I just left the Amtrak train and after an easy walk I am sitting on the Flyaway Bus speeding on the highway towards LAX where I will board a Finnair flight to Helsinki. I will arrive tomorrow evening and an hour later join a collection of education entrepreneurs at the pizza and beer pre-party for the HundrED innovation conference. From Finland, I will go to Istanbul and then to Dubai to join other climate influencers at the Cop28 conference. There is a certain horrible irony in the travel required to support education and stop climate change. I am aware of this irony, embarrassed by how obvious it is and yet, I do it anyway. I ask myself if it would contribute more to go, or to refrain from going? In our sustainability change making work, we often suggest that students consider the MOGO principle, “how can I do the MOst GOod and the least harm” when making choices in their activism efforts. I am under no illusion that I am actually an influencer or that my presence at any of these global events would be missed or is truly contributing anything. I go because it gives me the opportunity to create connections and have conversations that lead to resonance that generates trust that builds commitment that constructs alliances that maybe, just maybe moves the needle towards a better world. These rare and powerful moments don’t happen behind a zoom screen. Sometimes in those infinite zoom meetings, sometimes when someone is particularly exuberant to schedule yet another, yet another meeting to think about how to potentially do the thing that we are all wanting to do, sometimes I say out loud what I am always thinking which is, “I know that we are all good people and I appreciate you, all of you, but I am exhausted from talking to people like you, people who agree with me.” How do we find people who don’t think like us but also care to be in conversation with us? Isn’t that the real work to be done?
I have been traveling a lot these last many months. I scroll through facebook or instagram and I see others’ travel and vacations and I too would like to share mine. There is a certain affluence in the currency of travel pictures that I am both attracted to and repelled by. But I don’t often share my images anymore, because interspersed in my very same feed are the other things that I care about, and these days many of them come with warning labels cautioning “violent, shocking imagery” of death and suffering. At this moment the images come from Palestine and Israel, although for the last year they have come from Ukraine. Sometimes they come from Mexico, where I live and a few hurricanes lately have devastated. Scrolling on social media has become a pinball pull on the spectrum of mundane and insane. I scroll past images of the golden hour in Tuscany, the newest tik-tok craze “I trust my latina” where a latin girlfriend hurls a shoe from across the room at the red plastic cup on the top of her partner’s head. I try super hard not to spend too much time on baby videos or puppies because although I find a certain solace in them, I am afraid the algorithm might imagine that is all that I care about.
I do want to post my pictures of the Colombian street scene, my jungle bamboo architecture adventure, the tuk-tuks South American style, my amazing adult children that I hold tight in love and gratitude. But I usually can’t bring myself to post any of this lucky life because it all seems so strikingly useless and insensitive in the midst of what is happening today.
I spent $28.75 on a seaweed salad and poke bowl in the airport lounge. I cringe, and purchase it anyway. What would some people in the world do with $28.75? In countries like Vietnam, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon the money spent on my less than stellar lunch that I won’t finish could feed their families for a week. If asked, would I give up my meal to feed their families? Oh yes, I would! And yet I don’t because there is no direct connection or correlation or consequence of my life choices alongside their lives. I do not mean that there is no consequence, just that it is not direct and therefore I cannot see it or feel it or experience it and my sacrifice is empty, or feels empty, or unrecognized. In these last many months I seem to resonate, circle around and pulsate with the question of “does anything I do make a difference?” Does it matter if I spend someone’s week’s wages on a poke bowl?
And yet it does, doesn’t it? I rally for students and educators, for all of us to believe this, to believe that what we do today matters not only today, but tomorrow and in our collective future.
Maybe the single greatest challenge of my work, of our work to bring sustainability to the world is precisely this thing – this ability to link what each of the 8 billion of us do with the systemic and long vision impact. Today we are sometimes given this opportunity, we can choose to purchase organic, fair trade, ethically produced or sustainable products. But, I realize that these kinds of choices are only, once again, given to those with privilege to decide who and how privilege will be distributed and although we suggest fair trade, it is so often false trade, false choices. Maybe it isn’t about not choosing the seaweed salad, but actively choosing the ceasefire in Gaza, or even better, that there is no war at all? How can we influence the world to imagine better choices?
The philanthropic world believes that educating women and girls is one way to do this. There is direct evidence that a world where women lead is kinder, gentler, safer and more equitable. I don’t believe of course that it is only women that are capable of leading with compassion, just that there is little permission for a man to do so. I have a kind, compassionate young adult son and I worry about him everyday. But, the conundrum of course is that if we know that women leadership might create a better world, we still need the men in leadership to create space for women to lead. Once again it is the privileged choosing who has the privilege. In part, we women fail at rising to leadership because we will not, we choose not, to fight men with the same tactics that they fight each other and so change is not nearly as dramatic, as obvious or as quick. This, I suppose is the suggestion of the new Barbie movie, to fight men we must outsmart them and induce them to fight each other and force their own failure? We should come to power but under our own power. I love the posts of Ellevest, the women only investment firm for the unabashed suggestion that women with money, and by direct correlation, women with power, is always a good thing. But, as we all are witnessing, time is running out. We cannot wait and we cannot afford to continue to lose our mothers and daughters to violent combat and senseless sacrifice.
And so I return to the system, within the system, of the bigger system and I try to find my point of leverage, my opportunity, the one tiny connection within my sphere of influence that could potentially create a ripple of change that could support the systems change, the big change that we need. Yesterday I wrote a grant request to develop an app that teaches and supports systems thinking skills for students who want to create change. If funded it would use AI to help students identify a challenge, deeply understand it, name their sphere of influence and then ideate a list of the most powerful opportunities that they have to affect change. On the surface it could be a brilliant catalyst for student agency. Then in the way that we must do when we think of systems, my enthusiasm becomes more somber as I wonder about this technology in the hands of those who don’t care about the world in the way that I do. What could be the unintended consequences of powerful skills in systems thinking in the wrong hands? Already, I want to redesign my technology. Can we be sure to create an algorithm that only supports solutions for a sustainable world? Is there a litmus test for quality caring humans that non human intelligence can administer? I recognize the absurdity of this scenario, that our machines might decide our “humanity” and I cringe again. Where do we start? How will we end?