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• 1 media/background_roots_WHITE background.png 2020-04-20T05:18:43-07:00 Part V: Systems-Level Collective Imagination within Policy-Making 22 plain 992201 2020-05-13T13:49:48-07:00 In many instances, language tied to civic engagement can be summarized by voting and or buying. Marcia Bjornerud, professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University, notes that “consumption and monetization have become strangely mixed up with the idea of good citizenship" (17). Lili Loofbourow echoes this sentiment in her historical assessment of American responses to shared threats stating that “we have been led to believe that consumerism is the only political power we, the people, really have” (18).
  
  When one searches for means of communicating with legislators and participating in the policy-making process, apart from voting, he/she/they is met with a vast supply of articles that detail how to effectively write notices, send hand-written letters, emails or fax. Apart from face to face interaction (repeatedly cited as the most impactful), citizens have the opportunity to petition, to protest, to participate in public hearings and to submit comments on proposed agency rules through the Federal Register (19). There are various online web pages that provide calendars of when certain legislation is discussed at different levels of government (20). Participation necessitates an awareness of the policymaking process, time and some degree of influence to succeed in scheduling appointments with decision-makers.
  
  Hi, again! I decided to work as an intern in the LA Mayor’s Office Department of Legislative and External Affairs this past semester (Spring 2020) to get a more felt understanding of constituent engagement in practice. Even within a city striving towards innovation, transparency, inclusivity and responsibility, interns are tasked with collecting feedback pen to paper and directing any Angeleno that calls the Mayor’s Help Desk to other phone numbers or telling them their inquiry will be followed up by a Constituent Services Representative within 72 hours. Grunting constituents disappointingly saying this has been their 5th time calling with no response is typical. Communities are increasingly diverse and due to the rapidly changing tech/media space, “traditional approaches of gathering feedback [for policymaking] deserve to be called into question” (21). While there are attempts being made, challenges abound. It proves difficult for the average American (especially minorities) to amplify their voice, and channels that do exist for this purpose are severely outdated and do not allow for genuine deliberation.
  
  There is a need to create new frameworks and spaces for collaborative imagining where stakeholders co-deliberate approachable speculative design and then work to animate said visions. This is not about mere participation, or involvement without shared decision-making. This is about the nexus between collaboration — shared work and shared decision making — and cooperation — shared work and shared decision making for a common benefit. As artist Caroline Woodard points out, with few experiences of shared decision making at home, at school, at work, or online, people often have a hard time learning how to collaborate (22). This will be hard. However, if we are to change our course, we are going to have to think hard, be active in listening and picking apart stories that do not serve us and infuse and normalize those that do. Stories grounded in our inherent interconnections with humans and non-humans alike. Stories that encourage us to be curious about our cognitive blind spots. Stories that recognize the real evolutionary benefits and functional role of feelings with respect to processes of life regulation and behavioral flexibility. Stories that place us within rather than apart from the natural world.
  
  Narratives pertaining to productivity, output correlated to human value, and competition against one another are re-iterated via prominent textual, auditory and visual language. While expressions such as Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” may be used to justify assumptions about competitiveness and domination, perhaps it is worth noting his observation that “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
  
  The current moment is marked by pandemic, isolation, distancing and physical, financial and emotional pain. The next several years will be characterized by a rebuilding, with millions economically stranded and trillions of taxpayer money being injected into the economy. How will we create a robust resilient and regenerative economy and an inclusive respectful society? How will this rebuilding unfold? Rather than exacerbate root causes of our fundamental problems, lock-in unsustainable systems and industries for another generation or more, increase wealth inequality and treat our land, air, waters, and soils as refuse heaps, we must push past residual mental models, aligning those with hard skills who may accept positions for security and comfort with visionaries and community members. These conversations to usher in a more sustainable and resilient economy are not expendable or inappropriate to have because of the economic and emotional suffering triggered by rampant tragedy. Publics everywhere are grappling with how to respond to public health messages about the risks of COVID-19. This real gut-wrenching pain makes these conversations more pressing. These discussions do not discredit pain and suffering. They are borne of them.
  
  There is a complex knot of interacting social and biological forces linking human health and the state of the natural world. Perhaps we must ask ourselves, would we go through these motions if there were other options at hand? In this ongoing experiment of democracy, Professor David Orr asks us to consider, if the founders knew in 1787 what we know now about how the earth works as a physical and biological system, how would they have written a Constitution for a complex world of leads and lags, positive and negative feedbacks, and long delays between action and consequence—all governed by biology, ecology, and thermodynamics? How might we calibrate the systems we have developed with how the Earth works as a physical system? We need new norms for how we bring our worlds back together. Given the fact that our species has the remarkable capability of symbolic language, which has given way to imagination and forward-thinking insight unlike any other, we can either choose to be passive or active participants in history and in this larger ecology in which we form part.
  
  Let us take inspiration from the mycorrhizal networks that elegantly collaborate, cooperate and interconnect across our globe, working underneath our feet and bringing nutrients to life above ground. Let us look to the Dymaxion Map created by futurist Buckminster Fuller in 1954 that reveals one island surface with no visually obvious distortions of the relative shapes and sizes of land areas, no subjective “right way up,” no up or down, North or South. . .