Thinking In Systems To Save An Indivisible World

Quinn: [00:00:00] Is multi solving the future? Is it today? Should we do more? That's all today's big question. And my guest is Dr. Elizabeth Sawin. Dr. Sawin is the Founder and Director of the Multi Solving Institute, which is convenient for our conversation. She's an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well being, and economic vitality. She developed multisolving to describe such win win win solutions.

Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences. Her work has been published widely, including in Nonprofit Quarterly, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, U.S. News, the Daily Climate, and System Dynamics Review. She has trained and mentored global sustainability leaders in the Donella Meadows Fellows Program and provided systems thinking training to both Ashoka and Dalai Lama Fellows. [00:01:00] Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists.

Beth is a biologist with a Ph.D. From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M. I. T. She co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Climate Interactive's co-director from 2010 until 2022. Beth’s work has influenced me quite a bit, as you can see in the app.

We've got co benefits all over the place, more on that soon and today. She's been on the list for a while here, and yet it took a couple recent hurricanes and one timely tweet, thread, or whatever we're calling it now to actually get her on the show to talk about her journey, her mentors, her new book, and how we can most effectively deal with all of this.

Welcome to Important, Not [00:02:00] Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit, like Beth. In our weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human who's working on the front lines of the future to actively build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone.

My goal is to help you answer the question that they already have, which is, what can I do? Let's talk to Beth.

Beth, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. We could talk about Toby all day.

Elizabeth Sawin: Happy to be here.

Quinn: We'll exchange dog pictures after this. My current dog is a four year old, Lucy. She is a schnauzer poodle. She's about the size of a small deer, which is how it feels when she takes up the whole couch, but she thinks she's a puppy. But she's very sweet. So she is basically our content manager here.

Elizabeth Sawin: Everything is in good hands then.

Quinn: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So like I said, listeners will have just heard this.

We did a whole intro. But before we get into the meat [00:03:00] of this I've got a two part question for you. If you're cool with that, it sounds like one question. It's actually two. Sets the stage. So Beth, the question is, why do you have to do this job? And the two parts are, why do you have to do this job?

So of everyone in the world, why you? And the second is, why do you have to do this job or this work? Of all the ways you could answer the call, why do you have to do this work in particular?

Elizabeth Sawin: Mm hmm.

Quinn: Hit me.

Elizabeth Sawin: I actually ended up doing this work and taking a really 90 degree turn from what I thought I was going to do in the dark, in the cold, what, almost 30 years ago. So I was a biologist. I studied molecular genetics at MIT. The project I was doing, I had to do microscopy in the dark at a constant temperature of like 45 degrees.

So I spent a lot [00:04:00] of time cold in the dark, looking down a microscope, and I can still remember the moment where I was like, there's three other people on the planet who understand what I'm doing here. And I loved it. I love that research. I love the question. I love the organism. But in my spare time, I was volunteering with groups that were working on nuclear disarmament and global environmental challenges.

We weren't quite even always calling it climate change at that point. And I, I just, in the moment in the dark there, I had this feeling of like, the emphasis is wrong here, like I needed to switch it up so that my day job was those bigger issues. And I didn't know what that would mean. And it took a while, actually took probably three years.

I finished the PhD. I sat in the dark for a lot longer. The switch came when I met my mentor, Donella Meadows, who's one of the authors of the 1972, so 50 years ago now, Limits to Growth, and they used, in the Limits to Growth report, they [00:05:00] used the method that my colleagues and I use now, System Dynamics Computer Simulation to study complex systems, and they were looking at those big global questions, the same ones I had been working on as a volunteer. And Donella was starting a research institute called Sustainability Institute, and she hired six young people, most of us fresh out of graduate school, to be the staff of that organization. She actually hired my husband and me. She called us one day, asked us if we were interested, and it was a, we had, at that point we had an infant, And our first mortgage, she had six months of salary and it was a 50 percent pay cut from the biotech jobs we were doing.

And we said, yes, because, so to your question of is this the work you're meant to do? That was one of the moments where it felt like that was just so clear to us. So it's a long winding path since then through computer modeling about agriculture, about climate change, UN climate talks for many years was a focus of the work I [00:06:00] did.

And each of those had their own frustrations or roadblocks where I just couldn't see us getting us collectively, the people working so hard, the results we were trying to get. So after that big turn, every little turn in the road after that was honestly like a roadblock, a frustration. I don't see how this is going to get us anywhere.

And the idea of multi solving, which is where I put my energy now, that there are these solutions or these investments or these policies where people can accomplish multiple goals at once, is where all the roadblocks funneled me to because each of the problems that I was getting so frustrated by, like we couldn't see a full picture, it was too narrow, we didn't have enough power.

So the coalition was too small. There are different ways and we could talk about them, but where multi solving was like the door out of whatever that dead end I felt like I ran into in my searching really toward that question way back in the dark of like how to be useful in this [00:07:00] moment of global challenges and and their local manifestations.

Quinn: Thank you for sharing all that. I really appreciate that. I'd love to ask those questions. It used to be a more ridiculous version of it. So you're getting the grown up version. But I'd love to ask it because I try to be a stand in for at least some portion of the audience who are maybe generalists, maybe editors, maybe scientists or policymakers or a third grade teacher or they run a college endowment, someone who's either doing work on the front lines such as yourself or Donella Meadows was or trying to find their way in because they're young or because they've recently retired or they're trying to make a lateral move, whatever it might be.

It helps to hear people talk about why are you doing this? But also why are you doing this? When you could have, I'm sure, had some incredible outcome, some impact with molecular biology, especially now when you look around at all the tools available to us today.

So I think it's always [00:08:00] helpful for folks to hear that, especially when someone makes such a move like you did.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah I do think part of getting older is you start to realize very few people are like doing what they studied in college or anything like that. And so my kids are in their 20s now and I feel like they have probably multiple careers ahead of them and they may not even know what they are yet.

Quinn: Yeah. I've got a newly anointed sixth grader. And I wrote about it actually recently, per what you were just saying, and without speaking out of school too much he, after two weeks of middle school, lamented that it feels like everyone else has their life figured out. I don't have my life figured out.

He was like, you do this amazing work and you know what you're gonna do. And I was like, oh, buddy. Nobody knows what they're doing. There is no straight line to any, sure, some people, maybe kids are like, I'm gonna be a doctor, and then they're a doctor. But, it's rare. And, and the moments of insecurity, and, like you said, only, once we have [00:09:00] some time, can we look back and realize, Oh, maybe everything didn't necessarily add up to this. But everything contributed in some way, and it's only by having this wide variety of experiences and honed skills that we can probably do what we're trying to do for today, at least.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah and a good element of some combination of chance and courage. So I'll add to my story a little bit, which was, I gave you the impression Donella Meadows was so pivotal and she was, but it almost didn't happen. My husband, who is my partner at the time we were doing this volunteer work together and we made a little video called The Living System.

