Make ready your life.
Make ready your life.
Tomorrow is the last day to register for A Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization.
The planetary crisis is not an issue, it’s an era. Our whole world has been changed.
To live as if nothing has changed is to live foolishly. None of us can afford to plan our futures as if the planetary crisis weren't here — and getting worse fast. Inattention is about to become very costly.
As some of you know, I'm teaching a 10-week online course on how to make better personal choices in the face of discontinuity: A Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization.
I give an overview of the course in my letter, This Letter Could Ruggedize Your Life.
We are in the early decades of an all-encompassing planetary crisis. We should do all we can to limit the magnitude of future loss by taking bold action on climate and ecology. No matter what we do, though, we face a lifetime of unprecedented, rapid change.
This was really brought home last week, when scientists warned that because of pollution already emitted, Greenland will melt enough to raise the seas by a minimum of 27cm over this century, and quite possibly more. If we did everything we could starting now, we would still face 10 inches of sea level rise from Greenland alone.
And, of course, Greenland is not alone.
Greenland is just one set of systems enmeshed in a vast set of natural systems, all of which are now changing at alarming speeds because of the unsustainability of our societies. From Antarctica to the tropical rainforests, from the glaciers of the Himalayas to the ocean deeps, from the melting tundra to the burning woods of the American West, a nearly unimaginable amount of ecological upheaval and climate chaos is now locked in.
We should do all we can to limit the magnitude of future loss by taking bold action on climate and ecology. Speed is everything: how fast we transform the unsustainable is the future we get.
Nevertheless, the world we've built is no longer suited to the planet we've made. No matter how fast we act, we cannot avoid the consequences of that mismatch. Those consequences will be deeply tragic for vast numbers of people, as we’ve been seeing with Pakistan’s floods. The future now only comes in transapocalyptic shapes.
Even in wealthy countries, we face a reckoning. Decades of failure to even begin to prepare for the scale of the dangers our delay has set in motion have rendered the places and systems and economies around us "brittle." We’re surrounded by systems subject to sudden, catastrophic failure.
We are not ready for this — for any of it. Indeed, one of my core messages is that we are perhaps most unready for the scale of our unreadiness.
There was a time when we could have headed off the planetary crisis, limited it to a severity we might have managed without much upheaval. There was also a time when we could have saved every community from the consequences of inaction, or at least taken care of everyone as we readied ourselves. Tough truth: We chose not to do those things. Now discontinuity is shredding some of our most cherished assumptions.
It is a simple fact that even in the wealthy world, we are already unable to afford the price tag that would come with defending all our communities, as they are, where they are, with people there living the lives they lead today. That price goes up every day we don't act. Even in the wealthiest, best governed and geographically most fortunate places, some hard choices must be made.
One of those choices is this: since major impacts are locked in, and societal unreadiness is a fact, how do millions and millions of us act as best we can to ruggedize our own lives? How do we make ourselves ready for the chaos and churn ahead?
Personal ruggedization is not prepping or bunkering down.
Personal ruggedization is making smart decisions about where we choose to live, the plans we make as families, the systems we embed ourselves in, the professional paths we set, and the ways we work with others to improve our odds of success.
If we make those decisions well and boldly, we can not only secure a less risky, more prosperous future for our loved ones and ourselves — we can also help drive forward the kinds of large-scale changes needed to build better futures for many others.
To do that, though, we need to learn to think in new ways.
This course I’m offering is designed to help you do that. It's made up of ten classes, each a deep dive into a set of critical questions. Engaging these questions has helped me to understand when we are, and to see the patterns behind the apparent chaos ahead. There is, as far as I’m aware, nothing like this offered anywhere else.
If you are serious about making better choices, gaining acumen for working successfully during a planetary crisis, and making a difference for others, then I'd love to have you join me.
A Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization is a video class, held live every Thursday, from 10:00 a.m. to 12 p.m., Pacific time, beginning September 8th (the day after tomorrow!) and ending November 10th.
Each class will feature 90 minutes of teaching, 30 minutes of discussion, and be recorded and shared afterwards with all members of the class.
I’m limiting the class size, in order to keep it small enough to be a conversation. As I write this, there are exactly 10 places left.
Sign up closes this Wednesday night at 10:00 pm Pacific, so if you want to be a part of it, don’t wait.
» To sign up, please follow this link.
https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18593954&appointmentType=35618396
Again, the class starts Thursday and enrollment closes tomorrow, so if you want to learn how to anticipate what’s coming and act to ready yourself, don’t delay.
This is the last email I’ll be sending about this course.
The next email you get will begin a run of about 60 emails hitting all the major points in the forthcoming book, The Snap Forward (written with the help of Justus Stewart).
Buckle in, things are about to get interesting!
Thank you,
Alex
PS: Do you know someone who might benefit from this course? Please feel free to send them this email: