A conversation with Michael Lawrence and Megan Shipman who are from the Cascade Institute which is a Canadian research centre at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia about Polycrisis and the community they are supporting to understanding, mitigating and managing it.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Polycrisis Links
Transcript
Peter Hayward: What is a Polycrisis?.
Michael Lawrence: The differences between past poly crises and what we're seeing today isn't just history happening. We really are in uncharted territory and we're moving fast
Megan Shipman: We can say the four things that make this time very different. One, the total human energy consumption that we're having. Two, the Earth's energy imbalance.
Michael Lawrence: The earth energy imbalance is basically the difference between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy as heat. The amount of energy imbalance is today equal to detonating about a million Hiroshima sized atomic bombs in the atmosphere every day.
Megan Shipman: Many of our global systems are tied, to each other in ways that we've never experienced in the past.
Peter Hayward: And the fourth point was just the absolute scale of the global population?
Megan Shipman: Yeah, and I think it's not just our own footprint, but also of the food that we eat, particularly the meat and all of our livestock.
Peter Hayward: Those are my guests today on FuturePod. Michael Lawrence and Megan Shipman from the Cascade institute, which is a Canadian research center at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Michael and Megan.
Michael Lawrence: Thanks Peter, great to be here.
Megan Shipman: Excellent.
So who wants to start with the story of how they got involved with the Futures and Foresight community?
Michael Lawrence: I come from a background in the social sciences. I did an undergraduate program in peace and conflict studies, where I was especially interested in dynamics of conflict in world order. And then I went on to do my graduate work in the field of global governance, but still with a focus on conflict and security and further interests in a sort of co evolutionary approaches to the nature of world order and the changing forms of violent conflict that occur within different world orders.
But Amidst all of that, I've always really been applying a complex systems lens. I've always been very intrigued and engaged with the complexity literature. That's what led me to work with Thomas Homer Dixon for going on two decades now. And just as I was graduating, he went on to found the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, which is based in Victoria, British Columbia in Canada.
And the basic mission of the Institute is to apply complex systems thinking to think about how we can more quickly and justly transition societies to essentially more desirable and sustainable futures. So it's about thinking in systems terms about interventions that can help bring about.
More positive change in the world. Poly crisis is a key part of that mission and understanding what sorts of crises we're facing today and are likely coming down the pipe. But there's also programs in the energy transition with a focus on ultra deep geothermal and the Institute is also moving into what's called it's a political anti polarization program.
What a wonderful night. Exactly. The idea is to apply some of our systems thinking tools to ideological conflicts and diverse and diverse worldviews that are coming into play in a lot of these conflicts and a lot of these crises to try and ease some of that political polarization that we've seen deepening in recent years, try and counteract misinformation, and maybe once again, open some channels of dialogue on critical issues facing us.
Facing the world. So for my background, it was very much a natural fit to be at the Cascade Institute and I'm very happy there. I'll pass it to Megan.
Megan Shipman: All right. So my background's pretty different. I come from actually a STEM background where I did a PhD in neuroscience. My undergrad was in psychology.
And. I studied, a very complex system, the brain and so I was looking at that and its involvement in behaviors, learning and memory, I did empirical work with rats so pretty different from this I got involved in a Toronto Science Policy Network, and that's how I got really interested in these ideas and trying to bring more empirical work into The minds of policy makers, are into some sort of action, and I've been at Cascade Institute for about almost a year now, and my initial neuroscience has shifted more to looking at global health systems and interpreting polycrisis through that sort of stem empirical lens.
Peter Hayward: Thank you. It's an interesting addition when you added the the governance question, Michael, because one of the members of the Futures Community, Zia Sardar, He coined a phrase post normal in the sense that we're in a world where what we regarded as normal has gone and we haven't quite landed at the next place where the next normal is. So we're in this post normals phase. And what Zia talks about is that with the rise of information, there is an equal rise in ignorance. And it's now possible for people to actually be quite convinced of ignorance and actually wall themselves off. The governance systems that we have that have governed us for, hundreds and thousands of years, they are really struggling with the nature of crises that we face. Aren't they?
Michael Lawrence: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And you're right. We've always had the capacity for misinformation or delusion, but it's certainly turbo charged by social media technologies the prevalence of echo chambers and just. The amount of conflict and driving people towards more conspiratorial beliefs or driving them deeper into their own camps.
