Nora Bateson – Meeting the Double Binds of the Polycrisis

To meet this era and address the ecological problems is to recognise that they are wrapped deeply into many contexts of daily life, economy, technology, education, health, politics, family, culture, history.

There is an ecological pattern through which the many overlapping crises of the era are producing binds that make solutions difficult. Like the organisms in an ecology, the interdependency of multiple, transcontextual institutions – and the presuppositions within the culture that they are forged in – means that there is a need for another sort of approach. While this approach is not immediately recognisable as “effective”, it is important to remember that our ideas are woven into the industrial thinking that has created the polycrisis to begin with.

To meet these binds is to make a shift to ecological perception in which the issues are inseparable. This approach is not amenable to the usual spreadsheets, measurements and strategies. In the face of urgency, change-making and solution-finding has bumped up against the core structures of society that compartmentalise the issues. The urgency to meet the polycrises, in an ecological way, is in contradiction to the workings of the social and economic rules the institutions are locked within. How do you meet a double bind?