Newsletter #253 — July 18, 2024
Part 3: How must social change work evolve in the polycrisis era?
Within each of these ten crises comes a corresponding group of staunchly dedicated individual actors, all committed to the belief that their cause is most important. The result is a disjointed network of aspiring change-makers, at odds with one another, competing for resources and relevance. This raises fundamental questions: How can shift both the inner mindset as well as outer strategy to make social movement more effective in the face of the polycrisis?
Strategically, it is necessary to focus on part of the polycrisis but with an awareness of the whole. Every organization today must make a strategic choice about where to focus. One’s chosen issue(s) will inevitably be at the center of one’s strategy. Yet, in the polycrisis era, we have to organize and act with the broader awareness that our particular cause impacts, and is impacted by, all of the others. Regardless of where one chooses to focus as an agent of change, a collective shift-in-action towards polycrisis consciousness would expand our way of thinking about problems from being isolated and narrow to broad-reaching and integral. If we hope to make progress in any of the aforementioned areas, it is critical that action is grounded in this broader understanding.
Due to their urgent yet intractable nature, each aspect of the polycrisis alone is enough to cause anxiety, and even paralysis. Though it can feel overwhelming to fully consider the real potential of societal collapse, experts like Jem Bendell and Karen Perry emphasize that there is a certain freedom, even empowerment, in acceptance. By recognizing the larger issue for what it is, we can create space to move towards realistic, united action. Only by working to integrate the inborn power of civil society and that of larger systems, such as government and philanthropy, can we begin the slow but noble work of diffusing the polycrisis.
In order to make real steps towards change, it is critical to first develop a holistic way of thinking around the matter at hand. In order to develop a polycrisis consciousness, it is worth exploring the following practical concepts more in depth.
Think like a mountain range.
The polycrisis requires that we think like earthlings first and foremost. But we are not raised to think that way. We are raised to think like Americans or Russians, like economists or geologists, like Christians or Muslims. This is why “thinking globally” is easier said than done. Each of us are raised within a culturally specific context; we tend to see the world — and the polycrisis which afflicts it — through that lens.
In 1949, when Aldo Leopold wrote The Sand County Almanac, he advised human beings to “think like a mountain,” which meant seeing ourselves holistically as part of, not separate from, the entire interdependent ecosystem. We deeply appreciate his wisdom, which has been informing eco-activists for more than seventy years. However, we are adapting it by referring to a “mountain range” because the polycrisis requires that activists not think alone. We need to think as a team.
The polycrisis makes clear that no social change agent, no matter how rich or famous, can possibly be effective alone. At most, one person might have a positive impact on one crisis, for a while. But to have a positive impact on many crises, over time, we need to see ourselves as a humble part of something larger — something vast, majestic, and greater than the sum of our parts. We need to see ourselves as a mountain range.
Our passion requires detachment from outcome.
While linking “passion” and “detachment” may sound contradictory, the polycrisis shows us that it is not. We cannot let the sheer complexity and profound dangers of the polycrisis make us less passionate about our work. At the same time, it must entail a certain level of detachment. If we make our action conditional on achieving linear progress on our chosen cause, we may give up when those goals are not reached. In the current circumstances, “making things better” on our timetable may elude us for reasons that are far beyond our control. However, this does not invalidate or make the work less important.
Crisis X may get worse, not because we have not been effective, but because Crisis Y has undermined our efforts. If we are “thinking like a mountain range,” we will understand this. Doing so will enable us to continue being passionate about our work but be less attached to the outcome, which leads to our next working principle:
Retire optimism and pessimism and focus on possibility.
Both pessimism or optimism are like shooting in the dark because we don’t know with certainty how much, how quickly, or where things might get better or worse.
For generations, people engaged in social change have asked each other whether they were “optimistic or pessimistic” about the success of their efforts. Activists tended to choose the former because, if nothing else, we needed to keep our spirits up. We had to assume, for example, that race relations could be improved, otherwise why would we keep trying? We had to maintain that the rise of the earth's temperature could be controlled, otherwise, how could we inspire others to get involved in our cause? We had to argue that human beings could manage the risks of Artificial Intelligence, otherwise, how could we argue for regulatory safeguards and other government oversight?
But the polycrisis throws into question this optimism/pessimism calculus. The fact is: we don’t know the outcome. Even if we are fairly confident that Crisis X can be handled, there are scores of other crises that can make Crisis X far worse.
Far better, it seems then, to be possiblists. As William Ury persuasively says in his new book Possible, let us maintain that human survival is just that: possible. The polycrisis makes clear that neither our survival nor our extinction is guaranteed. Both, in fact, are possible. Learning to live with that fact will make us not just wiser, but more effective agents of change.
Avoid anachronistic “—isms” altogether.
While we are releasing these two “isms,” pessimism and optimism, we should consider releasing others as well. The polycrisis, if nothing else, is a reason for humility. We humans have been cultivating “-isms,” and combating them, for eons. Whether it is theism or atheism, socialism or capitalism, conservatism or liberalism, asceticism and consumerism — all of these opposing conceptual frameworks pre-date awareness of the polycrisis. None of them alone fully acknowledge the existential threat we are facing, and none of them alone can fully provide a solution.
The notion that any centuries-old “-ism” will have the magic key to managing the polycrisis is, to put it bluntly, arrogant. Both capitalist and socialist societies are contributing to the polycrisis, and both need to become more earth-centric in order to defuse it. The odds of survival are far better turning to humility than relying on a one-size-fits-all “-ism” that presumes not only to understand but to “fix” an unprecedented polycrisis. Instead of know-it-all “isms,” it is far wiser to be humble and begin with the truth that we don’t know.
Inner work is not optional but indispensable.
Imagine you discover a toxic waste site near your home and you organize with your neighbors to get it cleaned up. While this will be a serious disruption in your life, you can engage in this environmental project without significantly shifting your way of living. Within the framework of this threat and your response, you don’t need to adopt some new spiritual practice in order to keep yourself centered.
But the polycrisis is not a single, local, potentially manageable threat. The polycrisis consists of many, multi-local, potentially unmanageable threats. If we allow ourselves to experience its full magnitude, it can be overwhelming enough to throw us off-center.
A spiritual practice or some other form of inner work is therefore highly relevant in the polycrisis era. Such a practice is a humble recognition that we are facing a “devil” far greater than any religion could imagine. Even ancient religious foreshadowing of “Armageddon” or the rapture of “end times” could not foresee the intimate yet omnipresent threats of the polycrisis.
All of us, then, will benefit from engaging in our own polycrisis-informed spiritual practice. It may be something classical, like meditation or yoga. But it is far more likely to be something idiosyncratic, our own unique personal way of resourcing ourselves. We may also wish to engage in these practices with others because, as “thinking like a mountain range” suggests, we are interdependent with each other.
While the privileged always have more options than others, the polycrisis will ultimately touch all our lives. So part of our spiritual practice, whatever it might be, involves recognizing that we are not alone. The good news of the polycrisis is that this overwhelming, potentially depressing, challenge may enhance our spiritual lives by taking us out of our towers of separateness and into interwoven connection to others, and to Life itself.
These are few practices and principles that strike us as relevant. However, the list is by no means exhaustive, and we welcome and invite readers to reflect more deeply on what their own list may look like. What additional evolutions, in consciousness and action, would be beneficial to consider in your specific context? If these are some of the principles that may guide us, the practical question is: what next?
Part 4: Next steps
Our answer to the question must be collective. No single person or organization can define the “next steps” for dealing with the polycrisis. “Thinking like a mountain range” requires a team of activists working synergistically on most, if not all, of the major component crises.
We at Mediators are forming this project in order to find our way to serve among the many organizations and people stepping up to join the national and global collective addressing these issues. The Resilience Funders Network is already pioneering this general approach. In addition to their remarkable work, it would be helpful to expand polycrisis awareness to include the various “crisis activist communities” outlined above. Our intention in doing so would be to broaden public understanding of the situation at hand and catalyze a deeper dialogue about the scope and strategy of working within the polycrisis
In addition to pushing for change at the highest level of our national and global institutions, we must not forget that power originates in the individual acting as a collective front. Because of this, there may be no better place to begin elevating this shift towards a polycrisis consciousness than at the local level. Though major crises like those listed above may seem far-off and non-localized, we know that as the effects worsen in the coming decades, it will be local communities that are forced to adapt if they wish to survive. There is no better time than now to invest in bottom-up civic engagement and incentivize community resilience. In times of existential crisis, we cannot rely on other powers alone to do the work. It will be not only the collective responsibility, but the open opportunity for ordinary citizens to come together in preservation of something larger than ourselves.
For citizens, organizations, and institutions across the issue spectrum to explore some variation of polycrisis consciousness is not a matter of morality or special interest. It is a crucial and strategic decision. Only when actors acknowledge the total reality they exist within, can they hope to conduct their work most effectively. Whether you are working in sectors typically engaged with social change or not, developing a bigger-picture way of thinking that accounts for connectivity between all of the parts, will not only make the work more meaningful, but also elevate the impact it has.
Ultimately, the polycrisis may best be seen as a sacred opportunity – to change our unsustainable, divided way of living and work into something more integrative, effective, and life-affirming. The chance to co-create a better future for generations to come is at our doorstep if only we choose to turn the handle, forgo ignorance, and embrace possibility. The choice is yours.
About the Authors
Mark and Mesa thought that some readers might be interested in the following short biographies that explain the larger personal context surrounding their writing of this essay.
