Welcome to the great unraveling - and a love which defies gravity

 

The Post Carbon Institute has recently published the report Welcome to the great unraveling. Navigating the polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown. The concept polycrisis points to a situation where crisis in multiple global systems becomes causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanitys prospects. The different crisis interact in ways which produce more harm than each crisis would have made, had it happened in isolation. The report claims that the current global environmental and social polycrisis is evidence that humanity is entering the Great Unraveling - a time of consequences in which human impact are compunding to threaten the very environmental and social systems that support modern human civilization. 

The report describes social challenges as poverty, inequality, racism and other forms of discrimination as consequences of environmental challenges and the following scarcity in many areas, and as related symptoms of systemic failure. The report also predicts that extreme political tension will grow in the context of a highly unequal world, wherein collective survival may depend on those with the most power surrendering some of their advantages. Self-reinforcing feedbacks between ecological breakdown and social breakdown will grow more numerous.  

The report suggests that responding to the great unraveling implies new ways of thinking and acting and being in the world: "To think the unthinkable, to accept uncertainty, to resist both hopelessness and blind optimism" (p. 32). Some of the important changes which are needed is to let go of linear and siloed thinking and start thinking in terms of systems and multisolving strategies, moving from exploitation to collective care, and adopting different stories of humanitys relationship with one another and the natural world. 

One way of creating different stories to live by, other stories than the modern story about conquering and exploiting nature and eachother to create economical growth, is to return to old stories from people who have lived more aligned with nature. Indigenous societies tended to have a more holistic understanding of the world and humanitys place in it, and their stories are a source of inspiration and hope. Even though there are important elements of the modern western mindset, like scientific method and critical thinking, which are essential for future societies, there is a need now for a great unraveling of our current mindset which is based on consumerism, materialism and ecological destruction.

The great unraveling of the prevalent belief systems will require radical uncertainty and courage to be in the unknown, and a radical love for eachother and nature, a love which defies gravity and the strong forces of separatedness and polarization.