Towards a soft landing: a policy change for dissolving the polycrisis  

By Louis Klein, Secretary General of the International Federation of Systems Research

7 October 2024

Couple in winter clothes embrace while watching a field

StockSnap | Pixabay

The polycrisis is ubiquitous. We fight it but we fail to dissolve it. We exhaust ourselves in calls for action, activism, and even more research on what is already known. We fight and continue fighting for change. Yet, what if change was not a matter of fighting but all about a warm embrace? 

Back in time when I was a young man in the wine fields of the Mosel Valley, we were critically challenging the practices of conventional wine farming. We wanted to do away with all those pesticides and herbicides and wanted to treat the vines and the soil differently. We wanted change and we were willing to fight for it. We experimented, producing wine hardly distinguishable from cider and drank it with defiance. We demonstrated and were ready to take on the whole world. We fought and exhausted ourselves. All we transformed were ourselves. We transformed ourselves into frustrated cynics. The righteous fight based on the better argument, and appealing to morality did not yield. 

Nothing changed and then everything changed. Years later my sister and her husband went all in. Towards the first decade of the century, they registered their winery for full organic wine farming. However, for them, it was not a matter of science proving the advantages of organic agriculture. What won them for the course was the slow food movement.  

Throughout all cultures, people recognise as a most desirable moment of joy the sharing of a meal with friends. The slow food movement not only promotes eating slowly and taking time for our meals. It recognises all the conditions that co-created and supported the experience. Providing wine of deep organic quality is one element of it. For my sister and her husband, this was the invitation that felt like a warm embrace. They wanted to provide their customers and friends with the wine that facilitated the joy of being together and having lovely conversations over a more than agreeable glass of delicious wine. In hindsight, it took a lot of extra work and quite some effort to become a fully certified organic winery, however, the joy it facilitated and still facilitates was worth it. 

Today, we wish to dissolve the polycrisis. We call for action. We call for fighting against climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the global mental health crisis; we are fighting against the divide of societies, the growing political extremism, overconsumption and questionable forms of capitalism. However, we witness that the better argument does not win the battle. The fight just exhausts the activists and distances the audience. Let’s offer a warm embrace instead. We need an invitation for behavioural change and facilitating transformation that feels like a warm embrace. 

We need a policy change to dissolve the polycrisis. We need policies that feel like a warm embrace, policies that meet our humanity as an expression of our humanity. We need policies that grow from compassion with the living world, with each other, and with our selves. We need a soft landing of the conflicts and systems pathologies that violate our human being, our humanity, and all that sustains it. 

The soft landing is an invitation to an experience-based, relationship-oriented, co-created and co-facilitated process of inquiry, learning, and understanding, embedded in epistemic humility, trusting our human potential, trusting our humanity, realising the essentiality and existentiality of love. It’s a mouthful of a sentence but it feels like a kiss. 

The Fifth Element programme of The Club of Rome and the International Federation of Systems Research (IFSR) are initiating a collaboration to co-create a deeper understanding of what could make a real difference for systems change in the messy world of today.  

This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of The Fifth Element and or its partners.

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