Above photo: By Violaine Martin/Flickr.
How does change actually happen?
This question has followed me across every chapter of my life, from political science and philosophy studies, to graduate work in peacebuilding, into law and food policy, and now into conversations about the polycrisis and metacrisis. Across these settings, I have worked at many scales, always searching for where transformation truly takes root.
In the first essay in this series, I explored how food and place reveal the limits of our political binaries. In the second, I examined resistance as an expression of kinship rather than opposition. This final essay weaves those threads together to ask what becomes possible when we understand collapse not only as crisis, but as a collective passage.
Across the landscapes of work that informed these essays, I kept noticing that people who care deeply about the future often divide into two broad camps. One camp focuses on concentrated power, believing the decisive levers for climate, finance, and technological futures remain in the hands of elites. The other believes transformation will emerge from the ground up through bioregional organizing, regenerative agriculture, mutual aid, and community self-determination.
Working on federal food policy, I felt pulled toward bioregional practitioners who carried a deep understanding of land, place, and relationship. Yet I also sensed a mismatch between the scale of their work and the scale of the crises unfolding. Meanwhile, some national advocates dismissed locally rooted efforts as insufficient or nostalgic. Over time, I realized the deeper limitation was the binary itself. The idea that we must choose between local and global action, policy work or grassroots organizing, building new systems or engaging the imperfect ones we have, keeps us trapped in categories that cannot hold the complexity of this moment. What we need is not a different side, but a different lens.
What Is Actually Collapsing
When I use the word collapse, I am not predicting the end of civilization, but describing what many of us already experience: political, economic, ecological, and cultural systems that structured modern life are breaking down under the weight of their own contradictions. Economic arrangements built on infinite growth collide with ecological limits. Climate patterns destabilize, biological diversity declines, and water becomes increasingly scarce. Democratic institutions lose legitimacy as policy is shaped more by concentrated power than by public will. Healthcare systems profit from illness rather than supporting wellbeing. Food systems deplete soil, farmers, and eaters. Communities fragment, and our capacity for collective action weakens.
Beneath all this sits the story of inevitable progress, humans as separate from nature, technology as savior, and control as security. That narrative is dissolving because it no longer matches lived experience. Collapse is the accelerating present, not only a future threat. In response, two familiar narratives surface. One retreats into isolation and suspicion. The other clings to the belief that innovation will preserve the status quo. Though different in tone, both arise from the same worldview that treats life as competitive, security as control, and uncertainty as danger.
Indigenous teachings, ecological science, and even the cycles within our bodies invite another perspective. They remind us that decay and renewal are inseparable, that fire prepares soil for new growth, and that dissolution is part of life’s metabolism. Collapse becomes a threshold rather than an ending, a passage between worlds. And once seen as a threshold, new questions emerge: What is ending that no longer serves? What capacities do we need to cross this threshold together? What stories are dissolving, and what might take their place?
How Change Actually Happens
Years of food systems advocacy and teaching law students to confront unjust systems taught me the necessity of resistance and strategic action. Every meaningful movement has relied on them. Yet I also saw how activism, when fueled only by urgency and certainty, can replicate the very patterns it seeks to transform. We push harder, argue louder, and burn out faster. Complexity feels like obstruction rather than invitation. The work that calls to me now holds onto strategy while also strengthening our capacity to pause, sense, discern, and tend what is emerging beneath the surface. This is the orientation that underlies post-partisan practice.
Post-partisan does not mean neutral, centrist, or “above politics.” It is not a slide into both-sides flattening, and it is certainly not a retreat from truth. Post-partisan work takes evidence and structural analysis seriously. What it rejects is reducing people to political labels that no longer map onto the challenges we face. Across rural and urban communities, and across conservative and progressive identities, many people share material stakes in clean water, living soil, healthy children, and resilient local economies. Post-partisan practice helps us locate these shared stakes without pretending differences do not exist. It also maintains clear boundaries: collaboration cannot extend to ideologies or movements that rely on domination, dehumanization, or the deliberate distortion of reality.
