While the world must continue to adapt to worsening heat, increasingly intense wildfires, the acidification and warming of the oceans, and other climate threats, this year’s flooding is a wake-up call to focus on water.
Prefixing the world
by Jonathan Rowson in Perspectiva…The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.
Keep humanity’s future in sight and integrate the polycrisis lens
from transformphilanthropy.wingsweb.org….The climate crisis is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. However, only a tiny fraction of global philanthropic funding is dedicated to combating climate change effects, with some estimates as low as 2%. Most philanthropic funders already dedicated to other social issues do not feel they can divert resources at this stage.
RISD’s center for complexity developing design manual for maintaining life on earth
by Tim Maly on RISD.org…RISD’s Center for Complexity (CfC) has served as a think tank bringing together transdisciplinary experts and academics with real-world practitioners and policy makers. This summer the group is expanding its nuclear security research to include other threats to the planet and human civilization. Here CfC Senior Lead Tim Maly discusses the insights they have uncovered.
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction
by Gaya Herrington in The Guardian…A controversial MIT study from 1972 forecast the collapse of civilization – and Gaya Herrington is here to deliver the bad news
Trevor Hancock: A polycrisis is greater than the sum of its parts
by Trevor Hancock in Times Colonist…..Today’s crises, they wrote, “simultaneously span natural, political, economic and technological systems, because they’re driven by a multiplicity of underlying ‘systemic risks.’ ”
More in this category
On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
Renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems
Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in...