Holding the Line: A Feminist Reimagining of Climate, Capitalism, and Courage
Background: this is the first blog post I’ve written with AI. I took the raw notes I typed up at an SF Climate Week event with Paul Hawken and Van Jones, and thought, I don’t have time to write a blog post, but maybe if I share my raw notes with ChatGPT, it’ll make something useful enough to share the vibe of what I got from the inspirational event. And it turned out pretty well, with some light editing.
The prompt was: turn these notes into a blog post. use the style of a NY Times or The Atlantic article, and be a radical feminist.
-Katharine Bierce
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Let’s begin with a simple truth: our language is broken.
Not just the tired rhetoric of cable news or the sanitized jargon of climate conferences, but the fundamental ways we describe the fate of our planet. “Decarbonization”? It sounds like a sci-fi plot twist. Technically impossible, anyway. And worse: it’s sterile, masculine, lifeless.
Nature doesn’t want to be decarbonized. She is carbon. We are carbon. Trees, fungi, flesh, and breath — we’re all part of the great carbon ballet. To extract carbon from the narrative of life is to erase life itself. And yet, this is how we talk about saving the Earth?
Paul Hawken, whose work often straddles the worlds of ecological science and spiritual clarity, urges a different approach. Stop counting carbon atoms. Start talking about regeneration. About reversing global warming, not just slowing it down. About measuring success not by GDP or quarterly growth but by our capacity to sustain life.
This isn’t just semantics. This is politics. This is power. This is patriarchy cracking at its carbon fiber seams.
Hope Is Not a Strategy. Courage Is.
If you want to talk about the climate crisis, stop saying “hope.” It’s the velvet curtain we draw across the abyss to keep ourselves from acting. Hope is passive. It’s waiting for rescue. What we need is courage — which, if you trace the root, comes from the heart (coeur).
Courage doesn’t ask for certainty. Courage acts anyway.
For startup founders in the climate space, Hawken’s challenge is especially pointed: Do it, don’t just say it. Get the benefits and don’t brag-about it.
Real leadership — radical leadership — means standing up for life, even if it’s not profitable. Yet.
Capitalism: A System Built on Extraction (and Ego)
Let’s speak plainly. We cannot “fix” capitalism. You cannot staple a solar panel to an extractive economic system and call it green. There is no capitalism without nature — but capitalism doesn’t care. It takes, makes, uses, and loses. Hawken calls it degenerative. I’d call it masculine in the worst way: entitled, linear, transactional. (In contrast: I’d define enlightened masculinity as action in service of one’s values. Enlightened masculine leaders include: Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, for names you may know, and my friend Ted Gonder, who’s a men’s coach - for all the men reading this who want to get unstuck.)
We are, quite literally, reaching the dead end of this system.
What comes next must be grounded in natural intelligence, in the feminine logic of ecosystems: interdependence, relationships, cycles, birth and rebirth, compost and bloom.
That doesn’t mean abandoning innovation. On the contrary — it means rethinking it. Consider InventWood, creating materials from bamboo and grass stronger than steel, or CeraCool, cooling buildings passively with ceramic paints. These aren’t just climate solutions — they are acts of rebellion. Rebellion against the false choice between profit and planet. (Not mentioned at the event, but related, is Biomimicry: using nature as inspiration for innovation. Because nature has 4.8 billion years of experience with the lean startup method of figuring out what works.)
But don’t brag about relational innovations. Just do it. Let your work speak, like the Earth does: quietly, powerfully, without apology.
From Snobbery to Solidarity
Let’s talk about how liberals — we, the coastal elites, the degreed and the degenerate — are failing.
Van Jones reminds us: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That includes the coal miner whose pension is vanishing while his lungs fill with carcinogenic dust. He may vote red. That doesn’t make his pain less real.
But many of us — especially those in climate spaces — act like the goal is to convert the unwashed masses, as if they’re one TED Talk away from becoming vegan urbanists. That’s not solidarity. That’s snobbery with solar panels.
Climate change? Too abstract. Efficiency? Not tough enough. “Dominant in energy”? That sounds like something Trump would say. Fine. Take it. Say we want to be dominant in renewables. Say we want stronger homes, more jobs, clean air for your kids. Say what you mean in a way people can feel. Save the ten-dollar words for grant applications.
Feminist Leadership: From the Front
True leadership is not about being first to the podium. It’s about being first to act with heart.
“To lead means to go in front,” as Van Jones puts it. That means founders, activists, mothers, teachers — all of us — need to act not just with intellect, but with moral muscle. We may lose. But the only real loss is surrender. To let the planet die, or justice erode, because we didn’t want to sound “too intense” or “too radical.”
This is a tough time. Especially for those who have less. But it’s also a time of exquisite clarity. The Earth is not confused. The Earth is not negotiating. She is asking us: Will you rise in love or fall in fear?
Intelligence: Three Forms. One Future.
If we want to survive, let alone thrive, we need to build a coalition of intelligence:
Natural Intelligence: Gaia. The mycelial internet. The breath of the biosphere.
Artificial Intelligence: Tools that must be trained not just on data, but on ethics.
Human Intelligence: Emotional, moral, intuitive, kinesthetic — the kind of intelligence that patriarchy has long dismissed.
Our job is to make these intelligences cooperate. To align them in service of life, not profit. To invent a future that is beautiful, not just bearable.
The culture war is real. But so is love. And it’s time to weaponize both — fiercely, tenderly — in the fight for our future.
Not with fear. Not with hope.
But with courage.
And with the radical belief that regeneration, like feminism, starts with telling a different story.
One where life — all life — comes first.