I have been thinking this week about Nepal, the flash flooding in the Grand Canyon, and the end of a year in which we have been trying to identify practice partners who are seriously working on the question of how people become capable of another kind of collective life.

I have also been reading Imagining the Possible: New Responses to Systemic Risks, An Exploration 2025–2045, a report from the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment, an initiative hosted by the United Nations Foundation.

The report begins from what it calls the polycrisis: interconnected threats to people, ecosystems, and institutions whose effects compound and cascade across systems. Its authors use a futures exercise to ask what kinds of responses might become possible as the systems around us experience increasing disruption. What emerged were futures characterized by stronger local governance, grassroots networks, ecological responsibility, deeper participation, alternative economic arrangements, and communities increasingly capable of carrying one another through crisis.

One of the most important findings comes toward the end. The authors conclude that our capacity to respond to systemic crisis ultimately requires capacities in people: patience, sufficient time to deal with trauma, deep participatory decision-making, compassion, honesty, agency, energy, and stamina.

I recognized the question immediately.

For several years, Poetic Futurism has been asking: What kind of people must we become to be capable of the future we say we want?

Over this past year, our effort to identify strong practice partners has repeatedly confirmed how central that question is. We have spent much of the year trying to identify people working primarily with White communities around civic culture, regenerative culture, democratic life, community formation, and related efforts. We wanted to find people who were already practicing the capacities we believe this moment requires and with whom we could build meaningful long-term relationships.

What we found has been unsurprising and still sobering.

Again and again, we encountered sophisticated language about regeneration, belonging, reciprocity, interdependence, collective care, healing, democracy, and relationship alongside communities whose actual relationships continued to reproduce White supremacy and patriarchy.

The vocabulary had changed. The practices had changed. The aesthetics of community had often changed. People sat in circles, spoke about reciprocity, practiced ceremony, invoked ancestors, talked about relationship with the Earth, used consensus processes, and drew from Indigenous and ecological traditions. Yet when actual relationships came under pressure—when questions of race, gender, authority, responsibility, labor, conflict, accountability, and belonging arose—the deeper organization of the dominant culture frequently became visible again.

This experience has helped me understand more clearly a distinction that is becoming increasingly important within Poetic Futurism: the difference between performance and enactment.

Performance reproduces a form. Enactment reorganizes the relationships that make the form meaningful.

A circle can be a form. Relational governance is an arrangement of authority and responsibility. Reciprocity can be a value. Reciprocity becomes enacted through what people actually owe one another and what they are willing to carry. Belonging can be spoken. Belonging becomes real when conflict arrives and belonging remains available to people whose experience challenges how a community understands itself.

A community can perform decentralization while continuing to organize itself around charismatic authority. It can speak about collective care while women continue carrying disproportionate relational and communal labor. It can invoke Indigenous wisdom while White people retain control of institutions, land, resources, interpretation, and decision-making.

In other words, a dominant coherence can absorb remarkably different practices while preserving the relationships of power that organize it.

This is one reason I developed the concept of Colonial Coherence Terraforming. Conquest transformed far more than political institutions. It reorganized land, authority, memory, identity, relationship, economy, legitimacy, and our understanding of what constitutes reality itself. Over centuries, one historically particular arrangement of human life became capable of presenting itself as universal.

That matters enormously when we talk about the future from the Americas.

The dominant political and economic institutions through which the Americas are now governed are relatively recent here. Long before the nation-state, the modern corporation, multilateral institutions, contemporary property regimes, or the nonprofit sector existed, the Americas were filled with peoples carrying complex and enduring systems of governance, agriculture, diplomacy, collective responsibility, ecological relationship, law, ceremony, and political authority. Many of those systems developed across centuries and millennia. Many continue to exist.

So our historical trajectory is larger than an old system reaching crisis and humanity now needing to invent a new one.

We are living amid the consequences of one political and cultural order having attempted to subordinate and replace many others, while peoples carrying other political worlds survived.

This changes the meaning of futurism.

Some of what contemporary futures and regenerative movements are now trying to imagine—distributed governance, collective responsibility, ecological relationship, intergenerational thinking, locally held authority, relationships between human and more-than-human life—has very long histories in the Americas. These are possibilities for the future and living inheritances carried into the present.

