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.
‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
Research shows people who speak another language are more utilitarian and flexible, less risk-averse and egotistical, and better able to cope with traumatic memories
Treading Thin Air
by Geoff Mann in Uncertainty and Climate Change….What we need is a much more honest assessment of what we do not or cannot know, which is, among other important things, where the edge is. We might, in fact, be past it already, treading thin air like Wile E. Coyote before the fall. Today’s politicians don’t like uncertainty: it introduces doubt. Yet we are in desperate need of a politics that looks catastrophic uncertainty square in the face.
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.
I want a better catastrophe
by Andrew Boyd in bettercatastrophe.com…The apocolypse is already happening.
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.
Heat is not a metaphor
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Harpers Bazaar….Let me be clear: “Living on a menopausal planet” does not mean the extreme heat we are experiencing is just a natural part of Earth’s life cycle, as climate-change deniers claim. The volatile temperatures we are experiencing are a result of toxic human actions—just like the hot flashes experienced by menopausal people (many women, many gender-expansive people, anyone who has ever had a uterus or ovaries or stewarded the hormone estrogen) may be impacted by the prevalence of hormone-injected animals and processed food in our diets.
Where dangerous heat is surging
by Niko Kommenda, et al in the Washington Post….The danger of climate change is often associated with huge disasters: floods, fires, hurricanes. Heat, on the other hand, is a creeping, quieter risk — but one that is already transforming lives around the world.
The fear of a nuclear fire that would consume Earth
by Thomas Moynihan at BBC.com…..Perhaps the lesson for AI is that the dramatic risks should command our attention, but so too should the more tangible, less attention-grabbing, ones. Neither should cancel the other out, especially when – once again – our world is possibly at stake.
America is using up its groundwater like there’s no tomorrow
By Mira Rojanasakul et al, in The New York Times…..“From an objective standpoint, this is a crisis,” said Warigia Bowman, a law professor and water expert at the University of Tulsa. “There will be parts of the U.S. that run out of drinking water.”
More in this tag
Jul
06
2023
Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement
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...
Dec
06
2023
Overshooting earth’s boundaries: an interview with Bill Rees
by Rachel Donald in World Sensorium Conservancy….Our impact on the planet cannot be understated. We have thrust Earth into a new geological period, destroyed the...
Dec
06
2023
Weaving solidarity and hope: stories of regeneration and resilience
From Global tapestries of alternatives…..we learn that art is an important mode of everyday resistance that can offer healing possibilities from the trauma of...
Dec
06
2023
Rivers and water systems as weapons and casualties of the Russia‐Ukraine war
By Peter Gleick in Earth’s Future……Among the consequences of the conflict have been both direct and indirect effects on civilian populations,...
Dec
05
2023
Beneath the polycrisis is the singular dilemma of humanity called capitalism: the thirty-seventh newsletter (2023)
by Vijay in Tricontinental….Dilemmas of humanity abound. There is little need to look at statistical data to know that we are in a spiral of crises, from the...
Oct
15
2023
The blue dollar economy
Dollarization of the Argentine economy, which appeared an eccentric wish only a few months ago, now dominates media headlines and dinner table discussions and has...
Oct
10
2023
The tragedy on the financial horizon is closer than you think
In September 2015, then Bank of England Governor Mark Carney gave a landmark speech on the “Tragedy of the Horizon.” The concept was simple: climate change creates...
Oct
10
2023
Spaces for Growth: Learning our Way out of a Crisis
By Graham Leicester and Maureen O'Hara In normal times we tend to go about our lives oblivious to the structures, institutions, processes and shared values that shape...
Oct
10
2023
Why 2% is the most dangerous number no one is talking about
We’ve had a summer from hell, with July 2023 temporarily claiming the title of hottest month on record. But while the klaxons of Earth’s climate system have riveted...
Oct
10
2023
Finding the trickle
Idah Murithi shares a captivating tale of a young girl’s journey to restore a river and educate her community about the power of collective action in safeguarding...
Oct
10
2023
The bold idea to move millions to climate havens
The race against time to plan for climate migration has begun. In 2022, climate change and climate-related disasters led nearly 33 million people to flee their homes...