The greatest danger from climate change isn’t the heat.
It isn’t the incremental changes to the composition of the soil, or the habitat of polar bears, or even rising ocean levels. The danger is the social stress it will bring. It’s already started, and without immediate progress toward mitigating our carbon output, it’s sure to continue.
I’ve been concerned about this for a while, but I’ve never known what to call it. Climate change steals resources. A well runs dry. An insurance company takes a territory offline because it’s too expensive. The loss of each small, individual resource adds a little bit more stress to the entire social system. It’s slow and quiet, but as it builds, we feel a little more anxious. We feel betrayed by the failure of a social contract we created centuries ago. The contract was supposed to make us safer and more productive in exchange for giving up unconstrained individual liberty. The breakdown of the contract leads to anger and polarization, something we’re seeing more of every day.
It turns out this phenomenon has a name: polycrisis. Scientists who study it combine disciplines including anthropology, history, and sociology to explore how multiple vectors of crisis can combine to form bigger problems.
Dr. Daniel Hoyer is a computational historian and complexity scientist who draws from historical lessons to assess how polycrisis might factor into our reaction to climate change. In my interview with him we discuss what polycrisis is, how it erodes public trust, what lessons it may give us about where we go from here, and more.
The reason I consider it our biggest challenge is that we need public trust in order to make the hard choices climate change demands. Humans have work to do. We are a global species, and the solution to this crisis will require voices which not only cross geographic lines but ideological ones. With the passing of each day that we don’t lean into the difficult conversations that lead to forward movement, our fear grows. When we distrust each other because of ideological differences, it’s that much harder to come together and solve this.
Charles C. Mann divides the response to climate change into two camps: the wizards and the prophets. The wizards want to science our way out of the problem. The prophets believe we must deindustrialize and reduce consumption. I fall somewhere in the middle. While there will always be a role for the wizards, our consumption has been unsustainable since before we were aware climate change was happening. And as I discuss with Dr. Hoyer, we must acknowledge that many of the problems we see now stem from the wizarding solutions we implemented in the past, creating consequences that were invisible until decades later.
A lot of posts and interviews at The Lizard Brain Project concern humans’ biological evolution. Viewing climate change as a polycrisis gets to the heart of our social evolution. Dr. Hoyer points out how the Industrial Revolution can be traced to the economic upheavals resulting from the Black Death, which was exacerbated by the weather stresses of the Little Ice Age. The Industrial Revolution marks the beginning of humans’ impact on our climate. The more we know about these historical through-lines, the better we can understand the effects we can have on our habitat, both good and bad. To learn more, listen to my interview with a scientist who’s been diving deep into all these questions.
Dave Coulter
2/27/24
The Lizard Brain Project is always looking for contributors. Submit essays to submissions@lizardbrainproject.com. Or feel free to leave a comment below.
Lizard Brain | Question Everything