Wolfgang Knorr

From climate collapse to permanent war, our nervous systems are stuck between numbness and panic. A climate scientist argues that surviving the polycrisis means learning to move deliberately between neural states and building smaller, more grounded movements that protect our ability to care without breaking.

Heroism and hope in these times are only possible against a backdrop of total relinquishment to the possibility that we won’t be able to control our own fate. But on a deeper level, this will be the way for us to reconnect with our origins, to become one again with the natural world.

The climate crisis is not only an extreme case of a collective challenge, but also an extremely complex one. Conventional notions of expertise and specialisation are therefore failing. The essence of radical honesty is to recognise this failure of our conventional ideas and to draw lessons from it.

Resilience is the weak point of the economic-social-political system we have come to know as the “West”.

There is no stopping climate breakdown without stopping moral decay and the death of democracy.

We should not kid ourselves: the looming danger of planetary heating is that seismic shifts in our global society will be inevitable, brought about by a combination of voluntary or forced adaptation and impacts, and that a hapless elite, unable to face reality, will sleepwalk us all into catastrophe.