Across conversations about climate change, biodiversity loss, social fragmentation, technological disruption, and geopolitical instability, a recurring question keeps surfacing: How are these separate crises interlinked, and what are the deeper expressions they point us to?
People approach this question from different perspectives and with different priorities. Some focus on practical responses, such as policy reforms, technological innovation, or local initiatives that can address urgent challenges. Others are interested in the assumptions, values, and worldviews that shape these responses in the first place, asking whether lasting change requires a shift in how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the living world. Others yet try to mobilise communities and the grassroots, or focus on different groups of people, such as, for example, the ones in power, etc. There are myriads of responses. All expressions of an urge to find answers to the same recurring question.
These approaches are often presented as alternatives, but they do not have to be. In fact, even among those focused on immediate solutions, there is often an acknowledgement that many of today’s challenges are connected to deeper patterns of thought, mindsets and behaviour. The difficulty is not so much recognising the need for change, but understanding how shifts at the level of a paradigm actually may happen.
The challenge few people are naming: shifting the paradigm together
When talking about paradigm shift, we tend to put emphasis on the fact that paradigms are deeply ingrained, and therefore hard to evolve. A paradigm is not just a set of ideas we can change on a whim, or a week-long retreat in the forest. It takes deep and concerted effort.
This is true, but there is a different challenge: the paradigm is something that we hold together, as collectives. It is the background of our shared culture and our social contracts. It is what makes it possible to communicate, to collaborate, to recognise each other as participants in a common world.
As a result, changing the paradigm – really changing it “for the better”– is existentially dangerous territory.
If you do it on your own, you face a kind of isolation, a lack of shared understanding that may lead towards a form of madness or oppression: the type of disconnection that comes from perceiving the world differently from everyone around you, with no shared language or shared values. Many people who went deep into ecological grief, or indigenous cosmologies, or radical relational ontology, know this experience. It can be so isolating that you simply spiral into yourself and feel even more despair within that.
If you do it with a small group, you face a different risk: cultishness or elitarianism. The closed community that found the truth, or the subculture that becomes illegible to the outside world, self-referential, unable to communicate beyond the boundary it has drawn around itself. These experiments, worthy as they might be, run the risk of becoming mere curiosities or the domination of a few over the many others.
As for changing the paradigm ‘for everyone’, no individual, organisation, or movement has that power. Paradigms shift when conditions shift, when enough people’s lived experience makes the old frame untenable or obsolete. You can contribute to that, but you cannot engineer it, or plan it – let alone dictate it. And so, the risk of endeavours to ‘change the paradigm for all’ is performativeness: a superficial change in vocabulary, or minor surface shuffling, while the structures below solidify.
So here is the dilemma: the paradigm needs to change, but available options – individual conversion, subcultural retreat, top-down imposition – are either insufficient or dangerous.
This is the context where the World Ethic Forum places its action and its inquiry.
What We See
When we look at the current landscape, we see both cause for hope and for serious concern.
There is a wide field of inspiring actors and communities. There is growing acknowledgement of the importance of awareness-based and relational approaches. There is a rising movement for the rights of nature. There is genuine energy in regenerative agriculture, in degrowth, in buen vivir, in communities building different ways of organising economic and social life.
But each of these movements contains a trap. The awareness-based work still tends to focus mostly on the individual: inner transformation as pure personal development, detached from systemic change. (1) The regeneration movement sometimes is at risk of skipping the work of restoration, reconciliation, and healing of what was broken. The rights of nature movement might gain legal ground, but the underlying anthropocentrism of institutions may remain largely untouched. Communities with genuine eco-social integrity often remain isolated from each other and from the mainstream. They’re inspiring, but insufficiently connected across sectors and places.
Underneath all this, the paradigm continues. Anthropocentrism remains the dominant worldview. The economic logic of perpetual growth remains structurally embedded. Power continues to organise itself through extractive and dualistic frameworks. Competition continues to crowd out collaboration as the default mode of institutions.
The situation is what some are calling the metacrisis: not just a set of simultaneous, interconnected crises, but a crisis in the very frameworks we use to make sense of what is happening and decide what to do about it. A disruption of what we might call ‘the constitutive axis of resonance’ that holds communities, societies, and meaning together.
The two most common responses that we observe only make things worse. There is solutionism: jumping directly from problem to solution without understanding root causes. This generates interventions that treat the symptoms while the underlying dynamics continue. It might also get us into what some call ‘Gattopardism’, or describe as ‘moving deck chairs on the Titanic’: a ‘sense’ of engaging in activism while the very enactment of it ends up being what keeps things in place, stabilising the current system of destruction. There is fragmentation: siloed approaches at every scale, so that even the good work fails to add up into something larger than itself.
And then, there is a subtler risk: that even the most well-intentioned paradigm-change work gets absorbed. AI and digitalisation create false hopes, new patterns of extraction and reproduce biases and fragmentation. Awareness work becomes a personal development industry. The language of transformation gets adopted without the transformation.
