I have never thought of power as both a noun and a verb. Before reading Active Hope, I considered “power” to be something that an individual has or acquires, usually because they have more of something compared to the rest of the population. Macy and Johnstone defined this as “power-over”. “Power-with”, on the other hand, suggests that “the whole is more than the sum of the parts”, meaning that collaboration between parties brings about entirely new results.
There is a large difference between having power and being empowering. I realized that when I try to find examples of people in these two groups, there is very rarely any overlap. The president has a lot of power, but I realized that even if the president has the same viewpoints and morals as I do, I still do not necessarily feel empowered by them. Empowerment stems from power-with. People who I feel empowered by are not necessarily politicians or bioengineers, but normal people who also want to make a difference. I feel inspiration and empowerment from others when I can understand their personal inspirations and collaborate to generate new solutions or projects. Many of our action projects do not directly implement change, suggesting that they do not use power-over, but each one of us were inspired by our group members and peers by what we managed to create in just a few weeks.
Over the course of this class, I often felt as though I was not putting the pieces together correctly. Despite the influx of information that we received every day, I would come up blank when attempting to figure out just what to do about the Anthropocene. If power-with is meant to bring together groups in order to find a plausible solution, then why have we not already resolved the issue of climate change? The trick, I realized, is to remember that we will not necessarily see the outcomes of our actions. It took decades for our unsustainable habits to create the decaying environment that we see, and it will take decades before the Earth catches up to the changes that we implement today.
It is very easy to lose hope in the face of a globalized issue. However, if we can find power within each other, hope is not only easier to maintain, but it becomes an active process in which we can execute change.
Photo: https://www.slideshare.net/tetradian/bridging-enterprisearchitecture-and-systemsthinking