~ WEBINAR EVENT SERIES CO-SPONSORS ~
The FAN Initiative, Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere, The Resilience Project & The New School at Commonwealth
Ghastly Discussions & Response
Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement
Multiple global crises—including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia’s war on Ukraine—have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. Dr. Michael Lawrence, a Fellow at the Cascade Institute Read...
Treading Thin Air
Geoff Mann on Uncertainty and Climate Change The point of highlighting the vertiginous degree of uncertainty is that we might not be making nearly as big a deal of climate change as we should. We are, as a result, tragically under-prepared for the possibility of...
Prefixing the world
Crisis is a fascinating character, and we hope to keep talking, but the task in this post is merely to understand the idea well enough to grasp my main contention here, which is that meta, not poly, should be our prefix of choice. These prefixes that seek to qualify...
I want a better catastrophe
Global warming is projected to rocket past the 1.5°C limit, throwing lifelong activist Andrew Boyd into a crisis of hope, and off on a quest to learn how to live with the “impossible news” of climate breakdown. With gallows humor and a broken heart, Andrew steers us...
Keep humanity’s future in sight and integrate the polycrisis lens
Experts now agree that the planet has entered an era of ongoing ‘polycrisis’, in which society faces multiple, interconnected global threats, including the climate crisis and mass biodiversity extinction, geopolitical instability and nuclear threat, risks of unchecked...
Heat is not a metaphor
Marine mammals have been my poetry teachers for several years now. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, I documented my awe and wonder at how these animals do, with grace, what I flail at every day, breathing in the unbreathable circumstances...
Where dangerous heat is surging
The world is experiencing a surge in extremely hot days that put human health at risk, with the threat concentrated in some of theplaces least prepared to cope, according to an analysis of climate data byThe Washington Post and CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that develops...
The fear of a nuclear fire that would consume Earth
In the early years of nuclear research, some scientists feared breaking open atoms might start a chain reaction that would destroy Earth. Thomas Moynihan Read full article at BBC.com by Thomas Moynihan
America is using up its groundwater like there’s no tomorrow
Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the...
What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know
In a blistering talk, Nobel Laureate Al Gore looks at the two main obstacles to climate solutions and gives his view of how we might actually solve the environmental crisis in time. You won't want to miss his searing indictment of fossil fuel companies for walking...
RISD’s center for complexity developing design manual for maintaining life on earth
Humanity is running the world in a way that is creating incredible dangers we are not managing well. That has to change. We’re collaborating with 10x100, an organization focused on urgent responses to climate change, and trying to create a set of standards or ways of...
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond,Rodolfo Dirzo, Anne H. Ehrlich, John Harte, Mary Ellen Harte, Graham Pyke, Peter H. Raven1 William J. Ripple, Frédérik Saltré Christine Turnbull, Mathis Wackernagel and Daniel T. Blumstei
An international group of 17 leading physical and social scientists, including OMEGA Advisory Board member Joan Diamond, have produced a comprehensive yet concise assessment of the state of civilization, warning that the outlook is more dire and dangerous than is generally understood.
The paper has generated over a thousand media articles and interviews which suggests that public interest is extremely high despite competing news– insurrection, inauguration, and pandemic.
This Ghastly study has been covered in media organizations including CNN World, Reuters, The Guardian, International Business Times, Taipei Times, The Irish Times, and the University of California among many others.
See full article published by Frontiers in Conservation Science, 13 Janurary 2021.