Life in the Global Polycrisis

The Long View

— 5 October 2025 —
Jul 28 2025

Donella meadows revisited

by Donella Meadows with Calvin Po in Future Observatory Journal… In this previously unpublished text, the renowned systems thinker sets out a vision for bioregional learning centres. Four decades on, we provide a critical annotation from today’s perspective

Mar 05 2025

A ‘second tree of life’ could wreak havoc, scientists warn

by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times…Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too...
Sep 12 2025

Resilience science must-knows: A road to action for decision-makers

by the Global Resilience Partnership…This is more than a report—it’s a movement to ensure resilience and adaptation science translates into action and impact. It...
Sep 17 2025

AI and democratic publics

by Henry Farrell & Hahrie Han in Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University…A project studying how advanced AI systems may harm, or help...
Sep 18 2025

A philosophy of crisis – Miguel de Beistegui

by Alexis Papazoglou on The Philosopher and the News….How can philosophy help us understand the different types of crisis, from the arena of science to that of...
Aug 01 2025

The world economy is on the brink of epochal change

by Mark Blyth in The Atlantic…Capitalism’s operating system is due for a major upgrade. How that turns out depends on enormously consequential political...

"What we do: Hope & heartbreak & all points of view."

Omega

Pandemics

Polycrisis

A philosophy of crisis – Miguel de Beistegui

by Alexis Papazoglou on The Philosopher and the News….How can philosophy help us understand the different types of crisis, from the arena of science to that of politics? And what kind of political crisis yields a President like Donald Trump? This conversation took place on the day of the US election. 

How facing grief can help us navigate a world in crisis

Interview by Nate Hagen….How has an absence of ritual and the avoidance of grief in our culture distorted our relationship to loss – and therefore our ability to protect what we love? What practices do other cultures use to nurture ecological identity and kinship with the more-than-human world? And finally, why might grief, when honored and integrated, be a vital part of building more resilient and ecologically-grounded systems for the future?

Counter-hegemony and polycrisis I: how to eat and how to think

by Raj Patel in The Journal of Peasant Studies…Through examining twentieth-century counter-hegemonic movements, particularly the Italian mondine and the Black Panther Party, this paper advances a theoretical understanding of how counter-hegemony emerges through experimental renegotiations of world-ecological relations. This analysis demonstrates how movements dialectically integrate material practice with intellectual formation, producing new social relations within the interstices of hegemonic power. The mondine struggles against mosquitos and exploitative labour conditions, like the Panthers’ hidden gardens and breakfast programmes, illustrate a crucial theoretical insight: counter-hegemony operates not merely as critique but as practical experimentation with the very boundaries between social and ecological reproduction.

Resilience

Resilience science must-knows: A road to action for decision-makers

by the Global Resilience Partnership…This is more than a report—it’s a movement to ensure resilience and adaptation science translates into action and impact. It continues well beyond COP30 to inform policy, investments, and cross-sector-collaboration.

Resilience revisited 014: Beyond the binary of “Resilience is Resistance” – Imagining resilience as oscillation

by Tamzin Ractliffe on LinkedIn…Here’s the challenge this powerful formulation reveals: existing power structures are also extraordinarily resilient at resisting change. The statement “resilience is resistance” becomes problematic when we recognise that existing power structures use their sophisticated capacity for resistance to prevent the systemic changes that would enable collective resilience that societies need wholistically.

Dimensions of the Great Turning

from The Work That Reconnects Network,,,In the Work That Reconnects we uplift and celebrate the story of the Great Turning, the essential shift to a way of living and political economy that serves and sustains life.

Environment

Bioregional coordination: Sacred work in a time between worlds

by Benjamin Life in Omniharmonic…Start small. Start where you are. Start with what you have. But start. Because the infrastructure for life-affirming governance begins with the first agreement between people who say: “We’re ready to govern ourselves in service to life.”

Donella meadows revisited

by Donella Meadows with Calvin Po in Future Observatory Journal… In this previously unpublished text, the renowned systems thinker sets out a vision for bioregional learning centres. Four decades on, we provide a critical annotation from today’s perspective

ECONOMY

The business of betting on catastrophe

by Susan Erikson in MIT Press…
World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn calamity into capital.

Politics

AI and democratic publics

by Henry Farrell & Hahrie Han in Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University…A project studying how advanced AI systems may harm, or help strengthen, democratic freedoms

The impunity of the unscathed: Risk, elite security, and the rage of MAGA populism

by Nils Gilman in Small Precautions…MAGA, in its rawest form, embodies the fury of those who feel that the burden of these risks has been disproportionately offloaded onto them, while the beneficiaries of the modern system — the “elites” — remain largely untouched. Consider the climate change debate: for many in the MAGA base, the imposition of green policies is perceived as a direct attack on their livelihoods, a demand by scientific and intellectual elites that they make personal sacrifices for a problem they feel they did not create (and which may not even exist, according to many of them) and which are not a burden for those advocating for the changes.

People

The bioregional vision of Donella Meadows

by Isabel Carlisle in Bioregional Learning Center… ‘Helping people and cultures all over the world develop and express their own capacity to solve their own problems, consistent with their own needs and with the ecosystems around them. And doing that through enhancing the power within all cultures and peoples to combine intellectual knowing and intuitive knowing, reasoning about the earth and living in consonance with it.’ This became the project that the Balaton Group of practitioners (mainly scientists and systems thinkers) was formed around.

The transformative power of intersectionality

by Rana Zincir Celal…..The concept of intersectionality recognizes the multidimensionality of inequality and the interconnection of different forms
of discrimination. It analyzes the role, function and impact of
power structures on discrimination and privilege. An intersectional perspective can be used to draw attention to existing
systems of oppression in society and to challenge, break
through and change them. Intersectionality thus holds the
potential for promoting social justice, solidarity and fairness.

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.

Community

Reframing the future

by Patrick Dowd of The Long Now Foundation…The practice of reframing how we think about time has been woven into Long Now’s DNA since our inception, and yet long-term thinking is still not common.

Zero-problem philanthropy

by Christian Seelos in SSIR…Moving away from endless problem-solving and toward creating healthy context.

Culture

Reading Octavia Butler in a time of change

by Shady Grove Oliver in AfroLAnews.org…Through her writing, Butler models the concept of having a found family – people one chooses to surround themself with for security and companionship. She demonstrates how small acts of kindness and acceptance can have a ripple effect.

Philanthropy by the numbers

by Aaron Horvath in The Hedgehog Review…If the question is how to do more good with your giving, then the answer MyGoodness provides comes with crisply quantified moral clarity.

Worldviews

Bookshelf

Grow that stack by your bedside — check out this selection of some of the most compelling work we’re reading.

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