change happened over three phases: Phase 1 saw a shift from digital to analog, where the mycelium networks became something truly original. Phase 2 describes the move from networks to infrastructure, where we sowed the seeds of the counterculture. In Phase 3, we were powerful enough to affect system change and bring about a new cooperative world.

Some call it anarchy, some call it communism, some call it utopia — regardless, it’s ours and we made it, and we’ll do everything we can not to go back to how things were.

But how did it happen? What’s the secret to changing such deep-seated animosity? Well, in a word, people started doing things for themselves.

People start forming networks

My Substack publication acted as a catalyst and a node for the networks that would eventually turn our world inside-out. Anarchy Unfolds is about preparing the world to come, crafting viable alternatives here and now. As my audience grew into the thousands, we were able to do much more together. We traded ideas, shared news about projects and activities we were part of, and invited each other to participate. I did interviews and hosted virtual meet-ups where we talked strategy and gave ourselves space to dream. In my writing, I tried to seed healthy ideas into the world, inspiring people to think and act differently. The Anarchy Unfolds readership became an active community, not only a passive audience — and importantly, they began to form relationships with each other outside my publication.

I was not alone — many others on Substack were on the same wavelength. We connected via the platform’s powerful networking tools, but we didn’t stop there. We began to use our writing in the digital space to amplify our analog lives.

Building on campaigns like Substackers Against Nazis in late 2023-early 2024, we used online organizing to drive participation in real-life marches, demonstrations, and protests; cultivating an active resistance to the systems of violence and their culture of greed. Like Solarpunk Stories, we curated positive news from our collective memberships; little victories and small joys that had an outsized impact on nurturing a culture of hope and generosity. Like Radical Reports for the goodguys, we kept tabs on our growing movement, making sure everyone was in the know and no one was left behind.

That spirit of care translated into mutual aid groups, modeled after the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s. People crowdsourced help for those in crisis: they organized food drives for the hungry and grocery runs for the busy, swapped childcare and eldercare, crowdfunded exorbitant medical bills, and gave prisoner support in the form of letters, visits, and bail funds. They helped keep the lights on and heat and water running, especially for those affected by natural disasters.

At that time, existing mutual aid networks and activist projects tended to be hyperlocal or siloed in a particular community. The emerging mycelium networks on the other hand kept a pulse on everything at once. They didn’t need centralization to do this. Through overlapping systems of communication, all direct and interpersonal, they accomplished what so many organizations and institutions so far had failed to achieve: an autonomous, leaderless movement, a perfect blend of digital and analog.

This care work was inherently politicizing — people quickly ran into legal challenges while trying to share what they had, which illuminated the systems and their inequities in stark contrast. In the early 21st century, even feeding the homeless was illegal in some places. They also had cash bail, private insurance companies, and other evils we find hard to imagine. Even so, in the beginning stages political action merely spun off from the networks; it didn’t swell from the coordinated movement of them all at once. Such spontaneous order would come later, supported by a robust system of alternative, sustainable infrastructure.

People start growing their own food

The mycelium movement reached another phase of development when people began to meet their needs outside the state and capital. Urban agriculture got the spotlight, and sustainable techniques like hydroponics, aquaculture, and composting proliferated throughout the networks. People started raising micro-livestock, ripping up pavement to plant food forests, and of course cultivating mushroom logs. Almost overnight, it seemed as if everyone had their own vegetable garden.

If Phase 1 was simple sharing through mutual aid and food drives, and Phase 2 was the revival of urban agriculture, Phase 3 saw massive agricultural reform in rural areas. The huge monopolies were broken up, government subsidies dried out or shifted focus, and monoculture was slowly but surely replaced with permaculture. There was the narrative that these country bumpkins were slow on the uptake, clinging to conventional methods when the cities had evolved to sustainable practices. In reality, the city slickers got all their ideas from their rural counterparts — the hippie culture and pioneering ecologists, who themselves got it from indigenous people.

These moves were timely too, as global supply chains were rocked by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters, as well as military conflict. Food security was a matter of survival. Eventually, as government capability crumbled and corporations dissolved, the previous global supply chains collapsed — food production became localized out of necessity. Slowly, through the mycelium networks, a new way of exchange allowed folks from different regions to share surpluses freely with one another. Some used a gift economy and refused to keep count, others figured out direct exchanges at price. In any case, no one involved in the networks would dream of exploiting someone over food. Even when times were tough, the idea was that we had enough to go around if we agreed to share.

People start collecting and treating their own water

It’s remarkable that capital managed to commodify something as fundamental as water, but they’d done it. In response, people in the growing mycelium networks began to take it back. Phase 1 saw the dissemination of wisdom about how to collect, purify, and store water, giving individuals and households some measure of autonomy in the face of frequent droughts and unstable urban reservoirs.

Phase 2 saw alternative plumbing and waste management systems sprout up to counter municipal utilities. People stored water for their whole neighborhoods in silos and water towers, rigged up to their own tanks, greenhouses, and gardens. In concert with the movement for food independence, bioremediation became the new trend: graywater recycling, composting toilets, floating trash islands, and careful cultivation of microbial life meant less pollution, cleaner water, and much more water retention in the soil.

In Phase 3, legal battles over local water independence ballooned into regional and national fights over access to rivers and lakes — and eventually the ocean itself. Big cities were no longer permitted to drain bodies of water dry. Urban sustainability became a must, as people empowered by the networks brought water back into the commons. Bottling companies had their rights stripped, and were only allowed an administrative role, alongside former government utilities, as distributors of a free resource according to the demands of the mycelium. Big Fish also had to go — most of the plastic waste in the ocean was fishing nets, and most industrial waste ended up dumped in the ocean. At the height of their power, the networks were strong enough to coordinate rapid and wide-ranging restoration efforts, especially across coastlines. In a matter of years, our beaches were healthy and our taps trustworthy again.

People start making their own electricity

As mentioned, the mutual aid groups in Phase 1 helped folks keep the lights on, especially those impacted by natural disasters. In Phase 2, solar tech reached its zenith, with ever cheaper and more accessible installations, devices, and materials. Local power grids sprang up alongside water systems, and legal battles ensued over disconnecting from the grid.

Phase 3 meant taking on the power companies. They were dismantled and replaced by localized decision-making and maintenance, which was increasingly easy to do as they kept declaring bankruptcy after causing disasters like the PG&E California fire in 2019. The hard part was convincing the government to let people build and operate their own systems.