So two scientists talking about global change and he's like, there's this Donella Meadows professor. She would probably have good advice for our video. And I was like, she's famous. And our video is so amateur, we can’t show her that. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And one week when I was away, he actually went to her office with the [00:10:00] video and he showed it to her. And she was like, that's amazing. You need to do more, keep going. Great work. So that started our friendship with her and led to all these other changes and I would have been too scared to make that connection. Then when I started working with her for a while, I saw every time any young person brought her anything, she said, that's amazing. That's wonderful. You need to take that further. That was just how she met any new person with a new idea.

Quinn: What a light.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah.

Quinn: That's incredible. It's very easy to see folks who feel protective over their space, whatever it may be, and that is encouraging to young folks or new folks or outside ideas of some sort. But that is, it's inspiring. You try to, try to learn from that as much as you can. My children teach me things every day.

It's, they've quickly gone right past the whole like, why the sky is blue to just roll their eyes because they think I'm out in the field at this point.

So yeah, I get it every day. So that was the first time you really, I guess, [00:11:00] interacted , with Donella Meadows work right, who really started to talk about these systems as if we could at least superficially talk about them as being divisible, right and separable when in reality, they're just not and they haven't been for such a long time. And I know you've frequently quoted and I was actually at your Climate Week talk about Flower. And you had that quote up about, So many of our problems come from this mismatch of thinking and talking about things that way versus how they really are.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. I mean, Donella taught so many people so many things, but in addition to being this brilliant analyst and computer modeler, she was a writer too. And so she had a way of taking these ideas and crystallizing them into a sentence. And yeah, one of the things that she really helped me see was.

The world is interconnected, indivisible, a whole, and yet in general, in our Western culture, the one that's dominating the planet right now there's a lot of treating it as it's, as though it's divisible, whether that's in [00:12:00] education, right? So, you might study climate change science in a natural sciences program, and the political implications of destabilization, you'd study in political science, like some whole other building, a whole other set of professors.

And then it's true in the way we govern, whether it's ministries of environment being separate from ministries of health, how we build organizations, how budgets work in organizations, there's a kind of classic example of you might want to do a big energy efficiency investment and that is going to land on the capital budget.

You need to do some capital improvements, but the savings are going to show up on the operations budget because you're going to pay less for energy. It could be a win for the whole organization's bottom line, but different people are making those decisions. They have different incentives that look at their chunk of the budget and the finances.

So it's actually a systems intervention to figure out even within one corporation, how to straddle those two silos.

Quinn: And I know you [00:13:00] have so much experience with that, and perhaps some of these cities and states and countries and organizations are more proactive and open minded and receptive than others. But I want to just come back to, so this is what, October 2024, something. You were having this conversation.

You've been on my list for a long time, but you posted again, we didn't know what to say, something on Bluesky, a thread, whatever it might be amid the hurricanes we just recently had in the Southeast, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Hurricanes that were made more powerful specifically, usually wetter because of fossil fuels.

And I'm just going to quote that because I want to use it as the basis for what we're talking about today. And you just used the word intervention, which I thought was so good. And you said, It's time to emphasize those policies and investments that can reduce emissions while also preparing for extreme events. Electric school buses as mobile power stations. Robust public transportation that can [00:14:00] provide exit routes in evacuations. Bike infrastructure for gasoline shortages. Schools and libraries with solar power and battery backup that can be resilience hubs. Ecosystem protection that can draw down carbon and hold soils in place and soak up water to reduce flooding. Dense, walkable, mixed-using communities full of energy efficient buildings that can be better protected from fires or floods, and where neighbors are close at hand for mutual support. And the equity and justice provision so that all of this is equally accessible to all people and climate gentrification is avoided. And of course a disability justice lens so that all important infrastructure is accessible and that climate shocks don't disproportionately impact people with disabilities. And you closed by saying, people get down on complexity and interconnection, but it has a beautiful side and part of that is that if we try, if we work together, we can meet more than one need at a time. First of all, that whole thread just sums up my politics, basically, in general, so I'll just put that as my Ten Commandments. But, coming [00:15:00] back to the way you just used the word intervention, what have you found to be the most successful way to convince these groups to become more proactive in their systems thinking?

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. I'm going to tilt the question a little bit because I don't know that convincing. Okay. I had a theory for a long time. That's what was needed was convincing. So I'm a scientist. I'm a researcher. I love data and information and it's easy to think if people just knew then everything would be okay.

And I led a team that for a good number of years, just tried to share information. For instance, every year the World Health Organization now puts out a report about the health savings of getting off of fossil fuels and their conclusion is that the savings, the economic value of the savings more than balances out the costs of the transitions we need to [00:16:00] make.

It feels on the one hand, like a no brainer. And if everybody just knew that, you know, and I had my phase of Hey, did you know, I was that person who's trying to like open people's eyes, that's fun. And it does inspire people. But honestly, the things that we see and our approach at Multisolving Institute is to look for the bright spots to look where people are doing this kind of more connected, more whole system way of qorking and try to understand how they did it.

What were the ingredients? And some of the ingredients. Actually, one of them is frustration. And I think that's pretty interesting. People get to the point where they often, they can't live out their values within the silo where they're placed. So that makes more sense, I think, with an example.

So one I often, one story I often tell is about a guy who was really dedicated to urban conservation and specifically parks, and he fundraised to help communities build parks. And he was really successful at it, but what he was seeing was [00:17:00] when the parks were completed, the neighborhoods became more attractive which meant property values went up and property taxes and housing costs went up and the people those parks were supposed to be for couldn't afford to stay there anymore.

And that was really frustrating because in his personal ethic, he was committed to equity and he could see how his strategy was counter to the result he wanted and I met him in a project that also involved affordable housing advocates. So he wasn't an expert on that, but they were experimenting with things like community land trusts or ahead of announcing where a park would be, before any wave of speculation, could different affordability policies be put into place.

So he couldn't have done that on his own. He didn't have the expertise or the networks or the connection. And so a characteristic of multi solving is people working across silos and sometimes the driver for that is just frustration. We can't get this done on our own.

Curiosity is another one.

