As a teenager I wanted to be an animal conservationist. So I got myself some university qualifications which were sure to be useful in the new environmentally enlightened world.
But in the more than forty years since I graduated, the world’s environment is more degraded, there are more species extinctions, we are creating microplastics with our completely unnecessary new disposable plastic water bottles, and we are experiencing hotter and hotter years as climate change starts to escalate.
What is the problem?
So what has gone wrong? Environmental advocacy has been strong—people understand that pollution, microplastics and the burning of fossil fuels are going to affect our ability to live safely and comfortably on the planet. But yet we still continue to export coal, clear land that is the habitat of rare and unique species, and manufacture recyclable plastic that no one recycles.
Actions to save the environment are not being rejected because they are wrong nor do they fail for lack of support. They are failing because they are lower down the priority list of actions to solve other crises. We have been convinced that these other crises have more immediacy and priority—for instance, housing shortages and infrastructure requirements. The construction industry wants environmental planning regulations relaxed (what they call green tape) because they blame them for delays.
Increased petrol and electricity prices make people reluctant to give up fossil fuels for what they see as expensive renewables. The Liberal Party even started to advocate for nuclear power, when we still have no solution of nuclear waste.
Politicians from both sides of Australian politics have promised not to increase taxes so there is little chance of redistribution of wealth and no carbon taxes.
Globalisation has seen much of our manufacturing being off-shored, dumbing down the Australian economy so that we now seem to rely only on the export of iron ore and coal. I have bought shares.
What is a polycrisis?
This phenomenon is known as a polycrisis. “Polycrisis” was first used by French writer Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern in their 1993 book Terre-Patrie (1999 English translation—Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium). Morin and Kern suggest that economic, ecological, social, and cultural challenges cannot be treated in isolation. Crises interweave and magnify each other and cannot be solved when addressed individually, but need to be managed holistically. They describe it as the “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet”.
Climate anxiety and crisis fatigue
So after decades of lobbying and supporting environmental organisations based on our “climate anxiety” we now face “crisis fatigue” and suffer from “ecogrief”. The intersecting issues create a “polycrisis” that never seems to be solved becoming a “permacrisis”. The permacrisis may start to unravel the core political, economic, or philosophical frameworks of societies, leading to a metacrisis.
- Climate anxiety—unease of knowing what is coming but not knowing how to deal with it
- Eco-grief (ecological grief)—the emotional distress brought about by environmental destruction, climate change, loss of ecosystems, and species loss
- Crisis fatigue—when calls to action arrive faster than opportunities to respond
- Permacrisis—a prolonged state of instability that becomes quasi-permanent
- Metacrisis — the overarching, interconnected web of global challenges
- Omnicrisis—an abstract, all-encompassing crisis.
The word “polycrisis” acknowledges that to solve the environmental crisis we have to deal with bigger issues. It also explains why environmental outrage and calls to action have been replaced with weariness, frustration and resignation.