by Dr. Michael Lawrence at The Cascade Institute….. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium. We then identify three causal pathways—common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks—that can connect multiple global systems to produce synchronized crises.
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Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers
by Simonn Willcock in Nature…..Accelerating stress levels, increasing frequencies of extreme events and strengthening intersystem connections suggest that conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems.
Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
by Thor Bensen in Wired.com….The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications.
The government must say what it knows about covid’s origins
by Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times….The American public, however, only rarely heard refreshing honesty from their officials or even their scientists — and this tight-lipped, denialist approach appears to have only strengthened belief that the pandemic arose from carelessness during research or even, in less reality-based accounts, something deliberate.
Welcome to the “End Times”: Peter Turchin saw this coming — and says we can still prevent collapse
by Paul Rosenberg in Salon…..Peter Turchin predicted major instability in the 2020s. Unless we address inequality, he says, it will get worse
Why it seems everything we knew about the global economy is no longer true
by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times…While the world’s eyes were on the pandemic, China and the war in Ukraine, the paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier.
Love in the time of the polycrisis: 21new signs of emergence
by Susan Grelock Yusem in Commonweal.org…..As we live through extremes, like social turmoil, extreme weather, pandemic, and economic instability, we also hold complex emotional experiences: hope and despondency, courage and fear, joy and grief.
Polycrisis, unraveling, simplification, or collapse: coming soon to a planet near you?
by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org…If humanity descends into blame and desperate efforts to maintain a status quo that by its very nature cannot persist, the future looks dark indeed.
The global polycrisis reflects a civilizational crisis that calls for systemic alternatives
By Zack Walsh, Polycrisis Transition Consultancy…A review of emerging definitions of polycrisis within cognate bodies of scientific literature exploring societal risk and collapse, plus implications for how to respond to the depth and severity of the global polycrisis via just and regenerative civilizational alternatives.
Disrupting and diversifying the values, voices and governance principles that shape biodiversity science and management
by Anne Salomon in The Royal Society….With climate, biodiversity and inequity crises squarely upon us, never has there been a more pressing time to rethink how we conceptualize, understand and manage our relationship with Earth’s biodiversity.