Murmurations: Dawn of a New Beginning

Dear Beloved Murmurations Readers,

I am writing with an exciting update about this column. Since we launched “Murmurations” in 2021, we have collectively survived, witnessed, and lost loved ones, species, and land to floods, drought, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, genocide, a rise in fascism, and so many variations of cancer and disease.

We’re also enduring the ongoing violence of late-stage capitalism that shows up as institutional violence—denied health care, trigger-happy police, identity-based violence, and increasing economic disparity and insecurity. As all of these crises unfold around our precious globe, we are learning to persist in the work of living. We can simultaneously feel the end of the world as we’ve known it and the beginning of what will be shaped by us.

Though it’s looking dire, I am constantly reminded by friends, comrades, Octavia Butler, and historians that these are the conditions from which we have to make our way to lives worth living. We are at the beginning. Right now, I mostly feel a sense of devastating loss, but as the smoke clears, I know we will learn what is lost and where there are opportunities to survive. 

I began this column because I was feeling overwhelmed by what the pandemic had unveiled to us, about how hard it was to protect each other, and about how much we need each other. I wanted to call on the wisdom of murmuration: moving together, with adequate space and proximity, avoiding predation by being in right relationship. For humans to be in right relationship, we must practice accountability—being intentional about how we take up space and resources, attending to our role in the world and our impact on others, shaping what we can touch, and being able to repair and set boundaries, especially as conditions change.

After a year of exploring these themes in this column (also collected in Loving Corrections), I opened Murmurations up to other emergent strategists who are thinking about and practicing how we relate, change, grow, and hold each other through changing conditions. Those columns have been abundant and divergent, representing a healthy ecosystem of ideas and practices.

Emergent strategy is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. The Earth awaits our partnership, and we have to decentralize but move together to avoid the predation of this moment. We feel smaller and we may be smaller, but we—the workers, the makers, the parents, the birthing bodies, and the Earthlings who want a future on Earth—are still the majority. We need a place to keep learning how to flock together.

So, for our third iteration of the column, we are partnering with Movement Generation (MG), a group I worship. MG is shepherding a set of ideas that blow my mind every time I encounter them. I reference the organization often in conversation and interviews, and I included their “Shocks, Slides and Shifts” framework in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. To me, MG feels like emergent strategy in action, and the thinkers who founded the organization were teachers in the soil of my own “ahas” about how the world works, what matters, and what we must do.

MG taught me that eco– comes from the Greek word oikos, which means home, and that home is what we always want to center, protect, and grow. That takes multiple forms: Ecosystem is all the relationships in our home. Ecology is what we know and understand about home. Economy is not money or markets, but how we manage the resources of our home. And ecological justice—a state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems—is rooted in and flows from home. 

MG also taught me about “the lag effect.” Without realizing it, I had developed a short-term way of thinking about the impact of humans on Earth, but the “lag effect” framing helped me understand the cumulative effect of human behavior on our planet. Did you know it takes between 40 and 50 years to fully feel the effect of burning fossil fuels? Our Earth is experiencing the effect of the fossil fuels humans were burning in the 1980s. Consider how much fossil fuel has burned in the decades since then, a climate impact that will shape our next half century. Understanding this can give us a clearer picture of what is to come and how to take the right action. 

MG taught me that everything is precious. One of their beloved founders, Gopal Dayaneni, often tells the story about how he and his daughter would brush their teeth together so he could simultaneously teach her about the preciousness of every drop of water. I took that practice into my own life. 

MG helped me understand the true web of our interconnectedness. Our Earth isn’t organized by the borders we have set on top of it. Instead, Earth is a single living system operating as a spider’s web, where all of us are connected and impact each other, and core webbing ties it all together. There is fragility and strength in all of this connection. 

Learning interconnectedness helped me understand there is no “over there.” There is no climate catastrophe that can actually be contained. If we hope to survive, then we have to think about how we cause impact and are impacted by others and how we can protect the meta systems—air, water, soil, and energy—that hold us all. 

MG’s “Three Circles” strategy helped me understand strategy in a way I could quickly use and apply. In this exercise, the three overlapping circles represent what we need, what’s politically possible, and what are false solutions. So often, our political system will hear us articulate what we need and return with a false solution, claiming it is the only option that is politically possible. MG helped me understand that our work is never to settle for the false solutions, but to instead organize, exert pressure, and educate ourselves to make what we need politically possible. This has saved me so much time and helped me determine where to expend my own precious life force. 

This is just a taste of MG’s incredible thinking and experimentation. The organization has also liberated land in the Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area and is building a Justice and Ecology Center for communities to gather, deepen, and learn in part of a larger shift to return land to Indigenous hands and those who will love and steward it. 

As we keep watching our government devolve, I am calling on MG to helm Murmurations in 2025 and offer a guide for how we can foster a just transition, even against the odds. Movement Generation is going to use this column to provide current ideas, frameworks, and practices that can help us navigate this storm. 

I am so excited to be their student again, and I am grateful for YES! Media letting us continue to iterate to make the best offer we can. We invite you to learn with us, grow with us, and change with us.