Through a simple and accessible explanation of the history behind why “Labour are being forced to do Austerity 2.0,” Stevenson offers a suggestion for how best to talk about wealth inequality with ordinary British people: “The Squeeze Out of the working class, The Squeeze Out of the middle class, The Squeeze Out of the government by rich people.” ‘The Squeeze Out’, Stevenson suggests, “is a really powerful way to explain to ordinary people what’s happening and how it affects them.” Our typical language: ‘wealth inequality’, “can sound academic, idealistic, egalitarian, politics of envy” whereas ‘The Squeeze Out’ focuses on “the most damaging and dangerous effect for ordinary people:” as the rich outcompete other groups in society for assets, over time, everyone else has fewer assets and more debt. There are five stages to this process, and we’re not far off the fifth now: “the rich own everything, and the only way they can grow their wealth is by sending you to fight in their wars against each other.” To stop this ‘squeeze out’: “tax wealth, not work”.

“Soft hope is passive – the belief that things will improve on their own. Hard hope is different. It acknowledges struggle, faces complexity head-on, and chooses to act anyway.” We’ve heard something like this before, but what’s interesting here is the science-backed suggestion to center curiosity, which “rewires the brain to handle uncertainty better. It triggers dopamine, making problem-solving more engaging, and quiets the amygdala, reducing fear-based reactions. It also strengthens the prefrontal cortex, enhancing critical thinking, emotional regulation, and long-term planning. Curiosity-driven exploration activates (brain) regions like the striatum and precuneus, improving attention and memory formation.” Along with kindness, “curiosity beats anxiety because it feels better, but also because it moves us in the opposite direction, from closed to open.” So, how might our storytelling “start strategically generating more curiosity in the world?”

“Let’s Talk About Rape® is a movement that challenges the silence and stigma surrounding sexual violence. Through photography and creative expression, the project empowers survivors to reclaim their narratives, confront trauma, and redefine themselves as survivors, not victims… By using photography as therapy, the project fosters deep personal engagement, creating powerful images that demand recognition, showcasing strength, dignity, and defiance. Survivors’ stories, from war-related rape to child sexual abuse, reveal the truth that shame belongs to the perpetrator, not the survivor. Let’s Talk About Rape® shifts the narrative from victimhood to resilience and resistance, breaking societal taboos and fostering empowerment.” They offer a space to ‘unmute’ your story here.

A clarifying suggestion of how we can locate the Trump regime’s actions within the ‘adaptive cycle model’, which seeks to understand the trajectory of living systems. “Trumpocracy 2.0” can be seen as “the fulcrum of the movement of industrial civilisation through the “release” stage – a period of breakdown in which entrenched structures and institutions unravel under their own rigidity and contradictions”. This is the third of four system stages – 1. Growth and accumulation, 2. Conservation/stability, 3. Release, 4. Reorganisation – and “manifests as a collapse dynamic: old paradigms and power structures begin to break apart, opening up a new, if turbulent, possibility space for transformation.” Though identifying “seven sources of rot”, including how “in a failing system, ruling powers double down on military expansion and authoritarian control to stave off crises,” we can plan to navigate this ‘Release’ stage by making critical shifts, including developing ‘energy commons’, ‘decentralised and participatory organisational structures’ and a ‘cultural shift towards regenerative values’.

A challenge to prevailing Western narratives about China, offering a different perspective on the recent history of their civilisation and the West’s relationship to it. In particular we are asked to consider how China have developed so successfully, despite the West’s concerted attempts to suppress them, and reconsider events accordingly. For example we typically assume that the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre was a suppression of anti-Communist dissidence, when actually “exactly the opposite is true. They were protesting against the US-backed capitalist reforms”. Hickel provides various data and insights to challenge typical assumptions, including the role of markets in the clean energy transition, and what led to China’s success in reducing poverty and inequality (e.g. they put limits on billionaires). We’re asked to rethink suggestions that China is Imperialist, and consider whether it might even be more democratic than the US.

If you’ve been paying attention to reactionary discourse and propaganda (e.g. from ARC forum), the perspective shared here will be familiar, but it’s useful to see it so clearly laid out – and to see how the same collapse signals are leading to very different conclusions for people. Ali introduces us to the tactics of subversion, courtesy of a former KGB agent, and how they have been employed in a “systematic and totalising way” to undermine and erode Western values. She asks “who is doing the subverting, who is trying to unravel America and the West?” In her view: “American Marxists… Radical Islamists… and The Chinese Communist Party,” with Vladimir Putin “waging his own subversion campaign by supporting and advancing the three other forces.” We are warned they are “promoting ideas that weaken the bonds between members of the family, promoting narcissistic individualism over family unity, creating financial stressors that discourage family formation (and) acrimony between the sexes”, and told that “a closed society is immune to subversion because it simply tells potential subverters to leave. Free and open societies cannot rely on this defence.” Whoever it is that is actually using the tactic, ‘divide and conquer’ seems to be working.

