ELIZABETH SAWIN MULTISOLVER
The thing I appreciate most about talking to Elizabeth Sawin is how long she takes to answer a question. At least three times during our chat, we sit in silence for sometimes more than a minute. She sits in the morning sun in Vermont, amid the rural intentional community she has called home for decades. I sit at my kitchen table in Perth with midnight approaching — a time when I’m more than usually ready to embrace silence as a conversation runs deep.
What becomes clear is that Elizabeth has thought deeply about her place in the world and how her life connects with those of others, with our environment, with our political systems. Systems are Elizabeth’s thing. Having done her PhD in biology, she became fascinated with the interconnectedness of all things. Climate change sat at the heart of those connections, leading her on a crooked path to activism and co-founding Climate Interactive, a group that uses system dynamics — an approach to understanding the behaviour of complex systems — to drive meaningful and equitable climate action.
This year, she has moved on to a new role as director of the Multisolving Institute. Climate change remains a key focus, but multisolving says that addressing the climate emergency can’t be done without tackling other burning issues, and that one action can solve more than one problem at a time. It’s an inspiring idea that turns frustrating roadblocks — the oppressive complexity of the systems that surround us — into tantalising openings for change. I leave our conversation convinced those systems might be easily rewired, if we are all happy enough to spend the time thinking about they fit together.
MYKE BARTLETT: To begin, can you explain to us what multisolving is, because it’s a really fascinating idea and central to your work.
ELIZABETH SAWIN: Multisolving is the idea that you can use one investment of time or money or energy to solve more than one problem at one time. So, in that way, my grandmother was a multisolver, in that she could figure out how to stretch a dollar in six different directions. And a small farmer who incorporates permaculture into his practice is a multisolver. It’s not a new concept as I understand it. What we bring to it at the Multisolving Institute is saying that in the space of climate change, equity and biodiversity, we can really do with more of that thinking. Sometimes it makes more sense through examples. So, if you were going to close a coal-fired power plant in a community, that is going to protect the climate for the long term, because it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But for people living in the vicinity of that plant, there’s going to be an immediate improvement in air quality. And that means there’s going to be an improvement in the health of children with asthma, people with respiratory illnesses. One thing you’ll notice is that there are two time scales there: the climate improvement is over decades, the health and air quality improvement can be weeks or months.
I want to touch on something you said there, that this is quite an old idea. I’ve just read by James Rebanks, and one of the themes is that is that modern farming has this siloing process, whereas previously farming was much more dovetailed and worked together. Do you think that’s quite a modern viewpoint, that we isolate everything and reduce everything to singular states, and we don’t see how things fit together
