Multisolving the Polycrisis, and other compound words that are not as cool as jumpsuit
plus my fave: it's drooping peony szn.
One crisis is bad enough. Two is terrible. And a polycrisis just makes you want to apply ointment to the cut and go back to bed. Or does it? Does a clinical name for the overload of intersecting crises harming humanity right now help or hinder our ability to process, cope, act? One of the most vigorous champions of this polyrevival (the term was coined in the 70s) is Adam Tooze:
What the polycrisis concept says is, ‘Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment’. I think that's useful, giving the sense a name. It's therapeutic. ‘Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called’.
So, knowing we’re in a particularly heightened period of varied geopolitical awfulness might be helpful (it’s not you, it’s the entire effing planet!). Does giving this collection of supremely bad things a label ameliorate our fear and stress, as Tooze suggests?
Behavioural science would say lumping is bad — break things into pieces, don’t conflate. Chris Hatch puts it well:
For over 30 years, I’ve returned again and again to the advice Valerie Langer once offered, half joking, back in the War in the Woods defending the old growth forests of Clayoquot Sound. She’s still protecting forests, now with the organization Canopy, and her advice holds up: When the destination is out of sight, set a plausible objective and when the public and governments catch up, it’s “time to move the goalposts.”
Of course. But perhaps putting things in boxes is a privilege, if the problems are indeed very interconnected. And if the people most affected by this crossweave of horror don’t have the luxury of a perfect word to describe the stew of factors causing their pain.
I think my worry about the term is more to do with the word itself, however well intended. While most people know from poly and crisis, together they make the problems somehow less human — people are dying, from Covid, wars, climate change. People are suffering from the cost of living crisis, and rising authoritarianism. So what’s a better phrase for heightened world chaos and horror, for wicked problems woven together like an art class potholder? I love sleuthing out the right words, and I don’t know.
I could be on Team Polycrisis (sponsored by Tim Hortons) if I felt the terminology made the solutions clearer and more actionable, but I’m not sure it does. Sez Tooze:
Renewable energy is an example of the sorts of solutions we eagerly need to grasp onto in a situation which is otherwise going to be hugely challenging to our collective capacity to organize. We should be, in a structural sense, spending vastly more money on enhancing our ability to produce those kinds of fixes.
One of the things that's been happening in Germany right now is a sustained conversation between the public health authorities who had to deal with the COVID crisis in 2020, 2021, and the Bundesnetzagentur, the agency which dispatches energy within the German system, as to how they engage in public information campaigns about energy saving. And so that seems to me the kind of cross-sectoral learning the current crisis moment really demands.
They're not the same kind of problem, obviously, but in both cases, you have technical public bodies which are not party-political, but are part of the government apparatus that are making decisions that affect people in their everyday lives. The level of your heating, whether you can send your kids to school and they are communicating with each other, expert to expert, about the problems of effectively communicating in a democracy about those kinds of risks. That’s the kind of cross-sectoral learning we need more of.
I love finding holistic solutions. Who doesn’t? They’re wholly better than holey ones. But this segues perfectly to another goldstar vocab word I don’t wholly love: Multisolving. From the Multisolving Institute website:
Multisolving is a growing movement around the world. When people work together across sectors to address multiple problems with one policy or investment, they are multisolving.
Multisolving, of late popularized by the incredible Elizabeth Sawin, comes from the work of the OG systems thinker Donella Meadows. Meadows wrote that system boundaries are “lines in the mind, not in the world.” In short, we have to blur the lines to leverage solutions that solve a lot of problems at once. An enthusiastic yes to feeding two birds with one scone. And yes of course to cascading co-benefits. The fortunate thing is that co-benefits abound in the polycrisis: Climate change solutions invariably solve a half-dozen other problems, when executed with equitability at the fore. But does the term multisolving add anything to the conversation?
Aren’t we always trying to multisolve? To fix the bad with good solutions that cover as much ground as possible? I’m on side with anything that helps people feel less bad so that they can do more good, and with anything that renders a complex system more accessible, navigable. But sometimes I worry a fussy label actually creates barriers: people already multisolve in so many places, because they have to. A fancy term that you have to look up just sorta makes you feel strange…Oh, that’s what it means? Yeah, of course, we’ve been doing that for centuries.
