Optimus Prime
Well-known member
Online
Never heard the term before
Good article
Kind of like Lion King’s Circle of Life…..but for sociopolitical, economic and environmental disasters
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Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable.
In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods.
An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw.
Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.
The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.
How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?
A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself.
Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.
But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.
Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfork”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse.
Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”
Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval.
“There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface.
Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest.
When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.
In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines.
That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive.
Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.……
www.theguardian.com
Good article
Kind of like Lion King’s Circle of Life…..but for sociopolitical, economic and environmental disasters
====================
Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable.
In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods.
An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw.
Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.
The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.
How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?
A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself.
Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.
But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.
Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfork”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse.
Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”
Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval.
“There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface.
Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest.
When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.
In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines.
That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive.
Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.……
What is this era of calamity we’re in? Some say ‘polycrisis’ captures it
The term ‘polycrisis’ has gained traction as we face one disaster after another. It’s overwhelming – but diagnosing the catastrophe is the first step to addressing it