What is your plan for the planetary crisis?
Six weeks of accelerated insight into how to ruggedize your life.
I am thrilled to be teaching another edition of my Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization this fall. This is some of the most energizing work I’ve ever been involved with, and I hope you’ll join me to explore new paths to building the lives we seek on a planet in crisis.
This six-week course will empower you to make smart plans for your life on a fast-changing planet.
Millions of us are waking up to see we need plans for how to ready ourselves against the worsening of the planetary crisis. As this summer’s heatwaves, floods, fires, storms and droughts have shown us, climate change and ecological chaos are no longer future threats, but present realities. We know, too, that things will get worse. We should do all we can to limit the magnitude of destruction we’ve set in motion, but no matter what we do together, we cannot avoid the consequences of decades of inaction. We each face a lifetime of unprecedented, rapid change.
None of us can afford to plan our futures as if this crisis didn’t exist. Inattention is about to become very costly. But few of us are ready.
We can, however, learn how to get ready. The time to prepare for the accelerating discontinuities of the planetary crisis is now. And the best way individuals and families can gear up for what’s coming is to ruggedize our lives.
Climate ruggedization describes strategies that reduce risks while simultaneously increasing capacities.
Personal ruggedization is the practice of making important decisions in a realistic context of planetary change.
Personal ruggedization means making smart decisions about where we choose to live, the systems we embed ourselves in, and the ways we work with others to improve our odds of a good future. It’s intelligent, optimistic, purpose-driven engagement with deep uncertainties, making ourselves at home on a planet none of us have ever seen before.
My Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization shows you where to begin and how to plot your course forward.
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Why take this course?
Smarter choices.
The past is no longer a reliable guide to future choices, and old thinking can lead us quickly into error. This course delivers new, clear frameworks for spotting emerging patterns in the chaos and making clear-headed decisions about where (and how) we live, how we pursue our careers, how we raise our kids and plan our retirements and serve our communities.
Greater insights.
Our careers, investments, philanthropic choices and political engagements are increasingly entangled with discontinuous change. This course offers tools to both build a strong personal ruggedization strategy and to forge climate foresight into purpose-driven success in our working lives.
Deeper connections.
One of the things I’ve heard most frequently in this work is how hard it can be to talk with family members, friends and colleagues who are just beginning to grapple with the rough realities ahead of us. This course can help frame genuine, heartfelt conversations that bring us together as we look ahead.
Here’s what we’ll cover in our six weeks together:
Week One: How to get ready for what’s coming.
What is the scale of the change unfolding around us. How do we inform ourselves in the face of deep uncertainty and unprecedently rapid change?
Why is where we live so important?
What is personal ruggedization?
The mindset for personal ruggedization, the importance of grounded optimism, and the costs of outdated thinking.
“The best way to get smart about how to live through the cascading climate chaos of our time is to always read Alex Steffen.”
Jeff Goodell, Author of, “The Heat Will Kill You First”
Week Two: Brittleness breaks.
Why avoiding the growing local economic and social fallout from escalating climate/ecological risks is essential to making smart choices about the future. Understanding the three pressures that undermine brittle places.
The Brittleness Bubble. How unpriced climate, ecological and economic risks have led to an unstable overvaluation of endangered assets.
The Brittleness Trap: How waiting too long to avoid danger can undermine an individual or community's ability to act.
The Undertow: Spillover effects, climate displacement and social costs of a widespread collision with unreadiness.
When all the others are just talking about what systems-collapse or what planetary crisis looks like, Alex's work already gives you a framework on how to navigate it with confidence and with the clear possibility of creating a thriving and hardened future for you, your loved ones, and the communities you serve.”
Justin D'Atri, Group Sustainability Transformation Lead, Zurich Insurance Group
Week Three: Getting safer.
The first rule of emergency response is don’t become a victim yourself. The first step in the climate emergency is placing yourself wisely. The limits of individual preparation.
While it's true that nowhere is safe it doesn’t follow that nowhere is safer than anywhere else. Understanding relative safety.
Judging climate and ecological vulnerabilities: What makes one place riskier than another?
Climate foresight and thinking long-term about our retirements, out kids’ futures, and how we invest in building a better world.
"Consistently, Alex Steffen is one of the world’s shrewdest thinkers about this fraught moment in human history.”
Bill McKibben
Week Four: Building stronger.
Assessing systems and strengths: What makes one place more prepared than another place, when both face similar risks?
What is ruggedization? How do readiness for discontinuity, risk reduction, the development of new capacities, and the seizing of opportunities all work together?
Assessing the potential for future ruggedization of a given place. Even if a place is not yet rugged, how can we estimate how ruggedizable it is?
Being ready for the next boom. How the scale of need, once recognized — and the potential for profit and power in the building of the new — is likely to trigger an extremely disruptive rush into new markets, technologies, businesses.
“Alex has been thinking about the impacts of climate change longer than most people. Through the Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization, Alex provides an insight to the more likely future scenarios and helps attendees position themselves, physically and mentally, to avoid the worst impacts and take advantage of the opportunities that are created. It is a very thought-provoking course and also provides the opportunity to network with like minded people around the globe. Highly recommended.
Jeff Roulston, participant
Week Five: Moving faster.
Speed is everything: How to evaluate local governments and institutions — and their capacity to ruggedize quickly.
The Bottleneck. What happens when a limited supply of rugged places gets hit by a massive demand for those places?
The coming snap forward in public awareness of the depth of the crisis ahead, and how likely it is to disrupt a variety of markets. When shit gets real, it won’t be slow or fun.
Bargain-hunting for a rugged home — and avoiding the danger of getting priced out of a viable future.
“When CEOs want to navigate the world's mega-challenges and prepare for a volatile world, they look to business strategists like me. And when business strategists want to challenge and hone our own thinking about the future, we look to Alex Steffen.”
Andrew Winston, author Net Positive and Green to Gold
Week Six: Personal ruggedization as platform for success
Making personal ruggedization an ongoing practice, thus turning it into a platform for learning, growth and success.
Becoming native to now. Understanding our own climate isolation and personal discontinuities. Developing a healthy relationship to discontinuity. Moving from climate isolation to community.
Bringing others along. How we engage critically important conversations in a high-tension time, with kindness, clarity and optimism. How we connect with those we love, in order to form a shared vision of how to move forward together as the heat rises.
Building a platform for personal (and shared) success in tough times.
We’re at an inflection point in climate/ecological response. How more of us working harder to ruggedize our lives can be a powerful form of climate advocacy.
THIS COURSE IS NOW CLOSED.
THE NEXT COURSE WILL BEGIN FEBRUARY 29th, 2024.
“Alex Steffen… lays out the blueprint for a successful century.”
The New York Times