Life in the Global Polycrisis

The Long View

— 19 March 2024 —
Feb 09 2024

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.”

Feb 01 2024

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.

Jan 29 2024

Has the “Polycrisis” overwhelmed us?

by Mark Leonard in Project Syndicate…Today’s global crises are not only competing for policymakers’ finite attention; they are increasingly feeding one another in unpredictable ways. Add the uncertainty around this year’s high-stakes elections in the United States and elsewhere, and you have a recipe for a Davos meeting defined by angst and paralysis.

Mar 18 2024

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...
Mar 18 2024

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...
Mar 18 2024

“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...
Mar 18 2024

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

Jan 16 2024

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....

"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.

Polycrisis

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

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

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

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.

Politics

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.

Community

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.

Worldviews

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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