The beautiful music we make

When someone at New York Climate Week asked me, “What excites you most about being here this year?”, my answer came easily: I’m excited to sing with the Choir.

That line sounds casual until you remember what “singing to the Choir” usually means: preaching to people who already agree with you. For years, that charge has followed gatherings like New York Climate Week: a mass of experts, activists, funders, policy people, and organizers who largely move in the same orbits, trading ideas among themselves while the rest of the world looks on. Plenty of sensible people see that and ask whether these massive convenings are a waste of time and money.

But I see it differently. Now more than ever, we need the Choir.

There is a tactical argument that networks form faster in concentrated spaces, partnerships incubate, and funding flows where trust exists. There is a cultural argument that movements need a beat, a repertoire, a shared lexicon. But the deeper, more urgent reason is structural: our work has been painfully siloed. We have carried solutions in fragments; science separate from practice, activism separate from policy, Indigenous wisdom separate from technological innovation. If we are going to assemble the integrated responses the polycrisis demands, we must first re-tune the chorus. 

This moment in history demands coherence. We need to come together, tune up, and learn how to sing in harmony again. To sing with joy and conviction. To sing songs of resistance and resilience. To sing songs of renewal that will carry us forward in the hard battles ahead.

Because make no mistake, this is a battle. A battle for humanity and for our ability to thrive on this planet alongside all other species. This year has made that crystal clear to me. 

I used to think otherwise. When we launched Project Drawdown, our editor, Paul Hawken, was deliberate about rejecting the language of war. He reminded us that if we used metaphors of fighting, slashing, or conquering, we would be mirroring the very system we sought to transform. I agreed. Most people are not warriors, and we are not meant to be. Throughout history, we have been farmers, merchants, teachers, caregivers; people devoted to our families, friends, and communities. Maybe ten percent of humanity is born with the temperament of a warrior. The rest of us cultivate, build, nurture, and repair.

But we must be honest about the stakes. This year has made the urgency clearer than ever. Systems in decline do not go quietly. Political rollbacks, failing governance structures, and intensified climate impacts are the death throes of extractive paradigms that have ruled the last century. And the system, in its death throes, is thrashing violently against the living world. So we must rise and stand together in defense of our home.

And throughout history, when the vast majority of us who tend the land and care for our communities have risen up against the few who wield violence and power, that is when transformation begins. This is our moment to rise — not as soldiers of destruction, but as protectors of life.

I still hold that language must be precise and life-affirming. But language evolves with context. When institutions and norms that have long enabled extraction harden into active assaults on basic rights and ecological integrity, the moral imperative tightens. We must organize decisively, strategically, and at scale to defend the conditions for thriving life. That does not mean abandoning the regenerative grammar of reciprocity and abundance. It means bringing stewardship and resistance together: we sing to build community and we act to defend it.

So what does “singing with the Choir” look like in practice?

First: recalibrate coherence. Convenings must be more than display windows. They should be working studios; places where methods, data, and practices are stress-tested together. We need shared, interoperable frameworks that link local implementation to global actions, and we need bridges between knowledge systems: Indigenous wisdom, field practice, and rigorous science. This is knowledge stewardship in action.

Second: share the score. The Choir’s songs must be learnable and portable. That means more modular, evidence-based narratives that people can take back to their communities. We need clear examples of what works, why it works, and what institutions must change to scale it. It means communicating cascading benefits in ways that matter to farmers, small businesses, and municipal officials as much as to ministers and investors.

Third: commit to the Choir. Singing together is not a one-off. It is a practice of accompaniment, honing long-term partnerships that outlast headlines. Convenings should catalyze those relationships and then resource the follow-through: research, local capacity, legal protections for Indigenous guardianship, and pipelines of funding aligned with life-positive outcomes.

There will always be theatre at big gatherings. There will always be ego and noise — that will never change. Ignore those. Pay attention to the enriching continuities: the session where a scientist and a community leader finish each other’s sentences; the moment an investor stops talking about portfolios and starts listening to a farmer about seed systems; the dinner when old and new friends shared joyful laughter and our deepest fears. These moments are the consonant chords that hold the song together.

New York Climate Week was that moment for me. Not because the Choir is perfect, or because convenings are an end in themselves, but because when the Choir sings in harmony, we can change the world. That song is not simple. It carries grief and resolve, gratitude and strategy. It invites everyone — farmer, parent, teacher, organizer, investor — into a practice that is both restorative and resolute.

We are not singing to be comfortable. We are singing to prepare. We are tuning our harmonies now so we can support each other in the battles ahead. And when the music is right, it holds people; it teaches them how to act. It becomes, in short, the kind of public calling our moment requires.

What beautiful music we can make when we do that.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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