The biggest win here was taking down Big Oil. A tipping point was when the airline industry became the first to get rid of overhead and become the first worker-owned and operated industry. This set off a domino effect, and soon other industries followed, especially truckers and shippers — postal and delivery services were suddenly not-for-profit, and the planet thanked us for the dramatic decrease of waste. This buildup of sustainable practices and values meant that the auto industry also failed, leaving cities and communities free to rebuild themselves without cars at the center.

People start creating their own information systems

When the mycelium networks were first getting started, people shared info on privacy, security, and platforms as we learned how to balance the digital-analog space and act together. In Phase 2, DIY culture became cool again: repair cafes started popping up, which quickly led to right-to-repair laws. People were making, sharing, and fixing their own devices, and connecting them via distributed mesh networks such as those pioneered by HydroponicTrash. Decentralized social media platforms, like the fediverse, saw a surge in popularity and were widely improved upon. Open-source technology flourished, spurring on an anti-copyright movement that eventually challenged intellectual property rights.

By Phase 3, the knowledge commons was making a comeback. Largely in response to the demise of journalism and the dark age of traditional social media, public projects like Wikipedia, The P2P Foundation, GitHub, and Z-Library took over the scene. Planned obsolescence fell out of style, and streaming services atrophied because they couldn’t keep up with the free alternatives. Eventually Big Tech lost their legal monopolies over the information system.

Another tipping point in the battle for free knowledge was the closing of the schools. Public schools were already under attack from several angles, and unfortunately that never let up. Private schools puttered on in gated communities, buoyed by rich donors and reclusive elites, but for the majority of people education became an organic and integrated part of everyday life — not a separate world where young people are siphoned off and confined to classrooms while the rest of us work. Libraries became an epicenter of the new counterculture, fiercely defended as the physical institutions necessary for maintaining this new way of life. The knowledge commons was immaterial, but people viscerally understood the need to have physical spaces, a real-life commons too, to keep this thing from falling apart.

People start managing their own land

In the 2020s, no one could afford rent anywhere in the United States on a single minimum wage income. So from the start, people in the mycelium networks understood how crucial housing and land ownership was. We helped each other move, pay rent, and avoid getting evicted, sharing furniture, babysitting, and household chores. Many folks also moved in together, making the queer fantasy of polycule communes a regular urban reality. Co-housing was different than having random roommates, because it was through the networks that people met each other and developed trust.

Phase 2 brought in co-housing on another level: community land trusts (CLTs), like those pioneered by Koinonia and others in the mid-1900s, became an effective model for collective land ownership. People experimented with tiny-homes, mobile homes, becoming digital nomads, and living off-grid. Urban planning, finally free from the auto industry, created more green space, mixed-use buildings, and walkable cities. Public rest installations, inspired by The Nap Bishop, became a staple of the new culture.

Of course we had to take on the landowners, construction companies, and developers, and in Phase 3 we did. People asserted their right to determine the kinds of buildings and physical spaces they live in. CLTs grew large enough to drive out developers, and tenant unions imposed rent caps and demanded affordable housing.

A huge turning point was housing the homeless. By the 2020s, there were about 650,000 homeless people in the US, and over 15 million unused properties. Well that was a quick fix! But good gracious was it a painful slog to get there: that process involved occupying public and private facilities until the authorities ceded, like in Sunvault. It meant protecting squatter settlements, like in southern Spain. Thankfully, by this point the mycelium networks were so established that we were able to mobilize large numbers of people almost anywhere in the country, and especially in urban centers. All unused properties were seized and redistributed, not by the government but by private citizens ourselves, working in concert with each other for the greater good.

In fact, the entire world began to understand just how serious we were about autonomy and independence when one city got nominated to host the Olympics and flat out refused. What’s more, Big Brother couldn’t do anything about it.

People start defending themselves and solving their own conflicts

We found ourselves on the wrong side of the law almost from the beginning. It’s not that we were contrarians just looking for a reason to buck the system — it’s that so many of life’s basic necessities were bound up in red tape. So we began coordinating legal aid for each other through the burgeoning mycelium networks, as problems arose in every other sphere. We also did prisoner support, reciprocal exchanges where folks would send encouragement and supplies in, and our friends behind bars would send letters and updates back. When the authorities caught on this quickly became illegal, which simply escalated the tension and increased the volume of communications sent to and from the prisons.

At the same time, as we moved into Phase 2, we developed alternatives outside the legal system to solve conflicts. Abolitionists led the way, with centuries of experience in fostering peace instead of violence. People realized they could help victims get to safety or confront a perpetrator the same way we organized everything else. We called the police less often, and dealt with domestic violence directly. Sharing childcare and eldercare meant that parents got more support, and the co-living experiments meant that people had a broader community around them to help avoid or recover from abuse and neglect.

Letting go of the appeal to authority led to a general rewriting of relationships, where the sharp lines between friend and family blended — where folks established a more collectivist culture to counteract individualism, one based on free association and mutual interest, not blood relations or religion. It’s all chosen family. And just like with agricultural reform, straight white guys got a lot of credit for popularizing what feminists, queer folks, and indigenous peoples had been at for a long time. But we don’t hold it against them — better that we all get enlightened, no matter how who or when!

The stakes were high: legal action from someone inside a network against another person in that network caused problems for the whole network, if not put the whole community at risk, so it’s better to do it yourself. Also some elements were clandestine, and people generally understood that they’ve got a good thing going on and didn’t want to ruin it for themselves or others.

This was the heart of the cultural shift: we really can rely on each other, especially because no one else is coming to save us. We are all we need.

The networks grew fast — outpacing the courts, who couldn’t keep up with the complexity. In Phase 3, this of course led to the biggest confrontation with both the state and capital. We took on the whole carceral system and its monopoly on violence. As the government realized what it was up against, they started arresting more and more of our leaders and public figures — which was a huge mistake. We had already ceased to rely on them to solve our problems. Now they were tearing apart our families. Especially as more white folks found themselves behind bars, racial solidarity against mass incarceration grew exponentially.

By far the biggest moment was when a whole prison got torn down. We formed a combined internal-external force that overwhelmed the prison guards, the families of the guards, and every politician and corporation invested in the prison. The symbolism was staggering, the slave labor stopped immediately, and the networks proved that chaos doesn’t erupt when law and order break down, because we were more than willing to welcome the former prisoners home — they’d been connected to us for so long already.

At that point, to stop a total revolution, the state had to make a choice: either bring in the tanks, or make major concessions to keep existing. But they knew that if they did try to put down this rebellion by force, they faced mutiny from the military. Recruiters had been decreasingly successful, seeing as fewer people needed the military for basic needs, and as the nationalist brainwashing had been cut down to size in the information revolution. Also, who was helping veterans and their families? We were.