MARK GERZON, President and Founder, Mediators Foundation
In 1990, as director of a team of social innovators called Global Partners, I attended the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival in Moscow. A wide range of luminaries — ranging from Mikhail Gorbachev to Paul Newman to Al Gore — were present. This meeting was inspired by a previous one, held in Oxford England where speakers like the Dalai Lama, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, and astronomer Carl Sagan had inspired the organizers to venture to the USSR.
After listening for a few days to the hard data and even harder predictions, I was terrified, overwhelmed and, frankly, depressed. It was clear to me that the ecosphere on which terrestrial life depends was in danger. For the first time in my life, I grasped that our species’ current trajectory was headed toward self-destruction. My notions of “steady progress” and “making a better world” exploded in front of my eyes, like helium balloons.
Although I had by then been an activist for more than twenty years, working on issues ranging from the threat of nuclear war to economic injustice, I did not grasp how they were causally entangled in such a way that human life on earth was in peril. From that moment on, my innocence was gone. Even though I would not hear the word “polycrisis” until much later, it was already living inside me, unnamed yet deeply felt.
In the hallway of the conference one afternoon, I encountered Iroquois elder Chief Oren Lyons. After revealing my desperation, almost in tears, I asked him how, when faced with the overwhelming challenges we faced, he stayed focused on healing the world. Gazing at me with genuine sympathy, mixed with paternal impatience, he put his hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, son,” he said quietly. “Just carry your own pack.”
Neither he, nor I, nor anyone at that conference, used the word polycrisis. In fact, the word would not be coined until later that decade when two scholars would define it as “interwoven and overlapping crises” whose combined impact was overwhelming. More current definitions make clear that phrases like “catastrophic risk” or “existential risk,” while powerfully evocative, do not do justice to the full scope of the polycrisis.
In retrospect, my reaction of overwhelming despair is understandable. Despite being a mature adult (I was then forty years old), it hit me like a punch in the gut. Now seventy-five, I have had thirty-five years to integrate this awareness and begin to understand the challenge that we face. This paper is part of that integration process and I hope it is of service to the legions of activists who are already engaged in these issues.
MESA SEBREE, Researcher & Strategic Vision Coordinator, Mediators Foundation
Unlike Mark who first encountered the polycrisis midway through his life, I’ve grown up in it. I speak for the younger generation in saying that all of these challenges are more than scholarly interests or extracurricular passions for us. They are fundamental to our life; they always have been. In this way, the polycrisis has, in a way, lost its shock value. Existential threats are commonplace now, though the list continues to grow in size and intensity. This normalization of conflict and chaos has had two seemingly equal and opposite effects: we are both more energized to take on social justice issues and also increasingly burnout from the overwhelming amount of problems with the world we inhabit.
I understand the despair and empowerment arc deeply, swinging from hopefulness to despondency. Admittedly, it’s difficult to feel a sense of hope in the current landscape- some would say foolish. Climate anxiety looms in the background- a dull but constant fear of the future that makes it difficult to imagine a future where I can do normal adult things like bear children, live on the coast, see the natural wonders of the world. Pandemic isolation kept me enclosed to four walls during some of the most formative years of my life, still having ripple effects in the collective consciousness as well as my own socialization. Digitalization has made me addicted to media and my phone, and many of my peers are uncomfortable with the thought of just sitting in silence, at ease with their minds. Cancel culture has made it so that I can’t call myself a centrist for fear of losing my liberal friends, yet I’m unable to ascribe to the radicalism of either side of the political system. The list of polycrisis normalcy goes on.
My academic experience only exacerbated this narrative that “everything is wrong with the world.” Maybe it’s because my fields were all social justice oriented (Political Science, International Studies, and Conflict and Development), but for years it seemed like my peers and I were being buried under heaps of disempowering, detailed information on how, when, and why the world is falling apart. Every class, every reading, and every discussion drilled into our minds the idea that everything we learned about our country is untrue, the planet is dying, and we’re all doomed.
Glimmers of hope were rare, but when I found one, almost out of necessity, I clung to it. What allowed me to find some shred of optimism was my independent research on the theory and practice of nonviolent change-making. The mainstream discourse that everything was falling apart was soul-crushing at worst and unproductive at best. Out of preservation for my own mental health, I simply couldn’t believe it. Instead, I listened to alternative news sources, such as a podcast called Nonviolence Radio, to discover that, despite all of the valid concerns, there is a way forward. There is light if we choose to look for it.
Now more than ever, we need light in the world. Although I’m not under any naive impression that we can “solve” the polycrisis, I still intend to work for a better future. The polycrisis is an opportunity for growth, a chance to come together in a way that is far overdue, yet indispensable. What polycrisis activism does is inspire us to work constructively in a way that is not isolated, but united. Coming together in a way that is not only creative and informed, but also loving and simple, is not wishful.
It is, to me, the only sane way forward.
I hope you’ll join us in being excited for what’s to come.
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