Nudging the World
In 1976, I bid farewell to academia with the vague intention of pursuing a more socially relevant career. We created the Tellus Institute (née ESRG) as the vehicle for research in the service of environmental protection and social equity. I had no idea where this venture would take me; certainly not that it would lead ultimately to the broadest of concerns: the outlook for planetary civilization.
Whether by mere coincidence or subtle forces of synchronicity, my big career shift was coterminous with a big historical shift that was to enlarge the scope of my work. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the world was changing rapidly. Threads of interdependence multiplied, lengthened, and strengthened, weaving disparate places together as an overarching planetary place. The whole world and all its creatures were becoming entangled as one community of fate with shared crises, risks, and opportunities. History had entered the Planetary Phase of Civilization.
The bumpy transition to this new phase is marked by far-reaching crises, institutional instability, and a zeitgeist of deepening apprehension. The modern era, with its incessant growth, environmental domination, and a contentious interstate order, has reached its endgame. But the shape of the successor civilization remains deeply uncertain and highly contested. In the chaotic interregnum, it’s easier to imagine a new Dark Ages descending than anything resembling business-as-usual. Still, the possibility remains that the systemic crisis could foster a systemic shift to a better world.
The seeds of this line of thinking planted themselves in my consciousness in the mid-1980s. At that time, I served on the drafting team for Our Common Future, the highly influential report of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (known as the “Brundtland Commission”). The report’s indelible contribution was to introduce the idea and project of “sustainable development” into international policy and research agendas.
But the Brundtland Commission failed, in the view of us dissidents, to convey the significance of the historic challenge and the deep shift needed to avert a downward spiral. Instead, it put forth a “tech fix” strategy of market adjustments and policy tweaks that addressed the symptoms not the underlying disease. The Commission remained silent on underlying drivers of unsustainability—the growth imperative baked into the DNA of capitalism, consumerist culture, fractious geopolitics, and a “development” model in which poor countries converge toward rich-country patterns. The Commission’s reformism became the dominant policy paradigm for pursuit of sustainable development.
By contrast, I came to see sustainability as one aspect of a wider search in the twenty-first century for a flourishing civilization. The transformative times we lived in called for fundamental societal change beyond anodyne reforms. My organization was well situated to address the analytic and political deficiencies and lacunae of the mainstream discourse, inaugurated by the Brundtland Commission. Indeed, as I noted earlier, we had rechristened our institute “Tellus” after the Roman Earth goddess, as we turned toward integrated analyses of social-ecological systems.
My focus was on understanding and shaping the whole global system, an agenda pursued through a sequence of increasingly ambitious projects. Gordon Goodman, the Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and I took the plunge with the launch of the PoleStar Project (1990—1995). The aim was to build a conceptual framework for grasping the historic moment and thinking about alternative futures. The project created the PoleStar System, a data-intensive computer tool for painting quantitative pictures of alternative scenarios.
The PoleStar Project segued naturally into the Global Scenario Group (1995—2002). Ecologist Gilberto Gallopín and I created GSG as an international, interdisciplinary collaboration. The group’s widely read valedictory essay Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, written for a broad readership, summarized our perspective and findings.
The essay became the point of departure for an enlarged effort called the Great Transition Initiative (2003—2025), with the tag line “Toward a Transformative Vision and Praxis.” The project assembled a by-invitation network that grew to one thousand prominent scholars and activists. Its multiyear discourse generated over 5,000 pages of essays, interviews, and forums focusing on key sectoral, thematic, and political dimensions. GTI contributed two unique resources—a rich body of theory and a peerless international network—to the nascent movement for a Great Transition.
Three decades of collaborative work on building the Great Transition framework generated answers to four archetypal questions, very briefly summarized here:
Where are we? A macro-transition is underway to a new stage of history (Planetary Phase of Civilization) in which the scale of human activity has reached the scale of Earth. An interdependent social-ecological system now intertwines the fates of all people and the larger community of life. The reigning world order, rooted in voracious capitalism and contentious states, carries us deeper into multiple, reinforcing crises. We enter the Planetary Phase with a legacy institutional architecture ill-adapted for managing the polycrisis it generates. Because of this disjuncture, faith in conventional development has become a dangerous illusion. The delegitimization of the mainstream begets populist demagoguery feeding off reactive anger, fear, and xenophobia, but also a new cosmopolitanism attuned to our shared global destiny.
