The Long View
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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.
Omega Resilience Awards announced their inaugural cohort of fellows working in the Global South.
By Paul Arbair, Resilience…Human societies the world over are confronted with a growing number and range of difficult and compounding problems and crises, which they are increasingly struggling to address and failing to solve, and which are slowly but surely eroding their ability to function effectively and undermining their capacity to coexist peacefully.
Watch EJN’s 2023 #EarthDay webinar on the global polycrisis — what does this newly-popular term mean, why is it important for climate and environmental journalism and how can reporters uncover relevant angles and story ideas?
By Zack Walsh, Polycrisis Transition Consultancy….This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme (Bureau for Program & Policy Support’s Strategic Innovation Unit & the Inclusive Growth/Chief Economist) and One Project. The purpose of the collaboration is to connect expertise in new economics with an emerging understanding of the global polycrisis. In this first article, we synthesize existing work and identify potential connections between these two fields. We seek to identify economic alternatives that provide systemic and proactive responses to the global polycrisis and propose potential supporting roles for development organizations like the UNDP.
by Bo Harvey….“There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.”3
By Michael Lerner, Angle of Vision…The polycrisis has many names—cascading crises, the metacrisis, the permacrisis, the great unraveling, the great simplification, “the end of the world as we know it” [TEOTWAWKI], and more. In Latin America it’s called “eco-social collapse.” The French call it “collapsologie.” Or one can simply call it turbulent times or a rapidly changing world.
Since the Long View started as a newsletter almost 2 years ago, our aim has been to curate the highest quality polycrisis news, research, and analysis to support this growing learning community. As this polycrisis work has gone global, so has the volume of content, debate over its relevance, and evolving language. Here are this month’s top picks of polycrisis news, curated by Omega Program Director Stanley Wu. It was quite a month, worldwide. These selections were chosen to help foster thinking about these times and how we consider resilience in light of the global polycrisis.
Nate Hagens, Director of the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, offers a valuable, insightful, and cautionary presentation on energy consumption and the alarming challenges society will face in the not-so-distant future.
Peter Leyden and Gerd Leonhard take a closer look at a dozen of the most important paradigm shifts of the 2020s that everyone should better understand.
Oedipus’ fatal flaw is that he refuses to accept new information, because he always assumes he already knows what he needs to know
Meet Steven Pinker, whose denial of limits increases the likelihood of his worst fear: the end of the Enlightenment.
As 'The Displacements' slows down and sinks into the frustrations of life in a massive relief camp, the story recalls the Houston Astrodome after Katrina — except that here we witness what one character sardonically labels a 'catastrophe of whiteness.'… What unfolds...
Unless the Polycrisis seriously questions the drivers of power and finds ways of challenging them, it risks becoming yet another neoliberal policy buzzword.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6NAtDt3xGo The Resilience Funders Network brings you a special conversation with Nate. Nathan J. (Nate) Hagens is a leading public intellectual working at the nexus of multiple components of the polycrisis and threats to civilization...
I’ve noticed a marked increase in the use of the term “polycrisis” over the last year, at least in US/Western media
The term polycrisis is not and won’t be uncontested. Nor will its companion term, “resilience,” which we also use. Over time, both terms will be adopted as forms of greenwashing. They will become overused just as “sustainability” became overused.
A lot of the folks trying to sound profound in the hallways at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week had just the word: “Polycrisis.” That’s what we’re in, apparently.
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity.
A host of interconnected “megathreats” is imperiling our future.
Permacrisis: noun, an extended period of instability and insecurity