It's really hard to multisolve if you're attached to your identity as [00:18:00] an expert we find, who doesn't have much to learn about anything else. But if you're someone who can really bring your competence and what you know but you're really curious about what you don't know, that's so much of a better stance for finding these synergistic types of solutions.

Quinn: As I've described to my children, and especially, again, my sixth grader recently, their dad is not an expert in anything except being a generalist who's excited to talk to the world's smartest, most effective people like yourself. So 200 conversations later, I've upped my game in some things but it is, at least I have found, wonderfully informative and enriching to constantly encounter people who are trying to come at these things in a whether it's a specific problem or something that's actually more systemic in a more generous way, right?

In a more giving way. Hey, maybe this is something I've picked up from here that could be applicable here, because it turns out also affects that. And you talked about in your new Flower app, which is beautiful [00:19:00] and that I love and will link to, you said that in order to most fully multi-solve, you need ways to visualize the interplay of multiple benefits and trade offs.

You talked about shared visions and commitments. But also humility to understand where your perspective or the group's perspective so far, at least is lacking and how any multi-solving can take time. In your Climate Week talk, you talked about the, it's difficult to overstate how popular the Denver e-bike vouchers are. It's incredible. My sister moved out of Denver immediately before they started handing those out. She can't believe it. But I wonder if we can, let's use the Flower model and we can either use the Denver e-bikes or we could do one of my favorites electric school buses. Or clean air for schools, and I wonder if we can go through that so people really understand, sort of, how Flower works and the different ways we can look and go, Oh, we haven't really thought about this part yet. What is a perspective we might need to bring in [00:20:00] here?

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah, and maybe I'll start with a sentence or two about how Flower came to be.

So, we see part of our mission at Multisolving Institute as making it easier for people to multisolve. And when we scan for multisolving, we find it everywhere we look, all scales anywhere in the world we've ever looked, but we also find it's the exception, not the rule.

It's rare, right? And it's everywhere. That tells me it's possible everywhere. And it's rare. And it's because of, I think, we were talking about the silos. Whether it's jurisdictions or disciplines or budgets. Even when people want to, it's really hard. The incentives often are against them. Flower is meant to be a tool that takes this thing that's hard because of all the obstacles in the world.

And it starts off being hard just how to get people together to see what might be possible. And it is to create a visual object that people can look at to show their imagination of what could be possible. So it shows eight different types of benefits [00:21:00] like cleaner water, food security, biodiversity, climate protection.

And each benefit is a petal. That's part of why it's called Flower and the bigger the petal, the more the group thinks the larger that benefit could be and the beauty of it, we see as we see people using Flower is one person will know a lot about one benefit, but maybe not even have thought of another.

So yeah, with that caveat, do you want to, you want to do electric school buses?

Quinn: Sure.

Elizabeth Sawin: That’s one of my favorites too. So we could be the electric school bus fan club.

Quinn: I couldn't love it any more than I do. Yes, let's do it. Let's go for it.

Elizabeth Sawin: So you start. What's one benefit of electric school buses that you're psyched about?

Quinn: 100%. For me I was putting my own children aside for a minute who are otherwise healthy. I was an asthma kid and so many hospital trips, terrible. The idea that the pollution is actually worse inside a diesel school bus than even outside and that these kids are sick, and all of the threat multipliers that [00:22:00] come from that, missing school, parents have to take time off, all of that, that those kids will be healthier just for riding cleaner school bus, that's number one for me.

Elizabeth Sawin: So we would put that in a, probably in a category of health, health and wellbeing. And in this sense of interconnected world that we're talking about. So electric school buses mean less air pollution and less air pollution means not only less asthma, but also less cardiovascular disease. It means less premature birth for potential mothers in the neighborhood.

So that ripples into the health system. It actually saves money as well as just helping people be healthier.

So I'll put in the benefit of they're quieter. In a neighborhood that's being served by electric school buses, there's one less kind of source of noise pollution. And there I think about one benefit in Flower we call connection.

It's meant to include things like social cohesion. How do people know their neighbors? But also, do they feel [00:23:00] connected to nature? A quieter neighborhood is going to be a more inviting neighborhood to shop, to visit, to sit at a cafe for a moment.

Quinn: And correct me if I'm wrong here, is Connection the hub of the flower? What is the hub of a flower called?

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah.

The Flower app looks at seven different petals around a center, and the center is Connection.

Quinn: Okay, that's what I thought.

That's what I thought. Yeah, that is the thing behind it all. I remember, I lived in New York briefly for a few years, and just before that, I had lived in London, and when I lived in London, they passed this, you could call it draconian if you want, but it was basically every time you honk your horn, you're going to get fined $2,000 or something truly astronomical. And people are like, okay. And then I remember getting to New York and thinking like, why is my blood pressure so high all of the time? And obviously it's not just the noise, but it's kind of reassuring now, 20 years later, as they put out all these reports on what noise pollution actually does to health, much less not make you want to sit next to a cafe.

It's just like what it does to [00:24:00] sleep. And like you said, cardiovascular issues. That's great. Okay. So quieter. Is it my turn?

Elizabeth Sawin: Your turn.

Quinn: Okay. My turn. Obviously emissions, right? Not just surface level pollution, but emissions, carbon emissions. Go for it.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah, absolutely. Schools that I know of are experimenting with all the hours when the buses aren't taking kids one way or another, so they have these giant batteries and a lot of electric utilities are interested in batteries that can offset peak demand. So schools can actually get some financial incentives to help stabilize the grid when the buses aren't delivering kids, at least in my little town, like the school budget is a yearly kind of agony for our tiny town of how do we serve these kids the best for the least amount of money for people whose taxes are a big burden for them. So improve school budgets. I'd throw that one out.

Quinn: I love that one. I'm going to go and it ties in, which is the whole point. I understand. But this is now how my brain works. Because [00:25:00] of you and everyone who works with you, I'm going to go with employment for parents, right? Kids aren't as sick. Which means parents who usually don't have any sort of paid leave if they work hourly jobs can actually go to work and they probably will get less sick themselves even though pollution is less involved on that front. But kids are able to go to school. Kids are able to learn more. Kids are able to take care of themselves a little more as they grow, and parents are able to know that they don't constantly have to try to live near extended family or find coverage or what if this or someone has chronic asthma or whatever it might be they can do their job And that benefits the local economy.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah I endorsed that one and I'll go for the mobile energy source in a condition when the power's out for an extended time. Those same batteries that could stabilize the grid could also be driven somewhere to help people keep medicine cold or charge their phones.

