On Resolutions…
For many of us the start of a new year entails resolution setting; time to drop those bad habits from the previous year and commit to cultivating some good ones. For those of us involved in foresight and futures work, January also asks us to make predictions and map out coming trends on the horizon. When it comes to new year’s resolutions or predictions both tend to think only of the 12 months ahead and come December are likely redundant, ticked off and considered done, or simply passé, a tired ‘out’ to be replaced by a more tantalising ‘in’.
Now 12 months does feel like a measly length of time when it comes to shaking habits reinforced over a lifetime, and vertiginous when it comes to cultivating new ones. Either way, 12 months is a helpful portion of time that most of us know how to accurately measure. It’s a timeframe that follows a classic narrative structure, we have a new beginning where potential is ripe, we have a period of seeding and gestation, then blooming and action, then rest and review (all helpfully guided by the temperaments of the seasons). In those 12 months I’m more likely to set a resolution to [start going to the gym] than to [become an athlete], as we know what is reasonably achievable within that space-time. Yet what about those necessary changes whose impact is not immediately measurable, that might not be ticked off by December, but need to be seeded now only to bear fruit in the far off future?
Of course, the change we are thinking about is the action needed to respond adequately to climate change (itself a ‘change’ that has been increasingly making itself felt in catastrophic ways across the world). We know that what we have done has got us to where we are now, however with changes that occur over an extended period of time there is rarely a clear causal chain to trace back, a definitive moment that set it all in action or solved it. Anab comes from India, where the revolt against British colonial rule started in 1857, and it was not until 90 years later, in 1947, that India became independent. Revolutions may be slow, dark and murky, often progress isn’t palpable until you are out the other side, but in the darkness and chaos there is always hope. As Researcher and founder of Warm Data Labs Nora Bateson has observed:
“Change is unpredictable in direction and often occurs at second and nth orders of systemic relationality”. 1
It then follows that the practice of resolution setting – with its focus on a defined goal and specified set of actions that lead to an assumed outcome – is an unhelpful means of cultivating gestures that attend to complex systemic change over the next thousand years. Resolutions do little to help nurture the short-term adaptation that prepares us for long-term adaptation.
And so instead of new year's resolutions we’d like to dedicate this year ahead to ready-ing (not to be misinterpreted as prepping for an inevitable apocalypse). Rather, the hopeful notion of ready-ing is evocatively described by Bateson as “tending to the prelude to change.”2 It involves an acceptance of, and remaining flexible to, the unseen and innate complexity of all living systems. To tend to the prelude to change is to commit to relinquishing our hold on predefined ambitions and give ourselves over to emergent insights, it “is a shift of attention from what can be done to achieve an outcome, to how to nourish the conditions into which the organism(s) learns to be in its world.”3 More than anything there is patience and trust in process, allowing for the previously unimaginable to be realised.
…And Revolutions
We can’t think of a better guide on this journey than Masanobu Fukuoka, the man behind the book The One Straw Revolution (first published in 1975). An inspiring story of social impact, The One Straw Revolution is a quiet refusal of the status quo that reimagined our relationship to food, to ourselves, and to time. Masanobu Fukuoka trained as a scientist, but disillusioned by modern agribusiness he left his well paid job in the city and returned to his family farm where over the next three decades he perfected his “do-nothing” farming. A method of farming free of pesticides, fertiliser, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Fukuoka’s visionary thinking and efforts – such as regenerative agriculture, permaculture, the connections between soil and food – however are not just set on transforming agricultural practice. He would say:
“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” 4
This radical approach has had a wide reaching (and ranging) influence. In the 1980’s Dr Partap C. Aggarwhal worked to bring Fukuoka’s method to the Friends Rural Centre in Rasulia, India. He writes “We too saw revolution in a straw. We did believe that if only a fraction of ordinary Indian farmers could adopt rishi kheti [agriculture of the sages] they could bring down the agro-business establishment, the government, and with it the entire urban-industrial structures of the country. Perhaps the straw had the same kind of power as Gandhi’s charkha.”5 Responding to and adapting this practice, Raju Titus – a farmer from Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh, whose land had incurred much loss and was on the brink of abandonment – followed Fukuoka’s lead and ceased to use pesticides, tillage and halved his farm’s irrigation capacities:
“Now the soil is healthier, we don't worry about the future. We have less work, more time for recreation and economically we are better off. When I was using modern farming methods, I was always worried about my crops. I was literally at war with nature.”6
When following modern agro-business Raju Titus was like a swimmer trying to move upstream against a strong current, his dependents (those who bought his crops and demanded higher yields) shouted ‘swim harder!’, but really the interventions needed were not downstream but mid and upstream. It is only there you can change the direction the current flows, facilitating the subsequent ease that comes from swimming with the current. Rather than be at war with nature, Raju Titus could work with nature. This attentiveness to the interconnectedness of systems, the co-dependency between human and nature, and a trust in the nth orders of change is something that can only be achieved when practising a long-term outlook. We got in touch with Fukuoka’s estate for a recent project, and all this was affirmed: Masanobu Fukuoka Natural Farm’s guiding philosophy continues “to think about things on the long-term time axis of 1000-2000 years, rather than mirage-like desires for the immediate future.”
Indebted to Nora Bateson and Masanobu Fukuoka we here at Superflux are committed to moving beyond resolutions that centre personal gain or organisational growth, to immerse ourselves in the prelude, a space in which we can re-sensitise ourselves to the glimmering activity of the world in its worlding, of forests in their foresting and meadows in their meadowing. We hope you’ll join us in practicing that commitment!
Studio Updates
We are excited to announce our participation in ‘2124 –Where the Future Begins’ at Future Theatre, Sapporo’s International Art Fair 2024. This show gathers future mythologies that tell of deep transformative change over the course of 100+ years. In the show you’ll find our speculative myth ‘Refuge for Resurgence’ and we'll be sharing more about that work in future posts.
Our immersive installation ‘New York, 2050: A Possible Future’, first created for IKEA (Ingka Group) for their Action Speaks summit in NY, will be shown at ‘COAL + ICE’ at Asia Society, New York from February 13 through August 11, 2024.
Closing thoughts
We hope these meandering thoughts prompt some wondering and wandering from you too. Over time we’ll start to find the shape and rhythm that works best for this space, we are experimenting with form as well as our subscription model but for now we are excited to give glimpses into our thinking, and occasionally share some of our experiments and prototypes, stories and archaeologies, cautionary tales and hopeful visions.
We’ll see you next month!
We are respectful of inboxes and endeavour to share monthly updates from our studio. For more follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Nora Bateson (2022) “An essay on ready-ing: Tending the prelude to change”, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 39(5).
Bateson (2022)
Bateson (2022)
Masanobu Fukuoka (1990 [1975]) The One-straw Revolution: Introduction to Natural Farming (Other India Press).
Dr Partap C. Aggarwhal “Preface” in Masanobu Fukuoka (1990[1975]) The One-straw Revolution: Introduction to Natural Farming (Other India Press), p.4.
Raju Titus quoted in Thomas L. Green (1987). Organic Farming in India. Alternatives, 15(1), p.4.