Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As authoritarianism, military tensions, and temperatures rise, it is easy to look at the end of the world as we know it and ask what the point of academia is.
Everyone is now on board with the theory of multipolarity. But now that it’s mainstream that unipolarity is dead, it’s time to ask: is the world actually becoming multipolar?
Investigating how and why complex societies or civilizations have risen and fallen in human history, anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter uncovered a dynamic that can help us make sense of our present situation and future prospects.
The impacts of a strengthening El Niño and the war in Iran highlight in the Greater Horn of Africa, an area already beset by prolonged crisis and conflict, factors that are combining with others to potentially create a major, multicountry polycrisis.
Nate scales his exploration of civilizational futures down to the future of a single human life and analyzes how the same patterns that shape economies, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems turn inward.
In this excerpt from the Seeds Series Volume 2, interviewees argue that deeper shifts in consciousness, economics and governance are needed to confront the polycrisis.
In this presentation for The Climate Dialogue Group, Richard Heinberg shares his insights into why a world of climate disruption and energy volatility demands a shift from maximizing growth to strengthening community resilience.
As rising sea levels threaten low-lying island nations, questions once confined to legal theory are becoming urgent realities. From Tuvalu to the Maldives, climate change is forcing governments and communities to reconsider what sovereignty and nationhood mean when territory itself is disappearing.
Opening with a personal reflection on his own relationship to dread, Nate describes how the chronic anticipation of collapse affects the human nervous system long before any single crisis fully arrives.
Oil shocks, currency crises, refugee flows and rising geopolitical disorder: analyst and columnist Mihir Sharma explains why the consequences of war with Iran will be felt far beyond the Middle East.
As wars escalate, ecological systems collapse, and inequality deepens, traditional, nation-centered ideas of security and peace are no longer sufficient. “Planetary peace” links peace with ecological balance, regenerative economics, social justice, and planetary cooperation in this new human era.
History offers a grim account of how structural change occurs. But concealed within that bleakness is a window of possibility that opens just when things fall apart.