Quinn: I love it. What [00:26:00] leaves are we missing, what bud, flowers?

Elizabeth Sawin: Well, we haven't thought much about biodiversity, food and water. But I think we've hit resilience. We've hit jobs. Another one, of course, for jobs is manufacturing. Those are good potential, union jobs to get buses built.

Quinn: Absolutely. And maintain, obviously, in some reports it's less than ICE engines. And in some reports it's just different. But either way, there's an economy there for sure, certainly to turn the fleet over. And batteries and hopefully battery cycling, right? As we hopefully get better at that. Biodiversity, food and water, fascinating.

Elizabeth Sawin: This could be some new version of poker, right? Whoever ends up not being able to think of a benefit is the loser.

Quinn: You're the PM to your sort of street level pollution, would it say is going to just like they talk about idling cars and all the parking redistribute that's going to heat up that local area in some way that's got to affect biodiversity in some way, [00:27:00] right? Hopefully ish.

Could be a stretch.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe we've hit the big ones and it's okay.

It's totally fine that every flower doesn't have every petal. We're just trying to help people move from one petal at a time to can we get 2, 3, 4, 5. And the other thing we really want people to do with Flower is to think about who's getting those benefits.

So if we have to re-build almost everything to address climate change and resilience, the opportunity to include everyone in the benefits, in the safety and the jobs, it's really astounding, but it doesn't happen by accident, right? It's not going to just be a more equitable green world unless we have the policies in place to do it, so another goal that we have with Flower is to ask people, and there's actually, part of the visualization to represent, Do you think these benefits are going to people who historically have been marginalized? [00:28:00] And in different parts of the world those will be different. It might be gender. It might be race, might be economic class. Or are those benefits going to people who already are pretty well off and pretty centered?

So if you think about PV panels, rooftop solar, like one thing that happens is you can qualify for incentives for that if you own your home, but if you're a renter, those aren't available to you. So the benefits of maybe more affordable greener energy are going to people who already have a lot of privilege in that they own a home.

So Flower would just ask you to represent that, but then the visualization is meant to open the question, what more can we do? Like, all right, what other policy to make sure renters are included in this opportunity too?

Quinn: I want to get to that sort of more action oriented part of this, but I wanted to add one more piece to our Flower, and I'm not totally sure where it fits in. I, like you said, most people don't do their college majors. I was a religious studies major. I am like a [00:29:00] pagan, atheist monster but I was very interested in how history and political capital and religion and geography and all those things came together throughout time to really affect so much of the world and really the sociological, anthropological side of why do we do what we do?

We seem to make a lot of the same decisions as individuals and as groups over and over and what are the influences there? I sort of use them.

Elizabeth Sawin: I'm waiting for you to tie this to school buses.

Quinn: We're getting there. I promise. I promise. Don't worry. You have the look in your eyes that my wife and kids usually have when they're like, oh boy, here we go. They're like, he's never going to land this plane. But I also grew up reading Wired magazine and I grew up watching, you know, reading Jurassic Park before I saw it and what those dinosaurs meant to me. And this feeling of awe we can get from actually, not just [00:30:00] seeing what's coming in the near future, but actually interacting with it. And what that does to our humanity. And I think, I know, I see it in my kids who are very privileged and healthy, but regardless when I tell them about some of the folks I talk to. I think when you put any sort of kids on an electric school bus that's totally quiet and has clean air and is powered by these enormous batteries that we can recycle that will never in its entire life go to the gas station and is not noisy. I like to believe, and it's probably a lagging indicator, that that's going to do something to change these kids and how they see the world a little bit.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah I've been reading that there are some schools and maybe we can find these for your show notes that are actually designing curricula around the electric school buses.

And curricular around., Okay. So now we have these solar panels, like we're going to maintain them and that's going to be part of a class, you know, or we're gonna, [00:31:00] we're going to convince the town to invest in battery backup.

Yeah, there's so much that needs to be rebuilt in the world and the chance to involve our kids in doing that. And I especially felt this when my kids were in middle school, when it felt like the last place they should be would be sitting in chairs. Like they wanted to be, I thought, with tools in their hands, in the communities doing stuff.

So we've got so much that needs to be done. And this stage of development that's wired for learning by doing can't we connect those dots a little bit more?

Quinn: Sure. And it's hard. I try to get things going at a local library and they're wonderful. We love them. We're there every weekend. And yet when I say, Hey, could I contribute in any way to make this particular weekend or after school meeting happen on a recurring basis? You know, they have the same constraints that anybody does, which is they're like, we don't have enough rooms for it.

Or if it's after school at a public school, they say and this is the correct answer. They [00:32:00] say, We don't have the budget to make sure that every kid can get home on an after school bus, right? Not everyone can have a parent come pick him up. So we can't do that until we also have this. That's part of it, right?

Because the student's experience is the whole thing. So anyways, that's how I connected it to electric school buses. You're welcome, and I'm sorry, but I want to talk for a minute, so we, again, how we all get to this work I have done all of the different things over time and lived all the different places, but I started this because, again, kid who grew up reading Wired and science fiction and all this stuff, and my wife is a hardworking and very talented and successful screenwriter, and I was thinking about what are the next, like in the near, as much as I love Star Trek, what's in the the near future, and so what is, what were the streams of news and information I could program for myself in 2018 or so that, that could give me that information? And I realized I was reading a lot of stuff from that self [00:33:00] programmed firehose that friends who were similarly interested weren't getting and they were getting their news and such from Facebook, which turns out this was bad bad news in general. And so I threw together this little newsletter and said hey, here's the five or ten things you miss this week I send it out to a bunch of folks and like your moment with, oh my God, we can't show our little video to my hero, I started to get this feedback from folks saying what do you think?

And I was like, nobody cares what I think about this. Also, I don't know how to answer those questions. It doesn't matter. You know, over time, again, I got feedback from people. I'd put a little more generalist, holistic analysis, if you will, perspective into it, but people would say well, I want to know more about ocean acidification.

