Essay · 6 min read
We sense an emerging ecosystem that is growing. More and more people are talking about what we are calling the “Second Renaissance” ecosystem, although people are using different names, e.g. Metamodern, Integral, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Metacrisis, Game B. More and more people are also trying to map and make sense of this ecosystem, e.g. Catalist, Limicon, Gaianet. There is growing recognition between people who are aware of or part of the ecosystem around practices, thinkers, virtual or physical gathering places, analysis of “what’s wrong” and “what’s needed” – but the ecosystem’s identity is still quite vague and swirling, and may indeed never converge into a single clear identity. [1]https://lifeitself.org/blog/second-renaissance-mapping-and-sensemaking
What other efforts have been made to map who/what is part of the ecosystem that Life Itself are tentatively referring to as the “Second Renaissance” ecosystem? This page offers an overview of mapping efforts, acknowledging related efforts by our peers not only to map the ecosystem itself but also to “map the mappers”.
We gather these together with the intentions of:
- piecing together a coherent overview of efforts to map the emerging ecosystem;
- learning from work that has been done already; and
- discerning what to do next with our own mapping efforts so that they make a valuable contribution to the collective field.
We have split these mapping efforts roughly into a) those that map the Second Renaissance ecosystem or something very close to it and b) those that map something broader that includes the Second Renaissance ecosystem. Given the indistinct bounds of the Second Renaissance ecosystem, there is some fuzziness involved even in this exercise. Furthermore, the unavailability of clear inclusion criteria for most of the mapping efforts makes it harder to recognise the rough boundaries of each of these maps.
We welcome feedback and other perspectives on our work here.
Contents
Second Renaissance Ecosystem Mapping Efforts
- A Mindset for the Anthropocene
- Meta-Crisis Meta-Resource
- The Liminal Web
- The Flourishing of All Living Things
- Gaianet Ecosystem Map (New Earth Ecosystem)
- Approaches to the Meta-Crisis
- Mapping Metamodern/State of Sensemaking
Broader Ecosystem Mapping Efforts
- Illuminate: Visualising the Field and Practice of Systems Change
- The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0
- Building the Wisdom Age
Second Renaissance Ecosystem Mapping Efforts
A Mindset for the Anthropocene
- 🔗 Link: https://www.ama-project.org/
- ✍️ Created by: RIFS Potsdam
- 📅 Date: 2015
- 📃 Description: “A platform for exploring the synergies between inner transformation and sustainability”
- 🎨 Type: Graph visualisation; Directory; Other visualisations
- ❓Inclusion criteria: “people, initiatives, organizations, publications, and other resources that connect the cultivation of mindsets with efforts for socio-ecological transformation”
Meta-Crisis Meta-Resource
- 🔗 Link: https://metacrisis.org/
- ✍️ Created by: Kyle Kowalski (Founder of Sloww)
- 📅 Date: Launched Feb 2022. Last updated March 2023.
- 📃 Description: “A resource/directory focused on curating all people/projects involved in the meta-crisis and linking them together to make new connections”
- 🎨 Type: Wiki
- ❓Inclusion criteria: “people/projects involved in the meta-crisis” where meta-crisis is defined as “a ‘crisis of crises’ including the meaning crisis, education crisis, climate crisis, information ecology crisis, exponential technology crisis, and many more.”
The Liminal Web
- 🔗 Link: https://www.joelightfoot.org/post/the-liminal-web-mapping-an-emergent-subculture-of-sensemakers-meta-theorists-systems-poets
- ✍️ Created by: Joe Lightfoot
- 📅 Date: November 2021. Updated April 2023
- 📃 Description: “Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets”. Mapping “a collection of thinkers, writers, theorists, podcasters, videographers and community builders who all share a high crossover in their collection of perspectives on the world”.
- 🎨 Type: Article; Infographics; Lists; Written analysis
- ❓Inclusion criteria: [Not found]
Updated version: April 2023.
The Flourishing of All Living Things
- 🔗 Link: https://kumu.io/Naryan/the-flourishing-of-all-living-things
- ✍️ Created by: Naryan Wong (Consultant at Cultivating Leadership; Founder of ThinkBetter)
- 📅 Date: 2021
- 📃 Description: “This map will be a snapshot attempting to make sense of the myriad of ways humanity is attempting to save itself.”
