Alternative Editorial: Moving Into Integrity

Click above (or here) for Matthew’s video essay

One of the founding principles of Planet A is the bringing back into relationship between personal, social and planetary perspectives - what we call I-We-World. 

This is a partly to acknowledge that any of these interrelated paths of inquiry are valid, as a route to transformation of the whole socio-economic-political-cultural system. Because each of them implies the other. 

An individual on their path of self-awareness and self-actualisation will continually shift their relationship to their community, and thereby have a new impact on the planet. These are not three competing perspectives, but deeply interrelated ones, that we feel are at the heart of a new political design.

But the integration between I, We and World is not always easy to monitor. We can be treading water for a long time in the space of curiosity, keeping busy, yet unable to make a difference to our society or wider world. 

As we are busy mapping possibilities for the future, we might be experiencing increasing alarm at the deepening of the multiple crises around us - a burning planet, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, institutional violence.

At some point, we might come up against our attachment to a lifestyle that contradicts our growing understanding of the change that needs to occur, if the human species is to survive.

This week's editorial invites you to listen to one person's experience of shifting the dial. Writer and journalist Matthew Green writes two blogs on his Resonant World Substack on how his work first as a climate change correspondent and later as Reporter on Enterprise for Reuters news agency became untenable, as he worked through his personal journey of trauma healing. 

Matthew's earlier work as a freelance journalist (Financial Times, Guardian longreads, Observer, Newsweek, Wired, Vice, Monocle and New Statesman), his podcast "reframing mental health" and a book on Aftershock the effects of trauma on soldiers and their families will deepen your sense of the context for these recent shifts.

Yet listen to his video first (click on the play symbol from the image at the top of this editorial, or watch on YouTube). This details how the penny finally dropped on the system his own journalistic work was supporting—and what he did next. In the process of sharing his outcomes, Matthew offers some important clues for developing our own practice for transformation at this time.