Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Thirty-Seven: Triage, Transition, and Transformation: Change Work in Hard Times
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
“Given the gap between the world as it is and the world that I dream of, how then shall I live?”
That’s a quote from an earlier episode of the podcast—not from me, but from Nic Antoinette paraphrasing Wendell Berry—but I find myself asking this question again and again.
So today, I want to talk about the 3 Ts of change work: Triage, Transition, and Transformation. I encountered this framing on a podcast while driving the TransCanadian Highway during my 9000 mile EV roadtrip across the US and Canada. Unfortunately, I didn’t note which podcast it was. But the phrase stuck because it was so evocative.
TRIAGE WORK
Triage work looks like running four different food drives because SNAP has been cut off by a president who can barely speak coherently but is determined to starve 42M Americans to get what he wants. Triage work can’t wait, it’s emergency work, trying to save people, even though SNAP is nine times the size of the private food bank system. You know it’s not enough, it can never be enough, but you do it anyway, because stopping even some of the harm matters.
Triage work feels urgent and necessary. It quiets the existential horror for a moment because at least you’re doing something. In the best case, triage work can educate and build community infrastructure, as often happens in the wake of disasters. In the worst case, it amplifies existing power imbalances, relying on the anti-capitalist workers of the world, primarily women, to step up and do care work. That burden is real and daunting, and often shows up in the wake of disasters as well.
As Rebecca Solnit says, “capitalism is an ongoing disaster that anti-capitalism alleviates.”
Triage work is necessary and powerful, but it runs the danger of burning through all your energy, using you up while propping up a system explicitly designed to extract that energy from you.
Capitalism is the careless people smashing things and expecting you to clean up their mess, except the things are people, and the fascists intentionally starve them or snatch them off the street as a way to exert power. The harm is very much intentional. And they’re happy to see you running around trying to stop the damage.
TRANSITION WORK
Transition work is different. Instead of pulling the bodies out of the water, we go upstream to see why they’re being thrown in. Transition work tries to incrementally change an extractive system. It’s speaking before your county’s health control board, demanding they make polluters pay. It’s electing climate advocates to your county council so they’ll finally develop a climate action plan. It’s protests of all kinds, whether you’re mocking ICE in an inflatable frog suit or handing out zines for No Kings in your Statue of Liberty costume.
Transition work has a clear, reachable goal: stop deportation kidnappings, depose a wannabe king, stop dumping toxins in the water, develop a climate plan. If you’re the new mayor of NYC, it’s free buses and stabilized rent and city-owned grocery stores.
Transition work is hard work. It grinds on within the system, changing it in important but mostly non-revolutionary ways. (Although it’s wild how the status quo advocates will act as though free bus rides are a form of terrorism. The energy the status quo has put into stopping the smallest of changes should tell you how brittle our system of oppression really is.)
Culturally, we outsource transition work—really all activist work—to a ridiculously small number of people. A tiny handful of passionate individuals are supposed to take on the entire fossil fuel industry? Really? A single whistleblower is supposed to take down the entire tech industry? We build cultural narratives about this kind of work, how small, dedicated bands of people are what it takes to change the world.
But if everyone did transition work, the world would change overnight. The struggle is long and hard only because the majority of people think it’s not their work to do. Worse, they resist change, and they resist in part because they cannot actually imagine the world any different than it is right now. They can’t imagine it, even as it’s falling down around them. They think that, in change, they’ll lose something, unaware that the precarity that makes them so fearful is designed to keep them clinging to “normal”, even as the fascists are tearing down the East Wing. Even as change is happening rapidly all around them, most people simply cannot imagine a world different than the current moment. Sometimes, they can’t even imagine disaster, although that’s much easier than seeing how change can be good, how things could be better, much less that they might have a part to play.
