Explore Solutions
Ideas to shift perspectives and paradigms.
Guide to the Page
This page has solutions for everyone.
Indigenous philosophies, generations of academic work, environmental advocacy, and the results of scientific research have laid the foundation for great change. We hope the ideas on SoCal Earth can help to localize this change by empowering people and communities with data and tools at this pivotal time in planetary history.
Finding joy, community, and creativity in our work will nourish us as we attempt to find a new pathway forward.
- Making Sense of It All: Where to Focus Our Efforts
- Climate Change and Biodiversity Are Bookends to All Earth's Systems
- Key Topics, Key Solutions
- Approaching Solutions
- Scalable Solutions
- Featured Explorations
- Regeneration, Not Extraction!
- Toward a Circular Economy
- More of Our Favorite Models
- Band-Aids vs. Faucets
- Business Unusual: Invest | Divest
- Keywords for Climate Crisis
The term "climate change" is often used as shorthand for multiple forms of planetary crisis--sometimes called polycrisis. Polycrisis includes toxins in our air, water, and bodies, and things that are out of balance, missing or overabundant. This includes so many things, it can be overwhelming. Where can we even begin?
Here are three ideas to give this massive topic some shape:
- Focus where resilience is lowest and vulnerability is highest (these are defined on the climate page). Build community and connectivity in the way you do best and support others in doing the same.
- Focus on improving biodiversity and addressing climate change--carve out space for all creatures, stop the use of fossil fuels, and cool things down. Work from where you sit.
- Aim for 2030, when we can make the most difference, rather than 2045, when we will feel the results of our inaction.
In other words, put community and climate first, make decisions accordingly, encourage others to do the same, and do it now. Hold elected officials to these same standards.
The titles of the books above are the nine planetary boundaries that we must respect in order to preserve life on the planet. You do not have to know what these terms mean in order to make change. If you are curious to learn more, we recommend that you watch the TedTalks of Johan Röckstrom and visit the website of the Stockholm Resilience Center to learn about the planetary boundaries concept that partly inspired our project. Their academic papers contain a wealth of information--and very specific metrics and goals for how we need to reframe our priorities.
- Prevent climate change and improve biodiversity on land and ocean, and everything else will follow.
- See earth's systems as extensions of ourselves, earth's creatures as our kin, and earth as our only home.
- Be like a bookend. Hold up the values and actions that put community and climate first in order to preserve life for ourselves and the planet.
Key Topics, Key Solutions
We generally don't tell people what they need to do to make change. We believe that people's intimate knowledge of their world gives them the ability to determine appropriate courses of action.
Our job is to give people tools and data to think with. Below are key takeaways from all of our pages.
And because people ask us all the time what they should do, we have created some suggestions, ideas, directions, and scalable solutions. Start with the flip cards below and continue on down the page....
Biodiversity
Conserve habitat above all else. Fight for a proprotional approach to 30x30 or 50x50 (see biodiversity section) on the planet as well as in your own city and community.
Indigenous Perspectives
Land back to Indigenous partners will also preserve native habitats and will expand the views of Indigenous people that prioritize kinship with the earth and all its creatures.
Water
Increase percolation to feed aquifers. Stop trapping water outside of the water system by using water bottles. Explore solutions: fog catchers, atmospheric water generation, and everything from grey water to swales.
Climate
Imagine a fossil fuel free future. Reject any climate solution that bolsters fossil fuels. Phase our natural gas. Invest in nature-based solutions first. Be careful that technological solutions do not reproduce patterns and harms.
Food
Build a local food system. Support the creation of positions and institutions whose sole focus is securing a reliable food supply in the case of supply chain breakdown. To relocalize food, we need to preserve land.
Built Environment
Listen to the messages of old infrastructure: depave, build with new materials, create multiple pathways, embed redundancy in systems. Break cycles of harm through the placement of locally unwanted land uses. Build equitable housing.
Ocean Health
Prioritize what the largest and smallest ocean creatures need and everything else will fall into place. Halt polluted urban runoff into the oceans and reengage with coastal wetlands for multiple benefit.