The way you phrased the question reminds me of the famous quote from E. O. Wilson, which you might've had in the back of your head that we have was that we have Neolithic psychology, medieval institutions, And God, like technological powers, that's the situation where we're in, where our brains as Megan can attest in greater detail are not equipped for the sorts of complex challenges we're working with today.
We're. Using institutions that were based largely on, on competition, on growth on vested interests and things of that sort. And we're dealing with technological change that is vastly outstripping our ability to govern it, let alone really understand what its implications might be.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And Megan, I was going to throw it to you just on that point that Michael's touched on that, that at a time when all these crises are occurring, the crises on of what, how people think in the face of this, and also how do people choose and follow leaders in times like this?
Megan Shipman: That's a great question.
I think we definitely, Have all these mental health crises going on. We have people who are struggling to comprehend what's going on in the world. And there's this whole thing going on now that we're seeing the authoritarian rise of those sorts of leaders. And it's not really clear what people want.
They want information. They want things to be better, but. It's hard to find those sorts of leaders who can provide them with those things, besides just empty promises,
Peter Hayward: I'm sure you're aware that there are people who say that it's more likely to be a benevolent authoritarian that actually gets things done under these situations, given that democracy is going to struggle with the law of 51 percent that as I said, I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but it's certainly been said that, a certain degree of authoritarianism, if it's actually imposed in the most beneficial ways might be what is needed.
Michael Lawrence: I think there's certainly an impulse to want to cut through the red tape and break through the break through the institutional barriers and really get done what needs to be done. But of course, the, one of the key parts of the challenge right now is that we can't agree on what needs to be done, what kind of world we want to get to.
We can scarcely agree on what kind of world we're in. We're less and less on the same page about the nature of our reality. And that's why I think as much as I understand the impulse towards the dream of the Cincinnati's figure where you can hand power to a benevolent dictator to save, save civilization or the Republic and have him or her handed back or they but I just don't think that's the case because it has to be.
A participatory and inclusive project. With the, some of the challenges that we're in, it's we, we go all or we go none.
Peter Hayward: And I think, to me, the fallacy in that authoritarian benevolence is the notion that there is an answer. And again, I'm schooled in way, way back in the days of what were called wicked systems analysis, this notion that really these systems are so complex and dynamic that we're always chasing our tail in learning what the system is doing next. We are not in control. No one's in control. The system has its own dynamic and our response to it, if it's intelligent, is more akin to both learning and nudging and learning and nudging and trying to get what hopefully is And out of control dynamic into a balance or, even a temporary equilibriums that we can then start to catch up. Have we now got cultures and leaders and a populace that are in a long term learning phase for dealing with these crises?
Michael Lawrence: For dealing with these crises, I'd say no. They're very ill positioned for exploiting these crises. They're masterful. Yeah. People like Donald Trump know exactly how to exploit people's sense of uncertainty of insecurity. And I think a key part of the problem is that we have seen the complexity of global systems of interdependence of all these things escalate and almost inversely, the more complex our problems, the more seductive, the simple solutions or the simple explanations and leaders do know how how to exploit that.
Yeah.
Peter Hayward: And. I suppose irony mightn't be the best word, but I'll use ironic that, a club of Rome produced a report what going on 60 years ago saying that if we don't actually change things, we're going to get to a place that we're not going to enjoy. And guess what?
Michael Lawrence: Yeah, we're not having fun anymore.
Peter Hayward: We're there. The Homer Dixon Vox article that, where he penned this notion of there being a polycrisis, and maybe we just start with that for the listener's benefit, he set the, I would say he set the cat amongst the pigeons when he wrote The Vox article.
Michael Lawrence: One of the key motivations for Tad, we call him Tad Homer Dixon for his Vox article there was, it was a sort of response to the idea of polycrisis.
It's a term that's been used more and more frequently. It has, it's critics. But it was actually essentially the buzzword of the 2023 Davos summit of the world economic forum. And that led to a huge spike in its web usage, its mentions, but also a lot of criticisms of this very concept.
A lot of people were very resistant that, anything that it comes from the mouth of Davos could have any validity. So there was a sort of guilt. By association of the concept with Davos, but it also created some, I guess a little bit more studied pushback from people, the likes of Neil Ferguson, the historian arguing that, we really don't need this new concept of poly crisis.
