Notes on What's Happening Right Now

Hurricane Milton seen from space. Image: NASA, public domain.

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NOTES ON WHAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW:

1. Discontinuity is now the core fact of our lives. Our society is no longer suited to the planet we’ve made, or a Jeff Goodell has more pithily summarized it, "Our world was built for a different climate."

2. We're still rapidly changing our climate (and undermining ecosystems and long-running natural processes). We must cut emissions at breakneck speed, but even if we do, we’re already locked in unprecedented upheavals, and reversing climate change is not something we know how to do.

3. The greater the gap between the climate our world was built to function in and the climate we have, the more brittle the places and systems around us become

4. The costs will be greater than we think. Orders of magnitude more than some people yet understand.

5. Rebuilding to reduce brittleness while increasing sustainable prosperity is the main task of civilization now.

6. There's no new normal; the climate is moving from something we knew to a fluctuating set of conditions; we won't be able to predict what the world we're building for will look like.

7. That means we have to rebuild in ways that limit anticipated risks and increase our capacities to respond dynamically to a variety of possible futures.

8. Doing that is what I describe as ruggedization.

9. We are not yet ruggedizing at scale or very quickly. Speed is everything, though, so slow progress means multiple points of failure are inevitable in all our lives.

10. To navigate through these points of failure, personal ruggedization is a necessity. This is something that can be learned and done effectively.