Change

"It may not be everything you thought it was" 

I've managed to finish reading Damon Centola’s book, Change. It is a tutorial for activists not just on a theory of culture change, but on the grassroots mechanics. It reminded me of Jan Lundberg. He spent his life insisting that our culture’s love affair with fossil fuels was not just an unfortunate habit, but a full-spectrum addiction that would take the living world down with it if we refused to change course and reinvent our culture.

Centola’s Change: How to Make Big Things Happen feels less like a TED-talk than someone finally handing you the wiring diagram for the world you’ve been banging your head against for decades. For anyone trying to steer us away from the ecological and civilizational cliff, Centola gently walks us back. We’ve been trying to change the future with the wrong tools. But there is hope. We can still learn.

Simple contagions, complex predicaments

Centola’s distinction sounds technical — simple versus complex contagions — but it slices cleanly through a lot of wishful thinking. Gossip, headlines, memes, and stock tips are simple contagions: one exposure is enough to know them, and they spread through casual contact, the way a cold does. Or maybe have a hundredth-monkey origin. You don’t need a viral infection if the time is ripe. But the mistake is assuming that the things we care most about — regenerative farming, virus prevention, climate, justice — follow the same kinds of rules.

Centola spends much of the book demonstrating that meaningful behavior change is a complex contagion: you don’t move because you heard something once; you move after repeated, credible reinforcement from your own social world. We’ve been learning through mimicry since we were babies. People need to see “others like me” change, more than once, before they will risk reputation, status, or livelihood on a new practice. Climate advocates know this. Even the best delivered IPCC findings, presented on a big screen by Al Gore or Johan Rockstrom, or tweeted by the biggest influencer at the moment, do next to nothing for the neighbor who fears losing face at church or at the bowling alley if he starts talking about solar panels.

That gap — between how we think change spreads and how it actually does — turns many social movement strategies into cargo cults.

Fireworks and fishing nets

The Iowa hybrid corn case, old but still potent, shows marketers doing everything “right” — blanketing the countryside with messaging, touting objective benefits, lowering barriers — only to stall at 1% adoption. In Centola’s telling, the marketing campaign itself strengthened the counter-rumors; the social network translated “new and improved” into “dangerous and untrustworthy.” I remember a discussion with an Amish farmer about biochar. “Come back and tell me again in 20 years,” he said. Farmers, descended from many generations, are typically not early adopters. Their inertia of repose is strong.

Centola contrasts what he calls “fireworks networks” with “fishing nets.” Fireworks shoot information high and wide: a viral video, a celebrity endorsement, a big speech at a summit. The sparks impress, then fade. Fishing nets are dense and redundant: many overlapping ties, so the same signal arrives from multiple directions. For complex contagions — like adopting a controversial technology or joining a touchy coalition — redundancy, not reach, drives adoption. My Amish friend needed to see the taller, greener, early sweet corn in many nearby fields, year after year. Forty-pound cabbages were convincing.

Centola’s experimental evidence is uncomfortable for those of us who’ve spent years chasing reach. People he calls “laggards” — those who require several independent sources of confirmation before they move — turn out to be vastly more durable adopters once they do shift, on the order of hundreds of times more likely to stick with a new behavior than early adopters dazzled by novelty. That rings true for my Amish friend as much as for any ecovillage elder who’s watched waves of perfectionist enthusiasts arrive and depart, while his more cautious, slow-changing neighbors — the muddy greens — have become the backbone of the ecovillage.

Why influencers don’t save us

Targeting the most connected, most senior people — the “hubs” — is almost doctrine in campaign design. Centola shows, experimentally, that this is backward. The highly connected individual sits in a sea of silent non-adoption; the few signals in favor of change get drowned by the many signals of “nothing’s happening.”

He offers a striking ratio: someone with 500 contacts may be roughly ten times less likely to adopt a complex behavior than someone with 50, because each potential adopter is listening to a chorus that mostly sings status quo. The local pastor with modest reach, surrounded by neighbors who reinforce each other, may be far more powerful for changing energy use than the glamorous climate influencer with a million followers miming virtue to strangers. People, tightly knit, are the engines of transformation.