What we're seeing today is just history happening. We've been in these predicaments long before And he and other critics just arguing that, we don't need fancy new words. We just need to get back to business as usual. And, we aren't in this post normal situation. We just need to do better what we already know how to do, which is not obviously the position I take.
I'm quite. At the opposite of those ideas. And while I think it's productive to think historically about poly crises. Neil Ferguson's book, doom basically traces the history of intersections between health environments and climates and socioeconomic and political uprising. It does a very good job there, but does not really appreciate, I think.
The differences between past poly crises and what we're seeing today. So what Tad was trying to do in that Vox article was largely to respond to those types of critiques and emphasize just what features of the present day. Global poly crisis really make it unprecedented and unique. Why this isn't just history happening, why we really are in uncharted territory and we're moving fast
Megan Shipman: we can say the four things that make this time very different. That makes this a unique polycrisis, just because I think that would be helpful for everyone to hear.
So he cites one, the total human energy consumption that we're having. Mike, you can also feel free to elaborate on any of these points if you want. But it's transformed our civilization, obviously, to what it is now, but we're entirely reliant on it. Two, he cites the Earth's energy balance
Ooh, this is, Mike, do you have anything to say about the energy imbalance? Goes into very great detail about all of The calculations that I don't know that we want to do.
Michael Lawrence: The energy, the earth energy imbalance is basically the difference between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy as heat. And it's not only been escalating throughout the course of history since the industrial revolution, but over the last 20 years, it's been actually accelerating.
In a way that a lot of policymakers and the public have not fully come to grips with. In Tad's example, if I'm correct, basically the amount of energy imbalance is today equal to detonating about a million Hiroshima sized atomic bombs in the atmosphere. Every day, that's how much energy is coming in without going out.
And that's just unprecedented in human
Peter Hayward: history. If you go to the the model, it says it's all solar energy in solar energy out. But what we're doing is now we're actually expending solar energy accumulated over millennia. And we're actually, so we're actually releasing solar energy at a rate that is, as you say, the equivalent of releasing nuclear bombs worth of energies in the atmosphere.
Yeah and it's a kind of It's a geologic solar bounty that is finite and and as Megan said, we are 100 percent dependent on that system continuing forever.
Michael Lawrence: Exactly. Yep. And I think brings us to the second sort of strand of thought and in Todd's article, and I'll let Megan explain it better by getting to the growing complexity and interconnection of our global social systems and their links to the environment.
Megan Shipman: Absolutely. And so many of our global systems are tied. To each other in ways that we've never experienced in the past, I think a good example that everyone kind of recognizes is the pandemic. When we saw how everything was so connected at a virus go from 1 area of the globe to the other so quickly, just as we're used to doing.
We saw the transportation issues in terms of shipping. We weren't getting. The normal sorts of food and everything that we were supposed to. And then even just the interconnectedness that we have with our phones and who we can talk to and the groups that we can interact with. We're just so connected in ways that we're vulnerable in ways that we haven't yet predicted yet, because it's been able to mask a lot of our vulnerabilities by compensating for, Oh, if we want to get a some sort of thing that we mine from a region, we can easily get that.
But if. We're blocked from doing that now, then the whole system changes and we're not so resilient.
Peter Hayward: I think the other thing pandemic through, I think it is stark reality was the social inequality in societies that the very people who were at greatest risk were the lowest socioeconomic groups, because they were considered essential workers. Whereas many of the the more well off members were able to work from home. Work with comparative, get food in, get deliveries in. But the people who were beavering away in the machine were some of the poorest and and I think, as I say, that was another one of those things that. Yeah, came into stock reality. Absolutely.
Michael Lawrence: I think that's very true. And it's important that we saw that sort of inequality within our societies, but also at a more international level between countries that got access to healthcare, to vaccines quickly versus those that didn't.
That's obviously a schism that, that persists. And I think it's no coincidence that, you know, of all the sort of Racial tensions and racialized incidents that happen on a daily basis in the United States. It was during the pandemic that it really blew up into a mass protest movement with the murder of George Floyd.
Peter Hayward: And the fourth point. I think the fourth factor was just the absolute scale of the global population. I think the actual global footprint itself is that we are at levels of global footprint that we know we're consuming. Our footprint is, what do we need, what, two and a half or three Earths to sustain the footprint that we currently have.
