Designing culture that cares for climate justice: adrienne marie brown’s teachings on conflict and community
As climate designers, we might think of ourselves as a caring lot - we care about our precious Planet and the life it sustains. No matter the depth of our care, we are still humans who’ve tragically been socially conditioned to focus more on quickly “fixing” and less on the slower work of healing.
This is the fourth and final entry in a series that draws from Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, a process that helps people deeply accept the climate crisis in order to better turn toward the work of healing. The process begins with gratitude, then embraces honoring our pain for the world, and unfolds through seeing with new eyes before arriving at ways of going forth, which will be the focus of this entry.
At last we arrive at what it means for us to fully participate in what Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning. Macy inspires us to commit to action that will heal our world, and the person who has taught me the most about how to do this is adrienne maree brown.
Whether we are climate designers focused on creating products, services, or systems, we might have a certain way we are already approaching translating our concern for climate into our work and lives. What brown and others featured in this series highlight is that our work is not simply a matter of what we do, it’s also about the way we do it.
If we start with action, skipping the other parts of the Work mentioned above, we run the risk of continuing to create the very problems we are seeking to address. We need new thinking, new cultural perceptions and values, in order to create lasting solutions to the climate crisis.
As creators of images, campaigns and/or new technological realities, designers are, I believe, ultimately tasked with creating culture, specifically one centered around climate justice. To me, climate justice is in part about addressing inequities when it comes to the impacts of climate change. brown has helped me see more clearly that it’s also about repairing our sense of community, recognizing that at the root of all despair and crisis is a longing for connection.
What it means to care for climate and community
adrienne marie brown’s work is centered in building a culture of transformative justice, which she describes in her book We Will Not Cancel Us as “the work of addressing harm at the root, outside the mechanisms of the state, so that we can grow into right relationship with each other.”
Like Robin Wall Kimmerer, brown draws from nature as she considers what right relationship can look like: “One of our oldest ancestors, mycelium/mushrooms show us that the instance of life we can witness, the mushroom, is always evidence of a much more complex and wider network of connections underground. The same thing is true with conflict and harm—we are all connected to each other, at our best and at our worst.”
As we collectively respond to the climate crisis, conflict and harm continue to be tragic themes, ones that as designers we can easily attempt to overlook or bypass. Like most people, we tend to focus on our connections to the people we most agree and align with, and we periodically numb ourselves to the pain of what Joanna calls Business as Usual and The Great Unraveling.
brown has helped me see that not only is it important for us to look at where there is division and violence so we can build unity, but that it is actually critical that The Great Turning include creating systems of care that are able to embrace difference and conflict.
This work will include, I think, shifting our perspective and approach when it comes to addressing climate skepticism and dissent. Rather than coming from attitudes stemming from the domination paradigm, the very paradigm that has brought us to the existential brink, we need to shift towards ones that foster greater ecological and social harmony.
Those of us who are passionate about climate justice can too easily slip into patterns of condemning people we deem to be “evil doers.” brown reminds us that this can be at best a distraction and at worse an undoing.
“We won’t end the systemic patterns of harm by isolating and picking off individuals, just as we can’t limit the communicative power of mycelium by plucking a single mushroom from the dirt,” she writes. “We need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others.”
“Even though we want to help the survivor, we love obsessing over and punishing ‘villains.’,” she continues. “We end up putting more of our collective attention on punishing those accused of causing harm than supporting and centering the healing of survivors, and/or building pathways for those who are in cycles of causing harm to change.”
Even when we do consider how to design new systems that prevent harm, how often are we focused solely on ecological harms, sometimes even at the expense of tending to social harms? When we think of social harm, are we concerned for groups of people we may not know personally, and are we also equally caring for those people we are much closer to? One recent example of such heartbreaking oversight is at clean energy company Tesla, who is currently being sued for fostering racial bias at its main factory.
Designing culture that supports care-full choices
brown suggests change movements center values of both accountability and belonging, and that people involved build skills needed to navigate conflict, even as we are grappling with our own climate despair.
“We are, all together now, teetering on the edge of hopelessness. Collective pandemic burnout, 45-in-office burnout, climate catastrophe burnout, and other exhaustions have us spent and flailing. Some of us are losing hope, tossed by the tornado, ungrounded and uprooted by the pace of change, seeking something tangible we can do, control, hold, throw away,” brown writes. “I want us to acknowledge that the supremacy and hopelessness and harm and conflict are everywhere, and make moves that truly allow us to heal into wholeness … We must learn to choose life even in conflict, even when seeking accountability, composting the tension and bad behaviors while holding the beating hearts.”
The wisdom of the Work That Reconnects is that we counterintuitively lean into the pain and grief that brown writes of. This is what facilitates our internal transformation, which is a precursor to the larger-scale transformations we may be called to cultivate collectively.
“We need to ‘transform ourselves to transform the world,’ to ‘be transformed in the service of the work’,” writes brown.
“Movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. Movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into ... We must all do our work. Be accountable and go heal, simultaneously, continuously … We, together, must break every cycle that makes us forget this.”
As designers, we are gifted with unique opportunities to create the “practice ground” that brown refers to. We often act as leaders and way-showers in collaboration, advocating for the needs of the many at the proverbial table where outcomes are identified and opportunities to pursue are prioritized. We can act as a bridge between executives and tech workers, between advocates and administrators, between organizations and communities. We can show up as leverage points, tipping the scales away from harm and toward care.
Whether we’re working with people whom we largely agree with and/or people whom we don’t, we can recognize that perhaps the most important design decisions we make are in how we respond to inevitable conflicts that arise.
Do we honor our deep connections to one another, and direct our attention towards supporting healing?
Do we look to interrupt cycles of harm, both of the land and in our relations with one another?
How are we contributing to “flooding” our networks with life-affirming principles and practices?
Where are we accountable, including for our own healing and transformation?
What skills are we working to build related to working with these questions, and are we considering this training to be as important as any other we’re engaged in?
As these questions unfold in you and your design practice, I hope this series on what I've learned as a designer from four women "elders" working on climate justice continues to give you hope and inspiration. I would love to hear from you and continue the dialogue as we hold our inquiries and explorations collectively in community.
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Head over to the Climate Designers community space on Mighty Networks and let us know what thoughts this entry inspires! How has this series helped you to transform as designers? How has that transformation helped you to transform your world?
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This entry was written by
Lydia Hooper
Lydia Hooper is a hybrid professional with special expertise in communicating about complexity, facilitating collaborative design processes, and guiding teams through transformation. She works as a UX Designer in the civic tech sector. Lydia is an active member of the Design Justice Network Communications Working Group, a collaborator on All Tech is Human's Guide to Responsible Tech, and co-author and editor of The Authoritative Guide to Designing Infographics. You can learn more at www.lydiahooper.com.