Arif Yusop
As (inter)beings immersed in colonial modernity, we tend to forget who we truly are as a collective ‘we’. Exploring design vis-à-vis sustainability transition, Arif Yusop reflects on the manufactured global ‘we’ that has captured sustainability discourse and unearths a flourishing ‘we’ rooted in fertile soil: the one we lost along the way.
I recall watching a video from years ago, possibly a decade back, of NATO foreign ministers at the Turkish seaside resort of Antalya singing “We Are the World.” They were half drunk, swaying, locked arms and slurring through the lyrics, and I found myself unable to look away from the grotesque spectacle. The image stuck with me because it revealed everything about the manufactured “we” of global politics. Here were the architects of ecological destruction, wine-flushed and self-satisfied, crooning about healing the world with the same voices that wage wars and genocides, authorise fossil fuel subsidies and sign off on deforestation deals, singing “we are the world”.
When I was studying Service Design, the question of “How might we” was always presented as the pathway to solving any kind of problem. It’s a method of framing the mindset into saviour mode, sounding like a leader trying to gather everyone in the room to get on board with these problem-solving approaches to any kind of wicked problem. The very structure assumes someone must lead, someone must fix, and someone must design the solution for others or with others, by including others in a participatory manner. But who is this “we” that gets to ask “how might we” when it comes to the entanglement of planetary crises?
When the powerful speak of the climate crisis and “our” collective challenge, who is this “we” they invoke? Like the waters of the archipelago that separate yet connect countless islands, the word “we” obscures as much as it reveals. The corporate executives who have plundered Borneo’s forests, the indigenous communities who guard what remains, are these the same “we”? The shareholders extracting profit from palm oil plantations and the fisherfolk whose coral reefs bleach white with rising seas, do they share the same future?
This manufactured unity serves those who created the wounds they now claim to heal. When multinational corporations speak of “our transition,” they erase the violence of their own making. The life force of rivers poisoned by mining and water dams in the name of renewable energy, the ancestral wisdom of communities displaced by development, and even forest conservation, these disappear within the convenient collective pronoun that flattens responsibility into shared blame.
Fifty Shades of Green
The dominant voices orchestrating this “green transition” emerge from the very boardrooms and ministries that engineered ecological destruction. Their technological solutions mirror the mechanistic thinking that severed humanity from the living web of relationships that indigenous peoples call our earth and water as one breathing entity.
These architects of devastation now position themselves as healers, prescribing market mechanisms and digital innovations as medicine for wounds they inflicted. Yet their proposed remedies carry the same ontological virus: the delusion that nature exists as commodity, that forests are carbon sinks rather than sacred ancestries, that rivers are resources rather than the blood vessels of Mother Earth.
The much-heralded circular economy becomes another extractive circle, not the sacred cycles of monsoon and harvest, birth and decay that our ancestors understood, but industrial loops designed to perpetuate consumption while appearing virtuous. They speak of efficiency while indigenous communities know abundance; they calculate sustainability while traditional societies lived it for millennia.
When corporations proclaim net zero, they perform a colonial accounting trick, offsetting their continued extraction by claiming ownership over forests that communities have stewarded for generations. The mathematics of carbon trading erases the mathematics of relationship, the intricate calculations of reciprocity between human and more-than-human worlds that kept our ancestors in balance for centuries.
Unveiling the Colonial Cosmology
This technological transition is not politically neutral but carries within it the colonial worldview, the belief that reality consists of dead matter to be optimised, programmed, and controlled. It perpetuates what Javanese ancestors might recognise as the cosmic imbalance between outer form and inner essence, prioritising surface solutions while ignoring spiritual-ecological rootedness.
The sustainability conferences become contemporary versions of colonial treaties, elaborate performances where the colonised are invited to participate in their own continued subjugation, now under the banner of “green development.” The same extractive logics that carved up the archipelago into resource zones now partition the Earth into carbon markets, biodiversity hotspots, and renewable energy territories.
But whose knowledge counts in designing these futures? The indigenous healer who reads the forest’s health through bird calls, or the data scientists mapping deforestation via satellite? The fisherfolk who navigate by stars and currents, or the marine biologists measuring ocean acidification? The choice reveals the deeper violence: the systematic erasure of ways of knowing that could actually guide us toward balance.
