What Is a Sustainable Future on a Planet in Upheaval?
Staving off catastrophic warming is now only a part of humanity's climate challenge.
Reminder: my four-week Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins next week on Thursday, February 12th. FLASH SALE until tomorrow, February 6th, at 9pm PST // 5am GMT — get up to 30% off! Single Payment and Flexible Payment options are available. Click below to learn more:
How do we envision the future we’re fighting for?
I like this climate foresight advocacy short film, The Great Transition, 2025-2050, rallying support for the transition to clean energy. But there's something really off about these kinds of "it was almost a catastrophe, but we woke up" portrayals, now.
That's because now, no matter what we do, we are in for massive and unprecedented climate, ecological and societal upheavals. That discontinuity is now hard-wired into every plausible future in front of us.
Sure, we want to cut emissions everywhere and as fast as possible. We must limit the worsening of the crisis, and build the conditions for sustainable prosperity. This must be a top priority for all humanity.
We're going to be doing all that, though, while we face up to the now even larger challenge of societal ruggedization on a world like none humanity has ever known before. We've let that work wait too long, as well.
Staving off catastrophic climate change is now only a part of humanity's total climate challenge. As I wrote in December:
The Last Decade, and its promise of an orderly-if-headlong transition, has been replaced by a Long Ruggedization. We still have all those planetary imperatives to fulfill. Decarbonization and material sustainability, though, have now become part of a vastly larger program of discontinuity management: of climate defenses, reworked supply lines, innovations for new realities, ecological restoration into future patterns, huge movements of people and an unprecedented need to build in safer places.
Welcome to the future we fought for five decades to avoid. This new era will demand far more of every society’s resources, putting climate discontinuity at the core of all important decisions, from governments planning to business strategies to community hopes to the most personal decisions of our lives.
That’s when we are, in 2026. That’s what predatory delay has cost us.
So what does it mean to advocate for sustainability now?
On one level, it means accepting climate action and ecological restoration not as solutions, but as harm reduction. Not as something that restores continuity to our lives, but that increases our odds of facing a somewhat manageable crisis.
On another level, though, it just makes clearer what we’re known for years, which is (as I put it before) that “Our job is not to decide the future, but to leave the future as many options as possible. The most sustainable society is the one which passes forward the best possibilities to future generations.”
Alex
PS: If you want to learn more about how to make good decisions in a time discontinuity, you might be interested in my acclaimed four-week, live Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. The next one begins next week, on Thursday, February 12th.
Catch the Flash Sale when you join by tomorrow, February 6th at 9pm PST!
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— Dr. Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Director of CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry
“After nearly 20 years working in sustainability — and having followed Alex Steffen’s work for even longer — I finally took his Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. To put it simply: it’s the most valuable climate foresight training I’ve ever taken.”
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