Nate Hagens

And if we stop climbing, gravity, the social and ecological, will pull us back down into a valley we don't want.

An important caveat too is the landscape we are navigating is not static.

It's pretty dynamic and always changing, whether through human or non-human forces.

And as we move through the peaks and valleys of the terrain, the ground beneath us continues to shift under our feet.

Energy descent, climate change, biodiversity loss.

and much more are all actively reshaping the valley as we proceed through it.

In other words, a future that was uphill in the 1990s may now be downhill or will be in a decade from now or vice versa.

So, I'd like to think about this in terms of what we covered in part two.

Contraction, economic contraction, combined with adversarial geopolitics and increased concentration of power is now the path of least resistance, or at least economic contraction for most people.

This is now a downhill roll.

It does not require any conspiracies or villains.

It merely requires people being afraid and leaders responding to fear the way leaders have responded to fear for thousands of years.

Consolidation, control, surveillance, walls.

Economic contraction combined with cooperative geopolitics and broadly shared power is

That's possible.

That's uphill from where we are.

It requires people to trust each other during precisely the period when trust is hardest to sustain.

It requires leaders to share power when the incentives to consolidate are strong.

um it also will require communities to coordinate when coordination is the most expensive and tiring and difficult but and at the core of the work of the great simplification

And our outreach and the information and the community uphill does not mean impossible.