Words We Need: Coherence

Author Elizabeth Sawin sees coherence as a systems changer.

One thing I’ve learned from years of writing about conservation is that the English language doesn’t have enough words for it, and those that we do have can be counterproductive. “Words We Need” suggests some ways to fill the gap. Ideas welcome.

Background image courtesy of Ashok Boghani.

Elizabeth Sawin, a biologist, systems analyst, and author of the forthcoming book Multisolving, spent many years developing policy solutions to climate change. In that work, she encountered a problem familiar to conservationists: while many solutions to the climate problem would also benefit human health or biodiversity — and even pay for themselves by doing so — synergies are often stymied by specialization. Universities, government agencies, and other institutions just aren’t set up to consider the interactions between, say, energy and health policies or housing and biodiversity policies. And mutual benefits that aren’t perceived usually don’t get funded.

Sawin and her colleagues started looking for projects that had overcome these institutional barriers — where people from a range of backgrounds had worked together to solve multiple, seemingly disparate problems. They studied national health programs that had come to see home weatherization as a form of preventive care and city initiatives that used bike transportation to reduce traffic problems, air pollution, and carbon emissions. “What these projects had in common was not the specifics of their sector or what they actually did,” Sawin recently told an interviewer. “It was how people did it.”

One of the most important attributes of that “how,” Sawin found, is what complexity theorists call coherence — an ability to operate from a shared set of values or principles, both over time and at different scales. Sawin points to the Just Growth Circle, an Atlanta project that brought together experts in climate change, water management, housing, economic development, and racial equity. They started with four basic principles, including that residents should have a meaningful say in neighborhood infrastructure (which may seem obvious, but is by no means standard practice). Agreeing to and acting on those principles built trust within the group, and the same principles have since guided its work through three presidential administrations and any number of unexpected challenges and opportunities.

Coherence is a useful quality not only for organizations but individuals; in a recent talk, Sawin reflected on the power of personal coherence:

If you’re really sure about your vision as clear as you can see it, your values as clear as you can see them, you can live those out on the board of the preschool co-op, you can live them out in your company, you can live them out in your marriage, in your garden. And I actually think there’s growing evidence that it’s through that kind of coherence that systems change. It feels small, it’s not the massive leverage point that we’ve been looking for … but lately I’ve been relaxing into coherence because it’s actually more powerful, if that makes sense. I find it more relaxed and more powerful at the same time.

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Conservation at Work

• I recently wrote about the team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers that found “no basis” for the common claim that 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is located in Indigenous territories. Thanks to Eric Hoffner for flagging Mongabay’s thoughtful reporting on the issue: while the experts Mongabay interviewed agree that the statistic isn’t well-supported, some make the important point that it is possible to gather the necessary data for such an estimate — given, of course, the necessary funding and political will.

• Congratulations to Rodrigo Pérez Ortega of Science on winning a 2024 NASW Science in Society Award for his article “Should beetles be named after Adolf Hitler?” The cultural and political issues underlying scientific species names are a favorite preoccupation of mine, so I’m biased, but Ortega does a nice job of clarifying the central questions. (This debate is similar to but separate from the American Ornithological Society’s recent decision to change the common names of birds named after people. Common names are much easier to change, and I’d argue that there are more persuasive reasons to change them.)

• In related news, botanist Pedro Jiménez-Mejías and colleagues have published a “collective international appeal” in Bioscience against any large-scale revisions of scientific nomenclature, arguing that major changes would hamper research. To prevent future controversies, they write, coiners of new names should strive for “universality, stability, neutrality, and transculturality.” Bioscience editor Charles Fenster sums up the authors’ argument: “If you are going to name a species after a human, pick a mensch.”

• More evidence that conservation remains a bipartisan issue, even in these desperate times: this week, the North American Grasslands Conservation Act was reintroduced in the U.S. House by Democrats Sharice Davis and Mike Thompson and Republicans Nancy Mace (!!) and Brian Fitzpatrick. Like the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, the Grasslands Conservation Act is a common-sense step toward protecting the North American ecosystems that protect us. For a memorable illustration of the importance of grasslands, check out “In Search of the Continent’s Largest Shorebird,” Priyanka Kumar’s lovely High Country News story about the long-billed curlew and its habitat in northeastern New Mexico.

• Resolving the real and potential conflicts between biodiversity and food production, especially as climate change shrinks food supplies, is one of the most pressing conservation issues of our time. The IUCN has a brand-new report, Agriculture and Conservation, that goes well beyond the land sparing vs land sharing binary.

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Finally, it’s always a good time to read Ada Limon’s poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up.” May the greening of the trees — and their yellowing, and reddening — always get to you.