So the bloodshed never happened. The state backed down — and it was clear they wouldn’t stand up again.

People start doing what they want when they want

The story of how we killed the economy — no more work, no more money — deserves a whole volume in itself, so I’ll just lay out the contours of what happened.

In Phase 1, while the mycelium networks were just getting started, the first layer of resistance was in sharing goods and services free of charge, and distributing the monetary burden of large bills to the collective. It was also about the division of labor, especially domestic and household labor, the key linchpin of sexism and ageism towards women and children. Women especially benefited from the growing networks, and children enjoyed a much larger and more welcoming social world.

Then Phase 2 was about directly interrupting the supply-demand-production chains with moneyless (or money-less) alternatives, and using money as a tool for collective wellbeing. This looked like buying property, moving resources, building infrastructure. Phase 3 increased direct confrontation with work and capital, in that people started refusing to participate in the economy — especially as workers, but also in other ways, as propagandists or managers, and it began to die by attrition.

The ultimate win in this sphere came about when the work system collapsed: corporations become co-ops, and their assets were redistributed — not as a top-down imposition, but in response to the groundswell of popular resistance.

People finally demanded free healthcare, and refused to pay insurance bills. The stock market collapsed, which dealt a death-blow to the wealthy, who could no longer speculate on credit or debt. Banks dissolved, or transformed into credit unions and mutualist funds. International financial institutions were broken up, re-localized, and made largely irrelevant in areas where currency lost its value. The end of work meant that people controlled their own schedules; no more rush hour, no more traffic, no more pollution.

People start making their own decisions, together

Let’s go back to the beginning: we started with the nitty gritty of coordinating analog and digital connections — sowing the seeds of the counterculture. The key here is that there was no organization or institution, no centralized place, where all the decisions happened. A culture of reciprocity and care emerged, as people began to imagine and appreciate the scale of what was happening.

It quickly became clear that no one person could call the shots. Instead, there was a sort of absolute autonomy of the nodes. Whoever was there in the flesh got to make the call. This also quickly distilled the need for fast and honest communication, spurring on the Phase 2 innovations. Instead of a massive centralized database, we had a vast array of relationships. Not one single place for everything, but a thousand places with a thousand things moving in concert.

What kept the networks from splintering or being co-opted is that we were already splintered — we were already a distributed, decentralized network of autonomous cells held together by powerful relationships of care and trust. You can’t shut us down; we have our own power. You can’t turn the internet off; we have our own internet. You can’t arrest and kill our leaders; we make our own decisions independently, and everything we say and do is saved in a thousand digital spaces ready to be re-disseminated.

When it came time for a prison break, very few objected. There was a sense that this new society was making decisions as a whole, without having to say it. After the first prison fell, the rest felt like it happened almost without trying, such was the release of all the built-up tension.

Sure, some detractors left and complained to their international friends about how their country was descending into anarchy, oh the horror, but anyone part of the mycelium networks knew what was up. At this point we were internationally linked, so the militaries of the world couldn’t intervene without risking revolution at home. Hence the social contagion spread around the globe. Others picked up what we started and took off running with it.

Conclusion

And that’s the story of how we threw off the shackles of capital, smashed the remnants of the state, and entered a period of joyful celebration — unleashing a festival, carnival, bacchanal spirit that the world had scarcely seen.

And not a moment too soon: our energies are now 100% on ecological restoration. Mother Earth is running a high fever, and things are gonna get way harder before they get easier. But since we literally just birthed a new world, I think we’ll manage. Won’t you join us?

Life is good these days. Our communities are thriving, here and around the globe. We’re working together to grow into a bright future. But it’s also good to reflect on where we came from and how we got here.

In 2024, a sense of exhaustion gripped my hometown. Foreclosed homes, shuttered businesses, a changing climate that brought nothing but disaster. Life seemed narrower and emptier by the day. Our hope for a better future came from advertisements, depicting an exaggerated host of joys and sorrows that promised to give only if they could take first.

I remember how much fundamental sadness accompanied observing an advertisement. An implied grievance: why don’t you have this? (What’s wrong with you?) A picture of food that incites hunger, a picture of happiness that inspires longing. This sense of absence had overtaken our public and private lives, scrawled across buildings and bus-stops by corporations and private interest groups. Everything belonged to them, but when things went wrong they were nowhere to be found.

I started talking to people about it, sharing our thoughts and experiences. We organized a petition that called for a vote on how the town handled advertising in public spaces. Our new policy would require the town council to limit what kinds of street advertising it sold and to whom.

In short: local businesses and nonprofits had first rights to any advertising space in public areas. The town could not take bids from non-local individuals or companies if there was a local group interested in renting the space. While non-local chains and corporations could advertise on the insides and outsides of their own stores, they could no longer rent ad-space from the larger community.

Instead of filling our public spaces with messages from distant strangers, we started using them to connect to each other. We didn’t need to impose any new rules about ad content or public mental health. It turns out, people who live next to their own advertisements on a day-to-day basis are naturally inclined to make that a pleasant, hopeful experience. With that optimism came a renewed sense of capability. Places like bus-stops, billboards, the insides of public restrooms and phone booths–all of these locations belonged to us again.

And with that came a renewed sense of responsibility. If this space was ours, then we were in charge of keeping it healthy. We organized clean-up events, recycling drives, and paid greater attention to the effect we had on the landscape. Over the next few decades, our community became a model of friendly cooperation and environmental sustainability.

Other towns adopted similar policies. The movement got so popular, it became a political platform. As local communities regained power over their own space, they began restructuring the way that we thought about culture and economics. This time with a focus on public generosity instead of private greed. The influence of corporations began to wane, and local health and sustainability became our priorities.

It was a long road, and we started small and slow, but now we’ve filled our space with messages of hope and teamwork. We don’t need a billboard to show us what happiness looks like. We already have it. It’s here.

     At the time of writing this, Narges Mohammadi, the female Iranian 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lingers in jail, put there by the autocratic regime controlling Iran for daring to work for human rights.

    Some countries in Asia and Africa have it written into their constitutions banning LGBTQ relationships, making them punishable by death in certain situations.

    Meanwhile, Russia is more than two years into its invasion of Ukraine, under the pretext or “De-Nazification,” and Hamas seeks the elimination of Israel, such that the two are at war. The horrors of war need no explanation here.

    At its most essential level tyranny, injustice, and war is about egos imposing their will, or clashing with other egos, and too many of us are still identified with our ego “I” thought.

    But my book, Love Your Triggers: Mastering the Simple Mantra that Heals our World, has been an international bestseller, a true global sensation that is being read in every country and is helping to heal our world.