And I was like, I have been very clear here. I don't know anything about that. But I guess I can ask questions of people who really do, who are specialists in these things. God, if there's a system, it's the ocean, right? But, one of the things I really learned over time [00:34:00] was people just came to us and said, What can I do? This is all helpful. The news is helpful. Perspective is helpful. These conversations with these incredible people like yourself are helpful. But what can I do? And so we've spent the past couple years really reorienting our work, a little bit to embrace that and work on it because context is helpful, obviously. And we gave everybody these sort of action steps, as we call them. They were very rigorously researched. We weren't gonna have you waste your time or your money if you trusted us to say here's the place you should contribute to or volunteer for or learn from. but what was frustrating, and I promise there's a point to this as well, is that it was very one to many. So, it was just whatever we put in the newsletter or the podcast. So what we did is we built an app and it's called What Can I Do? And it's much more self-serve right, any time of day, whatever you need, whatever resources you have, you can find something to do and one of the most powerful pieces of data architecture, I think we've put in there is co [00:35:00] benefits. And so we're still learning and we're still putting it in, but I think like you said it's pretty rare to find people proactively multisolving or at least intentionally multisolving out there in the world And it's also easy to not step outside the climate action bubble and realize most people on Earth don't purposely engage in these for whatever reason, especially because of the incentives. So what we're trying to do and what I love about Flower and all of your work is expand these ideas of co-benefits, right? We just listed all the pieces of Flower for electric school buses or bikes beyond climate and then back and help educate folks about how that works along the way. Like you said, part of understanding the system is understanding where you can most affect it, too, right?

It's not just, this is what I can do, it's understanding just the philosophy of how this whole thing works, right?

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah.

Quinn: Yeah, it's, I wrestle with it, because you don't want to take it too far, right? It's easy to add 15 petals to the flower, and like you said, it's [00:36:00] okay if sometimes it's only 4 pedals. But, I also want to make sure we're really thinking about those things and helping people understand, like, how that can affect a kid's education or a parent's time at work or whatever it might be. And so I'm struggling with, like, how do we educate people on it while at the same time helping them take quick action, as it were.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah, yeah, I agree that that's an important question and kind of a tangled one. A few things that have come to me over the years. One of them is watching multi-solving projects happen. It's not only about the school bus or the new park or the better insulated building. It's about the relationships that were built to get that done.

And those persist. The lifetime of those relationships is a lot longer than, Oh, there's a new park. There's a new tree.

And that's particularly pertinent in these really challenging, destabilized times this far into the climate crisis because those [00:37:00] relationships build what in systems theory we call adaptive capacity, right?

A network is something that can, and we saw, we're seeing this, in North Carolina right now in the first three weeks after the hurricane it's relationships between community based organizations and citizens and who's got the truck and who's got the mailing list and that's how you get the volunteers organized.

Like those pre existing relationships are part of how that system is adapting to a really big shock. But it's true in smaller ways as well. And the other thing that happens if you build these networks, they also can move into opportunities.

We're looking right now at billions of dollars from the Biden administration flooding into things like urban forestry and sometimes it's a really tight timeline, right?

Okay, you've got time for an RFP and we could get enough money to really do this project in this city, but we need a municipal partner. We need a civic partner. If those trusting relationships are already there because of prior multi solving, [00:38:00] then stepping into a window of opportunity is a lot more possible.

So I think of that as just a no regrets investment in really tumultuous times. You don't have to know exactly what's coming. If you're investing in building networks of relationships. So when I think about your app. I would want people to realize, okay, we are getting cleaner air, cleaner water and climate protection, but we're also getting a relationship between the asthma coalition and the city energy department.

And that's going to persist.

Quinn: And not just for this time, but for the both inevitable next times and the ones that we don't foresee, right?

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah, yeah, we talk about multisolving as rewiring systems.

Quinn: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth Sawin: And in systems theory. The one way you get novel behavior in a system is when you change the connections between the parts.

If you don't change the connections, the system just keeps doing the same things. You can put new people in, elect a new official.

But when there's new flows of information or new trusting relationships, you get novel [00:39:00] behavior. And if there ever was a time to need novel behavior now, now is it?

Quinn: Well, we talk a lot about that here. For instance hunger, which is obviously a broad scope blunt tool, but, we talk about in our work, in our writing or whatever it might be or in the app. You do have to do adaptation and mitigation at the same time for everything, right?

So yes, we actively push towards, push people and money and candidates towards supporting not just universal free school meals but healthy ones. But also that takes time and we have to feed people tonight, right? So you need to also look at Feeding America and all the many food pantries they work with.

And it's the same thing for diapers or maternal health or whatever it might be. But my hope is, and this is again, the tool's only a few weeks old and we're really still thinking through that. The relationships part is so important and having people make sure that that's actually really their primary takeaway, no matter what they smash their finger against to take [00:40:00] part in.

Their takeaway that there are ripples to this, and the more intentionally you do them, at least, at the very least, maybe somebody starts to think in systems a little more, right? For the next thing they come out with, they go oh, I bet these are the co benefits, or these are the other petals of the flower, if not forming those formal relationships themselves, or whatever their group are. And again, it's like, how do we walk the line of not throwing thousands of words at them when they're trying to just do something, but at the same time, making sure that they're getting this, such a valuable impression, because you said, like you said, there is no time like the present for people to start thinking this way.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah, yeah. And there's another element. So there's this rewired systems, there's new connections, but you're hinting at the other thing that happens in multisolving, which is people acting out of a different worldview. Other people use the word paradigm, but in systems theory, the deepest lever for change is changing how we think, right?

Our assumptions, our beliefs about how the world works. What's the point of a [00:41:00] life? What do we owe each other? And you can't multi-solve while operating out of the worldview that's gotten us in so much trouble to begin with, that worldview of domination and separation. If you're going to collaborate across sectors, you're acting as though you are part of a web of relationships.

Which is actually true, right?

Quinn: Sure.

Elizabeth Sawin: That's the planet. That's what's going on.

And sometimes paradigm shift, I think sounds like such a big thing, that's over in that realm of religion or philosophy or something. But I've come to feel like it's also a day to day thing.

And it shows up in your staff meeting, in your coalition meeting. While you're packing the boxes of food to feed people. And a longer conversation, probably than we have time for, is what are the feedback loops that drive paradigm change and they actually are driven by little tiny increments of change that snowball and build upon each other.

So for me, it's another antidote to this like I'm so small. We're [00:42:00] also tiny. The problems are so big. So you doing your little thing is actually rewiring systems and changing worldviews. while also getting the tree planted or feeding somebody. Like the practical stuff matters, the connections matter, and the spirit in which it's being done matters.

Quinn: I love that and I'm happy to dig into the feedback loops, certainly I mean that, obviously with everything we all just went through and so many of us are still going through actively and as the after effects of, it was extremely annoying to keep yelling at people and saying, but that's not how a virus works. There's that very technical version. But like you said, there's also, the social version of who we are, which we've obviously seen all the different sides of in the past 5, 10 years from social networks to being separated from one another to, just understanding that, there's the research that says panels are something that when a neighbor sees them, they're literally more likely to get them.

