Join Me for a Dialogue With a 'Fire Soul'🔥
Exploring collective healing, quantum social change, and the climate crisis with Professor Karen O'Brien.
Thank you for reading this newsletter — I see every open as another micro-moment in the emergence of a resonant world! 💚🙏
“Sometimes we trivialise and underestimate our capacity for social change” — Professor Karen O’Brien, speaking at the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024.
Resonant World #134
Last week, Professor
published a newsletter exploring the Norwegian concept of Ildsjel — which translates as “enthusiast,” but literally means “fire soul.”I’d never heard this term before — and I loved Karen’s definition:
“It describes a burning force within us that connects us to others and can activate change at all scales. Furthermore, ‘it adds to our conception of the human potential for transformation by conveying how individuals can and do make a difference.’”1
The fact that what we do matters — that we can exert much more agency than we commonly assume — is core to Karen’s work on quantum social change.
This branch of social science adapts concepts from quantum mechanics (such as entanglement, complementarity, indeterminacy, nonlocality and many others) to open up new ways of thinking about transforming human systems — as documented in Karen’s highly accessible book You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World (beautifully illustrated by Tone Bjordam).
I find Karen’s work on this topic all the more captivating because — as a scientist who has spent her career working at the highest levels of international climate and biodiversity policy — she would have more reason than most to collapse into resignation or even despair at the trajectory we’re on.
A professor of human geography at the University of Oslo, Karen has been an author on four reports by the U.N. Intergovernmental Planel on Climate Change. Most recently, she completed the marathon task of co-chairing the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Transformative Change Assessment — an intense three-year project involving 101 experts from 42 countries working to identify the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, and what can be done to reverse it. (Karen wrote about the report here).
I very much enjoyed speaking with Karen at the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024 staged by the Pocket Project in partnership with DeSmog (you can see a brief clip above), and so I’m delighted for a chance to dive deeper tomorrow as the first guest in her new series Conversations That Matter.
These live online dialogues will explore the many different ways people are engaging the principles of quantum social change — in my case, through exploring the intersection of collective and inter-generational trauma healing, systems change, and climate action.
I’m also excited to explore how Karen’s thinking may align with the vision of a participatory, conscious universe that
and I explored in our new paper SPACETIME 2.0 Reconstructing the Experiential Structure of Reality as a Field for Agency.2Likewise, my thinking in these domains is heavily influenced by the work of
, who introduced me to Karen some years back, and who elaborated his vision of quantum ecopsychology in this paper. Zhiwa’s work on climate and collective trauma is a foundational influence on Resonant World. (Resonant World #1: Climate Trauma).When: Thursday, March 27, at 7pm GMT (London) / 8pm CET (Oslo) / 3pm EDT (New York) / 12pm PDT (Los Angeles)
Where: Zoom
Live participation in our Zoom call is open to members of the Resonance Council (paying subscribers of Resonant World) and so if you’re on a paid plan you can find the registration link at the end of this email.
Live attendance is also open to paid supporters of Karen’s newsletter
.We will share a recording to all subscribers some time after the live event.
We very much hope you will join us by clicking on the registration button below.
Please Register in Advance for This Meeting:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Resonant World to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.