What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action
Frankly #132
This week’s Frankly marks a turning point in the work of The Great Simplification. Having spent twenty years articulating the more-than-human predicament, I shift from diagnosis to direction as current events – including conflict in the Strait of Hormuz – accelerate the timeline. Today I share a first-pass framework for action and response that’s organized around what to do now, which could be applied to various places and at multiple scales.
The framework begins with a personal foundation of inner work: stabilizing the nervous system, recapturing a sense of agency, doing grief work, and cultivating inner calmness as a precondition for effective action. I also emphasize the need to build trusted networks and shared language so that when disruptions arrive, communities aren’t starting conversations from scratch. These two layers set the foundation for six broad fronts of intervention: infrastructure and physical stock-and-flow planning, poverty and displacement, ecological defense and regeneration, civic resilience and governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition toward commons-based and post-growth models. I stress that these fronts are interdependent and not contingent on a single scenario – they hold across various possible scenarios for the future.
I also introduce a timeline axis of three overlapping phases, which build upon each other to shape the conditions of our future: the current stability window where building is still possible, the period of triage and “bend not break,” and the stable attractor that gives direction to the work of the first two. I close with an observation about leadership: that modern systems select for dark triad traits, and that reluctance to lead may itself be a signal worth heeding.
What do you currently do with your time? Which of these six areas of engagement feels the most accessible to you right now? And where in your networks do you see the beginnings of shared language and trust that could support coordinated response?
Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.
In case you missed it…
In this week’s episode, I was joined by Dr. Shanna Swan, an award-winning scientist, and Sian Sutherland, a plastics expert, to discuss Shanna’s new Netflix documentary, titled The Plastic Detox, where she enacts a real-world ‘plastic intervention’ in the lives of six couples struggling with unexplained infertility – with the hope that they are able to get pregnant by the end of the study. Additionally, Sian shared the strategies her organization has been using to increase regulation of EDC-containing products and increase the availability of plastic-free options. Shanna and Sian also discussed how they’re bringing their work together for the Plastic Free Babies campaign, which emphasizes why avoiding toxic chemical exposure during the first one-thousand days of a baby’s life is so important to preventing generational effects on overall health and fertility.
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Dear Nate,
I watched Frankly #132 yesterday and had to write immediately, because you described — from the systems level — exactly what I have been building from the personal level for the past several years.
You said it yourself: start with personal equanimity, find others with shared mindset, build capacity, bring them into the conversation. That is the architecture of PlanetWise.
I am Monica Perez Nevarez, 67, living in Puerto Rico. I spent years on the finance side of Disaster Relief at the SBA and FEMA, watching families lose everything and watching the systems designed to help them fail. That experience — combined with 40 years as an environmental activist, living on an island that imports 85% of its food, that endured Hurricane Maria, and that has been in economic depression for over 30 years — became the laboratory for everything I am now building.
PlanetWise is a civic resilience platform working at the personal, family, and community scale — food, water, shelter, energy, finances, skills, and community connection — buttressed by education, small green business incubation, and reinvestment in local and regional economies. The goal is to make resilience something people actually do every morning, not something they intend to do someday.
You are working at the meta level. I am working at the personal level — the daily prompt, the backyard food forest, the neighbor's name, the pantry full of homemade pickled vegetables that can last a winter.
I would love to explore what working on this together might look like.
Monica Perez Nevarez
Founder, PlanetWise + NorthStar Network
PS I tried finding an email for you and could not. Also, I just joined Hylo! Happy to connect directly — please reach out through my contact page.
Thank you, Nate. I feel fortunate to have had a premonition of sorts and to have begun building an international trust network called Wisdom Exchange (affectionately, WE) several years ago. I’ve been charting its unfoldment in my upcoming book, "The Communal Heart: A Return to Belonging in a World Pulling Us Apart "(published by Wonderwell), now available for pre-order wherever books are sold. I share this because I want support anyone who is willing and interested to find their trusted others and begin preparing for the scenarios you outline.