    By January 1, 2050 people in every country, including those in government and positions of leadership, are being trained, in Zoom classes, to teach the book’s simple message via a foundation I have established, the Global Realization Project.

    And the book’s message? We are not our egos. The problem is that we take our ego “I” to be “real,” who we “are,” and as a result, are not free to truly love.

    When things are going our way, we feel good, happy, and confident in ourselves, but when they are not, we feel insecure, anxious, and defensive—and afraid to look into the eyes of others.

    But the truth is that we are not anything that comes-and-goes—thoughts and feelings, beliefs and emotions, not even the ego “I” thought itself—but rather the pure, open-hearted awareness or presence that is always, always here.

    Realizing this awakens freedom, love, and creative power. This is the simple truth that heals our world. It allows us to gaze into another person’s eyes—regardless of the color of their skin, their language, or their religion—without fear or judgment, in a warm and welcoming way.

    The fastest and surest way to realizing freedom from our ego is to learn to love or at least accept our triggers, those times when we have an emotional reaction to someone or something.

    After all, welcoming our upsets is the beginning of self-love, and until we love ourselves, we cannot love others. So, whenever we experience upset, we learn to welcome it because it is showing us where we are yet free.

   Then we affirm the simple but powerful mantra: “I am the awareness in which everything comes-and-goes…”

   Then we breathe and relax, and be the awareness are. We notice the coming-and-going of our thoughts and beliefs, feelings and emotions—including frustration, self-esteem issues, resentment, guilt, anger, depression, shame, etc.

    Yet “we,” as the pure awareness watching the coming-and-going of literally everything, are always, always here!

    So, we imagine ourselves facing the triggering incident again, but from true presence this time—free of the ego “I” thought and its “story,” that which got triggered in us—and we find it easier to flow with it.

    As we learn to master the mantra, we increasingly feel a current of inner peace and harmony, and a deep love for all humanity. This peace is guaranteed, so long as we follow the “I” thought all the way to its end.

   Freed of the “me, myself, and my ‘story’” obsession, our ego is still there when we need it, stronger and more powerful than ever, and our thinking is much more intuitive and creative.

    Then we can work together, cooperating at the local and global level to solve our shared problems and challenges!

©Jim Dreaver, 2024

Bio:

Jim is the author of End Your Story, Begin Your Life (Hampton Roads) The Way of Harmony (Avon), and The Ultimate Cure (Llewellyn) and has taught at Esalen Institute and elsewhere.

Get the PDF of his new eBook, Love Your Triggers: Mastering the Simple Mantra that Heals our World for any donation at:  

https://www.jimdreaver.com/index.php/donate

We Are the World
by Su Terry

At first we thought it was just us four. Five, if you count Mario (the dog). But gradually we realized that there were more of us than we could ever count. Hundreds of thousands. And that’s what ended up changing the world, a little at a time.

I’d better start by telling you about the initial group, which was myself (I’m a musician and composer), Taneshaa who’s a molecular biologist, Isaac the gardener (he’s really a genius with plants and nutrition but just calls himself a gardener, like the main character in Being There) and Suzanne, my best friend from high school who was Student President, and later…but don’t let me get ahead of myself.

Plus Mario, my chihuahua mix.

Even though Taneshaa, Isaac, Suzanne and I have very different professions, somehow we have always gotten along and in fact I think it’s because we’re so different from each other that we were able to form our little club, called We Are the World. We called it that because we still believed in the message from the song that came out in 1985 (maybe because none of us had been born yet and it seemed like this legendary thing from the past and we loved it):

We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving.
There’s a choice we’re making, we’re saving our own lives
It’s true, we make a better day, just you and me.
(composed by Michael Jackson & Lionel Richie)

We started meeting at Taneshaa’s house because she had a nice patio that overlooked some woods and it was very private. We needed privacy since most of the ideas we were discussing were thought of as quite radical for the time. Our mission was this: while our ‘leaders’ designed the world to make us feel powerless, we intended to bring our power back. We aimed to do that by creating initiatives that would help each individual person feel valued, and motivated to contribute to making a better day. All of us in the group had read Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, as well as Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods, so we were very familiar with how the male dominator culture had taken over from partnership societies. We realized that the majority of the world’s problems rose from the dominator culture mentality, so moving toward more of a partnership society became our model and our guiding light.

We didn’t want our lives to be micromanaged by government. It had been getting really bad. So many rules. You had to have a license for everything you did. They said it was to regulate industry standards but in reality it didn’t stop any less-than-ethical people, it only put a chokehold on innovation and made it hard for people to move to another state, since they would have to get re-licensed for everything.

We objected to the trend of A.I. to make us stop believing in ourselves. Technology and devices were becoming an addiction for so many people, and the ones benefitting from our addiction were the ones who owned the technology. People were asking Chat GPT what to do instead of asking themselves. Which was funny, because at the bottom of every Chat GPT window was the disclaimer “Chat GPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.”

As we sit here in 2050, with all the amazing inventions that have cleaned up pollution, improved people’s health, wealth and education, and made it possible for people to be free and live happy lives, it’s hard to imagine that 25 years ago we didn’t have any of this on the grand scale we have today. I think a lot more people started waking up when the death rates for so many countries rose to the point that it couldn’t be ignored any longer. People started understanding that as long as profiteering corporations were allowed to manufacture “medicines” that actually made us sicker, nothing would change. Taneshaa, being a molecular biologist, was instrumental in bringing this to the public’s attention. She knew that change requires energy, and people didn’t have energy because of subpar health and having to work all the time to pay their bills. She had so many ideas. Once, Isaac said to her “Gee Taneshaa, for someone who spends all her time looking through a microscope you sure know how to get the big picture!”

Now that we have clean air, water, soil and food, most of us are living long and healthy lives. Children are taught about how to care for the planet we live on, and I can’t imagine a child growing up who would want to harm it just to make money. In fact, I don’t even know anyone now who does something just to make money, the way a lot of people did back then. (I use the old fashioned term “money” but of course we don’t have currency anymore.) You almost had to live that way, because everything had become so expensive. There were so many aspects of life that seemed designed to make slaves out of people, instead of letting them live their lives in peace.

The We Are the World club was rather influential in showing humanity how they could be living, instead of being controlled by governments who were in turn controlled by global organizations, who were in turn controlled by some unknown billionaires who funded both sides of every war–and there were always lots of wars going on–so they could destabilize countries and seize their natural and human resources no matter who “won” the war. One of the ways our club did that was by organizing fundraisers to distribute copies of the tenth edition of G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island to libraries, community centers, schools, book clubs, TV shows, radio, and even to individuals. There were many other books and films we helped distribute, but that was the first one.

