The Long Work of Staying Human: Art as Resistance, Embodied Leadership as Practice
The crises we face are no longer isolated events. They are overlapping systems of collapse—ecological, political, social—that reveal the fragility of the institutions we were told would protect us. The eerie normalization of authoritarianism, the erosion of civil liberties, the weaponization of scarcity and the visible hand of climate disruption are not separate stories. They are a single reality, unfolding unevenly but relentlessly across geographies and bodies.
This piece does not offer answers so much as it opens a conversation. It is the beginning of a longer inquiry—into how we respond, how we relate, and how we remain human, not just individually but together.
This raises a difficult question that resists easy answers: what scale of response matches the scale of crisis? The temptation is to think globally, to devise comprehensive solutions. Yet the evidence from communities already experimenting with alternatives suggests something more modest and more demanding—that transformation happens through the accumulation of local relationships, not through grand designs.
Social sustainability offers a framework for this question—less as a technical category and more as an ethical commitment. At its heart, social sustainability is about the conditions that make life livable: reciprocity, justice, belonging and care. It is the opposite of atomization and asks how we protect not just ecosystems and economies but relationships. What emerges from this analysis is an infrastructure of empathy—a cellular knowing that our survival, culturally, physically, emotionally, depends not on extraction or domination but on interdependence.
To speak of interdependence is to speak of community, but not in an abstract sense. We are not talking about generalized goodwill. We are talking about mutual responsibility—a form of radical neighborliness that becomes politically essential when public systems fail. In moments of collapse, neighbor becomes first responder and community becomes safety net. Knowing who lives next door is no longer a nicety; it is survival strategy.
Yet something feels incomplete about this framing. The assumption that local relationships automatically translate into broader resilience deserves scrutiny. What becomes visible through community organizing work is both the promise and the limitations of local-scale response. Natural disasters often reveal networks of care that can mobilize quickly for immediate needs—food distribution, elder care, temporary shelter. But when it comes to structural challenges like zoning changes, development pressures, or policy decisions, the influence of neighborhood-level organizing often remains largely symbolic.
In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit observes that in the wake of disaster, people tend not to panic but to help. “Disaster,” she writes, “reveals what else the world could be like.” Her research shows that in the absence of functioning institutions, people often self-organize to feed, care for and shelter each other. But these acts of mutual aid, as powerful as they are, are often short-lived—because the dominant systems quickly reassert themselves.
This suggests a tension at the heart of mutual aid work: if helping each other is instinctive, why does it require so much intentional cultivation? Recent gatherings have revealed that while crisis can catalyze cooperation, sustaining that cooperation requires infrastructure—both material and relational—that doesn’t emerge automatically. The lesson here is not just that we are capable of care, but that we must institute it deliberately, knowing that the work of building community often moves slower than the crises demanding response.
This is what gets explored through embodied leadership. It recognizes that regeneration is not just ecological—it is social, emotional and structural. It asks communities to stop treating the body as a passive vessel, the neighborhood as background or the creative act as an afterthought. Embodied leadership draws from systems thinking, trauma-informed care, ancestral knowledge and creative process to build communities that can feel, respond and adapt with integrity. It refuses the disembodied logic of domination—the idea that intellect can be severed from emotion, or policy from relational consequence. It sees leadership not as hierarchy but as responsibility held in the body.
But here’s what’s curious: embodied leadership planning also resists speed as a measure of value, even while responding to urgent threats. In moments of moral crisis, the pressure to respond quickly is high—but speed often mirrors the very systems we seek to disrupt. Extractive capitalism, digital surveillance and the pendulum swinging toward authoritarianism all rely on overstimulation, distraction and urgency to dissolve attention. To move slowly, to pay attention, to feel before reacting—these become counter-strategies. They are ways of reclaiming time, breath and discernment.
This creates a paradox that organizers grapple with regularly: if fascism moves fast and climate disruption accelerates, can slow, local relationship-building actually keep pace? The question becomes whether depth of connection can substitute for breadth of impact, or whether both are necessary in ways that haven’t been fully worked out.
