The work is never wasted

On failure, and stewardship, and hope.

A little while ago, somebody said something which has stuck with me. We were talking about failure, and more specifically at that point about how it’s such a binary word, not really reflective of what happens if we try things and they don’t work, which is, usually, that we carry on.

I had given an example of being in a project team, in the policy world, of having been given a set of commitments and a set of constraints and of failing to match the two sets of things. We had failed well, been thorough and diligent and left no stone unturned, but the message we had to deliver after months of work was ‘sorry, but we can’t’.

The thing that had happened next, though, wasn’t that everybody gave up. Instead, the conversation moved, to people whose role is to make different types of decisions: What can be changed in the environment, or the requirements, so that a different answer might become possible?

The intended answer stays the same – there were (are; will be) national climate targets at stake – but which pieces of everything else can be moved into a different configuration? Then, with a new set of parameters, the work shifts again, back to the same team, maybe, or a different group of people, who will be able not to fail.

Failure is only failure, then, if you stop listening to the story after the first time something doesn’t work. 

Progress is slow and non-linear – frustratingly slow from the outside, often – but the important work keeps going, precisely because it is important. It moves around; it overcomes obstacles; it pauses; it is painful at times and euphoric at others; it expands or contracts, but it doesn’t stop.

The response to this: That’s an example of the stewardship work of systems change.

I think a lot about change, and how it happens. How I (we?) imagine that it’s the big stories that have to change, that nothing can be solved until the agreed narrative is that we are all doing everything it takes to solve the problem, that there is nothing to hope for until everything is solved all at once.

But failure is only failure, also, if you only look in one place, if you don’t zoom out. 

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A long time ago, I read Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit. Change happens slowly at first, is the central thesis, then all at once. Organising, grassroots movements, all this stuff works. There were examples. Governments overthrown, mostly, but also laws changed, policy and public positions taken on the acceptability of homosexuality or the unacceptability of slavery or genetically modified crops.

I didn’t like the book when I first read it. Perhaps because I was reading it at 2am in a deserted airport, still hours from home. Perhaps because I am frustrated by people who unquestioningly accept that genetically modified crops are an unambiguous evil without considering the nuance of it; yes, massive agricultural corporations can make GM seeds infertile, so that farmers have to keep buying from them. But farmers have to do that  with most of the other seeds these companies sell, too. The rest is fear, suggested and stirred and fomented by a small group of people to further their own interests, and the result is that we still use a staggering amount of agri-chemicals to achieve the same results as a few tweaks to the genomes of the plants, and I don’t like science being warped and manipulated like that. So no, I didn’t like this book, which treated that manipulation, easy to unpick once you know where to look, as a story of unmitigated success.

Look how easily private interests can influence governments, it seemed to be saying, and this was exactly the problem I had come to the book hoping to see a counter to, decades of inaction by governments in the face of lies and lobbying from powerful corporations and interest groups. (I was twenty-five; I still thought in Sharpie, all caps. I was angry - although I wouldn’t have called it that - with almost everyone with any kind of power: for not doing something about our impending and avoidable catastrophe.)

As I got older, I disengaged more. I recycled, tried not to drive, bought as few things as possible. I read that my individual efforts were futile, drops in the ocean of corporate emissions and governmental indifference. I read that the most impactful thing I could do was to write to my governmental representative. 

Conservative government after conservative government was elected in the UK. Did I believe that writing to my MP would enact meaningful change in directions I cared about? I did not. I did not write to my governmental representative. 

Quietly, though, things were happening. People organised. Grassroots movements moved. Our big narratives didn’t change – government inaction, corporate greed, failed COP summits, emissions in the developing world – but, regardless, many many small things did. 

Governments banned (some) single use plastics. Supermarkets stopped handing out plastic bags for free. Tens of millions of people bought electric cars, solar panels, ground-source heat pumps. Coal power stations closed: not many, but some. Renewable sources started providing 30% of the world’s energy, up from 20% 13 years earlier. Organisations appointed heads of sustainability: smart, committed people who started or continued the hard work of reducing emissions, pollution, consumption. Money moved towards decarbonising, towards sustainable innovation. 45,000 people started businesses in climate tech. Research groups were formed in decarbonisation, alternative materials, the circular economy. Carbon emissions in Europe and the United States started to fall, and kept falling. Low-emission jet fuel became a possibility. 

None of these things are enough on their own. Currently, they’re not enough cumulatively, either. But the tide is rising. There are already huge numbers of people working hard on the problems the world is facing, finding the bit they can do, doing it. And that number is growing: people want to do meaningful work. The youngest generation entering the workplace, we keep hearing, want jobs with purpose. Empty-nesters are leaving stable jobs to start businesses in biodiversity. Sixty-somethings are inheriting the family farm and setting out to prove that you can make regenerative agriculture profitable. 

The system changes. Not all at once, but each person, each group, takes responsibility for its own piece. As one failure happens, there are other, corollary successes. As one organisation shuts its doors, others bring themselves into being. The old, huge organisations trying to do all of it at once are struggling. But the groups, organisations, people, taking up the baton of change, stewarding their bit along, they succeed, in their own pockets.

I have realised that, for me, looking at the headlines doesn’t help. I want to stop looking at the big, stable stories, the ones that take decades and revolutions to change, rather than down, at the waters that are rising all around us, the contributions of the many, many people finding the thing they can do to help, and doing it.

For a while, inspired by Ross Gay's wonderful Book of Delights, I've been noticing my own delights and writing them down. I shared a few with some friends recently and they said such lovely things, I thought I'd start including one here.

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November (from before the snow!)

RAFI AND THE LEAVES

It is autumn here, but it has not been wet yet, and the leaves are still crispy, sprinkled under trees and blown into piles along the edge of paths. Firstly, I want to show you the dog walking through the leaves, across the grass: knees up for clearance, tail upright like a fluffy sail, tiny crunches with each step: pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. Curly-haired creamy dog, orange leaves, silver sky.

What I really want to tell you about, though, is the game Ben played with the dog, jumping around in the leaves, kicking them up into flurries for Rafi (the dog's name) to chase, Rafi hopping around trying to keep eyes on all the leaves as they fell, chasing his tail for a moment, making the funny little growling noise he makes when he's wrestling.

This is the image I wanted to pin here, to remember Ben and the dog on the path through the woods by the river, both jumping around in the leaves and laughing, if dogs could laugh.