Megan Shipman: Yeah, and I think it's not just our own footprint, but also of the food that we eat, particularly the meat and all of our livestock.
Peter Hayward: So Tad wrote the article, it, as you said, was in response to everybody quoting polycrisis from everything from, the bus not being on time to what Davos were putting up as the latest opportunity, and it caused its own kerfuffle. And then pleasingly, why I think we're here to talk today is that.
We're now getting to the stage of this is not about doom and gloom. This is about, we can do something
Michael Lawrence: Yeah just I guess a bit of the chronology there is we developed with some partners in Germany at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam.
Developed what is our theoretical framework and approach to polycrisis and polycrisis analysis, which in its more scholarly version is published in the journal global sustainability with open access. And then what Megan and I have done more recently is tried to make a more user friendly.
Version of that framework in what is our document introduction to polycrisis analysis, which tries to present that framework in a little bit more simple, less theoretical terminology and explain some of the techniques that we use to try and. Map and make sense of inter systemic connections and different crises interactions,
Megan Shipman: right?
Yeah. So I guess the first thing to talk about is just the way that we think about systems.
So the way that we think about systems is really as these basins of attraction. And so a stable system is at the bottom of a basin.
It's sitting there. There's these. I just want to use my hand so much for this, but I know this is audio. But
Peter Hayward: People can visualize you waving your hand.
Megan Shipman: So it's just steep on the outside. If it's the stable system and it's. Most systems are in this dynamic equilibrium, so they're not just sitting there, but the steepness of that basin allows them to stay near the bottom.
That's how we visualize a single system. And then a system that's in crisis, you would see with a much shallower basin or a ball that's been pushed up to the top of that steep slope so that it's sitting on the top and going to roll into another sort of basin. And so that's what we envision is a crisis, essentially this disequilibrium of a system, the ball sitting at the top of this, or in a very shallow basin where it might spill over at any point.
So that's the start. Mike, do you want to? Go on from here.
Michael Lawrence: Yeah, we are very visual thinkers, both ourselves and the Cascade Institute more generally. So that's the visual metaphor that we use on the underlying thinking about systems is that these global systems that we're seeing as either in or at risk of crisis.
We think of this basin of attraction is a set of Stabilizing feedbacks and core structural relationships that keep a system within a certain range of properties and behaviors. And it's when what we call systemic stresses things like maybe population growth or energy constraints these sorts of things, they start to shallow that basin.
So it basically erodes. The stability or the resilience of a particular equilibrium. And so when we see trigger events come along, say the transfer of a novel virus from animals to humans, it pushes the system out of its normal equilibrium. Into a state of what we think of as disequilibrium, where it's things are very unstable, volatile, unpredictable, and in that way, we understand crisis as a system forced from its typical equilibrium and in that volatile state, and of course, the crisis will end when it either returns to its earlier equilibrium or finds a new one.
And so to the extent that we're actually through the pandemic, for instance, our health systems have largely returned to the sorts of equilibrium that was pre, that predated the COVID pandemic, but that equilibrium is much shallow. Much shallower, much less resilient because we've had all the strain of the pandemic on our health systems.
And in many ways we've had health problems just accumulate and health services deteriorate. Of course the pandemic could have. Pushed health systems into an equilibrium defined by health system collapse. And for the most part, largely avoided that, but it could have pushed us, pushed our health systems into a new equilibrium that was based on radically re envisioning healthcare and health institutions.
And who knows, maybe that will be a more long term consequences, the transformation of health systems. But we did see, or at least in our interpretation, we can understand the pandemic as A series of stresses, like the density of global interconnection as a vector like increasing contacts between animals and humans in part driven by climate change, in part driven by urban sprawl and development with the trigger events of that zoonotic transfer of the.
SARS CoV 2 virus as the push of the system out of that equilibrium. And then ultimately to some extent returning to the earlier equilibrium, but in, in a way that we're still much worse off and still very vulnerable. That's just the way that we try and conceive crisis in specifically systemic terms.
The next step, that's crisis, not polycrisis. And the next step, which I'll let Megan tackle here is how crises in different systems defined in that way as being outside of equilibrium in this volatile state, how those crises interact.
Megan Shipman: Yeah, so that's a huge element of this. This grammar that we've developed of how different elements of these systems interact to cause the poly crisis and not just a single crisis.
