The Case for the TERRA Framework:

Currently, very little attention and resources are being directed toward finding pathways that can help change-makers and communities navigate this Global Crisis. Instead, most mainstream ‘solutions’ to the crises of our day attempt to address the individual symptoms, focused on individuated metrics like global temperature rise, carbon-dioxide emissions, renewable energy transition, air pollution, etc.

They pay little regard to essential questions:

▪ Is Global Crisis a problem to be ‘solved’ or a predicament that needs an adequate response?

▪ How sustainable are these solutions in the long term?

▪ What do we commonly mean when we talk about sustainability? What if economic and ecological sustainability are irreconcilable?

▪ Have our ‘ground realities’ shifted from the question of sustainability towards survivability?

▪ Are humanity’s collective effort currently driven by short-term pay-offs? Are we capable of thinking and acting in the long-term interests of both human and non-human species?

▪ How will the solution proposed for one crisis impact the other crises, and what might be its unintended consequences (nth order effects)?

▪ How might this solution be implemented in the context of industrial systems collapse?

▪ Do we know what a post-collapse sustainable way of life looks like? Will communities today feel motivated to build it? What transitional infrastructures do we need to build to get there?

In response to the existential risk posed by Global Crisis, we recognize the need for new thinking that addresses the problems of providing food, healthcare, education, climate mitigation, and other social goods as deeply interlinked concerns, each impacting the others. All of these concerns are also impacted by the cascading collapse of the inter-connected systems that sustain GIC.

We need a heterarchical (bottom-up led and top-down supported) planetary-scale strategy that takes the inevitable collapse of GIC into account as a given eventuality. Our plan must accept the inherent unsustainability of GIC and the futility of technocratic approaches that intend to ‘fix’ it. By pre-figuring collapse and addressing the multiple threats as interrelated symptoms of a single Global Crisis, successful pre-collapse measures will operate as transitional lifeboats (providing physical and social infrastructures that sustain communities through collapse). These measures will look quite different from those that more frequently find funding today. Yet in order to increase humanity’s chances of transitioning towards Islands (decentralized post-collapse economies powered largely by biomass-‘Economy of Permanence’), these paradigms must be understood and planned for, even while the ‘Titanic’of GIC is still operational and floating. Disconnected bottom-up efforts not unified by a super-narrative will fail.

The invisible-hands’of the global State-market order currently organizing human actions towards overshoot needs to be confronted with a matching synchronized, decentralized global response to be effective.

Today even change-makers sincerely wishing to make sense of and respond to Global Crisis find it challenging to navigate the misinformation and disinformation in conversations around sustainability. Stories, narratives and cultural myths—such as God, religions, money, nation states, human rights, capitalism, and communism—have played a critical role in the cultural evolutions of humans.

It is a known historical fact that any large-scale, society-wide transformation processes (energy, systemic & cultural) takes several decades or even centuries to pan-out. But given the scale & urgency of our collective predicament, we believe, in order to mobilize humanity and channel its efforts in a single direction, we need to craft new stories, super-narrativesthat are universal, clear, and inviting enough to help people effectively navigate Global Crisis. A good example here could be the narrative choice presented to the world for mobilization during WW2 (Democracy vs Totalitarianism).

Wouldn’t change-makers find immense benefit from a system that could classify all known solutions and measures in a manner that aids pragmatic decision-making, not just for experts but even for laypersons? This is the goal of the Existential Risk and Response Assessment (TERRA), a framework that helps change-makers recognize, filter and create super-narratives built around principles of Strong Sustainability by rating narratives against relevant criteria and filtering out those which are not.

TERRA is a holistic, analytical, and prescriptive approach to catalyze effective collective human action in response to Global Crisis. As a tool for analysis and assessment of proffered solutions and measures, it helps to identify those solutions and measures that are most likely to be effective, pragmatic, and sustainable as the world around us dramatically unravels. As a companion to TERRA, we also propose a model super-narrative, the Global Crisis Response Strategy (GCRS). Both of these together fall under our active research agenda.

What is the significance of TERRA?

▪ Potential to emerge as an alternative to the mainstream, ‘heat- and burn-centric’ sustainability discourse in order to effectively steer communities through Global Crisis.

▪ Ability to foster an eco-system of support and establish solidarity for Strong Sustainability (SS) initiatives/measures, which are those responses that remain effective without requiring industrial inputs and without furthering environmental or social degradation.

Who benefits from TERRA?

Primary:

Foundations, HNIs, and impact-investors engaged in strategic philanthropy, including systems thinkers and others who are sensitive about their legacy and are actively exploring no non-sense, courageous, futuristic, impact-oriented, and sustainable sense-making frameworks and responses.

