This week I wanted to share two brief updates.
First, I don’t regularly write journal articles but I did successfully navigate this labyrinth recently. The article, now published, explores different strategies to reduce suffering both during the polycrisis period and post-polycrisis period. I grappled with that briefly before in a reflection, but if you want a full exploration, check out the journal article here.
Read What Comes After the Polycrisis? at the Global Sustainability journal website (it’s open access).
Second, if you’d rather listen to me describe those findings, then watch this webinar I gave for Goucher College a few weeks back (now online). I walk through some of the different solutions that can help address the polycrisis and post-polycrisis period and also imagine what an ecocentric civilization of the future could look like, if we actually work toward that. Watch below:
Watch Erik explore the polycrisis and what ecocentric cultures of the far future might look like.
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading.
Good paper. It's dispiriting that getting rid of nuclear weapons is still the number one thing to be done to protect the future of humanity and the biosphere. I worry that this failure to do something so obvious means that nothing else will be done from his "doubly effective" list of things to do.
But Assadourian need not worry whether, "there (are)ways that increase the odds that the rebuilding after the polycrisis does not once again repeat modern civilizations' mistakes: treating Earth as an infinite pool of resources and waste sinks, forgetting humanity's dependence on this planet and the web of life humanity is woven into, and seeking empire over coexistence". There will never again be a modern civilization without the abundant fossil fuels that have long since been burned. The monks can put down their pens.