The ASRA report itself approaches this realization. Its nature-centered futures imagine traditional knowledge, Indigenous Peoples, ecological science, youth, local Earth councils, and representation of nonhuman life becoming part of future systems of governance.

Poetic Futurism asks us to move further.

The continued existence of Indigenous political worlds demonstrates that the dominant system represents one political possibility rather than the entire horizon of political reality. Our task therefore reaches beyond learning Indigenous ways of being and incorporating selected practices into regenerative communities.

Emulation is an insufficient relationship.

We can study Indigenous governance, practice ceremony, learn ecological principles, speak about reciprocity, or borrow practices of collective decision-making while leaving the colonial arrangement fundamentally intact.

The form changes. The relationship remains.

Since 2019, For A Loving Future has been in sustained relationship with both the National Maya Weavers Movement and the Women’s Awareness Centre Nepal. These relationships have developed across years and across many different kinds of work, becoming part of the relational infrastructure through which we understand solidarity, authority, obligation, and our responsibilities across distance.

Our relationship with the National Maya Weavers Movement asks us to become increasingly capable of encountering another political world as real. Our purpose is to become capable of sustained political relationship with Maya authorities as Maya authorities, recognizing authority we did not create, accepting that relationship can generate obligations we do not entirely determine, understanding the histories that position us differently, moving resources through relationships of trust, and allowing sustained political relationship to shape how we understand obligation, solidarity, authority, and our own practice of power.

And then there is Nepal.

When catastrophic flooding struck Nepal last week, we did not need to invent a system for international solidarity. Relationship already existed. We knew who to call. We trusted WACN's assessment of what was happening. They held the knowledge and authority to determine what their communities needed. Our responsibility was to respond, organize our own community, and move resources through an existing relationship of trust.

The relationship became infrastructure.

That experience has been sitting beside the devastating flash flooding in the Grand Canyon this week. On August 29, significant flooding moved through Bright Angel Canyon and the Phantom Ranch area, destroying nearly all of the footbridges across Bright Angel Creek and damaging trails, utilities, facilities, and other infrastructure.

But the Grand Canyon is more than a landscape administered by the United States as a national park. It is simultaneously part of the homelands and histories of Indigenous peoples whose relationships with that place long precede the United States.

The same place therefore exists inside the relatively recent administrative imagination of the modern state while simultaneously remaining inside relationships, responsibilities, histories, and understandings of place carried across vastly longer periods of time.

That matters when we think about systemic crisis.

The flood is occurring within a national park. It is also occurring within an Indigenous homeland.

Those are different descriptions of the same place, carrying different histories of authority, relationship, responsibility, and time.

This is precisely why I think our response to the polycrisis requires greater historical depth than simply imagining what system might replace the one that is failing. Other political worlds already exist. Other relationships to land already exist. Other arrangements of collective responsibility have survived. The question is whether we can recognize them as living political realities rather than converting selected elements of them into practices for our own regenerative projects.

The kinds of systemic disruption the ASRA report asks us to imagine are already part of the world we are living in.

The deeper question is what relationships will exist when they arrive.

Our year of searching for practice partners has clarified why this matters so much. We need more than communities capable of describing another world. We need more than practices associated with another world. We need more than institutions that have changed their language.

We need human formation processes through which people become capable of relationships that generate and sustain a different world.

We will know something has changed when reciprocity costs us something and we remain reciprocal. When authority resides somewhere we do not control and we recognize it. When racial conflict unsettles a community's understanding of itself and belonging expands rather than contracts. When resources move according to relationship and responsibility. When the mundane work of collective life is shared. When people formed within hierarchy become capable of relinquishing power. When relationships create obligations that continue after the gathering, workshop, retreat, ceremony, or crisis has ended.

This is enactment.

And I think this is one of the places where Poetic Futurism makes a contribution that I can now see with increasing clarity.

A great deal of futures work helps us imagine another world. A great deal of regenerative work gives us practices through which we can experience aspects of another world.

Poetic Futurism asks whether we are becoming people capable of enacting the relationships through which another world becomes real.

That is why we say:

The future is a relationship.