In terms of energy, the direction is clear: shut down wells, do not open new wells, do not expand of fossil fuel infrastructure, not excuses for continuing oil and gas business as usual. Decarbonize, transition, test and scale. Reject false climate solutions. Learn to tell the difference.
Approaching Solutions
Successful climate action needs to be flexible, non proscriptive, and adaptable to all sectors. It needs to be able to shrink or grow. It needs to be participatory, doable and possible, as well as stretching the limits of the human imagination--much as we have stretched the limits of Earth's systems. Change needs to be both global and tied to place. It needs to embrace the imperfect so long as the imperfect takes us on the path toward our goal.
Explore Project Regeneration. And especially Nexus Solutions and their Cascade of Solutions.
Explore Project Drawdown.There is so much to think with on their website. Especially see their Drawdown Roadmap.
All of this work emphasizes the urgency, purpose, and direction we need to take with climate change. Our approach builds from these organizations and more!
Regeneration, Not Extraction!
How can we give back to the planet instead of only taking from it? The resources below explore regeneration as the premier way to shift your thinking in order to give back to the earth.
Read our two nutshell books below to learn more about Regenerative Approaches!
Toward a Circular Economy
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a key global hub for understanding and participating in what we call the circular economy. Circular economics, donut economies, and degrowth are linked to the concepts of regeneration above--and linked to utilizing design and core principles of access rather than ownership to redevelop our relationship to things we make, eat, wear, and use.
One key question in circular economics is whether we can decouple growth from resource constraints. A related question is whether our own sense of progress can be decoupled from growth--that is what's known as degrowth.
More of our Favorite Models
Below, we've gathered together some of our favorite approaches, models, and solutions.
Band-Aids vs. Faucets
Flowcharts, memes, and infographics to help us ask ourselves...
"Is the solution a band-aid or does it turn off the faucet?"
Business Unusual: Invest | Divest
Investing in the future means valuing things differently--learning to see the work that the earth does as the most precious resource we have. With your money, make sure you support organizations and entities that
- Seek the circular
- Reject the conventional
- Work with the earth instead of trying to dominate it.
If you want your investments and our current economic system to last through the pressures of a changing climate, insist that your investment companies stop participating in and supporting fossil fuels, deforestation, and other carbon-intensive, and wasteful actions that harm humans, nonhuman beings, and habitat--everything from building warehouses to engaging in war and weapons manufacturing. This is called DIVESTMENT and is just one of many things that consumers and investors have power to change.
TIAA Divest is an example of a divestment campaign for higher educational institutions: https://tiaa-divest.org/
People are just beginning to create ways of valuing the work that people and natural systems do that expands our narrowminded vision of the gross domestic product.
If we had to pay for the work that all of earth's sytems do for us for free, we'd be in serious debt. In fact, we would not even be able to get a seat at earth's table.
InVEST is a software that allows you to use these calculations. Incorporating economic analyses into open space or into formal indices like climate vulnerability and resilience is badly needed. But it will require a paradigm shift--and a different way of doing business.
Keywords for Climate Crisis
The keyword flipboxes below are how we think of the paradigm shift necessary for living and thriving in the time of climate crisis. Use the word pairs to question systems, reorient your thinking, give shape to the transition we are in, and judge projects, decisions, or actions. Click the button at bottom to add your own word pairs. This is a little more theoretical than most of our flipboxes, but we are academics, so we hope you will indulge us on this one.
Anthropocene
An epoch when humans become drivers of geology, leading to instability, scarcity, warming, and reactive ecosystems. This is the epoch in which we live now, although some don't believe it. We need to redesign our lives around the practices and principles below.
Holocene
An epoch characterized by relative stability, in which human actions, while extractive, were not the main driver of geological change. That epoch has ended, although some don't believe it. We need to move away from the practices and principles below.
Regeneration
Where humans work with and within natural systems, as part of cohesive ecosystems that feed the biosphere. Rewrites the notion of progress to be about integration with natural systems. Practices take the long view and benefit future generations.Think percolation rather than channelization. Community-based rather than technocratic.