This kind of planning is inherently local, though it carries the assumption that local work scales up in meaningful ways. It is not about designing utopias from afar. It is about meeting the moment where you are, with what you have. It begins with gathering—stories, people, resources, ideas. It builds relationships between artists, organizers, caregivers, land stewards, educators and neighbors. It maps the interdependencies between housing, education, emotional health, land use, spiritual practice and governance. It sees these not as separate structures but as threads in the same fabric. And it asks: what kinds of spaces help communities metabolize grief? What kinds of rituals restore courage? What kinds of relationships protect the most vulnerable when official protections fail?
William Cronon, writing about land and community, reminds us that preservation is not enough. “The task,” he writes, “is to discover how to live responsibly in the places we inhabit.” This applies not only to wilderness but to cities, neighborhoods and social systems. Responsibility here means participation—not performative, but grounded. It means showing up for those nearby not because it’s convenient, but because the future might depend on it.
Yet the framework of embodied leadership raises questions about accessibility. Moving slowly and engaging in reflective community building assumes a level of safety and choice that many don’t have. For people in immediate survival mode—those facing eviction, deportation, or medical crises—is this approach accessible, or does it primarily serve those with enough stability to engage in long-term relationship work? The tension here is real and cannot be resolved simply by good intentions.
Fascist systems do not collapse under the weight of argument alone. They erode slowly, then all at once, when societal conditions—such as widespread isolation, numbness and a collective sense of helplessness—allow them to take hold. Timothy Snyder warns in On Tyranny, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. This voluntary submission teaches power what it can do.
The machinery of authoritarianism seems most effective when people forget how to care for each other. This suggests why mutual aid might be dangerous to oppressive systems. This points toward why joy becomes threatening. This indicates why art carries political weight.
But this analysis deserves scrutiny. Historical examples complicate the assumption that community organizing inherently resists authoritarianism. Nazi Germany had robust local organizations and celebrated folk art. What makes contemporary mutual aid specifically anti-fascist rather than simply community building? The answer might lie not in the form of organizing but in its values and analysis—though the distinction isn’t always as clear as organizers hope.
Art is not a sideshow to politics. It is the sensory infrastructure of resistance. It makes visible what power would rather leave unnamed. It holds memory when facts get distorted. It creates shared experience when language fails. From resistance quilts to protest songs, from community murals to grief altars, creative practice reminds communities what it feels like to be alive and in relationship. Making the invisible visible, art teaches people how to hold contradiction and complexity without collapsing. It trains communities in nuance, attention and moral clarity.
James Baldwin once wrote, “The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.” This feels like instruction rather than metaphor. Artists are not fringe contributors to justice movements—they are carriers of emotional memory, cultural literacy and civic imagination.
I keep coming back to something bell hooks said: “There can be no love without justice… abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love.” This is not sentimental but structural. Love, in this context, is not private—it is a public ethic. Love—as the force that makes neighborliness possible—enables people to show up even when they are tired, even when the news is unbearable, even when the systems around them insist nothing can change.
Woody Guthrie famously scrawled on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” It wasn’t a joke but a declaration. In a time of growing fascism and state-sanctioned silence, to sing, to speak, to name beauty, to tell the truth—these are political acts, and they are tools of survival.
To build regenerative communities in this time is to act as though the world we want already exists, while remaining honest about current limitations. This means living into stated values and designing rituals of care into gatherings, spaces, and systems. By making beauty where communities are—not to distract from the pain of the world, but to sustain people in the face of it—neighbors hold onto each other.
Still, the gap between local relationship-building and addressing planetary-scale crises remains largely unresolved. But perhaps the work is not to resolve that gap entirely, but to stay in it—to treat it as a strategic tension, not a failure of imagination. A place where uncertainty can become practice. A space where local action, while limited, becomes a site of principled experimentation.
To act from this place is not to pretend certainty, but to remain engaged—to choose relation over retreat. If nothing else, we begin here: in kitchens and classrooms, in community gardens and grief rituals, in the art we make and the care we extend. Not because it will save the world all at once—but because not doing so would mean surrendering our humanity.
The long work of staying human begins with staying close.
