Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a wide-ranging exchange, physicist Tom Murphy and energy scholar Dave Murphy explore the tension between optimism and planetary limits, debating whether modernity can endure or must give way to something entirely new.
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.
In his new book, the author argues that without a clearer view of the systems we’re embedded in, as well as our cultural and historical contexts, our responses to the polycrisis will continue to fall short.
The drivers behind the polycrisis, including relentless extraction, extreme inequality, and environmental degradation, are often attributed to human nature, but evidence suggests they are products of historically conditioned systems.
Nonviolent Revolutionary Ecocultural Prefigurative Direct Action, while quite a mouthful, means to propose a route out of what’s broken in our politics. It’s a way of suggesting what we do rather than to pound screws.
Are we capable of reforming our relationships with each other as well as with the planet? Nothing short of that will suffice.
In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level.
Instead of focusing on how much I can change the world, I try to focus on who and how I want to be as we all face tough times.
What we are experiencing today on planet Earth has been called in different ways “World War IV”, “slow, silent and lethal social holocaust”, “systemic crisis”, “global crisis of capitalism”, “polycrisis”, “crisis of Western capitalist (hetero)patriarchal civilisation”, “crisis of the hegemonic civilisational pattern”.
But I must admit that AI, whatever its positives, looks like anything but what the world needs right now to save us from a hell on earth.
Capitalism in essence is a cannibal, primed to guzzle its own conditions of possibility.
The arrival of this AI challenge to our adaptive capacities is occurring precisely at the historical moment in which all of the other facets of the polycrisis are reaching a kind of historical crescendo or apogee.
