The Work That Cannot Name Itself

Somewhere in America, a sustainability officer is editing a report. She’s deleting the word “ESG” for the third time. The targets are the same. The work is the same. But the language has become a liability.

This is what it looks like when a system loses the ability to say what it’s doing.

This essay is for her. And for everyone doing systems-level work — the kind that doesn’t fit on a checklist, doesn’t come with a dopamine hit, and can’t be solved by choosing chicken over beef.

I know this moment. I’ve been in that chair.

Here’s a strange fact: 87% of US companies quietly increased their sustainability spending last year. And 75% of them won’t use the word.

The work is happening. But it can no longer name itself.

This is a hard time to be doing this work. Not just operationally hard. Spiritually hard.

If there’s a way through, it starts with truth. The courage to see clearly, even when what we see is difficult.

In the Celtic Christian tradition I come from, there’s a concept called “thin places”: locations where the boundary between the material and the sacred feels permeable. Where you can perceive what’s usually hidden.

I’ve come to believe that our current moment is a thin place in time. The veils are down. We can see the systems — ecological, social, organizational — with unusual clarity. If we have the courage to look.

I’m a paleoclimatologist and an ordained minister. What I want to offer here is a way of seeing that comes from both lives — forty years studying how systems break down and recover, and a growing conviction that science and spirituality are not as separate as our institutions have made them.

If you’re reading this in the Midwest or Northeast this week, you may already know what a broken feedback loop feels like. It’s the orange sky. The air quality alert on your phone. The smell of smoke from fires burning a thousand miles away.

Fires release carbon. Carbon warms the atmosphere. Warming dries forests. Dry forests burn. Fires release more carbon. The system that once self-corrected has started to amplify instead of regulate. The thermostat is running in reverse.

I see the same pattern in organizations.

Psychologists call it psychic numbing: under overwhelming threat, our nervous systems learn to absorb information without responding. The more alarming the data, the less we feel. This isn’t a moral failure — it’s a neurobiological response to overload.

And it’s not just happening in sustainability teams. It’s happening at every level of leadership. The executives who receive the reports. The board members who approve the strategies. They’re numb too.

When an organization loses its capacity to feel the weight of what it knows, no amount of better data will move it. The feedback loop between information and response has been severed — not at the level of individual psychology, but at the level of organizational culture.

This is a crisis of trust in signals.

Ecosystems sustain productivity only when extraction is matched by regeneration. Soil needs fallow time. Fisheries need recovery periods. When we force continuous production, we don’t see gradual decline — we see collapse.

Sustainability teams know this intimately. You’re absorbing organizational anxiety. Translating between resistant stakeholders. Carrying the emotional weight of the crisis. The burnout rates are not incidental. They’re the predictable result of extraction dynamics applied to human systems.

I see this in my students. Twenty-somethings who care deeply about sustainability as a vocation. They want to do this work. And they’re watching. They see what the field does to people. They don’t want to enter careers that will extract the very qualities that brought them here: the joy, the compassion, the moral clarity.

If we’re depleting the pipeline of the people most called to this work, what does that tell us?

This is a crisis of trust within teams.

Climate change is a problem of temporal forcing. We’re pushing carbon into the atmosphere faster than Earth’s systems can absorb it. Changing temperatures faster than species can adapt.

And sometimes our solutions replicate the same problem. The clean energy transition requires critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, rare earths. But we’re racing to extract them faster than we can understand what we’re destroying. Deep sea mining proposes to harvest ecosystems we’ve barely studied, on investment timelines, not ecological ones.

We’re solving one temporal forcing problem by creating another.

When we can’t imagine forward — when the pace of change exceeds our capacity to envision what’s coming — we lose the ability to act with hope. And hope is not a feeling. It’s a capacity. The capacity to perceive possibility and move toward it.

This is a crisis of trust in the future.

Three disruptions. In Earth systems and in human systems. In parallel.

They share a common root: a consciousness organized around separation. Separation from nature. Extraction without reciprocity. Domination of living systems — nature’s and our own.

When we see ourselves as separate from the systems that sustain us, we lose the feedback that would regulate our behavior. When we approach the world as a resource to extract rather than a relationship to tend, we deplete it. When we impose our timescales on systems with their own rhythms, we break them.

This is not a spiritual aside. It’s a diagnostic statement.

If the diagnosis is parallel disruption, the turn is parallel restoration.

For broken feedback loops: create spaces for truth-telling — not more data dashboards, but environments where people can name what they’re seeing without immediately having to solve it. Ask whose truth gets heard.

For extraction without regeneration: build cultures that protect the sources of creativity and commitment — the conditions that let people stay connected to why they came to this work.

For temporal forcing: distinguish between urgency and frenzy. Urgency can coexist with deliberation. Frenzy cannot.

Three disruptions. Three forms of trust eroded. Three restorations possible.

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes from doing work you can’t name.

You know it’s real. You know it matters. And yet publicly, it’s being erased — or worse, reframed as a liability.

That’s a form of gaslighting. And gaslighting corrodes something essential. You start to doubt your own perception. You wonder if you’re the one who’s wrong.

The antidote is trust.

Not trust in the system — the system is the problem. But trust in each other. Trust in the people who know what you’re doing, even when you can’t say it publicly. Trust in the work itself, even when it’s underground.

This is why community matters so much right now. Not networking. Actual community — people who can look you in the eye and say: I see what you’re doing. It’s real. Keep going.

That kind of trust is structural. It’s the infrastructure of endurance.

The word may have become unspeakable. But the work still has a name.

We just have to learn to say it differently. Not in the language of reports and targets — though those matter. But in the language of trust rebuilt. Signals restored. Capacity protected.

87% are still doing the work. The question is whether we can find words for it that don’t make us a target — and that still tell the truth.

The work that cannot name itself is still work. It still matters. And the people doing it — the ones deleting words from reports, the ones watching colleagues leave, the ones lying awake at 2 a.m. — they’re still here.

So are you.