Love & Work treats “give peace a chance” as a design brief.
Humanity faces overlapping crises—democratic erosion, climate disruption, deep inequality, and a widespread loss of meaning. The current trajectory won’t get us where we need to go.
Across the globe, people are designing, building, and testing new ways to work, learn, love, and live. These efforts are small enough to try, real enough to matter, and open enough to evolve. Love & Work maps them so they’re easier to see, learn from, and join.
WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?
If you have ever suspected that ecology, democracy, education, economics, culture, and consciousness are all chapters of the same unfinished story, you are in the right place.
“The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes." - Freeman Dyson
WHAT'S GOING ON HERE
For the mad dreamers, holy renegades, and tender‑hearted good kids
The problem isn’t that you don’t care. The problem is that you care so much you sometimes wonder if you’re slightly out of your mind. You look at the racism, misogyny, runaway greed, and environmental collapse filling the headlines, and some part of you mutters, “It’s too late. Nothing I do matters,” even as another, more hopeful part refuses to shut up or shut down. That inner argument makes perfect sense. It’s the shape your love for the world has taken in a culture that keeps insisting it’s safer not to feel.
...read more
WHAT'S GOING ON HERE
The map behind the map
We’re trained to think in categories, trust experts, and solve problems one piece at a time.A kid struggles in school—call in education.
A river gets polluted—call in environmental policy.
A community fractures—call it politics.
Rising anxiety and loneliness—hand it to mental health.
This division of labor keeps institutions moving. It builds expertise, creates careers, and gets specific things done. It also distorts what is actually happening.Because the world doesn’t arrive in labeled boxes. It shows up as a mesh of relationships.
...read more
LEARNING, SYSTEMS THINKING
Learning to see ourselves as participants in a larger web of relationships
A turning point is not the moment when everything suddenly gets better. It’s the moment when enough of us admit that the old map no longer matches the ground under our feet.
BOOK: The Turning Point, Science, Society, and the Rising Culture
CULTURE, INTERDEPENDENCE
The shifting roles and relationships that actually hold communities and institutions together.
Carole Crumley is an American anthropologist and archaeologist known for founding the field of historical ecology and for introducing the idea of heterarchy to explain power and complexity in human societies.
ARTICLE SUMMARY: The Central Role of Collaboration and Trust in Human Societies
LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING
We don’t spend much time imagining all the possibilities the future holds.
Bina Venkataraman says that humans have a superpower that we ignore. In her 2019 book The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, she explores how individuals and societies can overcome shortsightedness to confront long-term challenges like climate change and public health.
TED TALK: The power to think ahead in a reckless age | Bina Venkataraman
CULTURE, STORY
We need a new narrative that can transmit values, orient education, and guide institutions toward sustaining the Earth community.
In The New Story, Berry suggested that the old Western worldview no longer provided an adequate understanding of reality.
BOOK REVIEW: The New Story: Comments on the Origin, Identification, and Transmission of Values
LEARNING, SYSTEMS THINKING
Reading the world as a whole system, not a broken machine
Donella H. “Dana” Meadows (1941–2001) was an American environmental scientist, systems analyst, educator, and writer. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in sustainability and systems thinking of the late twentieth century.
BOOK: Thinking in Systems: A Primer
learning, personal development
All things are interconnected.
Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the first teachers who showed me that peace is not distant or abstract. If I pause and notice, it can be found in every breath, every step, and even in the most ordinary moments—washing dishes, waiting in traffic.
INTRODUCTION: The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings
LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING
A Systems Thinking Glossary
By exploring the interconnectedness and holistic approach inherent in systems thinking, this glossary helps readers navigate complex systems and enhance their understanding of this transformative field.
WEBSITE: Systems Thinking Glossary
CULTURE, STORY
What we’re facing is serious, and we need to acknowledge the whole truth of it.
Joanna Macy talks about what it means to live well in dark times marked by accelerating climate disruption, collapsing ecosystems, chronic war, and extreme inequality.
ARTICLE: Learning to See in the Dark Amid Catastrophe: An Interview With Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy
spring 2026
Growth and change is complex. Here are twelve ideas that frame this catalog.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”— R. Buckminster Fuller
LEARNING, SYSTEMS THINKING
Our task is to participate wisely in a world where collapse and rebirth are unfolding at the same time.
None of us has to do everything, but each of us can do something. In Jewish teaching, Rabbi Tarfon says, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it”—a line often associated with the work of repairing the world (tikkun olam). No one is asked to save everything; each of us is asked to take up our share of the work through whatever mix of creativity, care, and courage is available to us, right where we are.