We organized a lot on college campuses. Young people have such energy and enthusiasm; but we weren’t trying to indoctrinate them with rhetoric. We didn’t just tell them what we thought–we listened also. That helped us formulate our workshops, educating young people on the real history of our country and the world. We even set up college courses that became some of the most popular on campus. Many of the students who were really onboard joined our organization, and it was really they who propelled the project from that point forward.

The Outreach Team acquired funding for Isaac, the gardener, to have his own TV show. Being very well spoken and also very handsome, he made the perfect host. His show, which he named after our club, showed people how they could grow and prepare their own food so they could be well-nourished, feel better, and cure illnesses. We were getting tired of global controllers like the erstwhile World Health Organization trying to tell the whole world how to manage public health. At one point they even said we should kill all our chickens because for sure they had Avian flu, and we should stop raising cattle because the lab-grown chemical food they were pushing on us was better. Big corporations were trying to eliminate farmers and sell us their artificial, GMO produce. And this guy Klaus Schwab from the now-defunct World Economic Forum said we should all be eating insects, and staying home so we wouldn’t pollute the atmosphere. That was while the WEF featured gourmet natural meals at their banquets, which billionaires flew to in their private fuel-guzzling jets.

Isaac’s TV show soon was so high up in the ratings that it was spun off into different languages and countries. He created a worldwide franchise for it, and we used some of that money to fund our other projects. (We were still using money then. More on this later.)

One of those projects was finding the inventors who were truly innovative and setting them up with manufacturing facilities. That’s why today we have roads, highways and even buildings that are made with recycled plastics and garbage. And today we have plenty of green areas and managed reforestation so even those who live in cities are never far from a pristine nature environment.

As you can imagine, it wasn’t easy to get legislatures and captured government agencies to agree to support these necessary innovations. There was so much corruption, and that was because of the trickle-down from the corrupt “officials” at the very top of the power pyramid. That’s where Suzanne came in. As I mentioned, she was always interested in making people’s lives better. She started out in politics by becoming Student President of our high school. She created committees and liaisons between administration, students and parents, with everyone contributing ideas and ways those new ideas could be implemented. She was so successful that pretty soon she was being interviewed by major news media, and her skillful use of the Internet allowed this way of thinking to spread across the globe.

By the time our We Are the World club started, Suzanne was already the Governor of our state, but she still made time to come to our meetings….though we did sometimes have to start them at 10 p.m. because of her busy schedule. But we were committed to our activities and were having such success that we were willing to give up a little sleep for it. The only one who didn’t lose any sleep over changing the world was my chihuahua Mario. He slept on my lap during the meetings, while we drank tea and spread out documents, maps and photos over Taneshaa’s huge dining table that she’d moved out to the patio in order to accommodate our expanding vision.

My own role began as the composer of our anthems, advertising jingles, and Isaac’s TV show theme. It was very important to me to infuse my songs with healing energies, having been very influenced by Nikola Tesla’s statement “If you want to find out the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” That proclamation by Tesla is what all of Science goes by today! With Taneshaa’s help I had studied the effects that frequencies have on physical, mental and spiritual health, and I was able to incorporate them into my compositions so that everyone hearing them would experience all those benefits, even if they didn’t know why. This initial work in frequencies, taken up first by independent laboratories, then NGOs, increased the public’s knowledge about frequencies to the point where today we have no harmful waves radiating from towers or any other structure. Everything is shielded (with materials developed by our Innovations Team) so that people have the benefits of our wonderful communications technologies but don’t suffer health issues because of it. Even our medical treatments are now all based on frequency diagnostics and healing modalities, as well as herbs, nutrition and energy pathway work. When surgery is needed, our surgeons are so well trained that it’s rare to encounter an unsuccessful operation.

Because I’m an artist, I feel strongly that creativity is one of the most important values that humans can have. I saw how the artificial intelligence industry was being allowed to run rampant, harvesting the creativity of humans without compensating them for it, and then used in situations where it controlled all the automated systems and there wasn’t even an actual person anyone could complain to about it. That’s why when Suzanne was elected President of the country, she appointed me as Minister of Ideas. (We were going to call my department “Ministry of Creativity” but I thought that was too New-Agey of a name.) We retained the name “Ministry” not to give it any type of formal historical religious meaning, but because we wanted to return to the original meaning of ministering to people, that is, helping them. As Minister of Ideas I now travel the world with my team, gathering the most useful ideas from other countries and implementing them in our own country. In fact, we have many exchanges with other countries, and I would say the entire world now benefits from the creative spirit we all share.

My personal favorite innovation, found here at every airport and train station, is vending machines with hot beverages in cans. I discovered that at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, and now we all can enjoy a nice hot matcha tea while we’re waiting for our transport pod! Speaking of traveling, it’s unbelievable when I recall how 25 years ago the global controllers were trying to get people to never go more than 15 minutes away from their homes, and to stop taking airplanes and driving cars to go places. Thankfully oil now stays in the ground where it belongs, our technologies have developed far more efficient and non-polluting ways of powering every type of vehicle, and people can go anywhere they want.

In terms of artistic creativity, today’s artists know they have the power to guide society in many ways. Because we work directly with the realm and source of creativity on a daily basis, we know that our art has to contain the timeless elements that connect people to those other worlds, those other dimensions we don’t perceive in daily life. For this reason, several artists are part of Suzanne’s Presidential Cabinet.

In fact, today’s societies have been built on creativity, literally! For example, when economist Yanis Varoufakis wrote his book Another Now, which then became a film and a TV series, it completely changed the way societies designed their workplaces and financial systems. Who would have imagined, back then, that commercial banks would shortly be eliminated and Central Banks would never again control people’s lives by manipulating the currency, but instead would do what a bank was supposed to do: safeguard our financial security for our entire lifetime. Of course, we don’t do that with currencies anymore, but with digital tokens. I suppose people could start hoarding these digital tokens like they used to hoard money, but that doesn’t happen. Everyone has what they need, so there’s no excess accumulation. I’d like to give credit for that to our evolving humanity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Age of Aquarius had something to do with it as well. Especially when you consider how close we had come to destroying ourselves…

Another remarkable thing about the change in the last 25 years is the absence of utility poles and cables all over the place. The world’s power grids were completely remodeled, and now everything is shielded and mostly underground. Makes the landscape a lot prettier, no? We also save energy by not tracking the entire population 24/7. At one point there was surveillance everywhere (just like in that book 1984 by George Orwell where the main character had to hide from his TV). Because most of that surveillance was actually illegal, five countries got together and shared the data on the other countries’ citizens with each other, circumventing the laws of the individual countries. Those countries even called their system “Five Eyes”–how obvious can you get? Suzanne said, “Technically it should be Ten Eyes, so maybe they should call themselves the Cyclops Coalition.”

