A consequence of increasing social and technological complexity is fragmentation, and this fragmentation is fundamental to our global collapse trajectory. Efforts to develop technical solutions to environmental problems fail because science is perceived as separate from politics. Grassroots movements fail to concretely describe an ecological society because they avoid making policies and institutions. Climate and ecological scientists fail to affect perceptions because their discipline is segregated from disciplines like cognitive science and political psychology. Revolutionary political theories fail because they lack any foundation in contemporary science.

The World Tree Center is fundamentally an exercise in integration. We are synthesizing knowledge solely by the criterion of relevance to our global crisis—regardless of whether typically considered the domain of science, social science, or the humanities—and we are integrating knowledge with strategic action. For example, our work includes crafting concrete descriptions of measures to sustain human populations, in specific areas, absent the current global resource-extractive economy. These measures inform the work of groups focused on mapping the proliferating diversity of political psychologies in the contemporary information ecosystem, describing populations in integrated terms—from neurophysiology to socioeconomics—and identifying frames in which to communicate with them. These psychographic and demographic analyses, in turn, inform the work of our artists and storytellers who are generating media to connect with different segments of the population.

The impetus for World Tree originally developed at the intersection of evolutionary biology and direct action environmentalism, in a media project exploring the empirical failure of movements to halt ecological crisis from a scientific perspective. Congruent with our mandate, however, it consists of individuals with a great diversity of specializations and backgrounds. Some of us are in highly technical scientific fields, some are artists, some attempt to inhabit both roles. Just as we seek to understand the individual variation in ecological and social awareness in the world at large, we actively investigate the common traits that define World Tree participants, using our work as a social microcosm in which we can investigate some of the very questions our work is dedicated to answering. Our decision making processes attempt to seek out the underlying differences that inform divergent perspectives rather than solely inhabiting the surface disagreement, and to model ways of wielding and sharing power more akin to the generation of scientific consensus than the processes we typically associate with politics.