Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown

* Book: Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown. Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg. Post-Carbon Institute, June 15, 2023.

URL = https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/welcome-to-the-great-unraveling/

Description

"During the 20th century, and especially the latter half of the century, humanity’s increasing adoption of fossil fuels as sources of cheap and abundant energy enabled rapid industrialization. The result was a massive increase in nearly all human activities and their ecological and social impacts, a process that has been called the Great Acceleration. The first two decades of 21st century saw a new phase of the Great Acceleration, with wars fought over the last sources of cheap oil, expensive and destructive exploitation of remaining natural resources, the massive use of debt and speculation to expand energy production and maintain economic growth, and the arrival of environmental and social impacts too overwhelming for even the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people and nations to ignore.

Now, in the 2020s, the Great Acceleration is losing steam and shows signs of reversing direction. Thought leaders and policy think tanks have invented a new word—polycrisis—to refer to the tangles of global environmental and social dilemmas that are accumulating, mutually interacting, and worsening. The central claim of this report is that the polycrisis is evidence that humanity is entering what some have called the Great Unraveling—a time of consequences in which individual impacts are compounding to threaten the very environmental and social systems that support modern human civilization. The Great Unraveling challenges us to grapple with the prospect of a far more difficult future, one of mutually exacerbating crises—some acute, others chronic—interacting across environmental and social systems in complex ways, at different rates, in many places, and with different results.

Welcome to the Great Unraveling is intended to help the general public—but particularly academics and researchers, environmental and social justice nongovernmental organizations and their funders, and the media—recognize what the Great Unraveling is, what it means for both human civilization and the global ecosystem, and what we can do in response.

The paper calls attention to four main things:

1. the alarming, rapidly changing environmental and social conditions of the Great Unraveling;
2. the need to grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and conflicting priorities—hallmarks of the Great Unraveling;
3. the need to maintain social cohesion within societies and peaceful relations between them during the Great Unraveling, while implementing key changes in collective behavior and managing the negative consequences of past failures to act; and
4. the personal competencies that are needed to understand what’s happening during the Great Unraveling and to respond constructively, primarily by building household and community resilience for this precarious time."

Excerpts

The Spectrum of Destabilization, via Breakdown, to Collapse

Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg

"When we refer to the condition of various systems or the entire state of society, terminology becomes challenging for two main reasons:

1) it is difficult to empirically and consistently quantify conditions across distinct systems like global finance or a local coral reef, and

2) terms like “collapse” tend to engender subjective responses. As resilience scientists Graeme Cumming and Garry Peterson have observed, “…the questions of how much and what kind of change constitutes a collapse, whether fast and slow changes both qualify as ‘collapse’, and whether collapse must have a normative dimension (and if so, then who decides on that dimension, since it may depend on perspective) are all contested.”

Cumming, Peterson, and many others have attempted to correct for often arbitrary and conflicting uses of concepts like “collapse” within academic literature by developing more comprehensive frameworks. While such frameworks are valuable, our intent here is simply to provide those concerned with systemic environmental and social challenges with clear and consistent use of terms like destabilization, breakdown, and collapse—particularly as they relate to one another on a continuum. The far end of that continuum is collapse. For our purposes, the collapse of a system—whether a pine forest, the market for insulin, or the global economy—entails a lasting loss of functioning or the loss of the entire identity of that system, as when a savannah ecosystem shifts to a desert.

The difference between the destabilization of a system and its breakdown can be more difficult to define, as it largely pertains to degree of severity. When a system undergoes destabilization, it experiences notable changes in its functioning or behavior. This destabilization is not merely an isolated event or perturbation, as when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) experiences a dramatic, short-lived loss in value, but rather a pattern of repeated discontinuities. These patterns of discontinuity could last a long time—for example, if the Dow Jones undergoes repeated, dramatic jumps and drops in value for many months—to the point where such patterns are viewed as “the new normal.” What’s key is that these patterns reflect instability. What differentiates breakdown from destabilization is that a system undergoing breakdown experiences a profound loss of function or structure, though this is neither permanent nor entails the loss of that system’s identity (that would be its collapse).

Sticking with the example of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, its destabilization could entail a pattern of dramatic, unpredictable shifts in value (up 8 percent one week, down 5 percent the next, up 3 percent again, down 9 percent again, and so on for a significant period of time); its breakdown would occur when all that instability leads to shareholders suddenly fleeing the market in large numbers, compelling the DJIA operators to temporarily suspend all trading); and its collapse would stem from such a loss of value or number of traders that a critical mass of companies listed in the market abandons it, or it is forced to close permanently."

(https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/welcome-to-the-great-unraveling/)

Antisocial Responses to Scarcity

Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg:

"Social scientists studying modern human responses to natural disasters or to sudden collective deprivation have noted a typical pattern of behavior: initially, people pull together.95 They share what they have, volunteering their efforts to help neighbors and strangers. However, if scarcity continues for many months or years, then cooperative behavior gradually dwindles, and each individual’s circle of trust diminishes significantly.

Often, scarcity can lead to violence—both within and between societies—though the linkage is usually indirect.96 For example, in Pakistan, rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and inefficient farming practices caused increasing scarcity of both cropland and water by the early 1990s.97 A resulting urban influx of migrants altered the ethnic balance in the cities, leading to long-running conflict.

Sometimes, leaders stoke the fires of war with other nations in hopes of obtaining control of scarce resources or simply as a way to maintain domestic cohesion. Archaeologists and historians have noted that earlier societies experienced higher levels of warfare when faced with resource shortages brought about by population growth or persistent drought.

Other times, elites compete among themselves, leading to factional division and civil war. Examples that emerge from historical studies of environmentally-driven civil conflict include the Chiapas rebellion, the Rwandan genocide, violence between Senegal and Mauritania, civil conflict in the Philippines, and ethnic violence in Assam, India. In civil disputes such as these, minorities nearly always suffer the worst casualties.

Foreseeable triggers for future conflict center on the impacts of climate change, population growth, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation. At the same time, in recent decades the means of conflict have proliferated, as weapons have grown more numerous, deadly, and sophisticated—now including (globally) an estimated one billion guns, 14,000 nuclear warheads, and new cyberweapons capable of crippling power grids or energy and water supplies for entire nations."

(https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/welcome-to-the-great-unraveling/)