Complexity science helps illuminate why this matters. In complex systems, outcomes arise from relationships, feedback loops, and evolving patterns, not linear control. Change is cultivated, not engineered. The work becomes a process of probing, sensing, responding, and creating conditions in which new patterns can take root. This is how the Overton Window moves, not by argument alone, but through shifts in lived experience, cultural meaning, and legitimacy. I remember when smoking on airplanes seemed unremarkable. The movement to smoke-free spaces grew gradually through community organizing, shifting norms, and shared acknowledgment of harm. Policy eventually followed, but culture had already moved. Mental health was once framed as personal failure. The emergence of trauma-informed understanding came through science, yes, and also through people telling the truth about their experiences, experimenting with new forms of care, and building spaces where those truths could be held. Regenerative agriculture is moving from the margins to the mainstream through lived evidence, farmer-to-farmer learning, and the visible failures of industrial systems. Legitimacy shifts first and then policy trails behind.
These examples show that while top-down decisions can accelerate change, durable transformation in complex systems usually grows through distributed pattern shifts. Small, local, relational work reorganizes meaning and expectations, and prepares the ground for moments when broader change becomes possible.
Local And Global: A Cosmolocal View
These shifts also reveal that transformation rarely comes from choosing either the local or the global. It emerges from the relationship between them. Ecological systems are nested; what happens in one layer ripples through others. The cosmolocal perspective helps illuminate this, showing how knowledge and culture circulate widely, while production, governance, and care remain grounded in place. Food makes this relationship visible. We all depend on soil, water cycles, and pollinators, regardless of our politics. Organizing around watersheds and foodsheds roots people in shared material conditions. Bioregional work is often dismissed as “local,” yet it cultivates exactly the competencies collapse requires. When communities save seed, tend gardens, build cooperative markets, teach one another, or make decisions together, they are practicing self-organization, mutual aid, ecological literacy, and collaborative governance. These are essential preparation for a world where centralized systems are increasingly strained.
And something else unfolds alongside this work. It becomes joyful. Meals are shared, children learn to care for soil, harvest gatherings strengthen connections, and people remember what it feels like to create something living together. These moments are not escapes or distractions from collapse. They nourish the very capacities that make long-term transformation possible.
Forms Of Power And The Work Of Many Timeframes
To navigate collapse with integrity, we need a wider understanding of where power lives. Yes, decision-making power in the hands of elites matters, but power also moves through culture, story, relationships, imagination, and daily practice. Paradigm power—the assumptions about what is normal, legitimate, or possible—is distributed across society and can shift quickly once cracks appear. Power also moves through multiple time horizons. During acute crises, communities mobilize rapidly through mutual aid and acts of protection. These responses often succeed because of trust and relationships cultivated long before the crisis. Over months and years, we see slower tempos as policies shift, institutions reform, coalitions form or dissolve, and new structures take root. Beneath both lies the longest arc of change, which unfolds through shifts in worldview and meaning. This is the realm where paradigms evolve and Overton Windows expand. These tempos feed one another. Rapid responses draw strength from the slower cultivation of capacity. Long-term shifts become possible when crises reveal what no longer works.
Post-partisan practice lives primarily in the medium and long arcs. It tends the cultural and relational foundations that allow communities to respond coherently when conditions shift. It helps people move together rather than fracture. And though this work can appear modest, it is what makes structural change durable. The slow work makes the fast work possible.
Navigating Together: What Becomes Possible
Across my work, from federal policy settings to grassroots organizing, regenerative agriculture, and metacrisis dialogue, I’ve learned that no single scale or strategy can meet the complexity of this moment. What we need is an ecology of responses that includes policy and governance, land stewardship, mutual aid, trauma healing, cultural work, and the cultivation of imagination. None replace the others; together, they form a living system.
