If you watched the excellent series on the Chernobyl disaster, you can see with perfect hindsight why many say that Chernobyl was the proximate cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can see it in the way incentives drove bad decisions, which reinforced each other. This is what complexity science calls a positive feedback loop. The recent winter storms in Texas offer another teachable moment, illustrating how failures in one system cascade over to other systems. Freezing rain and snow break the electric and heating grid. Pipes break and the water system collapses. Transport stalls and stores are not restocked. An already overstrained health system drops more services. The science points to more of these breakdowns-–and, let’s be clear, there is no credible dissent to the science. In this light, isn’t it time to prepare for it “just in case”? 

David Bonbright

Read We’re Living in a Global Polycrisis: It’s Time to Build Resiliency, by David Bonbright, in Giving Compass.  

More articles

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...
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...
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...
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...
Jan 27 2024

Rising to the occasion: Practical hope in a global polycrisis

In the New School at Commonweal video, Host Michael Lerner joins Commonweal board member Katherine Fulton in conversation with Graham Leicester, who has pioneered new...
Jan 09 2024

A year in crises

by Tim Sahay in Phenomenal World…https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/a-year-in-crises.

Jan 09 2024

The terrible twenties? The assholocene? What to call our chaotic era

by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker…There is something paradoxical about pinning a name on an age characterized by extreme uncertainty. But that hasn’t stopped...
Jan 09 2024

Nate Hagen’s end of year look at 2024

by Eric Lee in Medicum.com….So I’m not going to apologize that the following short reflection is is on the dark side. I’m trying to describe what ’24 may look...
Dec 15 2023

Why so much is going wrong at the same time

By Thomas Homer-Dixon on The Cascade Institute…Most obviously, given that Earth’s worsening energy imbalance seems to be emerging as the single most powerful...
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...