What is essential to Planet A, as a regenerative ground to stand on? It may be tempting to think that as long as we have a green economy, our problems will be solved. Or, as long as people stop using plastic, flying planes and eating meat, our planet will flourish.

But without an economy that addresses inequality and other forms of social injustice, directly empowering people to make better choices, we won't be making the shift that we dream of. Planet A is not simply for those that share regenerative principles and values. It can be your home even if you don't know or care about these terms, but are enabled to live within those frameworks actively. Meaning, not as passive consumers of someone else's idea of a better life for you, but as active co-creators of the future. One in which your own needs and desires are being met.

For the majority of people, changing behaviour in line with climate breakdown is unaffordable. Not simply from an economic perspective - green food and energy can cost less - but from a motivational one. If survival is your everyday concern - to be safe, to be seen, to be valued - the threat of environmental collapse does not offer itself as urgent. Instead the desire to keep consuming unsustainably is a more direct means to an end - to experience your emotional needs being met.

Who owns the climate crisis?

Add to that the knowledge that those with the greatest economic means are the worst violators of planetary boundaries take the most flights, waste the most products, use the most energy. This makes it logical for the less privileged to disown the climate catastrophe. In particular those in the global South including the former colonies of European nations, can be justified in saying "this is not our catastrophe" to fix.

Despite this demonstrable truth, much of our solutions-driven innovation is coming from the global North, hoping to scale globally. Having plundered the colonies in the past, the new business model is to save them. This includes initiatives aimed at behaviour change – everyday living becoming more aligned with planetary needs. Farming more bio-diversely, producing more locally, choosing regenerative over extracted resources: how many global North initiatives are hoping to teach the global South how to mitigate the legacy of their former exploiters?

Would that we could turn the clock back a few centuries - before colonisation - when all this natural wisdom was the norm across the globe. But now indigenous populations have been so depleted, their people so ravaged, that they cannot easily till their own land anymore. Isn't most of what the global North hopes to teach the world simply what we mostly need to teach ourselves? Aren't we the true objects of our own transformative intentions?

In the simplest of worlds, wouldn't the most effective action be to cancel the debts of all former colonies, and now simply offer all our technologies - developed through the wealth we earned at their expense - for free? We could even pay people to self-organise in their own territories. More than that, shouldn't we, the architects of the climate crisis, focus our attention on divesting ourselves of the fossil fuels industry and its ill-gotten gains? And doing what it takes to 'unlearn' the mind-set of the global leader? We’re still colonising the global South through the global tech platforms use of their data to earn us money.

Constant entanglement

Sounds like a clear goal - but very difficult to attain when every one of our daily actions is deeply entangled in, even dependent upon, the growth economy. From the moment we get up in the morning to the last thing we do at night, we are using the system we are trying to dismantle. But that's no recipe for despair, nor a challenge to our integrity - as long as we are committed to moving beyond it. Doesn't every living thing evolve from its present form? There's really no such thing as a clean slate.

Life in that sense has a cyclical nature - it's a repeating pattern with seasons of activity. However, each time we return to the beginning of a cycle, the conditions are somewhat developed: there is more knowledge stored in the system about its own behaviour. Knowing that can make us ambitious for new forms to arise and invest ourselves in.

At the same time, each one of us relates to the wider system in our own, personal way. Within any group - from family to tribe to economic class - the diversity of experience and capacity for action is infinite. Two good friends, or members of the same family, can have very different responses to the same set of difficulties - or opportunities. While they will be part of a bigger picture of common conditions, there will also be a personal story of relationship to power within that.

So how do we design for a 'decolonised' future, knowing that each of us has a different history of agency - personal, social, global? There's no easy answer to that and many are experiencing the difficulties of trying to jump to a solution without the conditions for thriving being available yet. For example, how often do we hear of gatherings in which someone from a vulnerable community speaks their truth, but then has to cope with the aggressive defences of the more privileged in the room?

In another instance, a more privileged person attempts to open a conversation within a diverse group and finds themself unintentionally channelling past power structures - causing furore and often being cancelled. Where do we go when we don't yet have the spaces, practices and rituals needed to transform these conflicts as established 'social software' in our communities?

Designing for safety

If we can't successfully fight the flames, we should at least work actively on designing for safety from the ground up. Meaning, how do we collectively design communities that meet the material and emotional needs of its diverse inhabitants - before clashes occur?

Material change might involve a Universal Basic Income at a good enough level to remove the possibility of ever having to choose between eating and heating. Or choosing between having to do a job without dignity or becoming homeless. Universal Basic Services would be a necessary complement, rather than an alternative.

These moves signify the debt that those enjoying prosperity owe to the badly paid workers in the factories and services of the past and present - without whom they could not have built their businesses. When politicians respond to these ideas with the retort "there is no magic money tree" they might consider the money tree whose fruits they harvest every day of their lives, seeded and grown by the labour of workers everywhere. Ironically, paying everyone a basic income for their work in building the present, would, as Phil Teer describes in his book "The Coming Age of Imagination' unleash exactly the kind of creativity we now need to get us out of the multiple crises we face today.

Designing for emotional needs would mean, according to Human Givens theory, to imagine home, work and community spaces that offer security, status, belonging, connectivity, achievement, autonomy, attention, meaning and purpose. These are not free gifts to the public as such, but design that removes the blocks to every person using their own innate capacities to get their needs met. As an evolved human, everyone has imagination, creativity, complex memory and knowledge competence: but when they are required to act out their life as a machine, or work in toxic environments, they can't use their innate resources.

People power can go wrong

Many - maybe most - of us reading will think 'nice idea, but it's never going to happen'. Is that because we cannot imagine a political party that could deliver on such ideas within the current system? One in which care is measured by cost rather than outcome? In which half the country is actively invested in the political failure of the other half, making real change impossible? Yes, it's hard to imagine. But if most of us were thinking 'nice idea' at all, then maybe these ideas can be community led, inviting the local councils to support in what ways it can. When these ideas become popular, political parties will begin to compete to become the best supporter of community agency. In many ways, this is already happening and, for both good and bad reasons, is set to continue. Yet we have to watch for power being devolved without changing its nature at all: widespread participation in decision making is fundamental to progress.

Of course, people power can go wrong - particularly when it has a central figure driving it for political purposes. Those without a developed sense of their own agency can easily be harnessed for someone else's. Which is why the race is on to develop the tools, methods and structures - the social software - to help us move quickly into community self-organising that prioritises all the above. We need the magic of 'liberating structures' and new capacities for response-ability.

Can the many forms of community agency networks (CANs) become the space in which decolonisation is happening in real time? They certainly have that intention but it's early days for that kind of design. If you're reading this and want to be part of co-creating that future, sign up here.

Alternative Editorial: Whose Crises?