Secondary: Change-makers, communities, and members of the general public who are curious about and already engaged with strong sustainability initiatives

How does TERRA help?

▪ De-clutters the sustainability and existential risk-response landscape by comparing, situating, filtering and clustering mainstream and heterodox ideas based on their efficacy and degree of openness to paradigm shifts.

▪ Filters out ineffective, fragmented ‘techno-optimistic’ measures and identifies which clusters of response measures are most effective.

▪ Empowers change-makers in sense-making, capacity-building, and consensus-building

▪ Nudges Weak Sustainability (WS) actors towards Strong Sustainability by re-aligning their organizational vision and mission statements to be consistent with transition towards new paradigms.

Understanding the TERRA Framework

The TERRA framework is diagrammed on the next page as a plot along two axes. Each axis describes proposed solutions or approaches to addressing the complex issues faced by humanity along the following dimensions:

A. Alternative versus Dominant Paradigm is mapped along the vertical axis. Scoring a crisis framework/solution/narrative to map it along the Y axis requires only a more straightforward assessment of how well it seeks to move away from the presently dominant narrative of consumption-led growth and industrial capitalism that perpetuate GIC. So ideas that score high along this axis are more amenable to new paradigms for how societies and economies can be structured into the future—alternatives to the presently dominant paradigm—and therefore potentially more sustainable (SS). Ideas that score low along this axis (closer to the bottom) are more aligned with the presently dominant civilizational paradigm of technocratic industrial capitalism and growthism powered by fossil energy. For example, solutions that incorporate Bioregionalism or Gandhi & Kumarappa’s decentralized Village based order as part of their design concept are likely to be among the most sustainable, while those that focus on targeting Net Zero emissions will likely be less sustainable or supportable without the continuation of an industrial economic base.

B.Fragmented versus Holistic & Coherent Frameworksis mapped along the horizontal axis. Ideas that score high along this axis (further to the right) approach Global Crisis with more robust frameworks that incorporate all critical dimensions of the risk, crisis, and predicament as well as all components of a holistic and coherent framework. For example, solutions that prioritize narrowly defined Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as defined by the UN are dependent upon weak notions of sustainability (WS) that do not take into account the availability of resources and planetary limits, while solutions that attempt to approach problems in terms of Polycrisis or Metacrisis are more likely to incorporate coherent narratives that enable more holistic and sustainable solutions.

We believe any coherent framework must comprise at least four components:

1. Holistic, multi-dimensional framing of the crisis, which factors in feedbacks related to ecology, energy, economy/finance, civilizational complexity, geo-political tensions, run-away exponential risks of technologies, cultural polarization, and other relevant triggers to collapse. It filters-out unviable and narrowly defined crises.

2. Response options such as BAU, Weak Sustainable (WS) or Strong Sustainable (SS) and scenarios or future trajectories emerging from specific responses

3. Clear articulation of the details and reasons why a specific response-scenario is not just possible, viable but also desirable for humanity

4. Clear articulation of the transition road-map that guides humanity in prefiguring interventions during pre-collapse phase, during collapse and during post-collapse ‘new-normal’ phase.

Note that ideas falling into the upper-right quadrant, labeled 1(SS), are those that align with Strong Sustainability, incorporating coherent narratives and holistic approaches to Global Crisis and thereby enabling the possibility of alternative civilizational paradigms. Global Crisis Response Strategy (GCRS) is one such model strong sustainable response.

The upper-left quadrant, labeled (SS)2, may also hold promising ideas for the future, though they are presently too disparate and fragmented, requiring further work to make them more robust and actionable. At present these ideas do not incorporate all the critical risk dimensions or explicitly recognize inevitability of collapse in the near-term.

The lower-right quadrant, labeled 4(WS), includes solutions that are authentic in their critique and terminal diagnosis of GIC, yet which continue to advocate measures that are entrenched in the perpetuation of GIC. This makes these ideas more useful for top-down predication and analysis, even though they still fail to aid constructive bottom-up action.

Lastly, ideas listed in the lower-left quadrant, labeled (BAU)4, are those that simply further Business As Usual, lacking a coherent understanding of the Global Crisis and highly dependent upon industrial civilization to implement and support.

We use this framework to assess and compare the usefulness of different proposed solutions or approaches to Global Crisis in order to help clarify the pros and cons of each. In this way, we clarify our thinking and hone our future responses toward Strong Sustainability. Because a successful plan approaches the problem of Global Crisis as a surgeon approaches a complex and critical surgery where all treatment options, procedures, complications and possible outcomes must be explicitly factored in advance, or else the patient is likely to die during the surgery.