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• 1 media/background_roots_WHITE background.png 2020-04-20T00:07:23-07:00 Part II: On the Constraints of Recurrent Language 30 plain 980458 2020-05-13T13:52:05-07:00 The eco-literacy of interconnections and underlying features of complex systems, and the need for these dynamic living patterns to inform our daily lives, decision making processes, alliances, treaties and institutions is pressing if we are to develop robust resilient, regenerative and inclusive economies. However, what informs these processes and structures are the repetitive textual, auditory and visual language and ensuing outlooks that shape both how we perceive and experience the world — what we see and how we know. Politics, advertising and various forms of media are a few sources of recurrent emphasis on human individualism,autonomy and the belief that these are mutually exclusive from collective arrangements and united forces. Further attention is placed on the pursuit of social security, economic comfort and pleasure. There is nothing wrong with these values. However, by failing to underscore them with our interdependence, with the partnership and symbiosis that is inherent in the organizational patterns of living systems, these goals are able to nurture mechanisms of power, greed, fear, mistrust, division, and paternalism; mechanisms that lead to the accumulation of wealth and spur power differentials, socioeconomic stratas, and exploitation; mechanisms that enable prestige, position, academic and corporate ladder climbing, and constrain bubbling civic potential. 
  
  Mainstream norms penetrate more deeply than we tend to admit. As American evolutionary theorist and biologist, Lynn Margulis put it, “any idea we conceive as fact or truth is integrated into an entire school of thought, of which we are usually unaware” (3). (Often) subconsciously ingrained assumptions ground everyone’s perceptions. Much of the mythos that in effect inform decision-making and organize society in various ways (the global economy, food, energy, waste, consumption, production and education systems, etc) are often accepted at face value. While it is common to understand the need for change, getting past residual mental models is much more difficult in practice. Rampant polarization reveals that both those who label themselves as “conservatives” and “progressives” may perhaps subconsciously think they know more than others, directing their understandings of issues with contempt, moral judgment, and elitism, pointing fingers at groups of people and banging heads; “If only they just understood. . .” “If only that group of people just got it. . .”
  
  Excuse me as I break this fourth wall. In this very act of conveying information, my own assumptions creep in. Shall I include the definition of confirmation bias? What to me seems a simple concept where we seek information to support our own attitudes potentially not worth mentioning, to many, is a new term. Not only this, but the experimental basis supporting the very phenomenon can also be questioned and unraveled, perhaps even suggesting a more adaptive quality rather than an undesirable one (4). Who would have thought that assumptions can blockade the facilitation of knowledge? :o And, further, I wrestle with the fact that the very language I use in this piece has the potential to come off as obscure or estranging . . . serving as motivation to transform it into various forms. Alas, *self-referential-moment-over* perceiving our interpretations of reality as truth stalls progress. 
  
  Due to their interesting drama, it is common to speak about and visualize our future in either dystopian language — showcasing our world gone to s*** — or utopian fantasy language often used to dismiss and de-legitimize imaginative ideas. Alenda Y. Chang, assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, unpacks the recent prevalence of dystopic and post-apocalyptic games, the common central premises of social and environmental breakdown and the insertion of players into hostile environments in her book “Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games” (5). A thread can be drawn into young adult fiction as well where characters are found in dark, post-nuclear fallout futures. Todd Mitchel argues this is an embodiment of the deep-seated social need or anxiety towards the time, writing that "Right now, we know on some deeply unconscious (or maybe even conscious) level that we’re screwing things up” (6). 
  
  On the other hand, grassroots endeavors at creating alternative structures and value systems that foster community, belonging and sustainability are often deemed as impossible and idealized utopias.
  Our understanding of the present inhibits efforts, funding and legitimate attention to arrangements that do not fall within the generalizations we have outlined. In situations involving common pool resources, for example, it is often held that if there is no outside force imposing management or privatization, the “good” will be over-exploited. A large literature of “prisoner’s dilemma” experiments claims to show how rational individuals behave when confronted with social dilemmas, such as how to allocate a limited resource (7). Every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner’s dilemma, a story overlaid on a mathematical matrix that comes out of game theory which posits that actions depend on expectations and anticipation (8). Modeling common pool resource decisions as a prisoner's dilemma, actors will choose their dominant strategy which is to defect no matter what the other player chooses. Strategies leading to a Nash Equilibrium provide considerably less utility for each participant than what would be feasible with a cooperative strategy (9). These common goods/resources are caught in a trap. Humans will despoil any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it. Garrett Hardin refers to this as a tragedy in his 1968 article, the “Tragedy of the Commons” which has become a highly quoted expression (10). The article “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge,” according to noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (11). He goes on to say that like most sacred texts, “The Tragedy of the Commons” is more often cited than read. Mutual defection as a solution to the game is merely the endogenously stable state or equilibrium which “might never be directly observed because the systems in question are never isolated from exogenous influences that move and destabilize them” (8) In classical mechanics and in economics, equilibrium concepts are tools for analysis, not predictions of what is expected to be observed. However, this logic has been described within a World Bank Discussion Paper as “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues” (12). Elinor Ostrom,the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, illustrates the reality that a private owner will “overuse” a commons just as much as will a series of unorganized co-owners in cases where dividing and privatizing community-managed property have had disastrous results, illuminated by the destruction of ecosystems around the world (i.e. rampant deforestation, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, soil erosion and depletion, etc) (7). According to Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School Yochai Benkler, rationalized modernization programs implemented as “regulatory interventions or state-sponsored public works, or as “privatization” through parcelizing common property resource (CPR) into individualized property rights, were likely to cause greater disruption and loss of local knowledge about proper management of the common pool resource than leaving the existing CPR in place (13). Ostrom’s extensive empirical fieldwork reveals various places negotiating cooperative schemes, dealing with people who may try to get around established rules and blending social systems with local ecosystems. All of this to say, narratives deemed as truth and accepted at face value inform conversations between friends and policymakers alike, as well as shape the spaces individuals are given to engage, make decisions and create together. 
  
  Humans have an amplified capacity for imagination, but what we see often fills our vision, and it is hard to see beyond what is on the other side. In effect, the language we utilize in passing and are surrounded by enables yet also limits our imagination by creating narrow frames and mental models. We are the stories we tell ourselves, or more accurately, we are the stories that are told to us again and again. The words, images and mediascapes that surround us are a few means by which society, often unconsciously, shapes who we think we are and how we can act. What we are taught and the paintbrush with which people, groups, concepts or events are rendered allows for certain ideologies to be perpetuated and others to be extinguished.
• 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. . .