The original reference was probably the eye at the top of the Big Brother pyramid. I sure am glad we don’t see that creepy image anymore, unless it’s in a history book. Studying history is as popular as football now. After all, we don’t want to repeat our past mistakes. Such as: in the old days there were huge social media companies that harvested people’s ideas without compensating them. That doesn’t happen anymore. Today, creativity is recognized as the most valuable asset we have, and that it’s we human beings who make it. Eventually we redesigned all the A.I. systems to compensate individuals for their ideas. Because all creative ideas are recorded on blockchains, individual creativity is always rewarded. Now A.I. works for humans, instead of the other way around.

The way our educational system has been remade to value individuals’ creativity has led to the happiness humans experience today. Everyone feels valued. Instead of before, when people just felt used by the “system,” or perhaps felt left out by society, now everyone knows they have a purpose. We don’t have the problems of suicide, drug or alcohol addiction or crime that we had back in the day.

It’s not exactly that people have no more tension or are free from troubles, far from it. But in today’s world we’re not living under the illusions that the former globalist controllers kept waving in front of our faces and beaming into our consciousness in nefarious ways, like with broadcast signals that entrained our brains to frequencies that triggered fear responses. They created media narratives and financed certain political groups who deliberately created chaos.

By this time we’ve developed our telepathic capabilities to such a degree that we feel tremendous empathy for one another. We don’t want to hurt anyone because we know we are just hurting ourselves. This is another reason the role of the artist is so important: artists of all genres create the elements of tension and release that we must experience in order to evolve as spiritual beings. What we lack of tension and release in daily life, we make up for in painting, music, sculpture, dance, writing, sports, invention, and so forth.

If I would point to one thing in particular that changed the world, it would be communication between people. In the former era, sometimes you’d be together with other people and they’d all be looking at their phones instead of at each other. I’d like to think the We Are the World club contributed to changing that, because we used to host big gatherings just so people could talk with each other, especially those who came from very different backgrounds and interests. It was kind of a giant online dating center, except it wasn’t online and it wasn’t about dating. Although a lot of people who met each other there ended up getting married!

Speaking of marriage, that too has changed a lot. Now it’s a ceremony and a commitment made between two people and their close community. It doesn’t need to be sanctioned by any state or any organized religion, but people can of course incorporate religious beliefs into their ceremony if they so choose. But I would say the prevalence of older religious orders has waned quite a bit, as people nowadays gravitate towards a more nature-oriented expression of a higher order or force in the Universe.

The practice of marriage, the way we do it now, is symbolic of the way people have discarded “authorities.” For centuries it was as if people were afraid of taking responsibility for themselves, and they entrusted responsibilities to authorities who usually abused that privilege. Now we are much more conscious of how each individual contributes to the health of the community. Each of us knows we’re responsible for our own lives, and we also take on responsibilities for our community. No more delegating to “authorities” who used to serve only themselves at the public’s expense. Today’s Representatives feel the tremendous responsibility entrusted to them, and they are honored to be able to serve our communities throughout the entire planet.

When I think back to Taneshaa, Isaac, Suzanne and my 25-year-old self (with little Mario sleeping on my lap) gathered around the table planning our next activity, it truly seems like another lifetime. Now that I’ve reached my 50th solar return, I’m even more grateful for being present on this Earth during such a formative era. My children have grown into a more welcoming world. In fact, it’s today’s children who indeed make our day brighter. They are givers, not takers. They’ve made their choice, and it is to save our own lives. They feel they are creating the world they want to live in.

And they are.

Brave and Bold for a Better Earth 

January 1, 2050 

Today is the day I wrote about so many years ago. It marks a new year, a new decade, and the day by which I envisioned living on a healed, cooperative Earth. 

I’m sitting in my moonlit study reflecting on how far the world has come. In 2024, the moon’s pale purity was a reprieve from the harsh realities throttling toward us. Now, it reflects the infinite light amidst shadow that characterizes our existence. We’ve gone from a world fueled by fear, antagonism, and ruthless “othering,” to a people fortified by hope and resilience who employ compassion, innovation, and transformation as their ultimate uniting recourses. So many leaders have been imperative to this change; I am grateful to be counted among them. 

***** 

Suzanne Taylor’s 2024 “Essay Contest” catalyzed my contribution to our changed world. She invited contestants to contemplate the future and recount how we contributed to Earth and humanity’s thriving. The competition combined many things I loved: considering consciousness evolution, creative writing, and a cash prize I could use toward my PhD tuition. Should be fun, I thought. 

But as I began to write, the weight of the task struck me. This was not a mere creative exercise for funds meant to spur small insights. This was a personal reflection of cosmic importance, designed to push each entrant to fulfill a calling. The prompt urged us to ask our inner knowing what does the world need and what can I contribute? 

At the time, I had convinced myself that I was doing enough. I had, after all, left behind my career in corporate law to pursue a PhD in consciousness studies to better understand how spiritual experiences impact our social and material lives. Alongside, I had accidentally discovered my own energy healing abilities, and I began facilitating small sessions of “Kundalini Activation,” a practice of energy transmissions that cleared people’s energetic systems and aligned them to their true essence. Yet with both my research and my energy work, I contented myself with a modest reach, happy to keep my “woo” in the shadows. I contributed my understanding about human potential, who we are, and our ability to heal on a person-to-person, if-and-when, one-at-a-time basis. 

And then I answered Suzanne’s prompt. 

I realized I had been hiding from the world. My research insights remained siloed within a confined academic community and my energy work within safe social parameters. While my proclaimed passion was to open people to their most authentic expression of existence, I myself was unwilling to put my cherished reputation as a “rational” person on the frontline. But as Suzanne wrote in Inside the Intelligence: Mapping the Path to Oneness, mankind’s progress required a few key people to align to a unified energy field and convey that “a pro-creative, happiness-inducing reality is joinable.” I had internally aligned; the missing piece was the courage to convey that reality to others. 

What Did The World Need? 

When I considered what humanity needed most, it mirrored our needs as individuals: to break old, stale patterns of being, to experience another way, and to feel safe to take a newly unveiled path. 2 

Humanity needed to expand its schema of possibility and know that the emerging route would be sturdy and lead it to recovery, not cause it to flounder in a cosmic vortex of chaos. We all yearned for a reconnection to self, to others, and to something beyond. 