So there's a number of those. Mike told you about the stresses and trigger events and how those. combined lead to crises. What we see for polycrisis is all sorts of interactions. One is we might see a stress in one system interacting with the stress in another system. So that can be a few things.
I think the example that we have in this paper is that the food system If you have this ongoing stress of food insecurity, that can interact with the economic system, people who are food insecure, aren't able to climb out of poverty at all. They have to then devote their money more towards food.
And so we see this kind of ongoing pressure of the stresses and these two systems affecting each other and making them. And so that's not necessarily a crisis at this point, but they're interacting in ways that are degrading the systems. Then we also have this interaction between stresses in one system and a trigger event in the other system.
An example of this might be just what we saw in in the pandemic. Or in that we might see in a future pandemic, we see this ongoing stress of we're invading these ecological systems. We're having greater contact with animals that we've never interacted with before. So we're increasing our chances of having more zoonotic disease spill over.
So these interactions are this ongoing stress that we have. You'd say in the ecological system, potentially but then that interacts with the trigger event of that code to spill SARS spillover that we saw for the pandemic and pushed multiple systems into crisis when we have the pandemic.
Peter Hayward: What's been interesting from a both historical and also in terms of a polar crisis thing has been how the Ukraine wars played out because the Ukraine war is an old war. Now, whereas this is like a continuing war that you know, back to Noel Ferguson, yes, this is actually history playing out and what happened.
In the case of that was we had the old team was formed, the old sort of allied was formed and, the good guys, if you want to use that sort of thing that they came together, but the difference is they haven't got the economic firepower that the other guys have got, they aren't able to produce enough material to compete.
It's also impacted dramatically on their electoral processes, because we're seeing right through Europe at the moment, that we're suddenly finding it's, if you like it, while it was a, an historical event that we well understood and we well understood how to respond to, The crisis was what it did to the, what it did to the political systems and what it showed was the reality of the economic systems that existed and it's, so this wasn't the old history playing out, this was in fact a new history.
Michael Lawrence: I think that's very much the case there. And it's especially interesting how the Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its effects are really tied up in, in the energy transition. Because you can go back to the Fukushima disaster in combination with growing concern about climate change prompts Europe to move against nuclear energy in an attempt to ramp up green energy, which in many cases they have done just not to the extent that we'd hoped.
And so inadvertently fostered a certain. Deepening of European dependence on Russian fossil fuel sources. Once you have that, you have Putin emboldened, annexing Crimea, lukewarm, tepid response from the international community. Can't stop him. He gets emboldened further, goes further into the Ukraine.
And. Thankfully puts Europe at the risk of a really acute energy crisis, which was not as severe as it could have been just because we lucked out or well, Europe lucked out and had a particularly warm winter after. The Ukraine invasion, but of course we've seen the ramifications on energy markets worldwide, energy price spikes.
And also of course the cost of fertilizers in food production as a downstream consequence of the war in Ukraine, just the spike in energy. Prices then affecting the costs of producing fertilizers and leaving a lot of poor countries in particular ill able to actually plant and harvest crops at a time of, in many cases, droughts and other acute stresses and acute problems in those countries.
Megan Shipman: Another interaction is crises in one system might interact with the stresses and trigger events of another system.
And we'll talk about the pandemic again. It's just such a good salient. Example of a crisis that everyone can think about clearly we've found so if we think about the pandemic as a crisis of the health system, then that interacts with stresses and trigger events in a separate system, the economic system in quite a few ways.
Stresses. There's ultra loose credit socioeconomic inequality. There's a number of. These stresses that we see the pandemic interacting with but the trigger event that it really caused that resulted in an economic crisis was just all the fiscal responses that governments had in order to try to rein in the pandemic ultimately triggered this cost of living crisis or inflation that we saw.
And so then this one last interaction we have Is between two crises. So prototypical poly crisis. This is when You see one crisis is just playing off of one another. Exacerbating each other and causing new issues that we haven't seen. And so this positive feedback is really dangerous. We see this now with the climate crisis.
And that's interacting with international security and migration in a way that's Pretty scary. So any sort of climate disaster can result in increased migration, which then can undermine further want to pause for one second. Sorry, I've lost my train of thought.