An exploration of moving beyond efforts to perfect the “visible structures of knowledge, power, and legitimacy“, through for example “institutional reforms, language policing, and compliance-driven inclusion efforts”, which focus on “moral purification” and “performative correction”. Instead we are encouraged to delve deeper, getting underneath with a “meta-critical, metabolic approach” focused on “tending to the soil, the fungi, and the unseen networks of relationality that sustain life,” which requires us to engage with decay and decomposition “as necessary elements of change, rather than failures to be avoided”. We are offered a table that compares a control-based ‘pruning the bonsai’ approach with a meta-critical ‘metabolising decay’ approach. Doing this deepest work “is not about perfecting what exists – it is about clearing space for what is yet to come.”

In this time of endings, we are encouraged to “move beyond fear and embrace the deep transitions ahead with wisdom.” As stewards, we will “develop the practices and capacities to tend to these endings, not with urgency or control, but with a kind of stillness that invites the birth of new ways of being,” and “reimagine how we relate to endings, not as catastrophic failures or moments to be avoided, but as natural processes that hold within them the seeds of renewal.” The pose this requires may feel unusual to us, certainly those in corporate roles, because “what we need is more like disinvestment than disruption”. We need to disinvest from these certainties and invest in our capacities for complexity,” and to be wise takes a “commitment to the viability of the matter while retaining a sense of the mystery and movement of the whole existing beyond us.”

Exploring five examples of emerging social, political and economic structures that offer pathways beyond our current predicament. Which are: 1. Post-capitalist ownership models (like Mondragón); 2. Indigenous movement’s growing influence (like the First Nations Land Management Act in Canada); 3. Post-growth policymaking (like the Wellbeing Economy Governments Alliance); 4. Wellbeing-oriented urban transformations (like 15-min models and car-free streets); 5. Commons-based public infrastructure (like the Bürgerenergie movement and OpenStreetMap). Quoting Arundhati Roy, Mezz suggests these emergences signal that “another world…is on her her way” — “piecemeal, imperfectly, but undeniably”. Those calling for alternatives would do well to look into these examples, and ask, as Mezz concludes: “how will we find our own way to participate in building them?”

An emerging effort in Scotland from the people behind Alternative UK, which holds that “given enough time and space, we humans – in our full diversity – are enough to meet the demands of our own lives and societies. And not just to fix what’s broken, but to envision something far better — then build it.” In doing so, ‘Spring’ recognises “the need to answer our sense of powerlessness with experiences of real power, exercised in the places we live, within our communities;” leaning into a recognition of our ‘cosmolocality’ aka “the technological freedom to access worlds of ideas, practices, even blueprints without leaving our homes or locality;” and that this empowerment will answer “deep emotional needs”, ultimately helping us to “reset our attitudes to the future”. It is rooted in an awareness of emerging ‘ecocivilisation’ economic structures, and the “new forms of deliberating, participating and envisioning” that are “being tested daily” to support and enable them.

A reflection on how climate activism has evolved, beyond the ‘information deficit’ fallacy to “telling new stories that connect with people’s everyday lives, while also building our own infrastructure to get those stories out there and recapture the collective narrative from the far-right.” With that in mind, a new speaker agency – ‘Speak Up’ – was developed, working to “join the dots by weaving together” and “inspire new ways of thinking about the solutions – and our shared existence – by flooding the space with bold voices and better stories.” Stories that speak from personal experience as well as expertise, building trust through authenticity and showing that vulnerability is a strength, not weakness,” and which spread “messages of connection and collaboration over division and competition”, creating space for “a new, better, kinder conversation, anchored in doing, not just telling.”

“The Planetary Civics Inquiry is an alliance of researchers, educators, policymakers, designers, and practitioners committed to transforming the structures and processes that shape how we govern our entangled planet. In the next 10x100 days, we strive to achieve significant milestones towards ‘planetarity’ as a frame of action, influencing public policy, creating a governance framework for complex ecosystems, and building a planetary civics alliance for a new knowledge economy and more regenerative futures.” This video playlist hosts all four events from the launch of the Inquiry in February, including conversations on ‘A New Internationalism’, Bioregions, and being ‘Human in An Age of Entanglement’.