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 →

Dear TNS Friends:

Thanks to so many of you for supporting The New School this giving season. We are so grateful. If you didn’t get around to making a contribution, no worries! Just make your contribution here. Start the new year supporting our unique approach to living and learning in this brave new world.

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Are you tired of COVID? Most of us are. The hopeful view is that omicron signals the movement from pandemic to endemic. The hope is that COVID will keep getting lighter and easier to live with. That’s the hope. But, not so fast. We are tracking COVID on a little website called covidstrategies.org. It is unique on the web. We post on all sides of the pandemic. Our advisors differ vigorously but kindly with each other. We leave it to you to make up your mind.

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The main question I have is why mainstream medicine refuses to take integrative approaches to COVID prevention and amelioration seriously. We know obesity is a major risk factor for serious COVID. We know that being elderly, having cancer or diabetes, or being immune deficient greatly increases risk. While many people get mild case with omicron, some get severe cases. Continue reading →

Dear Commonweal Friends:

I hope this letter finds you well. You will soon see the Commonweal Year End Report. This is my personal letter to you.

I’ve organized the letter around seven topics:

• What Oren Slozberg has brought to Commonweal.
• The 212^th Cancer Help Program returns—outdoors.
• Sanctuary, our on-line Cancer Help Program, born in the pandemic, here to stay.
• Healing Circles Global growing rapidly around the world.
• The re-launch of Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies as Cancer Choices.
• The Change—Choosing resilience in the face of the polycrisis.
• Picking a stone for our gravesite.

Continue reading →

Dear New School Friends,

How do we live in this time? It is a question I ask myself again and again. For many, there is little choice. It is a time of such anguish for uncounted millions around the world.

But what of those of us who have a sufficiency? Food, a roof over our heads, a bed, a safe place. What of those of us whose primary suffering, other than the sorrows of our own personal lives, is grief at the fate of the earth?

How do we live?

There can be no single answer. Often our own private joys or sorrows are sufficient to displace our anguish over the Great Suffering. Continue reading →

Dear Commonweal Friends:

I hope this finds each of you as well as you can be.

What a year this has been.

While the whole world wallowed in the anguish of the pandemic, the Forbes list of millionaires increased their net worth from $8 trillion to $13 trillion. There are now 2755 billionaires—up 493 from last year.

While the United States freed itself—and just barely—from the predations of an authentically pathological leader, more than 40% of the country remained in his thrall, following him blindly into a world of alternative facts and false narratives.

While the pandemic and its many sequelae occupied the headlines, the global polycrisis continues to unfold: two dozen global stressors—social, environmental, technological, and financial/economic—interacting with increasing unpredictability and force.

In the midst of it all, Commonweal continues to thrive. We are thriving because this is our time. The world wants and needs beacons of light like Commonweal. We’re here to serve. And we are stronger and more vital than ever before. Continue reading →