How do I phrase this better? Okay. So we see this interaction between a want and this cooperation between international groups, where they want to work towards climate change and they want to Work towards diverting that, but with migrants coming in, we see this diverting away of funds and attention towards trying to solve that crisis.
And that can then loop back on the first crisis and that sorry.
Let me think about how we phrase it here. I feel like I'm not Mike. Do you want to say this in a better way? I'm struggling with it.
Michael Lawrence: Sure. I think the last sort of crisis interaction that we try and highlight here is The way that a crisis in one system can interact and reshape a crisis in another system, which then feedback feeds back and reshapes the crisis in the first system. So when we have any sort of international security crisis, things like the Ukraine or tensions over Taiwan, these sorts of things, one of the unfortunate consequences is that it can divert attention and resources from other areas of international cooperation.
Like mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change. And so as climate change worsens, it can produce things like resource conflicts, uncontrolled flows of migrants and other sources of contention that can then worsen international security issues or deepen international conflicts. And so in that way, we just see that the two crises happening in parallel will interact and feedback upon.
One another, but I think the overall point that we're trying to get to here is that by. Thinking in systems terms about crises as products of this interaction of these long term systems stresses, and then the short term trigger events that ultimately push our systems out of a dynamic equilibrium and into this volatile crisis state that gives us.
What Megan calls a grammar or a way to start thinking about interactions across systems and across system crises in different systems in that there are a lot of stresses that are affecting multiple systems and there are a lot of density interconnections between these systems so that a trigger event can come from one and activate a crisis in another crises interact and feedback on one and one another.
And in this way we can start. Mapping some of the causal connections that are, or at least have been largely opaque.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, the way I would grasp it, there are the crisis and events That actually caused the stresses and the actual effects like climate and so forth.
And then there are the crises that are going on in our response systems. And often, and what can happen is you can overwhelm a response system. Because it's got its own set of crises. And so if our response systems aren't able to cope with the crisis, then the actual crisis gets worse. And as the crisis gets worse, the response system becomes more and more fragile.
I think Megan described that in the state of our health system that our health system got through. I think it didn't collapse, but a lot of the people did. And a lot of the people left the industry. Education was another one. I wonder, even when we closed the schools, people knew they were kicking the can down the road and there were going to be long term health problems with young people as a result of what they were doing.
The response to COVID was, and here we are now, three, four years later, and those crises now that, that were almost set in train are now creating their own sets of their own dynamic. And I dare say the health crisis with young people is now triggering its own crisis in other systems that we possibly aren't aware of, whether it's families, whether it's the ability of school teachers to stay in school.
Megan Shipman: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're totally right with that. And some of our examples, we had that too, that it's the response that's actually triggering something. And I think you're right too, that we don't know all of the things that we've done with all of our COVID restrictions that we've put into place, but it could have exacerbated this more polarized way of being just the masks mandates and all of those sorts of things we can.
See some of the effects of those had just the young people and socialization and things that we haven't thought of yet. And I keep thinking of more as I'm talking, but yeah the burnout that we're seeing from doctors and nurses from putting everything onto them, but then the burnout from teachers too, and the education system in terms of, I know.
So many people who were teachers and left around the time of COVID because they had to teach online and it was awful and parents as well. But I think you're right. In part of our analysis, we need to think about how we have responded and maybe created our own problems in a different system because of those responses
Peter Hayward: and you wrote the paper and you've done a workshop and I want to, and I want to move to the workshop because.
We're doing this in order, not just simply to say we're in trouble. I think we know we're in trouble is, and you're trying to produce an academic framework and a language and a discipline around how to study this. But we're actually trying to do this so we can do things. So we can at least learn or get an understanding or get or get commonality in how we see it.
And I think that's the point Of what you wrote is this trying to move from, we're in trouble to, can we understand it such that we can actually possibly do something about it? So what was the workshop that you ran?
Michael Lawrence: What we've seen in recent years is that there's this growing community of concern around the world who have focused on this concept of polycrisis and the recognition that we really don't quite understand the extent of the mess we're in. We're seeing these novel systemic interactions, and we need new ways of thinking and acting.
And so part of our goal at the Cascade Institute is to try and bring this community together and grow it into what we would. Typically in academics, we call, a proper field that is a group of people within a common set of conceptual frameworks, looking at common problems and in similar ways and trying to produce unique ways of actually addressing those problems.