...read more
culture, story
We need a new story.
For centuries, many of us in the industrial West have lived inside a tale that casts the world as raw material and humans as its managers, consumers, and winners or losers. This old narrative has powered extraordinary innovation, but it has also delivered us to the brink: a heating planet, frayed democracies, mass extinction, and a pervasive sense that life is speeding up and thinning out at the same time. In that light, the question is not just what policies we adopt or which technologies we deploy, but what story we are living in—and whether it can still hold.
...read more
learning, long view
The long game is not a strategy for winning; it is a way of belonging.
Social change unfolds over generations, not election cycles. Margaret Wheatley tells a story about colleagues who once met with the Dalai Lama while feeling deeply discouraged that their work for change seemed to have little impact. They asked whether their efforts would ever make a difference, given how dire things looked. With a smile, he replied: “Oh, don’t worry about that. Your work will bear influence in about 700 years.”
...read more
culture, celebration
Joy and creativity are strategies for liberation.
The future needs our delight as much as our outrage. adrienne maree brown teaches that what we pay attention to grows, and that pleasure can be a strategy for liberation—a way of reclaiming our whole, joyful selves in the face of systems designed to numb, exhaust, and divide us. When joy, kindness, and love are chosen deliberately, the terms of the struggle begin to change. Most of us were taught to think of power as domination, extraction, and control.
...read more
HABITAT, design
Design matters.
Design is often invisible but never neutral; it quietly shapes how we see, feel, and act together. It can make cynicism feel inevitable, or gently suggest that care is a given. The lines of a building, the way a room holds light, the ease or friction in a doorway or a website—all of these choices whisper instructions about what and who matters. When we move through environments that are coherent, gracious, and humane, it becomes easier to imagine that our shared life could be that way too.
...read more
civics, social intelligence
Why I still hold onto some of my flower-child hope
I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s when pop songs promised revolution and the distance between what we could imagine and what we could build felt easy to cross. In less than fifteen years, our culture underwent profound shifts in racial justice, gender equality, ecological awareness, and attitudes toward American power—changes so rapid they seemed to prove that consciousness itself could reshape the world.
...read more
LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
We are a lot smarter together.
The smartest person in the room is almost never the person who thinks they are. And in any case, the room itself is usually smarter than any single person in it — if we know how to work it. This is not a flattering metaphor. It is a finding. When groups are given the conditions to think well together — genuine diversity of perspective, real listening, shared stakes, and the freedom to disagree — they reliably outperform even their most gifted individual members.
...read more
LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING
Education belongs at the center of any serious conversation about the future.
We have confused education with the delivery of content. For more than a century, most schools in the industrial world have been organized around a simple transaction: adults hold knowledge; children receive it. The measure of success is how much sticks. The tools are lessons, tests, grades, and credentials—a production line that begins with small children and ends, theoretically, with prepared adults.
...read more
LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING
The living world is not a backdrop. It is a teacher.
We built our civilization on a single, confident assumption: that the natural world is a resource. Not a teacher, not a community, not a relative — a resource. Something to be surveyed, extracted, managed, and, if necessary, replaced. This assumption is so embedded in our institutions, our economics, and our education that most of us have spent our lives inside it without ever having to name it.
...read more
LEARNING, personal development
Personal transformation and emotional health are not personal luxuries. They are critical civic resources.
It's relatively easy to describe the crises of our time in the language of systems: broken institutions, failed markets, collapsing ecologies, eroding democracies. But why are these systems failing? It is elucidating to remember that every human-built system is a pattern of relationships. Decisions are made by people who operate from the emotional capacities they have developed over a lifetime.
...read more
LEARNING, systems thinking
The way we come together is itself a technology — and we can upgrade it.
Picture a meeting you have attended recently about something that genuinely mattered — a community problem, an organizational challenge, a question that required the best thinking of everyone in the room. Chances are it followed a familiar script. An agenda was circulated. A few people spoke most of the time. Someone at the front of the room held a marker.
...read more
ECONOMICS, long view
The purpose of economic life is to sustain people and places, not to sacrifice them to the gains of a few.
Most of us were handed an economy we didn’t design and weren’t asked about. We were taught to navigate it — find work, manage money, build security — but not to question its premises. The premises were presented as facts: people are primarily self-interested; competition drives progress; growth is the measure of health. Yet these are not facts. They are choices. And choices, as it turns out, can be changed.
...read more
"Self interest is of the past.
Common interest is for the future."
— David Attenborough
