The central risk of climate change is not gradual warming. It is reorganisation. The Earth system may be approaching, or may already be entering, a phase transition. Complex systems rarely fail all at once. They drift, they desynchronise, and then they reorganise. The shift is rarely theatrical. It emerges from relations, from accumulated imbalance, from […]
He noticed it first in the rhythm of things. Not the temperature, which always wandered, but the timing. Winter arrived on the calendar and not in the soil. Rain came hard and left quickly, as if it had somewhere else to be. Summer stretched, then stretched again, like a conversation that had lost its point […]
For a long time, serious problem-solving assumed the world could be broken into parts, those parts analysed separately, and the larger situation improved by fixing each component in turn. That still works for bounded problems. It fails when the object is not a part but a whole system composed of vast numbers of interdependent subsystems […]
Honesty or extinction. That’s the choice. Climate change isn’t a crisis outside us—it’s the mirror of everything we’ve built. Our systems, proud and precise, are designed to defend their own definitions. Governments, universities, corporations—all fluent in continuity, allergic to contradiction. They confuse repetition with stability, and stability with survival. But the planet doesn’t care for […]
Responsibility belongs to all, everywhere. There may be nothing more sacred than the nature in which—and for which—we exist as sentient expressions. Forests are cathedrals; mountains are temples; rivers are bridges of communication deeper and more elegant than we’ve yet even begun to understand. Might it be that divinity treasures all life, all being, all […]
Engaging whole and holistic systems is a little like trying to orchestrate and sustain the infinitely complex requisite variety of a universal remote control. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯/𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦, 𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘴: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘴𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺) 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 – […]
We rarely pause for thought to consider that all of this accelerating sociotechnical speciation and generative utility precisely is the drift through combinatorial complexity into states of maximum entropy. It remains as something of a collective (perhaps collaborative) blindspot that organisational order is profoundly dependent upon unrecoverable loss and stochastic uncertainty. The same observation applies […]
A significant problem percolates through all this melting ice: the decomposable modularity of our languages, technologies and organisational systems remains functionally unable to comprehensively or sustainably address the complexity or scale of this issue. Subsequently, we find ourselves inhabiting and endlessly replicating media tropes of hollow platitudes and inherited generalisations that are simply not sophisticated […]
The climate crisis is pretty much beyond salvaging now. Serial failures of governance, collaboration, intellect and co.passion have led us to the brink. All of this alongside the fact that a number of imperialist dictators around the world never learnt the first less of power (that potential conflict is both more effective and cost efficient […]
Context: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: ‘Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls?’ America boosting oil and gas production is ‘not against’ climate change I suspect that his opinion is, much and in one way or another as are all systems of belief, a function of the extent to which language as abstraction has […]
Context: In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics It is worth considering that the distributed material waste we can detect must only ever represent the most diminutive hyper-slice of a much vaster and more intricately complex dynamical system. It is a general problem of measurement as much as of the conceptual languages and normative grammars we […]
The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]
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