This ecology is also intergenerational. Young people are inheriting climate instability and institutional fragility. They need adults who can speak honestly without collapsing into despair, and spaces where they can practice autonomy, interdependence, and shared navigation. At the same time, they bring ways of sensing and imagining that those of us shaped by relative stability cannot access alone. Intergenerational reciprocity becomes part of how we navigate, by listening, supporting, and co-creating pathways none of us can map alone.
Post-partisan practice holds these layers together. It doesn’t erase conflict or ask us to deny difference. It simply recognizes that inherited binaries no longer reflect the terrain we’re traversing. Collaboration becomes possible when we begin with the material conditions that ground us, such as land, water, health, livelihoods, and community wellbeing. And yet, there are days when this work feels heavy. Coalitions fracture, projects lose funding or momentum, people withdraw, and grief arrives without warning. Even those with steady practices and strong commitments can feel unmoored. Post-partisan practice does not pretend those moments are easy. It invites a gentle return to relationship, curiosity, and presence, trusting that clarity often emerges through the act of coming back.
It is tempting to wait for better conditions, and to imagine that this work begins only after polarization recedes or social trust is repaired. But regeneration does not wait for ideal conditions. Depleted soil begins healing the moment we engage in practices that support life. Cover crops, compost, and diversity gradually build structure and fertility. In the same way, shared meals, collaborative work, democratic decision-making, and honoring multiple ways of knowing slowly rebuild social fabric. We start where we are, with whatever trust, capacity, or connection is available, and allow practice to create the conditions for renewal. Over time, this steady work expands our sense of what becomes possible together.
Returning To Food And Place: Why This Matters
Food remains one of the clearest doorways into regenerative public life, a theme that underpinned the first essay in this series. Food is universal and concrete; it returns us to ecology, community, and the daily practices through which culture is shaped. When we grow, cook, preserve, or share food with others, we practice cooperation, mutual aid, ecological literacy, and collective decision-making. This is transformation happening in real time.
Food can also create openings across difference, but those openings are often fragile. A shared meal can surface tension, because vegan, omnivore, carnivore, and other dietary patterns have become politically coded, and even choices about where we shop or eat carry moral and cultural meaning. People also interpret “shared stakes” through very different worldviews shaped by kinship or domination, reciprocity or control. Even so, post-partisan practice does not pretend food is apolitical; it stays attentive to the ways food is debated and symbolized while working from the material realities we all depend on. Concern for water quality, soil health, children’s wellbeing, and the viability of local farms often provides enough common ground to stay in relationship, even when values or cosmologies diverge.
In the food council gatherings I facilitated, alignment didn’t come from persuading people to agree on values or politics; it emerged through working side by side. Farmers, health advocates, educators, activists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers arrived with very different assumptions, yet the work itself of mapping farmland loss, strengthening local food economies, and improving school meals, created a shared field of attention. Their political views loosened enough for people to notice how their lives were tied to the same land, the same water, and the same community wellbeing. This is post-partisan practice in motion, expressed through grounded, relational, embodied, and place-based work. It shows that modest, shared practices can widen our capacity to collaborate, even when we carry different worldviews into the room.
The Work Of Now
We are living through a passage in which old systems are unraveling and new patterns are taking shape. No single strategy, movement, or generation can navigate this alone. We cannot predict the future, but we can influence how we participate in its formation. The ways we relate to one another, listen, share food, care for soil and water, and make meaning are not preparations for some future transformation. They are the transformation, unfolding through practice.
Collapse is already here in many forms, and so is the possibility for regeneration. Whether we meet this moment in isolation or relationship, fear or curiosity, domination or kinship, these choices shape the conditions future generations will inherit. The world is shifting in ways none of us can fully map, yet we are not without agency. Every act of care, every restored relationship, and every small step toward shared responsibility contributes to the future that is already taking shape. This is work we can keep doing, steadily and together.
