A Transformative Moment

It's time to fully engage with quantum social change. Stepping into preferment, I’m choosing uncertainty, entanglement, and oneness as the basis for generating transformative change. Will you join me?

Midnight

The year is over. At the stroke of midnight tonight, I’ll retire from the University of Oslo and become a professor emerita. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, emerita describes “a woman who no longer has a position, especially in a college or university, but keeps the title of the position.”

That makes me smile. Titles are lovely, but what does it really mean for me to retire from a secure university position that I’ve enjoyed? Can I embrace the uncertainty and focus on what I truly care about now? I see this not as an ending, but as a shift in how and where I place my energy and focus.

Driven

For decades, I’ve been driven by a deep concern about climate change, biodiversity loss, and global inequality. The intensity of this concern has no doubt driven people close to me crazy.

The fire was lit when I started graduate school in 1988, back when the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere was 351 ppm (parts per million). I had no science background, but a crazy desire to learn everything I could to address global environmental problems.

At the time, Professor Diana Liverman was doing a project on global warming in Mexico, and she hired me as her research assistant. This led to a master’s thesis on the impacts of global warming in Mexico. Then, motivated by a fascination with tropical ecology and biodiversity, I did my PhD under Diana’s supervision on the relationships between deforestation and climate change in the Selva Lacandona of Chiapas, Mexico.

These formative years fueled decades of research on the social and human dimensions of global environmental change. I’ve never felt alone; researchers, practitioners, activists, and policy-makers from all over the world share this commitment and drive. Yet despite an amazing community of people working around the world to create conditions where both people and nature can thrive, we have not yet been able to “bend the curves” on greenhouse gas emissions and the degradation of nature.

On December 28, 2025, CO₂ concentrations at the Mauna Loa Observatory were measured at 428.22 ppm. An increase of 2.89 ppm from one year ago.

This is not good news. We are not meeting the adaptive challenge of climate change.

Together, the work goes on

So what now? Climate scientist and Episcopal deacon Lisa Graumlich recently published a beautiful solstice sermon on Substack that emphasizes the sacred nature of climate action.

Lisa underscores that we are making a long-term, collective commitment to the future: “The cathedral builders knew: we build for what we love, across time we’ll never see, with others whose names we may never know.”

Her words resonate with me at this moment of personal transition. It feels like a sacred moment, not because the work is finished, but because it is taking new forms.

Not surprisingly, I interpret Lisa Graumlich’s solstice sermon as an ode to quantum social change, which has been a thread running through these newsletters. She stresses that “we need each other. We were never meant to do this alone. … we are one body. What hurts one part hurts the whole. What heals moves through the whole.” From Lisa’s Substack:

Everything is connected. Everything belongs. We are woven together in a web so vast and beautiful it can only be called holy.

And what we do together matters.

Across time. Across species. Across the thin boundary between heaven and earth.

I encourage you to read her post on “Thin Places: Climate Change and Seeing Earth Whole,” and I look forward to her future newsletters about the intersection of climate science and spiritual practice.

Preferment

At the stroke of midnight, I’m not retiring, but moving into preferment—a reorientation of how I place my energy, attention, and care.

It feels like a metaphorical quantum leap: moving from a “fixed” position into uncertainty, indeterminacy, and entanglement. Rather than resisting that uncertainty, I want to embrace it, trusting that new possibilities will emerge if I am open and attentive.

In this next phase, I’ll have the space and time to focus my energy and attention on quantum social change — a conscious, nonlinear, nonlocal approach to social change that is grounded in our oneness. I’ll be working with cCHANGE on scaling transformative change in society and remain connected to research and education, but at a slower, more deliberate pace.

To shift into “preferment,” I’ve been letting go of items that I have held on to for decades. Books. Reports. Articles. Business cards. This classical clutter has to go. Although each one holds a positive memory or has contributed meaningfully to my thinking, they represent the past. And I’ll always be entangled with the people I’ve met and the books and papers I’ve read.

It’s all part of a metamorphosis, as Irish poet Anne Pender writes in the poem below that sits on my desk. I’m reminded that I carry the lessons, connections, relationships, and care that have sustained me over decades, as I shed old skins and enter a formless future.

Transformation is never done alone; it moves through all of us, as we are entangled across space and time. My hope is that this midnight marks a sacred step forward for me, and for all those I am entangled with — past, present, and future.

Metamorphose

“My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed
into new bodies…” – Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 1.

Skins shedding, soft surfaces emerging,
letting go of holding on
as I freefall into a formless future.
No blueprints, only that whisper of a knowing
beyond the imagined boundaries of my mind.

But still I hesitate.
What I feel called to do makes no sense
in a world on fire,
yet the yearning is unyielding,
a tantalising taste of joyous being.

Maybe sense only becomes sensible
when the step forward is taken,
the path only formed by the walking.
Let courage be my compass, then,
leading me on through the turbulence

to the beckoning calm beyond.

Anne Pender, 2025

Image: mbbirdy / iStock