I believe in unicorns
If you want to change the world, you should too.
I love my job. I get to talk to people for a living about a thing they love, the environment, and the amazing things they are doing to protect it. I am a social scientist; I became one to help figure out pathways out of issues like climate change. But I decided early in my career that I didn’t want to focus only on the bad news. The triple crises of climate change and biodiversity loss and pollution are paralyzing enough without dwelling all day, every day, on the dark and dire details. Besides, there are lots of great scientists and science communicators already talking about the problems. Instead, I set out to find good news: stories about people and the planet working together rather than against each other.
A lot of people told me I was chasing unicorns. That scenarios where both people and nature “win” sound quaint but don’t really exist. “Or if they do,” they would sometimes concede, “they don’t scale. There are always trade-offs.” But amidst all the discouragement I also met two amazing mentors, a college professor and an Indigenous tribal chief, who saw the world different than most. Both told me in their own way that I was on the right track. So, I kept looking. And you know what? I found the unicorns. Lots of them.
Each unicorn was spectacularly different from the next. One of the first I encountered was an ancient Indigenous practice known as clam gardening. It is a way that coastal Indigenous people in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska have and continue to produce food and enhance the coastal environment at the same time. Next, I learned about cattle farmers in Western Ireland who, also following ancient tradition, graze their cattle in a way that restores, rather than degrades, the landscape.
It was like looking for a four-leaf clover — once you find one, you start seeing them everywhere. It wasn’t long before I had more than enough unicorns for my book, Finding Our Niche. I only found them because I suspended my western scientific biases and let myself imagine that they must be out there.
As I dug in, I found that each of these stories involves a beautifully bespoke ecology founded on a commitment to not just do less harm to the environment but to do more good — to not just take but to give back as well. In each case, the outcome of this commitment is that there is a little more, not a little less, to go around. I call it generative ecology; my Indigenous colleagues call it being in right relations with the world, or “doing things in a good way.”
Regardless of the cultural or scientific framing we use to tell their story, these unicorns demand that we reassess some of the most fundamental underpinnings of how we understand environmental problems, in the same way that the research of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom requires us to reconsider the tragedy of the commons.
If you don’t know it, the tragedy of the commons is this widely held notion that when left to our own devices, humans will inherently overuse a shared resource like a fishery, in a tragic cycle of competitive escalation as they try to secure their livelihoods. But Ostrom looked far and wide and found example after example of communities with established institutions — sets of rules and norms — that result in sustainable outcomes. And many other social scientists, like James Acheson and Bonnie McCay, have also detailed such cases. In other words, the tragedy of the commons isn’t as much a problem that we need to solve as it is a problem we need to stop creating. The tragedy is an anomaly, an outcome of economic and social and political systems that pit people against each other for their security and survival.
But if we imagine that the tragedy of the commons is simply a part of our nature, any other possibility may as well be a pink horse with a horn and wings.
Imagination is power
Right now, many of us feel extremely powerless. Like the world is spinning out of control. Like the problems are too big. There are no options, no brakes, no parachutes. But what if there are options all around us and we have simply convinced ourselves that entire categories of solutions are impossible?
Before the pandemic, few of us could have imagined what such an ordeal would feel like. And when we were in it, it was impossible to imagine a time when it would be over. But our imagination was key to getting through it. Young people imagined new ways to bring joy and laughter to each other on TikTok and Twitch. Fishers and farmers imagined new ways to use the internet get their neighbors healthy food when stores were closed. Scientists imagined entirely new kinds of vaccines.
The pandemic is in some ways behind us, but we are hardly out of the woods when it comes to big problems. Climate change is accelerating, and our government is not just in retreat but denial. And speaking of that government, even it is in crisis — instead of building a government that serves us, too many of our “leaders” right now seem bent on tearing everything down and turning us on one another.
All these problems — the climate change, the racism, the fracturing of our democratic institutions — are all part of the same great failure of imagination. A failure that has been going on for centuries. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European settlers to this continent never imagined that Indigenous societies were practicing extensive and complex systems of land use and management, so they had no qualms about eradicating them. The industrial leaders of the 19th and 20th century never imagined that the planet’s resources could be exhausted, so they set out consuming them endlessly. And environmentalists in the 20th Century looking to reverse the tide never imagined that the places they thought of as wild and pristine in fact reflect a long history of human tenure and stewardship.
Imagination gets a bad rap — people call it childish, say it is for play time, and that as we mature, we should grow out of it. That’s a trick. Our imagination is one of the most spectacular abilities we have as a species. Unfettered, imagining can be about as radical an act as there is. We have the power inside each of us to look at the world we live in, see things we think should change, and imagine a way to make it different.