This is what drew Jan Lundberg to come with me to Belize to see what Christopher Nesbitt had been accomplishing with the highland Maya of the southern Yucatan. The Maya are as resistant to novelty as, if not more than, my Amish neighbors. There are pros and cons to traditional and indigenous ways — they can be stifling. restrictive, wrongheaded. But they endure because they HAVE endured. Their longevity is an earned endowment. Eco-whateves are toddlers. They are vulnerable to even newer, younger cultural shifts, whether better or worse.

Before Culture Change, before sail transport, Jan was heir to what the industry called “the bible of the oil business,” the Lundberg Survey, charting prices, supply, and the subtle tremors that foretold shocks. In 1979, the firm he headed called the Second Oil Shock (originating from Iran) a sober, quantified prophecy about what happens when the system’s hidden fragilities meet geopolitics. Think Strait of Hormuz. Then, like a whistleblower who doesn’t just send a memo but walks out of the building, CEO Jan left his million-dollar lunch ticket and walked away. He turned his attention to how ordinary lives might disentangle themselves from the fate he had been tracking with elegant prediction science.

Culture Change, the journal he founded through his Sustainable Energy Institute, was his quarterly dispatch from that front. It never settled for a “green consumer” lullaby that says we can shop our way to salvation. Jan wrote instead about “de-paving” — literally ripping up asphalt, figuratively ripping up the mental highways that equate mobility with fuel and freedom with shopping. It was a small publication with a big appetite for controversy, willing to connect cheap airfares and Learjets to the “open, dirty secret” that both climate deniers and environmentally conscious consumers preferred to ignore. The problem is CULTural.

There was a stubborn tenderness in his work. Jan did not stop at diagnosis; he labored to build alternatives. The Sail Transport Network, his effort to revive commercial sail in the Mediterranean and beyond, was not nostalgia — it was a practical wager that the future of trade would have to remember wind and current once the petroleum age ran aground. He died at peace in his refuge in Greece, still working on sail transport, still betting that elegant, low-energy solutions could be revived.

Jan encouraged others, too, publishing and amplifying voices that tried to articulate the widespread effects of our fossil addiction in “creative and kind ways.” He understood that culture does not change by scolding alone. It changes when people feel seen, when they can imagine a life after asphalt that is not just surviving the crash but finding a saner way to live with each other and the Earth. This is the kind of strategy being explored by another long-time friend, Rob Hopkins, in his Time-traveler Gazette: go to a better future and reverse-engineer the path to it.

The 25 percent that flips the world

Perhaps the most electrifying number in Centola’s book is 25. A committed minority of about 25% can overturn an established norm, changing how the majority behaves. Below that threshold, activism looks like marginal noise; above it, the social meaning of the behavior flips from deviance to possibility.

The experiments are carefully designed — behavioral norms in controlled network settings — so we should resist the temptation to treat 25% as magical in every context. Still, the idea resonates with movements that have felt themselves stuck just shy of something. Many climate and justice campaigns hover around a visible 10% support: marches, petitions, recurring names. They feel like failure because the norm hasn’t visibly changed, but Centola suggests they may be silently accumulating toward a tipping point that, once reached, will retroactively make the years of apparent futility look formative.

This has implications for how we sustain ourselves emotionally in this work. If the relevant question is “what proportion of this specific network now behaves differently,” then a small town reaching 25% adoption of regenerative agriculture — or a complementary currency — might be more consequential than a national poll showing 60% “concerned about climate.” Concern is a simple contagion; cooperative planting or exchange, a complex one.

Relevance, legitimacy, and the wrong kind of “like me”

Campaigners reflexively build similarity: show the target audience people “just like them” endorsing the change. Similarity does matter — for credibility and solidarity — but it’s not the only axis. When the barrier is legitimacy (“is it socially acceptable for people like us to do this?”), diversity among visible adopters is more powerful.

