Excerpted from John Thackara::

“”As articulated by Joanna Macy, a politics of reconnection can seem, at first encounter, to be naive and unrealistic. But it would be wrong to disregard this story as implausible given what we now know about the ways complex systems – including belief systems – change. “All the great transformations have been unthinkable until they actually came to pass” writes the French philosopher Edgar Morin; “the fact that a belief system is deeply rooted does not mean it cannot change”.

Transformation can unfold quietly as a variety of changes, interventions, and disruptions accumulate across time. At a certain moment – which is impossible to predict – a tipping point, or phase shift, is reached and the system as a whole changes. Sustainability, understood in this light, is a condition that emerges through incremental change at many different scales.
There’s mounting evidence that a new narrative along these lines is ready to emerge on a mass scale. According to the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WGBU), the heavyweight scientific body that advises the German Federal Government on ‘Earth System Megatrends’, a ‘global transformation of values’ has already begun. In the North as in the South, a significant majority would ‘welcome a new economic system’ that supports ambitious climate protection measures. What the WGBU terms ‘post-materialist thinking’ is not limited to the well ­off and educated: its studies also found a ‘latent willingness to act’ among the citizens of South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, India, and China.

There’s a cheering consequence of this account: our passionate but puny efforts so far may not have been in vain: In an age of networks, even the smallest actions can contribute to transformation of the system as a whole – even of none of us had that outcome explictly in mind. It’s like the picture in a jigsaw puzzle that slowly emerges as we add each piece.”