Polycrisis Bios
The polycrisis is more than a global phenomenon. Like all complex, interconnectedness issues, it plays out not only in large systems, but at the micro-level: in our states, communities, and daily lives. As researchers and practitioners in the polycrisis era, Mark and Mesa both have ongoing personal connections to the crises that inform their work. The “bios” below shine a light on how their journeys in this area began.
MARK GERZON, President and Founder, Mediators Foundation
In 1990, as director of a team of social innovators called Global Partners, I attended the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival in Moscow. A wide range of luminaries — ranging from Mikhail Gorbachev to Paul Newman to Al Gore — were present. This meeting was inspired by a previous one, held in Oxford England where speakers like the Dalai Lama, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, and astronomer Carl Sagan had inspired the organizers to venture to the USSR.
After listening for a few days to the hard data and even harder predictions, I was terrified, overwhelmed and, frankly, depressed. It was clear to me that the ecosphere on which terrestrial life depends was in danger. For the first time in my life, I grasped that our species’ current trajectory was headed toward self-destruction. My notions of “steady progress” and “making a better world” exploded in front of my eyes, like helium balloons.
Although I had by then been an activist for more than twenty years, working on issues ranging from the threat of nuclear war to economic injustice, I did not grasp how they were causally entangled in such a way that human life on earth was in peril. From that moment on, my innocence was gone. Even though I would not hear the word “polycrisis” until much later, it was already living inside me, unnamed yet deeply felt.
In the hallway of the conference one afternoon, I encountered Iroquois elder Chief Oren Lyons. After revealing my desperation, almost in tears, I asked him how, when faced with the overwhelming challenges we faced, he stayed focused on healing the world. Gazing at me with genuine sympathy, mixed with paternal impatience, he put his hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, son,” he said quietly. “Just carry your own pack.”
Neither he, nor I, nor anyone at that conference, used the word polycrisis. In fact, the word would not be coined until later that decade when two scholars would define it as “interwoven and overlapping crises” whose combined impact was overwhelming. More current definitions make clear that phrases like “catastrophic risk” or “existential risk,” while powerfully evocative, do not do justice to the full scope of the polycrisis.
In retrospect, my reaction of overwhelming despair is understandable. Despite being a mature adult (I was then forty years old), it hit me like a punch in the gut. Now seventy-five, I have had thirty-five years to integrate this awareness and begin to understand the challenge that we face. This paper is part of that integration process and I hope it is of service to the legions of activists who are already engaged in these issues.
MESA SEBREE, Program Manager, Mediators Foundation
Unlike Mark who first encountered the polycrisis midway through his life, I’ve grown up in it. I speak for the younger generation in saying that all of these challenges are more than scholarly interests or extracurricular passions for us. They are fundamental to our life; they always have been. In this way, the polycrisis has, in a way, lost its shock value. Existential threats are commonplace now, though the list continues to grow in size and intensity. This normalization of conflict and chaos has had two seemingly equal and opposite effects: we are both more energized to take on social justice issues and also increasingly burnt out from the overwhelming amount of problems with the world we are inheriting.
I understand the despair and empowerment arc deeply, swinging from hopefulness to despondency. Admittedly, it’s difficult to feel a sense of hope in the current landscape- some would say foolish. Climate anxiety looms in the background- a dull but constant fear of the future that makes it difficult to imagine a future where I can do normal adult things like bear children, live on the coast, see the natural wonders of the world. Pandemic isolation kept me enclosed to four walls during some of the most formative years of my life, still having ripple effects in the collective consciousness as well as my own socialization. Digitalization has made me addicted to media and my phone, and many of my peers are uncomfortable with the thought of just sitting in silence, at ease with their minds. Cancel culture has made it so that I can’t call myself a centrist for fear of losing my liberal friends, yet I’m unable to ascribe to the radicalism of either side of the political system. The list of polycrisis normalcy goes on.
My academic experience only exacerbated this narrative that “everything is wrong with the world.” For years it seemed like my peers and I were being buried under heaps of disempowering, detailed information on how, when, and why the world is falling apart. Every class, every reading, and every discussion drilled into our minds the fear that everything we learned about our country is untrue, the planet is dying, and we’re all doomed. Having been steeped in a primarily Western, anthropocentric, capitalist culture where extraction and domination were the norm, this was not entirely shocking. As an enthusiastic, young “future change-maker,” I was willing to accept the facts, but not the futility
The mainstream discourse that everything was falling apart was soul-crushing at worst and unproductive at best. Out of preservation for my own mental health, I simply couldn’t believe it without at least investigating alternatives. Glimmers of hope were rare, but when I found them, almost out of necessity, I held on tight and dove deeper. What allowed me to find these shreds of possibility was seldom what I was taught in school but instead came from my independent research on more cooperative, life-affirming ways of seeing and being. I was enthralled by paradigms such as nonviolence, degrowth, and regenerative agriculture, which served as reminders that, despite all of the valid concerns, there are ways forward. The more I looked, the more ways I discovered that entire cultures and communities hold the wisdom to transform our myths of scarcity and separateness into abundance and interbeing. I saw that there is light amidst the darkness, if only we open our eyes wide enough to see the wide variety of sources.
Now more than ever, we need light in the world. Although I’m not under any naive impression that we can “solve” the polycrisis, I still intend to work for a better future. This is an opportunity for growth, a chance to harness our collective wisdom to forge a path forward that is not just more sustainable, but more compassionate, and maybe even more fun. What adopting a polycrisis consciousness asks of us is admittedly challenging, but to me, it can also be deeply freeing for these reasons.
I believe that coming together in this way is not wishful. It is, to me, the only feasible way forward.
