Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The sense of belonging in community I think we all deeply need now weaves human beings in—integrates us—with the other-than-human world, such that our neighbors are not just our fellow humans, but all of the life around us.
Unless the Polycrisis seriously questions the drivers of power and finds ways of challenging them, it risks becoming yet another neoliberal policy buzzword.
The best we can do is have lots of ideas, lots of tools, lots of ways of thinking, all ready at hand when crises of whatever flavor come barreling down that hill.
But as the American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter documents in his seminal book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, this is what “advanced,” hierarchical human societies do—they respond to challenges created by their complexity with ever more complexity. This may work in the short-term but usually leads to the underlying crises worsening in the long term.
Permacrisis is the joining of the prefix perma- (which means a fixed state) and crisis, resulting in a word that means ‘a state of permanent crisis’ (or according to Collins Dictionary “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.”)
To go back to the beginning, while such a thing is still possible, if nuclear weapons, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, fossil fuels, and apocalyptic fear helped get us to this breaking point, we need something truly different now.
Finding a way out of this “polycrisis” requires a deep transformation in how energy and food are produced and distributed, with actions that challenge corporate control head on.
The goal of An Inconvenient Apocalypse isn’t to try to convince people of the reality of humankind’s environmental and societal crises. The book’s authors know that’s a fool’s errand…
But I think ultimately, I’m hoping/working toward encouraging Gaians to play an active role in serving as death doulas for our current civilization and as midwives for the next one to come.
The more I listened to participants, though, the more I realized perhaps most accurate word is “embrace”, for is it really possible to manage this polycrisis?