Centola distills three principles of relevance: use similarity when you’re trying to prove a change will work for people in a particular situation; use diversity when you’re trying to prove the change is broadly legitimate. Many of us overuse similarity — think of endless shots of “concerned (middle-class suburban) families” in pharmaceutical ads — when what our neighbors might need is a visible spectrum of society embracing climate and social justice solutions: clergy, mechanics, nurses, artists, elders.

He illustrates this with a polarization experiment: Democrats and Republicans, shown NASA data about climate with partisan decorative graphics attached, fail to learn anything; remove the party cues, and accuracy shoots toward 90%. A small change in network cues — removing tribal markers — releases the possibility of shared understanding. For those of us trying to talk about survival in politically fractured communities, this is a reminder to pay more attention to the social frame than the cleverness of the graph.

Networks that prevent change

Centola does not shy from the dark mirror of his framework. Every mechanism that can accelerate beneficial change can be turned to suppress it. He points to China’s so-called “50 Cent party — paid commentators flooding networks with pro-government sentiment. By altering what looks like the majority opinion in a digital square, they make dissent seem fringe, weakening the social reinforcement that complex contagions need to grow. MAGA took that page from Xi Jinping.

It is not hard to see analogs in fossil-fuel-funded messaging, astroturf campaigns, and algorithmic Facebook feeds that reward outrage over deliberation. Centola’s point isn’t that networks are evil, but that we have to stop treating them as neutral pipes for information. They are architectures of perception; whoever tunes them tunes the direction of possible change, or weaponizes distraction.

This is where the book brushes closest to the political realities of our time without fully inhabiting them. As a network scientist, Centola rightly focuses on structure and experimental proof. For movement builders, the missing chapter is how to wrest control of the infrastructural levers from those whose business model depends on keeping us addicted to simple contagions — scrolling, rage-sharing, forgetting — while complex contagions like cooperative action remain starved of reinforcement.

It was the same for Lundberg. We owe him more than a quiet nod in footnotes. His warnings helped shape early conversations around peak oil and energy descent; his experiments in sail transport, cargo bikes, and de‑paving showed that resistance could be playful, embodied, local. In an era when the dominant story still promises that some combination of smart grids and venture capital will let us keep our lifestyles roughly intact, Jan kept reminding us that the real work was cultural: to break the spell of cheap fuel, to learn again how to travel slower, consume less, and belong more.

Jan Lundberg has passed on but the journal he wrote remains a beacon from the time before collapse became fashionable. If we do not change culture, culture as we know it will be changed for us by physics, biology, and the infinite patience of the atmosphere. He spent a life trying to tilt that balance, and for that, we can only say thank you, and keep pushing up the pavement.[

Strengths, limits, and uses

As a book, Change is lucid, well-paced, and unusually grounded for its genre. Centola isn’t content with just one or two clever studies. He brings a cumulative body of work to bear, revisiting the simple/complex distinction across health care, technology adoption, political norms, and online behavior. The recurring metaphors — fireworks vs. fishing nets, hubs vs. periphery, tipping points — stick without feeling gimmicky.

The limitation, to the extent there is one, lies in the book’s comfort with controlled experiments compared to the messiness of real-world power. The architecture of a lab network is clean; the architecture of a town shot through with precarity, racism, and economic coercion is not.

Still, as a manual for diagnosing why your pet project isn’t catching, Change is invaluable. It teaches you to ask: am I treating a complex contagion like a simple one? Am I chasing hubs when I should be nurturing clusters? Am I measuring awareness when I should be measuring adoption? Am I building relevance with the wrong mix of similarity and diversity?

For those working in climate, permaculture, mutual aid, or any other corner of the Great Change, Centola gives permission to stop worshiping virality and start respecting the quiet, redundant work of weaving fishing nets. The future won’t be saved by a single big blast of light over the horizon; it will come, if it comes, because enough of us find 25% of each other in the place we care about and patiently help them reinforce one another until “doing the sane thing” feels like the normal thing to do.

Thanks for reading The Great Change! This post is public so feel free to share it.

 

Kyiv today, courtesy of The New York Times

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.