Simply Complex

The Anthropocene is the first geological epoch produced by a species that can read the record it is writing. That reflexivity is the whole opportunity. A system that can sense its own state can regulate it, and regulation is exactly what complex-systems science knows how to describe: feedback, threshold, attractor, network, adaptation.

There are more people alive now than at any moment in history, better educated and better connected than any generation before. That is not only the source of the pressure; it is the largest pool of problem-solving capacity ever assembled. Abundance of minds is the matching resource to abundance of impact.

Nothing here asks for despair. Ecocide is not a fate written into the physics. It is an outcome of particular arrangements, and arrangements are the one thing this species has always been able to change. The vocabulary on this page is the vocabulary of changing them on purpose.