And that's probably pretty reductive. But I'll take it. I will build on that however we can. And it's the same thing where every e-bike [00:43:00] is just going to make traffic a little easier and a little easier for everybody to breathe, not just for you, but for everyone involved.

And I would love to know more about you, those feedback loops, and I wanna talk about your book, obviously which is coming out, very exciting. And what your hopeful outcome is there. What are the feedback loops you're looking for?

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. So let's talk about feedback loops for worldview change. And this probably fits great with your podcast, actually, because a lot of my thinking is shaped in by how scientific theories change with time. And of course, the really important work on that is by Thomas Kuhn and his book, The Theory of Scientific Revolutions.

And he looked at what he called normal science, which is when everyone was like just filling out a theory of how the world worked in chemistry or botany or whatever the field was. And that's most of the time. But because theories are just theories and they're trying to represent. the reality, sometimes they're wrong.

And when they're wrong, scientists start getting [00:44:00] experiments that don't line up with the theory. And so Kuhn called those anomalies. And I consider Western North Carolina as a disaster zone is an anomaly to the theory of our economic system, right? If it was doing what we think it's going to do, which is make everybody happier, healthier, and safer, then we wouldn't be having devastating climate change.

What happens with science and with people is that when a theory is really strong and people have a lot of confidence in it, they reject the anomalies. They reject the evidence instead of rejecting the theory. This famous example of that, the scientists who are looking at the ozone hole in the South Pole, their instruments were telling them there was a hole and they couldn't conceive that that was a possible thing.

So they spent, I think, years trying to figure out what was wrong with their instruments. But I'll just speak for myself. I walked into the men's room at an airport once and I was like, what are all these urinals doing in the women's room?

Quinn: Sure.

Elizabeth Sawin: So I'm[00:45:00] rejecting the evidence and hanging onto my theory that this is the women's bathroom. So the thing is that as anomalies accumulate, confidence starts to weaken in a theory. And as confidence weakens, people are more open to seeing the anomalies. And so confidence weakens even further. So that's a feedback loop.

That's what I was getting at. That's the kind of feedback loop that drives exponential decay of confidence. And so just being the person who says, Huh, maybe everything isn't getting better the way my economics textbook in high school said it would is actually participating in worldview change.

And the second feedback loop that Kuhn identified is what builds up hopefully a paradigm or a worldview that serves better. And that is when, he said problems are solved or explained by a new worldview, or it can be one that's been around for a while but is getting more strength and confidence.

So when you see people showing up with [00:46:00] mobile solar panels to a disaster zone, right? That's solving a problem out of a new worldview. When people establish mutual aid and that gets whole communities through the early years of the pandemic, right? That's operating out of a different worldview and it's solving problems.

And what happens is then confidence in that new worldview increases. So there's more experiments, more chances to see it. And confidence rises. So the thing is that it's a little actions like pushing a snowball downhill that have the power to create actually discontinuities in the underlying worldviews.

Quinn: I love that. It's really easy to read the headlines and say. What am I supposed to do about the jet stream supposedly slowing down? And feel very small. And that's justified in a lot of ways, but at the same time I always try to explain to people, and again, I'm extremely privileged to have dealt with very little of this, but climate change really is, as far as [00:47:00] most people are concerned, the heat you feel on your back, the water issues food prices, all that kind of stuff.

It's the stuff that affects you on the daily, and when you start to try to affect those in some reputable way, convincing your city council to plant more trees, successfully getting at least some electric school buses from the federal money, getting your school district to at least get air purifiers, much less not replace the whole HVAC systems, which again, there's also money for, all these different things. And seeing that, because it's really the most immediate version of change you're probably going to see besides something you do to yourself and for yourself, is that, you hope that is a positive feedback loop for you to go now I may be fighting for candidates on a larger stage that will actually send more money to the global south so that they don't use coal like we did, and all these different things, hopefully that is a, it's more of a concentric thing, but hopefully that is a loop that, impresses upon you what you are [00:48:00] able to do.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. And one of the challenges of working in complex systems is it's hard to see the impacts that you have. One consistent thing when we interview multi-solvers is actually they say it's confusing. They say they're not sure they're having impact and we were just stunned as that answer kept coming into our interviews because from our more observer vantage point, we were like, but you, you pass that policy. You built a coalition between developers and climate advocates. People are talking and listening to each other in a way that they weren't, but in the thick of it people were kind of like, We're not sure if we're being effective.

And so our team really thought about that, and we have some really brilliant social scientists that we work with. And the conclusion we came to is change doesn't look like we've been taught to think it looks, and therefore we don't see it. So we've been taught to think of change [00:49:00] as direct, like A causes B, linear instead of in a feedback loop.

And especially for people who work in organizations that are funded by either public or private philanthropy there's this incentive to prove you did it yourself. And it's almost like it doesn't count if it was a result of a partnership or of a fortuitous alignment of forces. And so we actually believe that multi-solvers way under count the ripples that they create.

The other thing that goes on and this, I really lay at the feet of philanthropy is people stop looking for the ripples way too soon. It's such a common thing. Like you've got a two year grant at the end of the two years, you're supposed to write up what changed, like change is just getting going at the end of that two years, but very few people are able to just trace what happened from that? And what happened from that? So that's something we're trying to work on at the Institute is they need to be [00:50:00] really simple. Cause everyone is just overwhelmed and working really hard already.

And we can't add big, complicated, weighty things, but there have to be better ways of seeing and believing in the ripples that we're creating. And I think that fortifies us for the work ahead to be able to better see that.

Quinn: I love that part of it. One of the most reputable NGOs on the planet is Against Malaria and they mostly just fund treated bed nets and they have got it down to the cent as to how much you can contribute will fund these treated bed nets will save this many lives. And it's both one of the easiest things you could do to contribute both in the sense of it'll be the most effective, but also like you can do it from your sweatpants anywhere. It's 2024. You can save lives with any amount. But it's hard to see that impact, right? But over time, when that generation gets to actually grow up and what their effects are on the world or all these [00:51:00] young women and men who are getting the HPV vaccine, right? If you are someone administering that even or the manager of that pharmacy or the pilot that works with the NGO to bring them over in cold storage, whatever it might be. It's hard. It can be a struggle, right? And also because it's just, like you said, there's just so much going on. We're also not very, I tell my kids all the time, and this is like parenting 101, but we're not very kind to ourselves. We're not very generous to ourselves. And obviously there's probably a way that can go in the other direction, but you gotta give yourself a little credit, right? If you're able to do those things and understand what an effect it can have on somebody else.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. I agree with that. And the other limitation is just time for reflection. To be able to see the signal through this complexity, you have to find ways to just pause and zoom out, have conversations, explore a little bit. And both the [00:52:00] incentives if you're being funded, to just get on to the next task, but also just the sense of emergency.

