Society

Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming. All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.

Leslie Davenport’s new podcast, Burning Questions: Conversations About Our Living World, brings together thought leaders navigating the emotional, strategic, and relational dimensions of our planetary moment. In this episode, Leslie is joined by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin to explore something both timely and timeless: how do we find leverage for transformation when the crises keep compounding?

From rising GDP losses to ecosystem collapse, climate reports are stacking up fast. The problem is we have no language for the difference between a bad situation and a civilisational threshold.

The Windigo diagnosis reveals that the threat we face is not only ecological or political. It is civilizational. It is rooted in a system whose deepest logic is to convert the living world into fuel for its own endless expansion.

Green AI will likely continue to stretch as different communities bring their own priorities and imaginaries to the term. But if its dominant forms remain tethered to extractive assumptions, it risks becoming little more than an alibi for the systems driving planetary breakdown.

The entire Community of Life—humans included—were better off when shrouded in the mysterious magic of the living world: held in awe, humility, and respect. We came into being inside the feedback loop, and threaten to destroy much when presuming to extract ourselves from its magical protection.