What if the polycrisis — our multiple serious entangled ecological, social, political, etc., challenges — is actually a poly-chrysalis? Where many places of metamorphosis are co-existing as intertwined healing and transformation opportunities?
Filippo Dal Fiore critiques reductionist tendencies in social science that create ideologies, abstractions, and disconnection from lived reality. He calls for a return to simplicity through analogies, subjective experience, and universal common sense. Science, he argues, must serve life by rediscovering its foundations in clarity, purpose, and human wisdom.
This deeply embodied essay invites readers to shift from a human-centered, extractive model of intelligence toward a wide-boundary, relational understanding rooted in entanglement. By engaging AI, collapse, and the wisdom of rocks through a posthuman lens, it calls us to metabolize modernity’s delusions and participate in a shared, emergent intelligence—one that listens, learns, and co-creates with all of life.
We have lost the perspective and humility to see ourselves as one very young species in the billion year timeline of life on earth. Through the arrogance of extraction, we have lost touch with collective humility. In the rush of rationalisation, we have lost touch with collective empathy.
Artificial intelligence is the culmination of the revolution in information technology that began in the 15th century with the printing press, followed in succeeding centuries by lithography, photography, phonography, and film, each of which extended the mass production of information to a new realm. A review of the cognitive and social effects of those previous technologies will help to illuminate what is crashing upon us in the age of artificial intelligence.
You would expect a course about collapse – both ecological and societal – to be depressing. Not so with “Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive” Shaun Chamberlin’s ten week course about the end of extractive civilization, and what comes after, offered via Sterling College.
Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet in the process of moving to Vermont. Her poetry appears widely in journals and anthologies and has received seven Pushcart nominations. Her collected poetry books include Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press), Ocean’s Laughter (Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books), Broadfork Farm (The Poetry Box) and, just out from Antrim House, How I Learned to Be White.
Carolyn’s poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout North America and the UK including “Stirring,” “CALYX,” “Persimmon Tree,” “How Higher Education Feels,” and “Antiphon.” Her third collection, Thin Places, was published by Kelsay Books in 2017.
...One part of me was urging the other part of me to get up, go to the professor, and seek clarity. The more fearful side of myself was anxious about being judged a fraud for being accepted to grad school at all; apprehensive of being yelled at or belittled.
...I imagine a world in which relationships are seen as wealth; in which education, parenting, art making, bio-conscious farming, and reverence toward the world around us, toward all species, people, and the natural world are most prized in our economic and value systems.