Nate Hagens

Plenty of things in nature are uphill and they happen all the time.

Every living cell in your body has succeeded in an uphill project.

Salmon spend their adult life swimming against the current to spawn.

A redwood tree in California spends centuries pulling water hundreds of feet up against gravity.

So this landscape metaphor doesn't tell us that the climb cannot be done.

It just informs us that the climb has costs.

And also, what happens if we stop before we've reached a more stable resting place on the other side?

We slide back.

And this is true at every scale, your personal health, your relationships, your community, national and international governance.

The biosphere, these are all states that are maintained with effort.

They exist because someone or something is doing ongoing work, putting in energy, attention, and care to maintain it.

And the moment that work stops or shifts, the contours of the system's landscape reassert themselves.

And these systems devolve in years or even months because the landscape is always gently but persistently pulling them toward lower energy configurations.

So when we get to part four, probably next week or soon, and I walk through four composite worlds I've come up with, I invite you to hold this landscape idea in your mind.

Before I share those next time,

Maybe sit with a few questions.

Looking at the near and longer term future, where do you see the steep valleys and where do you see the open ground?

Which civilizational pathways feel uphill from here and which feel downhill?

Where are you actually standing in this landscape right now?

Because what counts, as I said earlier, as an uphill from a farmhouse in Malawi looks very different from what counts as uphill from an office in San Francisco.