When we put into the world an alternative notion of how it could or should be, we take a little bit of power away from the people who tell us that this is all we can have. That this is the way things must be. That unicorns aren’t real. Sociologists call this “prefigurative power” — the ability to remake the social landscape of power, even if just a little, with a radical aspiration for how things might be.
Escaping our failures of imagination
Invariably, when I give talks about these unicorns I am met with skepticism about their relevance. “Clam gardens? Sure, they may work locally but they will never scale. They can never feed the world.”
This is a failure of imagination, one caused by the myths and language many of us learn over the course of our lifetime about how the world works and what is possible in it. Myths like the tragedy of the commons and the idea that we are inherently greedy and self interested as a species. And myths that tell us the world works in a linear, mechanistic, and predictable way.
These myths tell us that if we want to live sustainably, we need to do more with less. And to do that, that we need practices and technologies that are standardized, efficient, and scalable. But living systems simply do not work this way. Living systems don’t scale they differentiate, they adapt, they evolve. Living systems don’t thrive through uniformity and control but through diversity and coexistence. Constraining diversity and difference in a living system for the sole benefit of one group of participants may create some benefit for a while, but over the long term it is a death sentence.
Consider an analogy: imagine that you run a factory and you progressively ask your workers to create more products and work more hours, while paying them less, eliminating their benefits, reducing their time off, and abandoning investments in workplace safety. The only outcome that matters is to you is efficiency. Sounds kind of like exploitation, doesn’t it. Sounds kind of like slavery.
The reason examples like clam gardens are important is precisely because they do not scale. Clam gardens are not meant for the North American Great Plains. They are not meant for the moist deciduous forests of Northern Thailand. They are not meant for the windy limestone expanse of Western Ireland.
Each of these places have come to be through millennia of evolutionary and cultural learning about what works best where. Why ever would we believe that we should replace that with a standardized set of design principles conjured up by one single culture over the last couple centuries?
“But what are you saying, that we should go back in time? Go back to being hunters and gatherers?”
This is the second failure of imagination I regularly encounter when I share stories from my work: the notion that to question a part of the modern world is to question all of it. That the healthcare and technology and art and grocery stores and security we currently enjoy are only possible in a world the way it is. That the only path to an advanced society like ours is the damaging and violent path we took to get here.
This is like saying the only way to walk past a mountain is to blow it up. So let me offer a different perspective: that what is remarkable is that we have achieved the many modern marvels and comforts we presently enjoy despite all the harms and hate we have enacted in the process. Imagine what this world could be like if we hadn’t taken such a destructive path for the last several hundred years. Imagine how spectacularly thriving, equitable, and just the world might be today if we had decided to step into the future with an intent to heal, not harm, to love, not hate.
Arguing for the importance of ancient practices is not an argument for going back but an argument for looking back. These histories of how past societies have thrived and are thriving still are like heirloom seeds: the culmination of generations of past wisdom waiting to be planted in our imaginations in service of the future.
Shedding the conceits of futures past
Elon Musk, who is presently busying himself with illegally dismantling US government, once said “the future should look like the future.” But by all accounts, the future he envisions is a future of the past — what people were imagining 40, 50, even 60 years ago. The Cybertruck looks pulled right out of an 1980s computer game. His vision for transportation is heavily car centric. And his interstellar imagination for the long-term future of humanity is a mere repackaging of centuries-old colonial and supremacist aspirations updated with dystopian cyberpunk notions of artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
When Gen Z or Gen Alpha envision a future, do cars play a role at all? Based on how few young people are learning to drive, I would venture that they do not. And if the immense groundswell of youth around issues related to the environment and human diversity is any indication, these youth are more concerned with taking care of each other and this planet, than they are with leaving their bodies and the planet behind.
One way I’ve tried to reboot my own imagination is by going out of my way to spend time inhabiting the imaginations of others, whoever is inviting me in. Like writers and artists with different life stories than mine, different cultural histories, different skin colors, different abilities, different sexualites, different genders. I read hopepunk and Afrofuturism. The worlds spun by writers like Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin are simultaneously familiar and yet radically reconfigured, in ways that lay bare the dehumanization and oppression that scaffold our current society.
I also love reading the futurism of Indigenous writers. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas have already survived one apocalypse; there were 60 million people alive in the Americas in 1491. One hundred years later, 54 million them had died because of sickness and violence brought by settlers. So, when writers like Waubgeshig Rice and Robin Wall Kimmerer offer visions for navigating a world that is falling apart and pursuing something radically changed in the process, they are writing with actual lived experience.
And, though I have long been a technological skeptic, the new series “Possible Futures” published by the Timnit Gebru-founded Distributed AI Research Institute, has pushed me to draw back even this bias.
It is something like dredging out contaminated soil and rebuilding it from scratch.
This is how we find unicorns, I think. by unlearning the oppressive myths and language, and by stepping back to allow those who have for far too long lived under the heel of our limited imaginations to seed the soil of our future.
