Polycrisis

If we believe that stories aid in binding society together, then perhaps it feels like we’re unraveling precisely because we are transitioning from one narrative to another on multiple subjects simultaneously.

“We have a problem with scale. The planetary crisis can seem impossible to grasp. But focusing on the local can feel limited. How do we work to a scale that feels manageable? There is a way of reorganising how we think about scale: the -shed. -sheds (from Old English scead) describe the natural boundaries between waterbodies. They are not hard-edge

Before a tipping point in a complex system, there are early warning signals that may be detected.14 The most widely applicable of these early warning signals is “critical slowing down”—the phenomenon we are all familiar with before our computer crashes, and rather than heed the implications of this slower processing power, we jam at the keys in fru

History holds too many examples of what happens when the masses suddenly wake up to a sense of overwhelming dread

From mythmaking to legal treaties to weaving to movement building, what knits these various examples together is their avoidance of single solutions to complex problems, instead enabling a pursuit of multiple different actions and wider systemic changes with long term, positive transformations

Elsewhere, while COVID-19 may have abated from peak hellish weirdness, the narratives that collapsed then have not been put back together again

the great thing about living in a world of dying systems is that you are uniquely well-positioned to replace suboptimal systems with something superior. New growth takes root best in the decay of its predecessors. For most of the past, if you wanted to create a better future, you had to rally the troops and take someone else’s land or destroy exist