A Cascade of Failures: The Polycrisis Defined
A short explanation of the simultaneous global crises.
I have written quite a bit about the polycrisis, but mostly from an environmental/ecological standpoint. While I posit that the underlying elements of every aspect of the polycrisis stem from resource overshoot, there is actually much more to it.
To be clear, we live in the age of the polycrisis — a cacophony of interlocking disasters, a perfect storm of humanity’s worst failures converging into a single catastrophic reality. It’s not just one crisis. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once, and it’s spiraling toward us faster than we can comprehend.
Climate change, economic instability, political fragmentation, pandemics, and resource exhaustion are no longer isolated issues; they are compounding, amplifying, and feeding off one another. If you thought the chaos of the past decade was as bad as it gets, brace yourself. We are only at the beginning.
The Genesis of a Terrifying Concept
The term polycrisis isn’t just some intellectual buzzword conjured up in academic echo chambers. It has roots in the work of French theorist Edgar Morin and economic historian Jean-François Rischard. In the early 2000s, they sought a term to encapsulate the idea that…