The Forgotten ‘We’
“We, the peoples and nations of Earth…”
Yet there exists another “we”, one that sustainability systematically excludes. This understanding found profound expression in 2010 when thousands gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. There, indigenous peoples and civil society movements drafted the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth, beginning with the radical reimagining: “We, the peoples and nations of Earth..” Not the corporate “we” of boardrooms, not the diplomatic “we” of nation-states, but “We, the peoples and nations of Earth” recognising “Mother Earth as a living being” and “a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings” that includes all life.
This declaration articulates what Austronesian cosmologies have always known: the “we” that encompasses not just human communities but the entire web of relationships understood as family, the spirits of place, the ancestral presence in old-growth trees, the subtle beings that mediate between worlds. The document proclaims that “just as human beings have human rights, all other beings also have rights which are specific to their species or kind” and calls for economic systems that honour rather than exploit these relationships.
This expanded kinship includes the mangroves that protect coastal communities, the mycorrhizal networks that share nutrients between forest species, and the watershed systems that connect mountain to sea. When traditional communities speak of stewardship, they speak to this larger “we”, not the abstract humanity of development discourse but the concrete relationships that sustain life. The Cochabamba gathering represented this ancient wisdom, challenging the corporate “we” that treats Earth as a commodity rather than kin.
The real transition requires remembering these relationships, not as a romantic return but as a sophisticated understanding of how human societies can be embedded within rather than dominate ecological systems. The wisdom traditions of the archipelago offer cosmological frameworks where prosperity means the flourishing of all beings, where development means the deepening of reciprocal relationships, and where progress means moving closer to rather than further from the rhythms that sustain life.
Re-membering Holarchy1
What if the crisis we face is not ultimately about climate or even capitalism, but about forgetting, the forgetting of who we are within the larger body of Earth? The pathology lies in our cosmology rather than our technologies, in our souls’ disconnection from the spirit of land that once guided human communities, rather than in our systems.
How might we re-member this “we”? The question itself reveals the trap. The very framing assumes we can design our way back to wholeness, that the same mindset that fragmented the world can now piece it back together. But re-membering is not a problem to be solved but a relationship to be lived. It requires not the leader asking “how might we” but the humility of asking “how might I belong?” not as a designer of solutions but as a participant in the larger community of life.
The transition that matters cannot be engineered by the same consciousness that created the wounds. It requires what our ancestors might call a fundamental re-turning, a re-orientation to right relation-ship. This means listening to voices systematically silenced: indigenous women defending water sources, farmers practising mutual aid in the face of agribusiness, coastal communities developing traditional resource management systems that regenerate rather than extract.
Their practices reveal futures already present in the margins: economies based on care rather than growth, governance rooted in consensus and relationships, and technologies that enhance rather than replace ecological wisdom. These are not primitive remainders but sophisticated alternatives, knowledge systems evolved over millennia to create abundance within ecological limits.
The question is not what future “we” are transitioning to, but which “we” has the wisdom to guide that transition. Not the “we” of corporate boardrooms and development agencies, but the “we” that includes the forests, the rivers, the ancestors, the yet-to-be-born, the larger community of life that holds the memory of how to live as Earth rather than on it.
So perhaps the question is not “How might we transition?” in the manner of design methodology seeking solutions, but rather “How might we re-member ‘we’ again?” How might we recall our place within the sacred holarchy of being, as conscious stewardship in the unfolding mystery of existence itself?
Arif Yusop is a design researcher exploring the unlearning of dominant narratives through onto‑epistemic wayfaring and the weaving of contexture. His work moves between design, sustainability transitions, and pluriversal futures, tracing the tacit practices that open pathways toward pluriversal radical alternatives. www.arifyusop.com
Footnotes
- Holarchy (from Greek holos, “whole,” + –archy, “ordering principle”) A term introduced by Arthur Koestler to describe the nested structure of living systems in which each level, from cell to body to ecosystem to Earth, is simultaneously a whole in itself and a part of something larger. To inhabit a holarchical cosmology is to understand that the human is not sovereign over nature but embedded within it, a member of a body that was never ours to command, only to serve. ↩︎