
Conversations about the Polycrisis
Conversations about the Polycrisis is a series of in-person, community meetings to learn about and share ideas, thoughts and feelings about the crises in our modern industrial society. For more information about the resources we will draw on, take a look at Exploring the Polycrisis.
2025 Schedule
We will be holding another six meetings in January–March 2025. These will be fortnightly on Tuesdays, 8.00 pm – 10.00 pm. There is a provisional schedule below but it is still a work in progress.
8.00pm–10.00pm, Tuesday 7th January 2025
(Novara Media) Ash Sarkar in conversation with Sunil Amrith — The History of Rice, Air-Con and How The Mongols Really Won. What if instead of talking about history from the perspective of humanity, we told it from the perspective of the resources that made human expansion possible?
8.00pm–10.00pm, Tuesday 21st January 2025
(The Great Simplification) Nate Hagens in conversation with Erik Fernholm — Inner Development Goals: Cultivating Change from the Inside Out. The deeper we dive into the complexity of the metacrisis, the more it becomes apparent that the changes we desire in our communities, governments, and societies must start with individual mindsets and behaviors. But what practices can help us cultivate this shift in consciousness?
8.00pm–10.00pm, Tuesday 4th February 2025
(Accidental Gods) Manda Scott in conversation with Nick Weir — The Power of (Good) Food. [T]he Open Food Network … is a global community of farmers, growers, community food enterprises and software geeks with a common belief that world food systems are broken — and that better, more connected, open, resilient systems can arise in their place. They are building alternative food systems from the bottom up.
8.00pm–10.00pm, Tuesday 18th February 2025
(Novara Media) Ash Sarkar in conversation with Stephanie Kelton — Could ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ Save the World? Stephanie Kelton is an author and economist, and subject of the new film ‘Finding The Money’. Her work as a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory and as an advisor to Bernie Sanders has put her front and center of the debate around government debt, taxation and the potential green industrial revolution.
8.00pm–10.00pm, Tuesday 4th March 2025
(The Great Simplification) Nate Hagens in conversation with Vanessa Andreotti – Hospicing Modernity and Rehabilitating Humanity. Vanessa Andreotti brings a unique framing [of the polycrisis] rooted in indigenous knowledge and relationality to aid in understanding, grieving, and building emotional resilience within this space.
8.00pm–10.00pm, Tuesday 18th March 2025
TBD
2024 Schedule
8.00pm–10.00pm, 13th November 2024
Jason Hickel, Sam Fankhauser: How to save the planet: Degrowth vs Green Growth
8.00pm–10.00pm, 27th November 2024
Art Berman: Energy Wars (Planet: Critical)
8.00pm–10.00pm, 11th December 2024
Kate Raworth: The Doughnut v. the Superorganism (The Great Simplification)
What’s a polycrisis?
A polycrisis is where we currently find ourselves: a number of overlapping and interdependent crises that converge and amplify each other. There’s the climate emergency of course, but also huge losses in biodiversity, political polarisation, extreme levels of financial inequality, pervasive pollution of the biosphere, limits to growth imposed by depleted energy and mineral reserves, fragility of the global financial system… the list goes on.
Is there anything we can do?
It’s hard to get one’s head around the complexity of the polycrisis and there is a temptation to just focus on day-to-day concerns without worrying too much about what might be heading our way in the future.
The first thing we can do is learn more about the predicament we find ourselves in. Without properly understanding the problems — and their systemic origin — it’s unlikely that we will know where to look for solutions. Conversations about the polycrisis is an opportunity to come together as a group so that we can build resilience to confront the unprecedented shocks that are impacting modern society. The proposed format is simple: we spend about an hour watching a video together and another hour sharing questions, reflections and feelings. The videos themselves will involve conversations between knowledgeable, passionate and articulate people.
The topics we can sample are wide-ranging, including AI, art, biology, climate justice, colonialism, ecology, economics, finance, geology, history, music, systems change, physics, politics, psychology, regenerative agriculture, sociology. More information about the videos, podcasts, and other relevant resources is available at Exploring the Polycrisis. We will decide as a group how to navigate through this space.