A Third Path: Nurturing a Paradigmatic Ecotone for System Transformation
In ecology, an ecotone is where two ecosystems meet. For instance, the edge between forest and grassland, or the zone between river and dryland. Ecotones, the in-between spaces, the liminal spaces, are often the most biodiverse zones in a landscape, where species from both systems coexist and where new species emerge that could not exist in either system alone. We think paradigm change works like this.
Our hypothesis is that it is possible for a group of people to inhabit a new paradigm – to experience it, practice it, embody it – in a way that nonetheless remains connected with ‘the world as it is’. We believe that we can inhabit those new paradigms, not as a retreat, not as a utopian community that has severed its ties, but as an ecotone: a zone where the old paradigm and the emerging one coexist, where the boundary between them is deliberately kept permeable, so that people can cross back and forth. A place of the in-between where we embrace liminality and not-knowing. And that cultivating such paradigmatic ecotones might offer a way for us to seriously address the need for paradigm transformation.
Of course, this is harder than it sounds. The status quo keeps asserting itself, bringing us back to the old. Meanwhile, a community that forms around a different way of being tends to develop its own language, its own references, its own internal logic, and gradually becomes harder to enter from outside. Either way, the ecotone recedes.
Keeping the ecotone open requires deliberate design. It requires staying in relationship with the existing world rather than withdrawing from it or overriding it. It requires holding the tension between depth and accessibility, between being with the diverse pain points and cultivating hope and clarity for emergent pathways, without resolving too quickly in either direction.
It also requires a different relationship to time. Paradigm change is not a project with clear timelines and deliverables. It is a long arc of collective learning and practice. It is overall gradual, with unexpected sudden shifts as things fall into place. It comes with individual glimmers of a different way of being accumulated, slowly, into something that more people can recognise and inhabit.
Such glimmers are not nothing. You do not need to fully inhabit a new paradigm for it to change what you sense is possible. A moment of genuinely feeling your intraconnection with the living world, of experiencing a group that thinks and feels together rather than alongside each other, touching the quality of attention that becomes possible when the more-than-human is actually present in the room: these experiences change something; they often evoke strong emotions. They shift what feels real, what feels achievable, what feels worth trying.
If one finds oneself in an ecotone together with others, a safe enough space, where the liminal is embraced, new meaning perspectives can be explored and enacted jointly. Paradigms change through the enactment of an emergent knowing informed by collective sense-making, wider ways of knowing and accumulated experience of dormant yet silently palpable potential.
What the World Ethic Forum Is Doing
This is the hypothesis at the heart of WEFo’s work. We are trying to create and study ecotonal spaces, where different paradigms can be genuinely experienced, practised, and felt by people who are embedded in and committed to care, kinship and the expressions of radically shared aliveness, in its many different manifestations.
The design of our work reflects this. We adopted a seven-year arc because paradigm shift cannot be rushed, and because the kind of trust and depth required to do this work takes years to cultivate. The Firekeeper Circle is very deliberately diverse, with farmers, artists, researchers, activists, policy people, and community builders from many different places. This is a structural defence against cultishness, a way to keep the ecotone open in multiple directions. As for public events, they are not outreach, but the mechanism by which the inside stays connected to the outside, and what happens in the circle can ripple beyond it.
The work itself is organised around what we call thematic strands: domains which in their collective interweaving are needed to shift the paradigm and with the understanding that all of these domains hold pivotal importance: ethical groundwork, healing and reconciliation, bioregional stewardship, kinship, DEI and decolonisation, HouseHolding, intergenerational learning and dialogue. Only when we interweave these can we then come to a responsible way of managing our households, our economy.
Our core methodology is participatory action research: reflective, documented, iterative. Because rigour is itself part of what keeps the ecotone open, and because publishing our inquiry in a language that relates to other discourse is a responsibility in itself when walking this path. It is another way to invite wonderfully brilliant people to further expand it with their perspectives and start to explore how to do science differently, science that remembers its intrinsic knowing of intraconnectedness, and come alongside us to enrich our collective thinking and action.
As for the practices, like firekeeping, social field resonance, generative scribing, somatic and ritual work, land connection, those are how the paradigm shift actually happens, in the body – the individual ones – and the collective body, not just in the mind. This is how people get to actually experience – not just think about – a different way of being together.
What we aspire to contribute to is a culture of care and kinship: a way of organising collective life that starts from the understanding that humans are not managers of nature but participants within it, that care is not a soft supplement to serious work, but its foundation, that kinship extends beyond the human. The ecotone is where we practice moving in that direction, together, without losing the world in the process.
The World Ethic Forum is an ongoing inquiry. We do not have the answers. We are serious about finding out.
NOTE
- In Buddhist thought, practitioners traditionally take refuge in three pillars: the Buddha (the teacher or example), the Dharma (the teachings), and the Sangha (the community). These are not equal in a purely abstract sense: Many interpretations emphasise that the Sangha plays a crucial, grounding role, because it is through community that the teachings are lived, supported, and sustained. In practical terms, this implies that spiritual development is not meant to be an isolated, purely individual pursuit, but one embedded in and accountable to others. However, many Western adaptations of Buddhist-inspired contemplative practices tend to shift this emphasis, presenting the path largely as an individual journey of self-improvement or personal transformation, often sidelining the central importance of communal life and mutual responsibility