- 🎨 Type: Graph visualisation
- ❓Inclusion criteria: [Not found]
Gaianet Ecosystem Map (New Earth Ecosystem)
- 🔗 Link: https://www.gaianet.earth/ecosystem
- ✍️ Created by: Gaianet
- 📅 Date: 2020
- 📃 Description: “A database and map of the key players within this movement, as we have been able to uncover so far”. “The collection of mission-aligned projects who support the transformation of humanity into a paradigm of unity and regeneration.”
- 🎨 Type: Directory; Graph visualisation
- ❓Inclusion criteria: “Gaian allies who are actively aligning themselves with the restoration, regeneration, transformation, and transcendent metamorphosis of a new earth paradigm, characterized by more symbiotic and synergistic human cultures”
Approaches to the Meta-Crisis
- 🔗 Link: https://medium.com/@brandon_29259/comparing-approaches-to-addressing-the-meta-crisis-9393e6ee17d7
- ✍️ Created by: Brandon Norgaard (Founder of the Enlightened Worldview Project) and collaborators
- 📅 Date: 2022
- 📃 Description: “The table […] lists various distinct approaches to addressing the meta-crisis. These are primarily categorized based on the thought perspective or value meme that would essentially be the center of gravity of whatever worldview upon which the given approach would be based.”
- 🎨 Type: Article; Table; Inheritance diagram
- ❓Inclusion criteria: [Not found]
Mapping Metamodern/State of Sensemaking
- 🔗 Link: https://ecosystem.lifeitself.org/
- ✍️ Created by: Life Itself and collaborators
- 📅 Date: 2020
- 📃 Description: “An emerging ecosystem is seeking a radical, alternative approach to social change. One that is simultaneous paradigmatic, integrated and engaged (PIE). The project provides a map including key features, ideas, organizations and initiatives.”
- 🎨 Type: Directory; Graph visualisations
- ❓Inclusion criteria: Organisations taking approaches to social change that are “paradigmatic”, “integrated” and “pragmatic”
Broader Ecosystem Mapping Efforts
We see the following mapping efforts as related but having a scope that spans broader than the Second Renaissance ecosystem. We include them below for the utility of their analysis, and for their contribution in piecing together an overview of how the Second Renaissance ecosystem is situated in relation to other movements, fields, and communities.
Illuminate: Visualising the Field and Practice of Systems Change
- 🔗 Link: https://www.illuminatesystems.org/visualisingthefield
- ✍️ Created by: School of System Change
- 📅 Date: 2020
- 📃 Description: “an affinity map that connects language: how people and organisations are talking about themselves in the field - the words they’re using, the capacity they’re putting forward, what domains they say they are working in, and how those map out across the group that we currently have here. What this map does is then start to cluster the most common terms, for example - stakeholder engagement and facilitation are most commonly found together, as is social innovation, collaboration and impact measurement.”
- 🎨 Type: Graph visualisation
- ❓Inclusion criteria: Systems change practitioners/people doing systems change work, as identified through snowball sampling
- 💡Related materials:
The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0
- 🔗 Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11Ov1Y1xM-LCeYSSBYZ7yPXJah2ldgFX4oIlDtdd7-Qw/edit#gid=0
- ✍️ Created by: Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes
- 📅 Date: September 2018
- 📃 Description: A spreadsheet identifying a number of “memetic tribes” and an accompanying essay. “We define a memetic tribe as a group of agents with a meme complex, or memeplex, that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map of reality — along with its moral imperatives — on others. These tribes are on active duty in the new culture war. They possess a multiplicity of competing claims, interests, goals, and organizations.”
- 🎨 Type: Table; Essay
- ❓Inclusion criteria: [Not found]
- 💡Related materials:
Building the Wisdom Age
- 🔗 Link: https://www.roote.co/wisdom-age
- ✍️ Created by: Roote
- 📅 Date: [Not found]
- 📃 Description: A “dynamic paper” seeking to respond to the research question “When we zoom out from the different movements, what does the Wisdom Age look like as a whole? What are we collectively building?”
- 🎨 Type: Written and visual analysis
- ❓Inclusion criteria: [Not found]
Co-funded by the European Union, part of the Cohere+ project.
First published by Life Itself in March 2024 as a paper on the Second Renaissance site. See also our ecosystem map.
