We stand at an unprecedented point in history. Our global systems, economic, political, and cultural, were forged in an era of cheap energy and a perception of limitless resources. Today, those assumptions have collided with planetary boundaries: the atmosphere can no longer absorb our carbon, biodiversity is in free‑fall, and social inequities undermine collective resilience. To navigate this rupture, we need more than incremental fixes. We need to learn to live in the space between. To embrace liminality.
Liminality (from the Latin limen, “threshold”), is a term borrowed from anthropology, which names the ambiguous phase in rites of passage when an individual has left the old status but not yet entered the new. In this threshold, identities are unsettled, norms dissolve, and new possibilities emerge. Victor Turner described it as a moment of “anti-structure,” when hierarchies relax and creativity blooms. In organizational and societal transformation, liminal spaces offer the invitation to question deeply held beliefs and practices before rebuilding more life‑affirming ones.
Why is this idea so critical now? Firstly, the enormity of the ecological and social crises befalling us demands more than technical solutions. While we have engineering and technical “solutions”, renewable energy, electric vehicles, green finance, circular economies, they derive from the same extractive logic as those that got us into this mess. Further many of these ‘solutions’ are driving perverse outcomes, with many working to destroy the environment in order to save the climate. For us to have a regenerative future, we need to inhabit the threshold: to hold complexity and uncertainty long enough to notice what’s breaking, learn from it, and co‑design radically different ways of living. Any path forward must be one that keeps all systems in mind, so that working towards healing the climate, also heals the environment and addresses fundamental issues of social inequity, the legacy and ongoing impacts of colonisation and indigenous reconciliation.
Secondly, liminality emphasises process over outcome. In a threshold space, we pay attention to how we work together, who sets the agenda, whose voices are centred, and how power flows. Bringing consciousness to these processes helps prevent new or existing hierarchies/power structures for dominating and invites continuous adaptation to new contexts and the ecological nature of relationships. This approach shifts the goal from “delivering a plan” to “cultivating capacity”. This supports the ability of communities and organisations to sense, respond, and evolve to the dynamic changes that emerge.
Planetary boundaries remind us we no longer have any margin for error. Safe operating spaces for climate, freshwater use, land‑system change, and other critical biophysical processes are narrow, if that. We are already at perilous risk of tipping points that threaten cascading systemic collapse. Liminality acknowledges that reality, including the grief, and recognises the importance of creating space for collective mourning, accountability, and new imagination. From this, and as collectives, we can move into active hope, helping to find new ways to live and being together in more equitable and earth‑centered ways.
Reconnection to nature often begins in threshold moments, not always dramatic, but deeply felt. The slow return of green after drought. Entering into an old growth forest. A gathering at season’s turn, marking time through harvest or story. For me it’s the incredible cleansing feeling of diving into the ocean. That transition into the water never ceases to improve my mood and diminish my stresses. These experiences remind us that we are not separate from nature or it’s rhythms, but entangled in them. They can teach us about reciprocity, impermanence, and the quiet power of renewal. By weaving liminal practices, shared reflection, intentional pauses, collective unlearning and being in nature into how we govern, design and relate, we can begin to embody the principles that sustain living systems.
Liminality is not a side path, it is the fertile edge where transformation begins. Like the boundary between forest and grassland, it is alive with diversity, tension, and possibility. It is the composting of the old mixing with the seeds of the new. If we can learn to stay with that uncertainty, sitting in the unknowing with humility, attention and care, we may find ourselves not just changing systems, but becoming part of a deeper shift in how life regenerates itself.