One of the quotes I have hanging by my desk is from Wendell Berry, and he says that we're in the kind of emergency that requires patience. And it's a trial to have patients in an emergency. So whether that's building trusting relationships or slowing down enough to see what happened from what you did so you can learn and do better next time.

It's hard to do, but essential.

Quinn: And like you said, and obviously it's very easy and often misleading to lean on the power and often perverse power of incentives. But you’re right. We are in every way incentivized to move right on to the next thing or be moved on to the next thing, right? It's whether it's 10, 000 different GoFundMes or just scrolling on something or like I said, I gave three kids a flu shot yesterday.

The odds that a school was going to call me today were like 90 [00:53:00] percent and it didn't happen.

You know, at any given moment, we're all exposed to something and either you don't find time to do the thing, much less like you said, take time for reflection. I try to think about that in my parenting.

I don't do a very good job of it, but I try to obnoxiously send the kids out the door every day and say, Hey, ask how can I help? And then in a much smaller percentage of time, because they're usually just done with me by the end of the day I try to ask them, how did you help? And I feel half the time they're probably just making up an answer.

But even then it's something. But yeah, I dunno. The reflection part is key.

Elizabeth Sawin: I think we're going to have to get better at reflecting while acting.

As more and more shocks hit, we have to take care of each other. Like that demands emergency response and we have to do it. But can that be done with and I'm trying to do this in little ways, just like when I feel overloaded with my day can I, be effective, address the emergencies, but with a kind of observer [00:54:00] mind, with a reflective, one mindful breath before launching into whatever the little crisis is, because I don't think we're going to get to not respond to crises the rest of our lifetimes are probably going to be shaped by that. But we're not going to be responding effectively if we're reactive, if we're not learning, if we're not reflective.

Quinn: And it does just require space. It also requires. Those mutual nourished relationships to be able to talk about that among each other and not just support each other's actions but support those moments and times to be reflective and like you said, the technicals of what worked and what didn't and how we can do, as we say to do better, better next time.

But also just why you did it, how you did it, how you spent time that you might not otherwise would have or money you might otherwise would have.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. And the honesty to say really loudly when something doesn't work. We don't have time to keep relearning each other's experiments. If it doesn't work, we [00:55:00] need to say that. So nobody does it again.

Quinn: Yeah.

Elizabeth Sawin: There's incentives again too, right? Like the grant report that's like we found out this doesn't work is a hard grant report to write.

Quinn: But like you were saying before about some of the feedback loops, some of the best and hardest, but often best moments of science are not when someone goes, Aha, my hypothesis worked. It's when they're like that's super weird.

And then you have penicillin, right? Or, or something like that. That's the extreme example, but you never know. And man, you'll never know how good donating books to a library can feel or volunteering in a classroom or one of my favorite things in the whole world. And again, I'm public school to the end, is one of my favorite organizations is Donors Choose. And it's mostly just teachers looking for someone to help them buy supplies, basic shit.

And, again, this is selfish, but [00:56:00] it forces a moment of reflection. Because very often, you get in the mail, and sometimes digital now, like a package of thank you notes from kids who got to read science books or got a projector or whatever, And I feel like almost we need a little more of that, that tangible version of look what you did. The lives you affected. I'm so lucky to talk to these young people. I talked to this young woman a couple months ago who I still haven't figured this out but it's very real.

She has figured out how to use automated, no, how to use sound cannons on automated drones to hold back forest fires. And I'm like, what are you talking about? But also and this is why I love that question. When did you go that way? What was the thing? What did you read?

What did you see when you were like, hold on, not only like I have to do this, but like I can do this.

And we have other more linear examples. So we had a gentleman on whose father had [00:57:00] this terrible muscular dystrophy when they were growing up in Iran, and he grew up, became a scientist and cured it. Not in time for his dad, but it was very much like this is what I'm going to do and obviously the validation there. The reflection is bittersweet.

Elizabeth Sawin: Right.

Quinn: Some of that's out of your control, obviously. But you never know and anyways, the Donors Choose thing is great because I always forget about it, as usual, like everyone, and then I get these package of letters in the mail because some kids got some crayons and you're like, first of all, nothing radicalizes me more than kids who just don't have basic school supplies, or their teacher has to pay for them.

And two, you're just like, Oh my god, this is the most, like, how do I not just go do more of it?

Elizabeth Sawin: That's the invisible web of connection. And it's the antidote to this worldview that's not serving us very well. So we're all disconnected and we really should just look out for those near and close to us. In addition to Donella Meadows, one of the other most important teachers of mine is Joanna Macy and she's developed what she calls the Work That Reconnects, which is learning [00:58:00] how to accept the huge emotions that come with being alive at this time, right?

The fear of what might happen next, that rage at the injustices. And one of the teachings from Joanna that has really helped me is to believe those feelings, actually, that we are wired to care about the family on the other side of the world. And our culture whispers in our ear that that's not true and that we're just out for ourselves and even pathologizes climate anxiety or people's just rage at injustice.

And I think Joanna is right, like we are meant to connect in those ways. And these status quo systems couldn't survive if we all believed that part of ourselves was true. So there's a lot of advertising budgets and media plans and all kinds of things to undermine those feelings. So your little, it feels small, I'm going to donate to one classroom, but it's an act of affirmation of that interconnection.

Quinn: [00:59:00] I love that. And again, you might be one of those teachers. We get letters when you sign up for the email. You get a little automated one and reply. It says, Why are you here? And we get everything from I'm a big investor or sports star to I'm a grandma that feels like we blew it. What do I do?

You know you don't have to contribute to a classroom or Against Malaria or build a network of city council people who don't otherwise talk to each other or the wastewater people, whatever it might be but it is empowering. It's a little addicting. And it can be extremely frustrating especially when you try to build those relationships. Getting it over the finish line, seeing those bike lanes in your town and again knowing that the air is cleaner, people are safer, people are healthier in about four different ways. They're happier in many ways There's, there's nothing like it, but it's work, it's work.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. I think we're all you know, trying to offer our drop into the ocean of connection and maybe [01:00:00] bolstering each other for the times ahead. Certainly I spent a lot of hours in my writing studio writing a book, first book I've ever written. And why, why am I doing this?

