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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

@bethsawin.bsky.social
29K followers 1.6K following 4.3K posts

Director Multisolving Institute. She/her. Systems thinking, climate justice, and multisolving, with a sprinkle of gardens and the odd puns. @bethsawin on X

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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Join us for our next Multisolving Moment Oct 29th at 12PM ET. to register:
us06web.zoom.us
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Multisolving Moment: Visioning a Future for All. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
Join Multisolving Institute and a global audience for a visioning practice inspired by our Seeds for the Future Project. This will be an interactive session, so we ask you to remain fully present. Out of respect for attendees’ privacy, this session will not be recorded.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Join us for an hour discussing and using the muscle of imagination. These days systems can feel chaotic and progress can feel hard it's more important than ever to cultivate a vision for the world we want to see. How else will you recognize the seeds of it in the here and now?
Visioning a future that works for all
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
After all, we can't steer towards a future we can't imagine. Like all #MultisolvingMoment this will include a little bit of teaching from us and a lot of conversation and collaboration amongst those who gather. Register here:
us06web.zoom.us
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Multisolving Moment: Visioning a Future for All. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
Join Multisolving Institute and a global audience for a visioning practice inspired by our Seeds for the Future Project. This will be an interactive session, so we ask you to remain fully present. Out of respect for attendees’ privacy, this session will not be recorded.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Join us Oct 29 at 12PM ET for our next #MultisolvingMoment, free virtual gatherings for people who see #health, #equity, #climate, #biodiversity & #wellbeing as integrated challenges. This month we will be working with vision & radical imagination.
A flyer for an event called Visualizing a Future for All
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Reposted by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
this is an excellent and informative thread
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
But, in my experience, those who are walking the talk, not just talking it, are laying of teams, struggling to pay bills, etc etc. I think it's a core problem to figure out.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
It's a time waster. A hope-getter-up. A distraction. And a source of sorrow and anger. We really need a breakthrough in how to resource what is bursting at the seams to emerge - a just and thriving collective of care and connection. There's a reason the old is dressing up in those new colors.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Gosh it is painful when the language of healing, mutuality, and systems change turns out to be layered on top of the same old power over ways of working and relating. Sometimes it's devious co-option. But more often, in my experience, it's a kind of cluelessness.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
'Tis good to gaze at celestial objects for a sense of perspective these days, my fellow inhabitants of a tiny, watery, life filled (still and despite it all) celestial object of our own.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
very cool!
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Did you all see Jupiter next to the moon this morning?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Assume we would happy and fulfilled as disembodied consciousnesses in space...is not where I a living breathing carbon based life form that enjoys sunsets and strawberries and cool looking beetles would start.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I mean if you don't start with we are living beings inseparable from the earth and wholly dependent on one another sharing a single planet what are you even proposing?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Anyway, I don't think you should expect to get out of a problem caused by exponential growth by purchasing services that people who are trying to get more wealthy and powerful via exponential growth are selling you.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
We need wisdom. Embodiment. Breath. Love. Care. Imagination. Not easy. But possible as the cultures that center these attest.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The failure to change course has to do with power and its misuse, with ideas, supremacies, with disconnection from life and living systems, with trauma, and with incentives that are shaped from those wounds and misunderstandings.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The lack of changing course wasn't that weren't enough scenarios with enough data points.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
If we were in such dangerous waters because we couldn't move fast or manage lots of data then maybe what the tech companies are selling would seem like a life raft. But we had data and scenarios in 1972. Emissions gap reports year after year.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
If a thing's momentum is it main justification I tend not to be a fan. (Said in a curmudgeon voice).
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The fact that some people profit in an economy that has operating beyond earth system limits while other people spend their time and wealth sewing umbrellas for coral is part of the broken feedback loop nature of our current predicament.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
One of the symptoms of overshoot (according to the Limits to Growth authors) is that humans/the economy have to start doing work that was once provided for free from nature.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Do you ever think about how some folks' fear of death ushers in so much death?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Thank you Ann 💚
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Steer on friends. Billions of years of life on this planet say that it's the weavers and creators and givers and balancers that persist, and the gobblers that are the blips.
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Reposted by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Ardath Whynacht @ardathjean.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
This whole thread!