Extraction
Where humans take from ecological systems, utilizing "man over nature" paradigms in which humans divorce themselves from other elements in the biosphere, making short-term decisions that compromise the integrity of ecosystems. Diminishes the ability of future generations to flourish. Technocratic rather than community-based.
Decentralization
Decentralized systems withstand pressure, breakage, assault, or incursion. They are rhizomatic and cannot be pulled out from the roots or cut off at the head. Multiple centers = multiple modes of thought, and multiple truths. Subjective as opposed to objective. Decentralized systems are more resilient.
Centralization
Hallmark of modernist perspectives, a centralized system relies on top-down control, and leaders or structures that are vulnerable to attack, breakage, or compromise. Single center = single mode of thought, and single truth. Objective as opposed to subjective. Centralized systems lack resilience.
Circularity
Systems work in cycles, feedback loops, interconnections, seasons; thinking generations ahead and behind. Circular systems are self supporting and reflexive, creating positive externalities and closed loop systems. Think zero waste, crade to grave, nature-based solutions. Indigenous perspectives often emphasize circularity.
Linearity
Reliance on unidirectional time, progression or regression, cause to effect but not back again. Thinking evolutionarily and hierarchically rather than ecologically. Significant negative externalities, such as tailings and waste generation. Reliance on technical experts rather than local knowledge systems.
Redundancy
Inclusion of additional pathways or parts to systems of water, energy, food, etc. to provide back up during times of extreme pressure. Multiple pathways rather than tightly coupled systems. Weakened links can be worked around. Slow movement. Systems with redundancies can withstand pressure and avoid operational compromise.
Efficiency
Assembly line thinking, tightly coupled systems. Attempts to maximize outputs with fewer inputs. Intended to increase speed. Close relationships between component parts. Under climate pressures, vulnerable to weak links, breakages, which can cause widespread compromise to energy, water, and/or other systems.
Interdependence
Acknowledgement of exploitation within human systems that have privileged consolodation of power in one group. Embracing connection of humans, animals, living and non-living things in the biosphere. Reanimates the non-human and right sizes the role of the human in ecosystems.
Independence
False narrative of rugged individualism and bootstrapping, without acknowledgement of the labor of subjugated communities. A denial of interconnectedness and a belief that humans are separate from ecological systems. Related to monoculture, monocropping, pesticide use, and human-centrism. Relies on overanimation of humans and deanimation of the nonhuman. Elimination of problem species.
Queer Fluidity
The rejection of male/female and associated binaries as definitional. Moves beyond conventional constraints, envisioning new categories, and making room for new systems of thought. Navigation of in betweenness; body-centered identities. Embracing the imperfect body, like the imperfect planet. Related to non-binary identities, alternative family systems, disability.
Gender Binary
Hinging male and female opposition to additional Cartesian power-laden binaries. Male is associated with mind, white, culture, cooked, etc. Female is associated with body, black, nature, raw, etc. A quest for ideal types, ideal bodies, idealized behaviors. Related to heteronormativity, patriarchy, and ableism.
Land Back
Return of lands to collective stewardship. Post-property; the commons. Belonging instead of owning. Related to repatriation, reparations, restitution, restoration, reconstitution. Recognition of complex, sometimes contradictory histories of original stewards.
Land Grab
Systematic takeover of lands through ownership and extractive purposes. Owning and excluding. Related to genocide, greed, damage to ecosystems, imperialism, colonialism. Oversimplification and/or idealization of complex, sometimes contradictory histories of original stewards.
Permeable
Life-giving, porous surfaces that make room for microbial life, root systems, and lifeforms above and below. Soil, gravel, grass, meadows, and wetlands all work with environmental systems, slowing and filtering water, storing carbon, creating cooling, and replenishing aquifers and groundwater supplies. Permeable surfaces contribute to climate resilience by preventing flooding, erosion, and heat.