And so we think that. This whole idea of polycrisis, the concept, and then developing it into novel theoretical framework to give us something novel and essential in understanding the situation that we're in. And so that's really the first part of the work is trying to better understand what's actually going on in the world, but also to encourage I think more people to think in these sorts of ways and make contributions to this sort of analysis and its translation into practice.
And so it's still very much as a field in its infancy, but I think there's a lot of. Key points that are drawing a lot of people towards this polycrisis idea, mainly the recognition that we need to think in systems. The idea that simple solutions to single problems are not going to work anymore, which is largely because so many of our problems don't have singular root causes.
They're deeply rooted in system interactions in multiple Causal chains and this whole intertangled global web. And I think, yeah, a lot of people really recognizing that we're at a very unique and potentially precipitous moments in human history, especially as the climate crisis grows more acute.
We know more and more that we're approaching tipping points within key earth systems. And the fear is that we could see a sort of runaway disaster as crises in multiple systems, amplify one another, take us behind or beyond some sort of point of no return and see this all. spiral into something that we really haven't seen in human history, because we haven't, we've had collapse, we've had adaptation, we've had death and rebirth, but never quite at the scale of a globally integrated system like we're seeing now.
And so part of the conference was really to bring together a lot of people who tend to think in those kinds of big picture ways to talk about, Both how we understand the polycrisis, how we study polycrisis but also how we nurture this type of thinking and try and actually translate it into changed practices, different types of policy.
And I think to get back to your kind of core focus on futures thinking, just the recognition that A key part of the problem is that we, as we discussed before we can't necessarily agree on where we want to go or what options we really have for the future. We can't agree on where we are, but we know that that kind of conflict, that lack of communication, that inability to speak to one another is a core part of all of these challenges.
And so a key Part of the practical implications that came out of our workshop are that the need for more participatory processes of governance, better conflict management, but also mechanisms of dialogue where people can actually start visioning futures. Be they disastrous or desirable in a way where they can actually speak to one another again and be constructive and, can think collectively about where we want to go because ultimately as you indicated before Peter, the challenge of a lot of these global systems is that nobody's really in control.
That doesn't mean that there aren't people in groups that are much more responsible and that should be held accountable. But it's to say that even when you do that doesn't necessarily give you the sort of controls that you'd like. And so if I can reiterate the point I made earlier one of the key themes to come out of this workshop, at least for me is, we're We have to face this together and we need solutions that actually work for everybody, because if it works only for some, then it's ultimately going to work for none early.
So that's the way I see it.
Peter Hayward: I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We're able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons, like Fabienne Goux-Baudiment who has been a long time patron. Thanks for the support Fabienne. If you'd like to join Fabienne as a patron of the Pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.
Peter Hayward: I think Megan, I'm interested in this notion of whether people can do this level of in depth inquiry and hold. The level of ambiguity that is necessary to be able to sit in these poly crises and learn from it. And I'm encouraged by what you're saying about this having to be participatory rather than elites talking to themselves in a narrow language.
You have to both have people having the high level conversations, but people have to feel they are participating in it. Otherwise they are not going to support it.
Megan Shipman: Absolutely. And that's something that definitely came up in the workshop that we need to be more inclusive because it's academics. We tend to just talk to each other.
The cascade institutes try to. Branch that out a bit more and do more op eds and do more policy briefs and things so that we can get people to read this. But we still need traffic to the site in order to do this. But something that really came up was our research needs to be for people. We need to listen to people about it.
And we need to it. Include them in it and people at all levels. Particularly we need the global North and global South to communicate. Global South already experiencing a lot climate change issues that the global North is just starting to deal, have to deal with. And so that's one big inclusivity that we need to have.
Another one is even just people who are in poor communicate, poor communities who don't. Feel included in a more academic scholarly that sort of community. They need to be involved. We need the youth involved. We need to bring things down from this high level analysis to find ways to communicate complex systems thinking to people in ways that they can incorporate it in their own lives.
And it doesn't feel so abstract, which is what some of this feels to a lot of people right now. I think absolutely inclusivity is our next step on this. And it came up over and over again in so many different ways and all of the discussions that we had there.
Peter Hayward: I just did a series of podcasts with the APF. They have an awards process called the if awards, which are where they give nominations to people who do the most significant futures work for a year. And I did. I did very short interviews with a lot of the winners. And what struck me was a lot of them were gamifying futures concepts.