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Light and dark. Collapse and sprouting. Tending and rending. Truth and lies. And an earth that keeps spinning in an expanding universe. And you and me, here right now, in it.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And I didn't get that as it was all happening it wouldn't really be comprehensible. That we couldn't know how it would turn out. Or that the heart and brilliance would themselves be called forth by the stupid small meanness.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And I didn't have the heart or understanding to know how amazing the farmers, tenders, creators, artists, makers, poets, teachers, weavers would be or how it would all be there in the very same time and space. The stupidity and danger the brilliance and heart.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I've known ever since I first encountered the Limits to Growth in the 1980s that collapse was possible. What I didn't have the ability to imagine was how stupid and small would be the conductors of the trip down the last miles of that road.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
You know it. That's how we know it is a sane and sober world.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And what they eat is so nourishing
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Maybe after a nice glass of warm (local cooperatively pressed) oat milk, they close their treasured journal in which they record their inner journeys to heal their frozen and wounded parts. And on the hills coyotes howl. That's how I see it.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And, I feel sure, all those men who in this current world would have been awake restlessly counting their billions and clambering for that sensation of enoughness that has been unatainable to them will sleep well too.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I am sorry.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Just being. Maybe a glass of wine from across the valley at the neighborhood pub and some live music. Someone playing chess in the corner. And the owls calling safely in the forest as we walk home to deep and quiet sleep.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I guess I am saying I'd just like a plain old Friday evening where we do whatever people in the sane and sober society that we maybe, hopefully, with luck and grit and grace, are heading for will be doing.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Instead of planting new trees for the climate zone to come I'd like a freaking fossil fuel non proliferation agreement.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Instead of building bee hotels with the neighborhood kids, I'd like to live in a society that bans insecticides and conserves land.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Honestly instead of learning new techniques to hack my nervous system I'd like to live in a equitable life-affirming society that didn't push me into fight or flight hour after hour. You?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I know that "not all men" or "not all farmers" is sometimes a cliche, when used as an excuse especially or to avoid facing structural issues. But sometimes at the end of the day, at the end of this day, I'm so grateful for the outliers who prove by their humble actions that things could be different
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Anything that exists is possible. I've seen food grown in a way that enhances the life of the soil. Men who nurture. Neighbors who protect neighbors. People who share.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I've been mowing around these beauties, leaving them for the bees (and for us).
Purple asters in the foreground, pasture and a reddening patch of sumac behind them.
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Reposted by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Sip Coffee, Build for Change @sipgoodcoffee.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
To add to this: Build green, resilience, community, change & power. We're building walls made of Virginia hemp & Southwest US lime. There are fewer than 5 commercial hempcrete projects in the US. We are shifting that -- an act of resistance against industrial foam & fiberglass & for resilience
A vertical photo of a second story interior commercial wall. There are exposed oak 2x4s in between compressed hempcrete insulation. The hempcrete is striated from where it's cast in place about one foot at a time vertically. Two black totes filled with a fresh batch of hempcrete sit in a window opening. The brick wall of the building and green foliage from a tree can be seen through the same wndow opening.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
all around you, with the congregated and accumulated wisdom and beauty of a billions of year old journey, so remember there's power on the little guys side too, including staying power and deliciousness.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The congregated accumulation of the most wealthy and powerful industries in human history are fighting for your attention and to overwhelm your heart, and yet, the small and humble yet astonishing things are
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Spend time with tangled vines and musty leaf litter on the forest floor and the mist on ponds and the humanity at the taco truck. To listen to the mysterious knowing of your own body and to read poems and be ok with uncertainty and to feel pain.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I think it is essential right now to spend time with salamanders and pre-schoolers and the dying and the sprouting.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
that, at the very least that there were life-givers in the very heart of the death cult (as there have been throughout the centuries of this worldview of coercion and control) and at the very most there will be seeds scattered of the just and thriving future that is still possible
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
You see where a system oriented towards accumulation of wealth and power is heading. You can't opt out entirely. But even the tiniest acts of a free person - help that darn frog across the road, take the time to really hold space for that rambling story, even the smallest act of protection - means..
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Eat, drink, tend your mind, read stories, tell stories, fix problems, be with people, use your body, think for yourself. Orient towards life. Whatever seems like it would support life do that. Compost, plant, sing, barter, hear live music, cook real food.
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