Where are we going? From the chaos of transition, the historical trajectory can branch in contrasting directions. Three archetypal visions—Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions—capture broad possibilities (see figure). Conventional Worlds reliance on market mechanisms and reformist policies makes descent into Barbarization increasingly likely, although a swerve in history’s trajectory toward more favorable outcomes remain plausible.
Where do we want to go? A shift to a Great Transition is both necessary and possible, but hardly guaranteed. In this vision, global citizenship emerges as an outer layer of nested identities stretching from diverse communities to the planet. Human values swing toward solidarity, ecology, and quality-of life and away from ethno-nationalism, domination of nature, and consumerism. Cooperative economies designed to sustain people and planet displace capitalist economies rooted in greed and the profit motive. Transnational governance structures matched to Planetary Phase challenges address our common crises and opportunities. I imagine such a Great Transition future in Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization (pp. 71-108).
How do we get there? As the years pass and storm clouds gather, this critical question demands our attention with ever more urgency. Each of the scenarios depicted above features pivotal social actors for advancing its narrative arc. Global corporations and ruling strata are leading characters in Conventional Worlds stories. Authoritarians, ethno-nationalists, and jingoists have starring roles in tales of Barbarization. These dramatis personae strut prominently on contemporary global stage. But where is the leading actor that will drive a Great Transition?
The planetary predicament has spurred tens of millions into action. A vast constellation of organizations, movements, and campaigns are tackling the multitude of grievances, conflicts, and perils spawned by the deepening polycrisis. This Cambrian explosion of diverse forms of progressive public engagement brings wisps of hope to a sorry world.
Surging activism stands as a necessary precursor to a movement for a Great Transition. Necessary but not sufficient. Taken collectively, these efforts remain too fragmented, too myopic, and too defensive for the task of transformation. The gains they painstakingly win here and there are overwhelmed by systemic deterioration. Awareness and action have yet to reach the requisite scale and coherence for driving a holistic shift.
Recent decades have not been kind to a Great Transition. The bad news has taken two forms: what has happened and what has not happened. Tangible ecological, political, and cultural deterioration extrapolate toward a barbarized abyss. What has not happened is the coalescence of a consequential cultural and political force for civilizational renewal. At a historical fulcrum, we swing toward darkness desperately looking for an answer to the existential question: who will change the world?
The appearance of a planet-wide movement aligned with the imperatives of the Planetary Phase is long overdue. We see hints of it in justice, peace, and environmental campaigns. We see it in street demonstrations under the banner “system change not climate change.” We see it in scientific understanding of our fragile biosphere and paths to a safe harbor. We see it in critical scholarship, post-consumerist lifestyles, and experiments in cooperative economies. We see it in indigenous worldviews and the visionary search for a new meaning of development.
Although the critical actor for a Great Transition—a global citizens movement—remains missing from the global stage, it may be gathering in the wings. The imagined GCM would appear as an ecology of formal and informal associations working on a thousand fronts from local to global levels. It would assert power culturally, by shaping ideas and behavior; tactically, through actions that challenge the status quo; and strategically, by building institutions for sustained political influence. Diverse multitudes would act under a broad carapace of shared values and visions, proto-citizens of Earthland, the meta-country with no name.
The signature feature of the Planetary Phase—one global community of fate—is the historical precondition for this kind of movement. Our interdependent lives, institutions, and vulnerabilities urge enlarged consciousness, solidarity, and collective action. But powerful barriers—entrenched power structures, regressive ideologies, cultural inertia—stand in the way. Perhaps the most debilitating obstacle is the endemic despair paralyzing so many potential comrades.
These are daunting impediments, but with the stakes sky high, the only valid response is to double down. The long game is still on and, with cards to play, it’s too soon to fold. Hope is buoyed by the one certainty about the future: surprise. Desperately needed now are legions of catalysts working to coalesce a great movement for a Great Transition. That’s what I’ll be doing for as long as I’m able, the next leg of the outbound journey I embarked on with the childhood epiphany recalled in the opening paragraphs of this chronicle.