In other words, producing games or dynamical games that could be taken and played amongst farmers to understand the climate system or the way that logging affected that. I know it's early days in polycrisis, but the notion of, gaming has its own dynamics, that, games themselves can carry a lot of scripted, of course.
But games are ways that people can play and participate. And the experience of people who do these gaming and take gaming into the field is that people are actually quite able To understand systemic nature of things, because it's their lives, they understand nature, they understand rainfall, they understand what happens with crops and pests and everything else.
And so I know it's very early days and obviously you've got a lot of things you've got to try and cover, but something around the gamifying it to make it accessible. To deal with language problems and education problems. I think, as I said, I've, I was struck by how many of these innovations just last year were centered around a gaming dynamic.
Michael Lawrence: I think that's great. And it's an example of sort of these more unconventional, but. highly participatory, inclusive and surprising methods that we can use to rebuild some of these dialogues and think about these problems. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I know that one of our colleagues Eric Asadorian at the guy in way Has developed an extension set for Settlers of Catan that incorporates a fossil fuel energy regime into the game.
And so in that vein, I think there's a lot of potential to see through play through these games, how certain scenarios will play out. And there's also a lot of opportunity about storytelling futures, which I'm sure you're well aware of, but just thinking and envisioning the kinds of features that we want to see, how we might get there.
There's very incredible imaginative fiction, like the ministry for the future. And others, but of course also burgeoning genre on, on societal collapse and. I think part of people are fascinated by societal collapse, especially right now and with apocalyptic film and these sorts of things.
So I think part of the reason is not just that it seems all hopeless and that we're doomed and it's totally bleak, but I think a lot of that fascination comes from a yearning for a chance to really shake things up. See things break down and start again, even though we know that in practice, that would be a very very harmful transition.
But I think people are also sick with the status quo and hoping and looking for these opportunities to. Build better. We keep hearing the phrase build back better. I don't know if we've really built back much at all, but there's definitely a yearning and we heard it throughout the pandemic that, we should never let a good crisis go to waste.
And so the flip side of catastrophe as Tad Homer Dixon has written about in the upside of down is really the opportunity for. Renewal and transformational change. And I think you see that quite a lot today. And so in a sense, hope is the flip side of fear and disaster.
Peter Hayward: So if people, if.
If listeners want to know more or want to participate or want to get involved, how might they do that?
Megan Shipman: First of all involvement is our next step, but to learn more, definitely they should go to polycrisis. org. It is this, or the Cascade Institute website, but the polycrisis. org is a. Non biased just pure polycrisis learning.
Mike developed this learning journey that you can take through it. That's really excellent, where you can start with. What is polycrisis? How did this term develop? And walk through everything step by step. We have this whole resource library where we're constantly updating it. And members of our team are just making sure that we have the most up to date, anything that people are publishing about poly crisis on their some links out to all of those.
We have events that are coming up, so you can know if there's any. Webcast coming. We can these releases on there. But yeah, there's it's a lot of great resources there. So that's the best step that I think anyone could take if they want to learn more. Mike, do you have more that you want to add?
Michael Lawrence: Just that polycrisis.
org we've intended to be a sort of community building hub for anyone who's interested in this in polycrisis or this way of thinking. And in addition to the learning journey, the events roster and the resource library, we also have a very, spiffy community map or a stakeholder map of people who are increasingly involved in this discourse and this discussion and how they relate to each other and it lets us help track how this community is growing and what opportunities we might have for collaborations and building a more representative and diverse group of polychristist thinkers around the world.
Peter Hayward: Awesome. Congratulations to the two of you on your paper and the workshop. And I really wish well for Cascade Institute and obviously the polycrisis. org and what you're doing. It is needed. So thank you for your work. And thanks for taking some time out to have a chat with the podcast community.
Thank you so much.
Michael Lawrence: Thanks for reaching out.
Peter Hayward: I hope like me you think the work that the Cascade institute is doing on firstly understanding the complexity of the crisis we're in, but then most importantly, finding what we can do to ameliorate it is really important. And I'm sure both Megan and Michael would be interested in collaborating with anyone working in this space. So reach out to them if you think you're one of those people. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please follow the Patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me. And I'll see you next time.