TRANSFORMATION WORK
Transformation work does that imaginative work. It creates the possibility of change by rendering it in words and images and ideas and metaphors. It can be stories or studies, manifestos or documentaries. Transformation work doesn’t imagine making polluters pay for dumping in the river, it imagines nationalizing energy production altogether. And sending polluters to jail. Transformation work is what this podcast is all about: lifting up stories of a more just and sustainable world and talking about the struggle to get there. There might be free buses in that transformed world, but it’s so much more than that.
Transformation work builds the conceptual model that gives transition work a target. It gives triage work a purpose beyond harm reduction. It gives a compass heading that points the way toward wholesale change and situates the triage and transition work inside a larger movement.
Transformation work is incredibly important cultural change work but it can feel like it’s frivolous compared to the urgency of triage work or the practicality of transition work. That narrative—that it’s unimportant to create art or stories or narratives about larger transformative change—is exactly what the status quo defenders will tell you all day long.
They are wrong.
The framing of the 3 T’s itself is transformation work: it reframes working for change as something with three forms, three aspects that work together. If you’re working for change, you’re doing one of those types of work, and they’re all valid. It allows you to situate yourself in the struggle and know that you’re playing your part.
All three forms are important in their own way. Each has a shadow side as well. Triage work can prop up the thing you hope to dismantle. Transition work can be too small, too incremental, not dreaming large enough. Transformation work can dream too big and never achieve anything concrete, the kind of change that might convince people a better world is actually possible.
But knowing these dangers—and knowing all three forms of change work play for the same team, the one that rejects the brutality of the world and demands better—allows you to understand you’re part of a larger movement.
We need our front-line activists, suburban moms sitting in front of an ICE facility in Chicago and getting arrested. We need the people dropping food in the bin out by my mailbox for SNAP recipients they will never meet because no one should go hungry. We need the army of inflatable animals mocking the absurdity of Trump’s desire to wage war on America.
And we need storytellers to imagine worlds where all those actions work to unseat a wildly unpopular, broken old man who wants to be king in a country that fought a war to be free of one.
A Conceptual Framework for Action
Friends, I haven’t been podcasting a lot lately because I’ve been busy doing all of the three Ts. But I wanted to share this conceptual framework because it’s really helped me to make choices about where to spend my time, how to take action, and how to not just be glued to the news.
Am I always successful in that? Absolutely not.
But this is a tool that helps. Sometimes, my efforts feel too small. Sometimes, I feel too reactive, jumping to do something, anything, to stop the harms. I gotta be real, it’s incredibly hard to do transformation work when the world is on fire. Sometimes that stops me from doing anything at all, and when I find myself in that space, that’s when I know I’m just exhausted and need to rest.
That’s when I reclaim some of the renewable energy that comes from joy.
Because I know myself: given any energy at all, I will spend it doing some kind of work for change. And whether it’s triage work or transition work or transformation work matters less than being part of the fight.
So if you feel paralyzed into inaction, get some rest. Find some joy. Power up.
Then maybe the framework of the 3Ts will help you better understand the work you’ve already been doing and find ways to take new action as well.
Because I can’t do this alone. A small band of activists can’t do this by themselves. We each have to do our part, but we cannot do all the parts.
It’s going to take a whole lot of us, working together, in a million small networks of change, to transform our world into something better.
Yesterday, a follower on Mastodon reminded me that manifesting things into the world is necessary for them to do their work. They said an earlier episode of this podcast, which I consider transformation work, reached them at a time when they really needed to hear what it said. You never know when your work will reach someone at just the right time, all you can do is send it out into the world, and hope it will find the people who need it.
They inspired me to get busy and get this podcast written and recorded and sent out into the world, in hopes that it will find someone who can use it.
I hope that someone is you.
These hopeful climate-fiction stories include clicky space centipedes, sentient trees, a flooded future Rio de Janeiro and characters trying to find their place in a climate-impacted world. Each story imagines a way for us to survive the future, together.
LINKS Ep. 37: Triage, Transition, and Transformation: Change Work in Hard Times
Download Zines: Bright Green Futures and How to Solarpunk
Climate Non-Fiction (revelent to Transformation work)