SO WHAT SHOULD WE SAY?
Poly means many. Intersectionality is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term for the overlapping characteristics that contribute to systemic discrimination and inequality, particularly race and gender. It immediately conveys the layers of view necessary to take on the complex (poly) crises we face, and has driven important movements like intersectional environmentalism. But Crenshaw is very clear that intersectionality is not just a way to lump complicated problems together.:
These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.
Intersectionality is the human lens for the impacts of crisis. But the crises themselves are perhaps less intersectional than interwoven. Not a bunch of disparate things, but a bunch of things that interact and exacerbate each other, creating explosive chemical compounds that have very different implications for different groups of people. How do we define all that in a phrase that people can use to situate themselves in this moment in time, and find strength, and take action should they have the capacity to do so? I’m not sure it’s possible. It feels impossible to wrap my brain around. I can be aware that a multitude of factors contribute to the problem I’m staring down, but the awareness needs no formal term: we know this, and the language we use to define it should be the most human and least clinical we can find.
Instead, I wonder if it’s a bit like Steve Sloman’s Knowledge Illusion, which is a perpetual fascination of mine. From the the British Psychological Society:
The knowledge illusion occurs because we live in a community of knowledge and we fail to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads from the knowledge outside of it. We think the knowledge we have about how things work sits inside our skulls when in fact we're drawing a lot of it from the environment and from other people. This is as much a feature of cognition as it is a bug. The world and our community house most of our knowledge base. A lot of human understanding consists simply of awareness that the knowledge is out there. Sophisticated understanding usually consists of knowing where to find it. Only the truly erudite actually have the knowledge available in their own memories.
How much do we or can we actually know? And how much is shared knowledge that we just tap into it? If you knew my brain, you’d say a lot of the latter. I can be aware of all the strands of the polycrisis, but wrapping my brain around them in a way that is both helpful and meaningful seems unlikely at best. Holding complexity and nuance doesn’t seem to be humanity’s strong suit these days. There’s too much to hold in the best of times, and, to the point of this whole newsletter, we’re not in the best of times.
As usual, Bill McKibben puts it smart: We’re in a period of INTENSITY. He’s talking about the life-destroying heat in India and Gaza, but he is also talking about everything: “Right now, everything’s turned to 11.”
Sarah, you’ve gone on for many paragraphs. What’s the climate comms takeaway? Use polycrisis and multisolving if they’re helpful for you or your particular audience. But they probably won’t be for the vast majority of humans. So maybe just crank some Spinal Tap and zero in on the work you can do, using the simplest and easiest and funnest language possible.
In some ways the framing of everything’s multipolypotholder connected is a helpful license to monotask. Know the complexity, whether defined by words or not, and use it to drive the single thing you can train your attention upon.
I love this:
This planet
How do you think about our interwoven problem set? What language is helpful? Let me know!
Stuff
Rachel Donald from Planet Critical with a must read: The World is Absurd.
Climate at the Ballot Box, A GreenPac event, June 11th. Register for online or in person here.
GREAT Conversation piece on climate social scientists pushing back against doom. A must read!
Yes, take away their social license. (What was left of it!) Antonio Gutierrez is amazing. So is Clean Creatives.
Speaking of creatives, read my pal Natalie’s excellent write ups of Indigenous Creative Agencies you should totally hire, like this one on Jennifer Taback.
Try it before you electrify it. Love to see it.
People dancing
My reggaeton crew performed last week and I’m still tired. But it was the most joyous of shows, and peak Toronto energy! My teacher Carolin is a force worth following. City Dance is very much the Toronto I love — a warm, welcoming, diverse place where you can come with any level of skill and commitment and find a style and teacher that works for you. Never clicked with a bunch of ladies so quickly! Highly recommend if you’re in TO. (They did not pay me to write this). It’s been a rough year, and this crew is getting me through.
Wishing you peace and comfort and safety and health and soft-serve ice cream,
Sarah
Love this exploration of words to describe the multiple crises we are facing. Thank you, Sarah, for an enlightening read!