Life in the Global Polycrisis
The Long View
"What we do: Hope & heartbreak & all points of view."
Omega
Pandemics
Why the world needs its own immune system
by Atul Gawande in The New York Times…A global immune system must be built for speed. Speed in detecting that a pattern of illness might be unusual and dangerous. Speed in diagnosis. Speed in alerting public health officials and tracing the path of exposure. Speed in getting treatment to the sick and preventive measures to the well.
The government must say what it knows about covid’s origins
by Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times….The American public, however, only rarely heard refreshing honesty from their officials or even their scientists — and this tight-lipped, denialist approach appears to have only strengthened belief that the pandemic arose from carelessness during research or even, in less reality-based accounts, something deliberate.
W.H.O. ends global health emergency designation for covid
By Stephanie Nolen, The New York Times….The decision has little practical effect but is a significant moment in the struggle against a virus that has killed millions and upended lives throughout the world.
Polycrisis
History’s crisis detectives: How we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse – and clues about the future
by Daniel Hoyer in The Conversation….Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people could course-correct to stave off devastation.
Global collaboration of scientists needed to solve polycrisis
in Cambridge University Press….“Above all else, the polycrisis concept emphasises that crises interact with one another in highly consequential ways that are grossly underappreciated by academic and policymaking institutions that study those crises individually, in separate silos.”
Polycrisis in the anthropocene: An invitation to contributions and debates
by Michael Lawrence in Cambridge University Press…The popularity of the term polycrisis suggests a growing demand for new thinking
about the world’s intersecting crises, but loose and haphazard uses of the concept impede knowledge
generation. The special issue, “Polycrisis in the Anthropocene,” aims to close the gap.
Resilience
“Lean Weaving”: Creating networks for a future of resilience and regeneration
by Curtis Ogden in the International Institute for Social Change….“The more flexible the sub-systems, the longer the expected life of the system as a whole.”
Crazy Town: Episode 74. Prepping for the apocalypse: Elites’ foolish fantasies for surviving a collapse of their own creation
by Asher Miller, et al., in podcast Crazy Town: Meet Barrett Moore, the bunker-building bullshit artist who helps capitalists survive the apocalypse with beans, bullets, and bravado. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation.
The Seven Shifts
in Horizon 2045…We safeguard the wellbeing—and the promise—
of future generations.
We realign our human experience around propelling humanity forward
Environment
Global energy-related CO2 emissions hit record high in 2023 – IEA
by Reuters in Climate Home News…Global emissions from energy rose by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 to 37.4 billion tonnes, hitting a record hight
Forget the partisan hype, Aust farmers are preparing for the extremes of climate change
by Jamie Seidel in Cosmos Magazine…Farmers consider the animal breeds and crop types they produce to be flexible choices. Others are prepared to relocate operations to chase the conditions their particular produce needs.
Pivotal moment for humanity as disasters threaten to converge
by David Nield in Science Alert…The researchers warn of a catastrophic loss of crop-growing capacity with up to half the global area for growing wheat and maize potentially lost, putting the “stability of our societies” under threat. These processes are already well underway, with more than 27 million children driven into hunger by extreme weather in 2022 alone.
ECONOMY
A starting point for degrowth: The Costa Rica “Pura Vida” meaning
By Juan Ignacio Marín Degrowth is a theory, a movement, and a practice with a long and distinguished history. The excellent Wikipedia article (worth consulting) starts this way: Degrowth or post-growth economics is an academic and social movement critical of the...
Crop insurance costs explode
by Robert Arnason in The Western Producer…Those massive payments are connected to the severe drought of 2021, which crushed crop yields across much of Western Canada. There’s also the factor of higher prices for grains, oilseeds and pulse crops, which exacerbated the size of crop insurance payments.
Towards multivalent currencies, bioregional monetary stewardship and a distributed global reserve currency
from Dark Matter Labs.org…Ultimately we hope to convene a community who have diverse skills and experiences beyond our own; a distributed team united in designing and building the alternative monetary system that we so desperately require. A first step towards that is to think carefully about what a desirable monetary system might in fact contain.
Politics
Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat in 2024 — and the U.S. is less ready than ever
by Brandy Zadrozny in NBC News…The U.S. presidential election comes at a time of ideal circumstances for disinformation and the people who spread it.
Arundhati Roy: The dismantling of democracy in India will affect the whole world
Millions live on subsistence rations delivered in packets with Modi’s face printed on them. India is a very rich country with very poor people. One of the most unequal societies in the world. For its pains, Oxfam India has been raided too. And Amnesty International...
Chartbook 218: “So far from god” … friend-shoring and the debate in Washington over whether to bomb Mexico.
by Adam Tooze in Chartbook….Proximity brings safety and harmony only if you have sorted out your neighborly relations. That is far from being the case between Mexico and the USA.
People
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.
Margaret Atwood offers her vision of utopia: The pre-eminent writer of dystopian literature would build dome homes, wear mushroom leather and compost corpses.
Shortly before she turned 83 last month, she taught an eight-week course, “Practical Utopias,” on Disco, an online learning platform in Canada.
Community
‘Civilizations rise and fall’
by Evan Malmgren in Business Insider…Inside an off-grid community of families preparing for the downfall of America
Here’s what’s missing from San Francisco’s understanding of its Honduran drug dealers
The fentanyl crisis in San Francisco is real. And, as the Chronicle’s recent investigative series on Los Hondos revealed, there are a disproportionate number of Honduran migrants selling these opioids in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. Oscar Estrada...
Nonprofits as battlegrounds for democracy
It’s not often that a body of work comes along that makes us ask big questions about the nonprofit sector. Claire Dunning’s new book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods, is one.
Culture
An ancient Chinese text that’s surprisingly relevant today
by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org….I’ll leave the last words to the Old Master, this time from the Bahm translation:
Whenever someone sets out to remold the world, experience teaches that he is bound to fail.
For Nature is already as good as it can be.
It cannot be improved upon.
He who tries to redesign it, spoils it.
He who tries to redirect it, misleads it.
‘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
The Desert of the Anthropocene: An ongoing installation from artist Ravi Agarwal
The long engagement is a part of an ongoing investigation into the current state of the nature, both as a crisis which traverses a political realm, but also a cultural contestation of how ‘nature’ is thought of in the era of the Anthropocene.
Worldviews
Chartbook 268: “How can we not know?”: CAR and the challenge of tracking a silent crisis.
By Adam Tooze in Chartbook 268…It was at a moment when many of us were discussing the polycrisis as a concept with which to grasp the current world. Was an explosion of child deaths the ultimate indicator of crisis?
History’s crisis detectives: How we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse – and clues about the future
by Daniel Hoyer in The Conversation….Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people could course-correct to stave off devastation.
Systemic wisdom for and beyond systems change – A critical systems perspective convening not only indigenous traditions of wisdom
by Louis Klein in EUSG.org…Systemic wisdom facilitates the re-entry of trust and love into science. And though this challenges the modern worldviews and the contemporary self-perception of sciences, it allows for translating knowing into understanding and knowledge into wisdom. We may lose the option of heroic systems change, yet we gain the possibility to realise a humanising society embedded in systemic wisdom.
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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