The Polycrisis

Ville Lähde explores various considerations involved in the coining of new terms and concepts, such as polycrisis. He highlights in particular the difference between those who speak of the polycrisis as a totalizing description of the present era and its existential problems, and those who speak of a polycrisis “as a technical concept with which to analyse and understand more specific concatenations of events, some of them with significant environmental dimensions, others with none.” He rejects attempts to reduce polycrisis to singular causes (such as capitalism), stresses the importance of distinguishing between crises at different timescales, and ultimately concludes that “The ‘the’ in polycrisis is crucial, because our historical condition is truly unique.”