Thread by @richardheinberg

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the resulting disruption of multiple global supply chains, policy think tanks have increasingly adopted the term #polycrisis to signify humanity’s destabilized status quo. 🧵

Regardless what we call it, this will be a time that calls for new attitudes and behaviors. Strategies that seemed to make sense before the #polycrisis, such as efforts to grow national economies, will need to be replaced by different ones, such as efforts to build resilience.

Fortifying resilience at the community level will be especially important, and cooperative strategies to ration scarce resources and reduce inequality will also be required so as to defuse conflict and ensure optimal outcomes for as many as possible.

A new report by @postcarbon, Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown, seeks to build a coherent narrative about the roots of the polycrisis, its arrival and evolution, and why we should think differently about the future.

When confronted with evidence that our collective path is unsustainable many of us tend to jump to “all-or-nothing” ways of thinking, sometimes framing our future in simplistic terms as “the end of the world” or “apocalypse.” But according to the report this tendency is unhelpful

While a complete and sudden end of humanity is theoretically possible via nuclear war, our more likely future will consist of decades of social, economic, political, and ecological turmoil punctuated by periods of rescue and recovery.

According to the @postcarbon report we should be spending far less effort building upon expectations of a future that looks much like today; instead, we should devote our collective brainpower to questions like, How does a civilization downsize gracefully?

The report is free on @postcarbon's website. Download, share, and let us know what you think: postcarbon.org/publications/w…