The Origin Story

How the vision came to be

I grew up feeling pushed out. Picked on as a kid. Racked with self-doubt. I didn’t realize until my forties that I was autistic — the kind that makes you good at solving complex problems but makes it hard to socialize. I spent decades wondering why the world felt so different to me than it seemed to for everyone else. Why I couldn’t stop seeing the connections between things. Why the big picture arrived all at once, overwhelming and complete, while the small details of daily life slipped through my fingers.

I grew up the son of a Republican pastor who also happened to have a master’s degree in environmental engineering. He moved our family from Iowa to Seattle so he could help build the city’s recycling program. He believed in coming together. He believed that people of good faith could disagree and still find their way back to each other.

I was eight or nine years old when my father took our family to a political event — an attempt to bridge the divide between loggers and environmentalists, two communities that had been set against each other over jobs and owls and the future of the forests. He believed in good faith that people could come together. I watched a woman’s face contort as she threw a pie at him as hard as she could. He had shown up to build a bridge. She couldn’t receive it — whatever had been built in her mind long before that day had already closed the door. I didn’t have words for what I saw. But something in me knew. The divide was real. It had been deliberately built. And it wasn’t going to be reasoned away.

The years that followed confirmed it. Wars launched on lies. Trillions spent on destruction while the needs of many were ignored. The slow erosion of shared reality until one day you could be called brainwashed for having a degree, and people would tell you the earth was flat with the same certainty they told you everything else.

I watched humanity lose itself. And I felt every moment of it — I am wired that way, feeling the world like a raw nerve. It can be a burden. It turned out to also be the thing that wouldn’t let me look away.

For a while I thought the answer was in politics. For one brief window I had genuine, naive hope that the right person with the right vision could still steer things in time. I watched that hope get crushed — not by the opposition, but by the very institutions that were supposed to be the solution. They chose safety over transformation. Mediocrity over courage. And then I watched everything else that followed — the assault on norms, on truth, on the basic agreement that facts are facts.

That’s when I knew. No person was enough. No policy was enough. The system producing the problem could not be the system that solved it.

So I went looking for what could.

I spent a year and a half digging to the bottom of the climate crisis. Not the version that gets discussed in public — the real bottom. The feedback loops already triggered. The timelines the models don’t advertise. The gap between what scientists say in papers and what they say to each other when nobody is performing optimism for the cameras. I used every tool I had — my background in restoration ecology, my ability to hold complex ideas across many fields simultaneously, and a new world of knowledge suddenly accessible through technology in ways that had never been possible before.

I went until I understood it better than most specialists. Not because I’m smarter — because specialists see their piece with devastating clarity and I was looking at all the pieces at once. And when you hold all the pieces simultaneously, something emerges that no single discipline can see from the inside. The pieces begin to reinforce each other. Connections appear between things that seemed unrelated. A whole comes into view — something greater than the sum of its parts. The full picture, finally, begins to be visible.

But before I found the full view, I had to survive the bottom.

I was alone in a basement apartment. Researching until exhaustion, then watching puppy videos to keep myself functional, then back to the research. Cycling through every stage of grief — not once but hundreds of times, each time another layer of comfortable illusion stripped away. Every half-measure exposed as insufficient. Every political solution revealed as inadequate to the actual scale of what was coming.

Through a meditation practice I had carried for years, I found myself returning to a particular inner place — a cave of history where the wall at the back held everything that was coming. My teacher had told us the wall was mostly black. The probable trajectory of humanity was toward the apocalypse. Only a small pinhole of light remained — one thin chance for something different. His message had been to prepare. To survive what was coming.

For years I had carried that. But slowly I realized I couldn’t accept it. I didn’t want to be the person in the woods feeling the collapse around me. I wanted to find a way through for everyone. So I went back to that cave in desperation — not to prepare for the end, but refusing to believe the end was inevitable. I crawled into the pinhole and pushed with everything I had. And I cried out to the generations not yet born — if you want to live, send back the vision. Tell us how you made it. Because we cannot see. All we see is despair.

And then a vision came. Uninvited, unexpected — a place in my mind that suddenly opened and showed me something I hadn’t gone looking for. I saw humanity as a rope, the collective choices of all choosing beings woven together moving through time. I saw that at a certain point that rope had split. What had been unified frayed into countless threads spiraling downward. Not just the obvious bad choices — every half-measure, every insufficient answer, every deflection, even righteous resistance improperly placed. Almost everything led the same direction. We still had the freedom to choose. But almost every available choice, even the well-intentioned ones, was leading somewhere none of us wanted to go.

But there was one thread. Thin. Tenuous. So fragile it might dissolve if you tried to behold it directly. I took my mind up along it to see where it led.

It opened into the bright vision. Something beautiful and built but natural. A coming together instead of a falling apart. A world that worked. I cried out there too — the same desperate plea reaching forward through time.

I didn’t know yet what it was showing me. But I could see it existed. And if it existed, then there had to be an answer. There had to be a way out.

And something came back.

Not all at once. In pieces — flashes of insight so large and so fast they arrived as thirty minutes of content in milliseconds, compressed downloads I had to race to capture before they dissolved. I started recording everything. Hundreds of hours over months and years, catching the pieces as they came. And slowly, the pieces revealed themselves as a whole.

The food systems I had been developing as a small business. The resource-based economy I had encountered in my research. The restoration ecology I had spent years studying. The political philosophy I had been living. The spiritual vision of the pathway and the pinhole. The technological reality of what was now possible.

It was all the same thing. It had always been the same thing.

The solution to climate change breaks money. That’s why it hasn’t been done. You cannot solve a problem of this scale within the system that generates it. But once you let that break — once you allow the full weight of the problem to demolish every comfortable partial answer — you find yourself on the other side of something. In a cleared space. Where the obvious answer, the one that was always there, finally has room to be seen.

That is the Trust Collective.

I am not telling you this because I am remarkable. I followed a thread that was always there. What made the difference was simply refusing to stop following it — through the despair, through the grief, through every layer of comfortable illusion that had to be stripped away before the answer could be seen.

And I don’t think I was alone in hearing it. Haven’t you felt something too? Something scratching at the back of your mind that won’t quite leave. Something in the stories we keep telling each other, in the things that wake us at 3am, in the feeling that the world we’re living in is not the world we were meant to inhabit. Something that knows — even when everything else insists otherwise — that another way is possible.

Maybe some of us were here to walk this road first. To go into the grief ahead of the crowd. To process the despair, survive the bottom, and find the way through — so that when the rest of humanity arrives at those same walls, the path is already marked. So that their journey doesn’t have to end where it might have ended. So that when the illusions start falling away and the first waves of awakening begin — as they will, as they must — there is something waiting on the other side besides more darkness.

That is what this is. Not a vision belonging to one person. A path that was always there, waiting to be found, waiting to be walked, waiting for enough of us to choose it.

The thread grows brighter with every person who does.

From the Trust Collective Project. A vision for restructuring human society — for everyone.

The only thing that has ever been missing is the decision.

The thread grows brighter with every person who chooses it.