what if 2025 was the year we chose repair?
and it’s okay to start small.
What if 2025 was the year we chose repair? We sure need it.
Americans are experiencing a well-documented crisis of disconnection—disconnection from each other, from the land that supports us, from traditions that guided this land’s first peoples.
These fractures have consequences. An epidemic of loneliness. Higher rates of depression, drug overdoses, and suicide. The rise of extreme political polarization and reduced trust in public institutions, from unions and churches to the federal government. We experience more frequent, and more extreme, weather-related events like droughts, fires, and hurricanes. More food insecurity and less food safety. We are losing biodiversity and carrying more chronic diseases in our bodies.
It’s a lot.
Pooja’s mother, Anita, always tells us to “be strong,” and have hope, especially in times like these.
We found a glimpse of hope in A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair. It’s a short film painted in fluid strokes of animated watercolor. A compassionate world takes shape from the ashes of the COVID-19 pandemic, one brushstroke at a time. Communities devastated by the disease – or whose decay went ignored for years until Covid pulled back the curtain – are remade with “systems of care and repair.”
That was our hope, too, early in the pandemic. That the calls to “support essential workers” would lead to broader support for all our neighbors through a stronger social safety net. Maybe we were naive. Maybe we still are. But we still have hope that a brighter future for all is possible.
To cast the vision of that brighter future, we can first look to the past. Not to the recent past of robber barons and racial discrimination that President Trump seems to be referring to when he proposes to “Make America Great Again.” But much farther in our past. We need to revive age-old practices of repair, reciprocity, and stewardship of our communities and our ecosystems. Practices countless generations before us understood and relied upon.
For most of human history, thriving wasn’t measured in bank balances or quarterly profits. Many Indigenous communities practiced economies rooted in a different kind of balance - an equilibrium - taking only what is needed, giving back to the land, and ensuring resources endure for future generations. But in recent centuries, so-called “modern” and “industrialized” societies, including the U.S., have drifted away from this wisdom—instead prioritizing endless growth at any cost and reducing “success” to a system that treats nature, labor, and human relationships as disposable.
The true cost of this new culture of disposability is steep.
Fast fashion brands churn out cheap clothing made by exploited workers, shedding microplastics that pollute the environment and our bloodstreams. Agricultural megacorporations douse crops in chemical pesticides that degrade soil health, contaminate water, and disrupt local ecosystems. Factory farms squeeze too many chickens into tiny cages to artificially reduce the price of eggs while making the flocks vulnerable to disease.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What if 2025 was the year we chose repair?
What if we defined prosperity as the collective health of our communities and ecosystems, not the accumulation of excess in the hands of a few?
What if we repaired our relationships with the land and each other, building resilient neighborhoods that support our needs for connection and care?
What if we transformed our economic practices to value long-term sustainability over short-term gains?
We can’t remake our culture into a culture of repair all at once. But all of us can do something. And it’s okay to start small.
In our home, 2025 is a year to begin repairing our relationship with our food system. One thing we can do is buy less produce from giant corporations and more from local farms, including by investing in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program.
Let’s all take some small step toward connection, toward repair, and move forward, together, toward a brighter future that builds on the best parts of our past.
What will you repair first? We’d love to hear from you.