If we were to become whole, then consciousness expansion and healing would have to become normalized, accessible, and commonplace – an essential pursuit for all. Spiritual experiences could no longer remain exclusive to those with the means to either ditch Western civilization for ashrams or invest in reclusive esoteric practices. These practices and ways of being had to be brought in both theory and experience to the masses. 

My research on healthy spiritual transformations had taught me that on an individual and collective level we would need knowledge, experience, and guidance. With those three pillars, people could seek truth about our existence, experience something deeper that could bring them into alignment, and have the social support to see them comfortably through to a new reality. But the question remained: how could I contribute? 

My Contributions 

The realities of our world at the time meant that my particular positioning as an Ivy-League lawyer, consciousness PhD researcher, and energy healer could bring diverse parties together to learn about and experience deeper levels of consciousness. My contribution to humanity, I realized, would be to help bridge the practical and spiritual realms for as many people as possible. I could do so through (1) research, (2) disseminating information, (3) offering experience, and (4) providing guidance and community. I aimed to bring an integral approach to the study of consciousness to help people see that ascension and descension, transformation and grounding, and integrating spiritual experiences were all inevitable and imperative parts of the spiritual and human experience. 

Research 

I committed myself more deeply to my research. My PhD focused on how to integrate and navigate the aftermath of spiritual and mystical experiences. This research, which I continued and expanded upon beyond my degree, showcased the narratives and lived experiences of individuals who got a glimpse of something beyond our 3D realm during altered states of consciousness. The project created a map of a range of spiritually transformative experiences to help a rapidly awakening world navigate the human realities of the awakening process, such as how to maintain health, careers, social relationships, and a new sense of self. My research brought insights about both human flourishing and the Dark Night of the Soul (how to avoid it, what incited it, and tools to regain balance). After my PhD, I collaborated on research projects with various organizations to further our understanding of integrating all forms of spiritual experiences. I also partnered with subtle energy research organizations and became a leading expert on subtle energetics and ensuing transformations from energy experiences. 

Dissemination 

Pushing aside my impulse to hide my work, I published journal articles, presented at conferences, and teamed up with interdisciplinary research teams to further our understanding of the relationship between altered states and human flourishing. Importantly, I shared this widely beyond academic circles. I started a website and social media channels where I posted research insights and findings, and I began speaking on podcasts and doing presentations for various wellness platforms and 3 

institutions. Eventually, I began my own limited video podcast series to discuss findings from my research and to share anecdotes as both a recipient and facilitator of energy work. I published a book on the findings from my dissertation, and I became known as an adamant advocate for gradual and safe spiritual emergence. My book mapped how people could retain the wonders of their old lives as they manageably and magically emerged into the new. 

Inspired by the course I helped teach during my PhD called Spiritual Realities, I sought out guest lecturing opportunities at universities across the US and UK to normalize what had previously been an academically taboo topic. In the private sector, I sourced consulting opportunities in the psychedelic-assisted therapy and energy healing spaces to teach practices for safe, balanced, and thriving integration. I applied what I had learned from analyzing countless interviews about spiritual transformations, and I built and disseminated a model so people could fully embrace the path in a way that was grounded in our practical human experience with the eye-opening, objective, and mindful perspective that comes with a deepening of consciousness. 

Offering Experience 

As so many researchers before me had highlighted, knowledge means little without the corresponding personal experience. In my own case, I knew that to be true. I had gone from a materialist and atheist to a deeply spiritual person after my first Kundalini Activation session. No amount of reading or learning alone could have offered me that shift. The practice made me more planetarily conscious, more loving in word, thought and action, more discerning about what I put into my body, and more aligned in my vision and purpose. Because of the change I witnessed in myself and countless others, I knew the power of this practice to transform and reroute lives. If we could only popularize the practice, I knew we could create a profound ripple effect of unblocking, transcendence, and alignment. 

Thus, I brought my industrious corporate skills to the mission. Employing many of the tactics from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I began to both spread the practice and my research findings on its benefits with an aim to go viral. The outreach targets were mavens, salespeople, and connectors, as they comprised the three groups of people that, according to Gladwell and Pareto’s principle, made up the 20% who effected 80% of social change. I recruited the help of Kundalini Activation facilitators who had well-established social media followings. Together, we contacted influencers, media outlets, corporate organizations, people of influence, and celebrities from various countries and walks of life and offered an opportunity to experience the practice. Each facilitator resonated with a particular social group. I leveraged my reputation and background to draw in people who would otherwise be turned off by esotericism, like lawyers, lobbyists, adjudicators, academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, doctors, and other professionals from the public and private sectors. I satisfied their left-brain desires with the research and right-brain yearnings with experience, contributing to a more awake and open atmosphere in each of their professional sectors. 

More researchers and energy workers from other practices caught wind of our mission and we joined forces to make energy healing scalable. We teamed up with researchers like Dr. William Bengston to develop lines of healing products and at-home trainings to empower people to strip back layers of inauthenticity so they could evolve their own energetic system and help the surrounding collective. It took time, but we achieved the tipping point. Energy work became as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation. 4 

Providing Guidance and Community 

When navigating any change in life, the presence and guidance of like-minded, encouraging people is essential to positive growth. For that reason, I maintained a list on my website of all the resources I and others had created on navigating spiritual transformations. Alongside, I provided links to spiritual support networks and organizations committed to consciousness exploration, like the Scientific and Medical Network, the Emergent Phenomena Research Consortium, and the Galileo Commission. And, as my career developed, I began to hold workshops, seminars, and networking events designed for continued education, experience, and support in spiritual emergence communities. Through these efforts, transformation could always be met with the right company. 

***** 

Suzanne’s prompt made me realize I hadn’t been living in my fullest, bravest, and most authentic power. What she said in Inside the Intelligence was right: I was the product; I had to serve who I was; and I had to honor and celebrate my own emergence. I had to let go of my small story and the plans and ideas I once had for myself. Something bigger was at play. I had to step back and see who I was and what pieces of the puzzle I had been given to help create a more whole world. And I had to do this as much for myself as for others and the world. Once I did, I watched as each action I took contributed to meaningful, lasting change and helped create the pro-creative, happiness-inducing reality we enjoy today. 

We are mirrors for each other to reach self-understanding and take committed action. Through example, we remind each other of who we are, so that we may each realize our essence and give back from that place. For me, it started with the Essay Contest, which called for me to double down on my research, disseminate it freely, and spread transformative experience far and wide. In that way, I helped spread the understanding of human potential as broadly as possible, inspiring others to do the same. With the help of many people who worked beside me, I contributed to changing our world. Together, we forged a tipping point for expanded consciousness. 

