Post by Rachel Cheang

Last night, Energy CoLab had the opportunity to join Studio Dojo as a partner for From Crisis to Clarity: Understanding our Energy Blindness. Huge thanks to the generous invitation of Khai Seng Hong and team! Designed as a watch party with curated clips of Nate Hagen’s videos, Khai Seng’s light facilitation prompted us to think about how energy and the economy are entangled within the metacrisis. Nate’s three-layered pyramid offered a stark yet simple visual for confronting an inflated financial economy built upon a rapidly depleting living biosphere. The depth of discussion and audience were vastly different from what we typically encounter in our workshops. In our efforts to make energy accessible, we often deal with the tension between oversimplifying complex realities and overwhelming people with the true scale and severity of the challenges we face. Studio Dojo showed us that confronting despair can be necessary. Allowing existing mental models and narratives to collapse may be what creates space for more creative and transformative possibilities to emerge. Khai Seng invited us to reflect on our stress responses (fear, flight, fawn, freeze), and how these map onto the roles we may adopt when facing the metacrisis: king/queen, lover, warrior, jester. As we speak about “collapse”, we recognise that multiple collapses are already unfolding, from recent floods in Indonesia to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Different communities face vastly unequal capacities for recovery and renewal. Within our circles, we grappled with what it means to confront these truths from relatively comfortable positions in Singapore, where we are deeply “abstracted” (Wilson Chew) from labour, land, and extraction. Carol Lim and Ibnur also sharply pointed out our deep alienation from nature - an urban societal condition which organisations like Ground-Up Initiative (GUI) 聚友爱 and Forest School Singapore are actively addressing while building collective wisdom. In hindsight, much of our education work has always gestured toward hope and action as an antidote, particularly in the context of energy transitions. Yet Nate Hagens remind us that there is no clean or linear “transition”. New energy systems tend to layer on top of old ones, compounding extraction, complexity, and ecological strain rather than replacing what came before. So where, then, do we even begin? Conversations and spaces like these that allow us to interrogate what we know, unsettle what we assume, convene over shared curiosities, and wonder about plurality of narratives and frames that can help us see ourselves not as isolated actors with limited agency, but as embedded within living, energetic systems far larger than us. Shout out to Jérôme Bourgeon for capturing the emergence so brilliantly, and to my teammates Elizabeth Mak and Rinko whose closing reflections reminded me of why change cannot be done alone. Thank you Sarah Djumin for your warmth and photos, and superstars Sharon and Ruiqing ❤️