In a recent New York Times column, Thomas L. Friedman argues that we have entered a new historical era — the Polycene.
The Polycene is defined by overlapping, interacting systems rather than simple binaries — an era shaped by the collision of climate change, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, biology, economics, and hyper-connectivity.
Central to Friedman’s thesis is the concept of the polycrisis — the colliding crises that reinforce and worsen one another. Climate stress amplifies food insecurity, food shocks fuel political instability, and instability spreads rapidly through globalized networks. Friedman argues that understanding the polycrisis is essential to navigating it.
Friedman describes how how his understanding of the global polycrisis was sharpened through the work of Cascade Institute founder Thomas Homer-Dixon and collaborator Johan Rockström. Their research on the accelerating feedback loops of the polycrisis, writes Friedman, not only warns of dangerous cascades but also create opportunities for stabilizing feedbacks if systems are designed wisely.
The Polycene, Friedman writes, “will be the first era in which humanity must govern, innovate, collaborate and coexist at a planetary scale in order to thrive.”
Read the full column in The New York Times.
