Three contradictions we must now hold

It’s summer, the beginning of August. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading, writing, and thinking a lot. I’ve looked back on the path I’ve walked and spent time reflecting on what lies ahead. And this image above, something I picked up online sometime last decade, has stayed with me. Simple as it is, it captures something essential. It shows how the path I’ve taken, with all its turns, forks, choices, and closures, leads to this moment. A branching point, a place full of potential futures, full of possible paths to wander.

Right now, my thinking is colored by three contradictions. Each difficult, each alive, and each asking to be held rather than solved.

The system is failing — and doing exactly what it was built to do.

We often hear that the system is broken, that chaos and collapse are the result of dysfunction. But what if the real horror is that it’s functioning exactly as designed? In recent months, and especially in the past few weeks, we’ve seen power being exercised not in spite of the system, but through it. Lobbyists gut environmental protections. Fossil fuel executives stall or rewrite regulations. Major banks quietly abandon their net-zero pledges. These are not glitches. They are the program running as intended.

This is not a system built for planetary stewardship. It was built for extraction, expansion, and control. And now, with collapse on the horizon, it is not loosening its grip. It is tightening it. The more pressure it feels, the more it digs in. Like a threatened animal, it curls inward, spikes out. What feels to us like failure may, from the inside, look like success. A logic of empire defending its own.

Urgency is real — and rushing only deepens the wound.

Yes, the world is on fire. Droughts and horrendous fires grip southern Europe. Catastrophic floods displace so many in China. Glaciers collapse. The Dolomites are crumbling, with huge rockfalls in the Brenta and Marmolada ranges. Rivers run dry. The clock is not hypothetical.

But the instinct to rush, to launch the next strategy, build the next tech, convene the next summit, often repeats the same logic that brought us here. Urgency without reflection becomes panic in disguise. As I’ve written before: haste is not responsibility.

The Stetind Declaration offers a quiet counterpoint: “There is no path to harmony with nature. Harmony with nature is the path.” The work ahead is not about acceleration, but reorientation. Joanna Macy spoke of active hope, not as optimism, but as a choice to stay present. To slow down enough to feel the grief. To act without guarantees. Not because success is assured, but because participation is what the moment asks of us. It echoes that old line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Self-possessed, resolute, act without any thoughts of results, open to success or failure.” It’s not speed that matters now. It’s presence.

Collapse is accelerating — and something else is germinating.

The ground is shifting. Yes. But maybe not only in one direction. Paul Hawken offers a different view: “There is an emergent offshoot of homo sapiens, women and men merging observational Indigenous wisdom and deterministic Western science into a different understanding of our place on Earth, a perspective that reveals what we do not know. Certainties are dissolving. They are being replaced by unfathomable complexity.”

As the old world falters, a new posture is quietly taking shape. One that doesn’t reduce carbon to a villain, but recognizes the deeper relationships we’ve severed. One that refuses the old separations (of people, of nature, of sky) and begins to reweave a different tapestry. Relational. Humble. Attentive.

It doesn’t arrive with headlines or applause. But it is here, in communities tending soil, in councils reimagining governance, in grief circles, in learning spaces where care matters more than control. Not a blueprint or a masterplan, but a shift in stance, in gaze, in rhythm. As Joanna Macy reminded us, we don’t need certainty to act. Only presence.

So perhaps this is where we find ourselves: not at a dead end, but at a branching point. The past has shaped both me and the world, yes, but it doesn’t define what comes next. The image at the top reminds me that even in a time of unraveling and collapse, the future still holds many paths. Almost all of them are narrow, unfamiliar, probably difficult. But also, hopefully, full of promise. And the way we carry these three tensions may guide us, gently, toward the ones that begin to open.

This article is also published on Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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