Cause I'm supposed to be leading an organization. I have all these responsibilities, but I have this compulsion. And part of it was that I've had these teachers like Donella Meadows and Joanna Macy. And I feel like what I learned from them isn't mine, it's meant to be shared. So that was one motivation for the book.

Another motivation is just, I've seen this power of rewired systems. And I've seen when people come together. across these silos, like the magic that happens. So one just dream I have for the book is, the book itself catalyzing some of those connections. I wrote it pretty deliberately with questions for reflection and a dream I have is that people in a community or an organization will read it together and some of those little tiny rewirings will happen through the act of reading a book that's full of [01:01:00] stories about what people did when they rewired things.

So it comes out in a little more than a month, late November. And I guess I'll get to see it's like everything else, an experiment, but can this bolster people for the journey ahead and the way that I feel like I've been bolstered by some of the teachers I've had.

Quinn: I think it's wonderful. I'm excited to get my hands on it and then obnoxiously send it to everybody I can find. I recently did that with one of our very first guests and most recent guests, Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, who, she does all the things, she does all the things, but the book is great.

I love the way she frames it and the conversations inside and the top 10 things to know and all that. It's wonderful and it's really hard to walk away from that perspective and not have been moved just a little bit. Maybe not necessarily towards action, but at least towards your perspective into how you take on the next thing that comes across your desk or city or school.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. There are all these voices that are [01:02:00] telling us that we're tiny, that we don't matter, that it's all lost. And I just really don't believe any of that, like understanding complex systems means we all matter. And so books like Ayana's and hopefully mine, hopefully they're just like little pebbles and that big torrent of discouragement and they give people a little bit of agency in action taking.

Quinn: Absolutely. I love it. I could do this all day clearly. So I thank you so much for your time. Maybe we will revisit it. Last couple questions. We ask everybody if you have a little, if you have a moment.

What are, besides buy your book and check out Flower and the Multisolving Institute? What are specific ways people can answer that question, what can I do? Specific things to talk to the representatives about at whatever level. Get educated, volunteer.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah.

I would actually give people a question to reflect on, which is how does the solution to whatever it is that [01:03:00] keeps me awake at night? How can that be the solution to what keeps someone else awake at night?

Quinn: That's so good.

Elizabeth Sawin: I'm worried about climate change and my neighbors worried about their kid in the emergency room with asthma.

Together, the coal fired power plant is our common thing to address.

Quinn: Oh my god, that's so good.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah.

Quinn: Great. So that's up there. I've had a few of these over the past few years. I've been very lucky to have and again, I was a religious studies major. So it was pretty familiar. And I got married at Jamestown. I'm familiar with much of Native American history and such, but I had on a woman who is an author of a book called The Optimist Telescope and she has this quote in it that says how can I be a better ancestor?

And if that doesn't frame your perspective a little better, like yours does, these are the ones that really stick with you. I love that. That's amazing.

Elizabeth Sawin: Good.

Quinn: That's amazing. Where I'm going to just yell that to people and tattoo it on my [01:04:00] children's lunchbox.

Elizabeth Sawin: It's actually, I think, pretty subversive. Maybe also like, how can I be a better ancestor?

I mean, the fossil fuel companies love it that we think that the health effects of air pollution are a separate problem from climate change, right? They're worked on separately, by separate people who are trained in separate departments of universities.

Like we're just weaker because we allow these issues to be disconnected. So let's stop doing that.

Quinn: Let's stop doing that. I love that perspective. Okay, I'm going to ask you one more. What is something as you've written your own book, what is a book you've read in the past year or so that has affected you in some way? Could be a coloring book, could be a reread, could be poems, could have changed your thinking.

We've got a long list of recommendations up on Bookshop.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. Gosh, there's so many. I'm gonna go longer than the last year and just say almost anything that Ursula Le Guin has written.

Quinn: My favorite! [01:05:00]

Elizabeth Sawin: Wait, we love electric school buses and Ursula Le Guin?

Quinn: Nailed it.

I will tell you what. I have an edition of, like a big fat combined edition of All theWizards and, and her epilogues? No, not epilogues. It's like an afterword. Basically her commentary about her time in between writing each of the books. And how they were affected by her life, and her life affected them, are almost more valuable to me than the books themselves.

She's incredible.

Elizabeth Sawin: Wow. I would love to, I didn't know that existed. I would love to read that.

Quinn: What's your favorite?

Elizabeth Sawin: My favorite, one that is growing on me, I didn't like it so much the first time I read it, is Always Coming Home, which is an interesting little compilation of stories, but it's also a whole world and it's a post technological world but it has a lot of roots of more indigenous ways of knowing and thinking and it's set in a California landscape. I keep going back to that one.[01:06:00]

Quinn: I'm definitely old enough now where I'm really looking forward to and enjoying the ones I keep coming back to, as opposed to, oh, the top 20 new books! I'm like, that's great. I've still got so much to learn from the ones I've already read.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah. And then The Dispossessed for just thinking about stories of possibility that are also really hard. There's so many where it seemed easy to get to that world that's so much better and more beautiful. And this one is hard. So those are two of my favorites.

Quinn: I love it. My kids, I was rereading Wizard of Earthsea in the past couple years, the first one. And they’ve seen Spider Man and the whole with great power comes great responsibility stuff, and Star Wars and Harry Potter and everything that comes after it. And I told him, I said this wizard was the young, chosen one with all the power, and he decided to use his power that was supposed to have great responsibility, and he did not use it well, and basically the rest of the series is those ripples of him [01:07:00] figuring out how to atone for that in a lot of different ways, and they're like, wait, is that the way a story can go?

I'm like, in her hands, it can, very much and it’s important.

This has been so wonderful.

Elizabeth Sawin: I've really enjoyed it.

Quinn: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it on such short notice. So excited to get my hands on your book and get it out there. I would love to do this again sometime, anywhere else listeners should follow you online, newsletter, website, anything like that?

Elizabeth Sawin: Multisolving.org is our website, and you can sign up for our newsletter there, which is the best way to know about up and coming things like some Flower trainings. And maybe I'll say my plan for the book is a virtual book tour.

I'm trying a little bit to walk the talk, not burn jet fuel. So around the world actually people are hosting me, and it's half me, and it's half a local multisolver talking about their work.

So I'm really looking forward to that, and those will all be on our website too.

Quinn: I love that. That's amazing. And I assume the book's up for pre order already, right? We're a month out.

Elizabeth Sawin: Yeah, it is, yep. Island Press is a good place to look for [01:08:00] it.

Quinn: Awesome.