Future Serious Resources for June 29, 02025

Polycrisis ⊗ "Fight for Life" ⊗ AI and Media

Hey,

Feeling a bit back in the groove of reading and processing and learning. Stacking up some interesting edu twists to write about, and pushing myself further into inquiry into how we educate for collapse. Hard but good.

And the kinda big news for me this week is that on Tuesday, I will do my last f2f consult with a school. (I’ve got one more virtual presentation in August.) I want to write about why I’ve made this choice, but I’ll tease it by saying that I’m now focusing on using my energies in ways that I feel actually can make an impact, and more and more, I’ve come to understand that’s with people, not institutions. The short of it is that schools can’t (won’t?) change. More on that at some point.

As always, thanks for reading. As a reminder, all posts here are free, but if you want to show your support for my work in general, a paid subscription is always an option. (Thanks so much to HB and KL for their support this week!) Remember: I’m donating all proceeds from paid subscriptions to my local food pantry at the end of the year (now at $1,078.71!)

See you Wednesday with Provocation #23.

With gratitude,

~Will

“What is the Polycrisis Asking of Me?”

As I’ve mentioned, I’m coming out of a pretty deep funk that landed me in bed for a few days a couple of weeks ago. I’m trying to navigate the space between beauty and horror, between awe and sadness. And, similar to the question that Carolyn Baker is asking in this post, I’m trying to figure out how to “show up” in ways that are both healthy and impactful. She glosses six responses, the first of which is a “Willingness to Begin a Journey”:

Gathering information about the polycrisis is not for the faint of heart because it is not an intellectual matter. It may begin with processing facts and connecting dots, but almost immediately, deep emotion will be stirred, and that reality cannot be metabolized cognitively. One can choose to proceed in learning more about collapse or not. Understandably, few people actually persist. The choice is ours, and we should not judge or be judged for declining the journey. Once we allow the facts of the polycrisis to touch us, there is no turning back, which is why so few entertain them.

This part (and the rest) resonate really deeply for me right now. I can’t unsee or unthink the three years of swimming I’ve been doing in the sea of collapse. And I can’t now suddenly just turn away from it. How each of us chooses and learns to navigate this moment is a question for our times.

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Our “Fight for Life”

One of the challenges of enlisting people in the work to reduce carbon emissions and prepare for a much more complex future is the gravity of it all. Humans have a tendency not to want to “sit with the shit,” a term I’ve used before that I think aptly sums up the challenge. We want good news. We want hope. Or at least we want to hear that things will be “manageable.”

In this interview, Dr Genevieve Guenther, author of “The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It,” suggests that without being honest and totally real about what science is suggesting is coming, we won’t get too far toward mitigation. But it is really hard for people to hear.

Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels.

[It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening.

There’s an interesting lens here, too, about the silliness of the idea that wealth will save us from the worst of it, and that as we near a number of identified “tipping points,” things might spiral quickly if they are breached.

So, yeah…this is a “fight for life,” and not just human life.

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AI’s Assault on Media

I think I’ve noted before that I was a journalism major in college and worked as a general assignment reporter for a few years before becoming an educator, and ended up teaching journalism and media for 20 years. Which means that I’m fascinated (and, at times, scared shitless) by the shifts that the media ecosystem is undergoing right now.

And if you think AI is messing with education, it’s upending publishing.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with several news publishers, all of whom see AI as a near-term existential threat to their business. Rich Caccappolo, the vice chair of media at the company that publishes the Daily Mail—the U.K.’s largest newspaper by circulation—told me that all publishers “can see that Overviews are going to unravel the traffic that they get from search, undermining a key foundational pillar of the digital-revenue model.” AI companies have claimed that chatbots will continue to send readers to news publishers, but have not cited evidence to support this claim. I asked Caccappolo if he thought AI-generated answers could put his company out of business. “That is absolutely the fear,” he told me. “And my concern is it’s not going to happen in three or five years—I joke it’s going to happen next Tuesday.”

Book publishers, especially those of nonfiction and textbooks, also told me they anticipate a massive decrease in sales, as chatbots can both summarize their books and give detailed explanations of their contents. Publishers have tried to fight back, but my conversations revealed how much the deck is stacked against them. The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.

Read those last two lines again. If you don’t think the same stressors are already at education’s doorstep, you haven’t been paying attention.

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Quoteables

“All that you touch you change; all that you change, changes you.” ~Octavia Butler

“All social change comes from the death of old bodies-embodiments of ways of thinking-and the birth of the new.” ~Carol Bridges

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” ~Lao Tzu

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Thoughts / Reflections / Questions / Shorts

• The rise of “bibliotherapy”

• Our “mortgage-less future”

• Thinking about “wide-boundary learning” and how little of it happens in traditional schools.

• Good news: 24-Hour Solar

• America’s Coming Smoke Epidemic. Ugh.

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As always, let me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of in these newsletters. I’m always open to learning and evolving in ways that help you make better sense of this interesting moment.

With gratitude,

~Will