Commonweal was founded 50 years ago in Bolinas by Michael Lerner, a visionary pioneer in integrative cancer care, environmental health, and the emerging understanding of the global polycrisis—the convergence of climate disruption, democratic erosion, economic instability, social fragmentation, technological risk, and environmental degradation.
At a recent anniversary gathering, the organization’s executive director, Oren Slozberg, framed the nonprofit’s future in a manner both sobering and quietly galvanizing. He spoke of the polycrisis not as a set of discrete problems, but as an interwoven condition in which each problem intensifies the others. Commonweal’s work is focused on healing and resilience in the context of this polycrisis.
West Marin faces a similar set of crises. Consider the housing pressures that strain community continuity, the ecological changes reshaping our landscapes and waters, the precariousness of local institutions, the absence of an effective local governance voice, and the broader social and cultural currents that reach our rural edge. Facing such interwoven challenges, many of us may feel despair, while others may jump to reactive problem-solving that treats problems in isolation.
We must take a holistic approach. Nowhere is such an approach more important and timely than in Marin County’s proposed West Marin Vision process. As the county prepares to develop a request for proposals for a consultant to guide the process, we must keep this relational perspective in mind. The R.F.P. must not only define a scope, a timeline, and deliverables, but also lay out a clear understanding of the complex moment this visioning process is meant to address and the future it seeks to bring about.
Commonweal provides a good model. In its work with people facing cancer, it draws a distinction between curing and healing. A cure is the elimination of disease; healing, by contrast, is a movement toward wholeness, a movement toward integration, meaning, and vitality, even in the presence of problems that cannot be fixed. The same understanding can be brought to West Marin’s challenges. We are unlikely to “cure” our converging crises in any comprehensive sense. But we can ask a different question: What would it mean for a place like West Marin to move toward wholeness?
This shift in thinking has practical implications. It suggests that our work is not only to mitigate risks or manage decline, but to cultivate forms of community life that are coherent, resilient, and deeply rooted. At Commonweal’s anniversary event, Slozberg invoked Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, who has said that in times of systemic chaos, “small islands of coherence” can help shift larger systems toward new forms of order. Commonweal, he suggested, has long aspired to be such an island.
West Marin can be that, too, as a bioregional community capable of embodying and demonstrating a different pattern of living. This does not mean withdrawing from the wider world. We will always remain embedded in global systems of energy, technology, and exchange. But we can model more integrated relationships between ecology, economy, and community.
What might this look like in practice? We must begin with a knowledge of place, with knowing where our water, food, and energy come from. Only then can we shape systems that align with these ecological realities. In West Marin, this could mean deepening our efforts in regenerative agriculture, watershed stewardship, and localized energy resilience—not as niche projects, but as core civic priorities.
Our challenges do not fall into neat categories. Housing, water, land stewardship, emergency preparedness, transportation, agriculture, ecological protection, and civic trust are interdependent in practice, even when they are managed by different agencies.
A county consultant hired for the visioning work should not simply collect preferences or facilitate a conventional planning exercise. They should help articulate an integrated vision that is rooted in place—and then translate that vision into a framework that can guide public decisions across institutions.
Equally important is the cultivation of what might be called cultural and imaginative capacity. If we are to plant the seeds of a different future, we need spaces for reflection, dialogue, and creativity, places where new narratives and possibilities can take root. West Marin has long been such a place, through its artistic communities, environmental circles, and spirit of experimentation. The task now is to renew and extend that legacy under more challenging conditions.
Tourism deserves explicit attention in the visioning process. West Marin’s economy and many local livelihoods depend on visitors, yet unmanaged visitor pressure strains housing, infrastructure, ecosystems, and the everyday life of residents. The consultant leading this work should help the community articulate clear principles and practical tools for balancing visitor access with resident well-being and ecological stewardship within the state regulations that govern the coastal zone.
The county should make clear in its search for a consultant that the process must not dilute our myriad perspectives into a generic countywide consensus.
West Marin sits within overlapping systems of authority, including county government, local special districts, and state and federal regulatory regimes. The consultant should be tasked with designing a process that strengthens local control rather than weakening it. In this context, local control does not mean isolation from state law or environmental regulation. It means a durable governance structure in which local knowledge, local priorities, and local stewardship responsibilities shape how outside mandates are interpreted and implemented.
The consultant should demonstrate experience working in communities where governance is fragmented across multiple agencies and where legitimacy depends on meaningful participation by residents, not merely formal hearings.
Just as importantly, the consultant should be asked to organize the work around linked systems rather than isolated policy silos. The visioning process should address housing and demographic continuity, water and watershed resilience, food and agricultural viability, energy reliability, ecological stewardship, mobility and access, emergency readiness and civic participation. The result of this process should show how these systems interact, where tradeoffs are unavoidable, and where local policy can create reinforcing benefits across multiple goals.
Importantly, the consultant should propose governance recommendations, not just offer narrative findings. West Marin does not need another report that sits on a shelf while agencies continue to act in parallel. The consultant should identify mechanisms for coordination among county, local advisory and planning bodies, special districts, and community-based organizations. The Marin Local Agency Formation Commission notes that community-service and related districts provide a wide range of services, which makes institutional design an important part of any long-term resilience strategy.
If the task of public policy is not to “cure” every dimension of the larger crisis, then it is to create what might be called local coherence: systems of decision-making, infrastructure, stewardship, and mutual responsibility that make a community more whole and more capable of acting on its own behalf. The consultant’s role should be to help West Marin define that coherence in actionable terms.
The R.F.P. should ask for concrete outputs beyond a final narrative. These should include a community vision statement, a set of measurable principles for evaluating future county actions, a governance map showing where authority currently sits, recommendations for improving coordination and accountability, and a short list of early implementation projects that demonstrate local benefit. The county should also require an engagement plan that is multilingual where needed, transparent about tradeoffs, and designed to build public trust rather than simply document outreach.
Finally, the county should make explicit that the success of this process will be measured not only by participation numbers or the production of a report, but by whether West Marin emerges with greater civic clarity and stronger capacity for self-direction. In a time of institutional distrust and overlapping pressures, our real objective is to become more able to govern ourselves wisely within legal and ecological frameworks. That is the kind of visioning process this moment requires, and it is the standard the R.F.P. should set.
The temporal dimension of this work is critical. We must hold immediate needs alongside generational horizons. Visioning for West Marin is not simply a planning exercise, but an act of stewardship—creating the conditions from which future forms of engagement and community can arise.
None of this is easy. Building something that endures requires moving beyond reliance on singular figures or moments. It requires institutions, relationships, and practices that are resilient enough to carry a shared calling forward over time. For West Marin, this means transmitting our values across generations, while remaining open to change and innovation.
The question before us is not how to fix everything, but how to live, here, in a way that allows something coherent, life-giving, and enduring to take root.
Chris Desser is a land use lawyer, a painter, and a former Marin County Planning Commissioner and California Coastal Commissioner. She lives in Point Reyes Station.
How to design a visioning process for West Marin’s future