Dear Friends:

This essay, or working paper, is my latest effort to explore how we may live as best we can in the global polycrisis that we have entered.  

I use the terms global polycrisis and polycrisis throughout this working paper. But I hold no special brief for these terms. I will discuss many other frames of reference as well. For simplicity’s sake, I have chosen a title that I believe almost everyone can relate to:  “Changing Times.”

Backstory

I have thought about the polycrisis for at least 50 of my 78 years. When I first imagined founding Commonweal in 1975, my vision was of a center dedicated to healing ourselves and healing the earth. In the early years, we held conferences on the prospects for better systems of planetary governance.  

We were active participants at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992—which many saw as the last chance for a North-South agreement on a sustainable future. Likewise we have focused for 30 years at Commonweal on environmental health and justice.

In the early 2000s I wrote a series of articles on “The Biosocial Decline Hypothesis,” “Biopsychosocial Transformation,” and “The Age of Extinctions and the Emerging Environmental Health Movement.” They each addressed the emerging reality of the polycrisis through the lens of this new age of human driven extinctions. Continue reading →