Impervious
Life-taking surfaces, where no water, fluid, gas, or other matter can penetrate. Rooftops, pavement, storm drains, and concrete are all examples of impervious surfaces. The increased amount of impervious surfaces in urban areas exponentially increases runoff, pollution, stagnant, pooling water (think: mosquitos), urban heat islands, and flooding. Impervious surfaces also prevent runoff, rain, and creek and river water from percolating back into the soil, disrupting replenishment of aquifers. Creates unidirectional flow.
Polyculture
Cultivation of multiple species that work together, attract pollinators and beneficial insects, and protect against disease. Increased resilience against change. Use of hedgerows, focus on building and restoring soil through composting food and greenwaste, and controlling pests without the use of pesticides. Contributes to carbon sequestration, water filtration, and habitat restoration. Requires fewer outside inputs. Related to biomimicry.
Monoculture
Emphasis on cultivating a single species. Related to monocropping, pesticide use, and human-centric control. Relies on overanimation of humans and deanimation of nonhumans. Heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers, resulting in compromises to pollinators, topsoil, and water. Relies on elimination of problem species and carbon/technology heavy systems. Reliant on outside inputs. Lacks resilience without such inputs; vulnerable to disaster.
Non-Violence
Embracing non-violent solutions has multiple wins for people, animals, and the planet. It means understanding that ecosystems are as much casualties of war as people are. Non-violent approaches to conflict resolution strengthen communities and retain ecosystem connectivity. Non-violence allows us to reduce direct carbon emissions due to reduced fuel demand, but also to strengthen the fabric of communities and ecosystems for the betterment of all.
Militarism
Militarism represents compounding harm for people, animals, and the planet. Ecosystems are as much casualties of war as people are. Violent conflict weakens communities and disrupts ecosystem connectivity--both key components of climate resilience. Warfare can include scorched earth campaigns, habitat destruction, water, air, and soil pollution, forest burning and clearing, and more. Military logistics and operations produce untold amounts of greenhouse gas emissions due to increased fuel use even during times of peace. Militarism contributes to environmental disaster.
Abolition
Not simply a negative declaration, but a positive, visionary strategy that eliminates the need for oppressive structures by creating or investing in their opposite. A reminder that our most important climate resilience work is to build strong, (bio)diverse communities and social networks, and to fight for equity and justice in the present moment. Related to relocalization and post-capitalism.
Reform
Attempts surface-level change to make things seem better, while failing to address root causes, such as racial capitalism, slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide. Relies on trying to make cages, walls, separation, extinction, extraction, and forced labor better without taking steps to eliminate them. This type of change is not transformational.
Localization
Bringing things back home is critical to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to build holistic, nurturing lifeways, healthy ecosystems and healthy communities. This form of self-reliance is not meant to be isolationist but rather to build strong systems in place and to emphasize ties to the earth, our local geographies, and our non-human neighbors. Related to regenerative and circular economic systems.
Globalization
Relying on global supply chains is not weatherproof--in fact, multiple disruptions from extreme weather to security issues threaten the viability of networks as well as contributing massive harms to ecosystems and the planet. Global supply chains can be exploitative economically, and also produce greenhouse gas emissions, damaging ecosystems and communities. Contributes to unequal relations between trading partners, disrupts place-based connections. Related to extraction, fossil fuel consumption.
Community-based
Knowledge and control are co-defined with communities who are considered experts. Reliance on solutions that exist within ecosystems, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Integrates multiple knowledge systems into decision making and problem solving. Shares power between humans and nonhumans. Emphasis on process. Related to multiperspectivism.
Technocratic
Knowledge and control are in the hands of experts who use language and ideas that are unintelligible to the lay public. Divorces community or nature based expertise from decision making and problem solving. Consolidates power among human elites, narrowly defined and often outsiders. Emphasis on outcomes. Related to humancentrism.
Your word here?
Write a climate crisis word that will allow us to rethink our world. The language we use both constrains and is an artifact of the way we think. Stretching the way we categories things can help us to make change.
Your Word Here?
What got us here in the first place? What analytical tools can you use to change that?
There are so many other potential pairings! We invite all comers to submit climate crisis keyword pairs to help define the paradigm shift needed today. What ideas and concepts resonate with you the most? Click the button below to submit your ideas.