Navigating Collapse Together: Toward Regenerative Public Life

In this essay, Nicole Negowetti reflects on what becomes possible when collapse is understood not only as crisis but as a collective passage. She contrasts dominant responses, rooted in worldviews that frame life as competitive and uncertainty as dangerous, with perspectives from Indigenous teachings, ecological science, and bodily cycles that reframe collapse as a threshold between worlds. She argues that navigating collapse with integrity requires a broader understanding of where power resides, and calls for an ecology of responses that includes policy and governance, land stewardship, mutual aid, trauma healing, cultural work, and the cultivation of imagination.