The process of awakening was and continues to be something that unites us all cross-culturally, as it reminds us that beneath our flesh we are part of the most impressive, magnificent field of consciousness. Watching that understanding permeate our collective systems, beliefs, and way of being on this planet has been the greatest gift of my lifetime. 

And with that – Happy New Year! Here’s to all the change to come. 🙂 

New Year’s Day 2050

Sixty years ago, I first imagined a beautiful future of communities hand-built of wood, straw, earthen plaster and thatch, of light-filled rooms warmed by the sun, of solar panels and rainwater collection and damaged ecosystems restored to glorious biodiversity. Building this future would be joyful, meaningful work. Everyone would be needed, their contributions valued. For two decades, I did my part to lead by example. But the rush to drain wetlands and throw up big-box stores continued unabated. Oil and gas drilling expanded, as did the wanton waste of energy, materials and people, hoarded wealth and refugee camps, and the callous disregard for the suffering of others. It was all too much.

When climate denial finally fizzled, the national mood sped right past hope and crash-landed in despair, taking me with it. Overnight, Climate change isn’t real became It’s too late to do anything.

Not so, said my young, idealistic architecture students. We can do better. And they went on to prove it.

Jemimah designed a community center on the riverfront of an under-resourced community to serve everyone, babies to elders. There were places to swim, play, garden, cook, learn, climb, feed the ducks, listen to music, meet friends, bike, walk, rest, and watch the sunset. For a while, people accessed the waterfront from their historic neighborhood on a graceful, wide green bridge over a noxious eight-lane highway from the same era as the Berlin Wall. But within the decade, buoyed by their rich experiences along the river, the residents banded together to remove the highway and install light rail, bike lanes, and miles of solar panels in its place.

Excited by their talent and vision, I assured my students that design-thinking is their superpower. When we align our actions with nature’s design wisdom, we tap into her 3.4-billion-year history of ingenious solutions that create and nurture life. Every being on earth is part of networks within networks, from the smallest cell to the largest organism, from a tiny niche ecosystem to a vast continent, from backyard weather to the earth’s climate. I encouraged my students to see that their individual talents and responsibilities are part of these nesting networks that form a miraculous breathing whole. My students belong here. We all belong here. Together, we found the courage to look into the future with hope.

Hope is not wishful thinking or empty optimism. Hope is a renewable resource, best tended in community. Hope is a necessary ingredient for effective action.

Armed with the certainty that We can do better, my students refused to follow the status quo of architectural practice in firms held hostage by late-stage Capitalism. Instead, they gave their imaginations free reign to roam over degraded waterfronts, impoverished inner cities, concrete barriers, and toxic waste dumps. They bravely confronted the interlinked crises of climate change and social injustice, and they answered with beauty. Drawing from deep wells of empathy, they raised their voices and sang out hopeful solutions.

Leah cleverly repurposed shipping pallets as temporary emergency homes, gardens and gathering places to occupy vacant lots and house the unhoused. City officials, inspired by her simple statement that housing is a human right, enacted policies to guarantee every one of their citizens a place to live. Other cities took note and followed suit.

Not once did these young people go to a place and say, This is what I want and this is what I expect from you. Instead, they asked, What do you need? And they listened to the answers and set about designing housing, community centers, schools, libraries, and heritage trails to reveal erased histories. They tore down barriers and built places of love and connection and healing.

At that time, we didn’t realize that each of us was acting like a single white blood cell in earth’s immune system response to the assaults and damage of centuries. It was a fertile time of unraveling and reweaving. It was all such a jumble; nobody could be certain of the outcome. Especially since all of us were still mired in and complicit with the very systems we so desperately wanted to change. Refusing to succumb to doubt or despair, parents and grandparents followed their hearts. They held rocking-chair sit-ins and chained closed the doors of fossil-fuel-funding banks. Other marched, voted, ran for office, started businesses, planted gardens.

Looking back, there was no one thing that pushed the world onto a better path. Much as we might have wished for it, there was no one answer, no magic formula. Other than this: people stopped saying It’s too late. Instead, their collective cry was We can do better, together.

When my students weren’t marching against pipelines and demanding justice, they spent long hours in the design studio, giving birth to their visions. I knew that if more people could see their work, it would inspire and create ripple effects of hope in action. Together with my students, we produced a podcast called Building Hope to feature their projects and to talk about their experiences designing them.

One episode featured Christian, who collaborated with the residents of the small town in Guatemala where his grandmother still lived, to design and 3-D print houses, schools, shops and community centers. Everyone there was already living a good life, they just needed better places in which to thrive. Following the exposure from the podcast, this way of working spread to other communities in his native country, and beyond.

Melonee helped a Baltimore neighborhood to rise from the ashes of decades of racist zoning and divisive infrastructure, by building a beautiful school set in a landscape of native plant gardens and a pond. A welcoming place for people of all ages to come together, visit, learn, grow, and celebrate. It was so successful, other neighborhoods followed their model. Eventually, Baltimore became as much garden as city.

I encouraged my students to, no matter what, follow their heart’s calling. They understood that no individual project was going to solve everything. Even if not in a visible way in their lifetime, they trusted that the stones they cast would create ripples to catalyze change. They knew they were a small part of a vast system.

Ava, guided by her last name meaning “hopeful” in Persian, designed a climate-resilient building for artists and small businesses that could be moved to higher ground when the waters rose. After the great flood of 2043, her building performed flawlessly and became a model for other coastal cities.

Juhi worked with a large team to build a mixed-use high-rise tower of mass timber on a prominent waterfront site in Boston to demonstrate eco-design in action, because, as she observed way back in 2018, “Climate change is now, it’s happening, and we can do better.” Her building sequesters more carbon than went into its construction, which is now the standard for all architecture in the U.S.

Jazmin turned the tide of soulless apartment buildings in a historic neighborhood with her proposal for a community of houses, a history heritage trail, a permaculture farm, and an arts center, on a site that had been a vibrant Freedman’s farming village after the Civil War. Residents were so inspired by learning their long-buried history that they organized into a cooperative to purchase the site from developers and build out her vision. Today, it’s a thriving showcase housing thousands of residents and supplying food for the entire community.

Each season of the podcast, Building Hope, inspired architecture students to give their own imaginations free reign. They followed their hearts, cast their own stones into the pond, making their own ripples. Other students shared the podcast with their friends around the country, and those students shared it with their friends around the world. Their beautiful proof that We can do better was guided by nature’s wisdom—that one small act of restoration connects to another and another. That together, we are the earth’s immune response. That healing is possible when we listen to our hearts and to each other.