INDY JOHAR: The starkest collapse prognosis I’ve heard
Nov 19, 2024
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Indy Johar, the innovative founder of Dark Matter Labs and a Professor of Planetary Civics, shares his insights on urgent global challenges. He discusses the alarming potential for societal collapse and the foundational shifts needed to redefine our relationship with the planet. With a focus on community and interconnectedness, he urges transformative actions to avert crises. Johar emphasizes the critical role of sustainable practices and resilience in creating a hopeful future, encouraging a conscious evolution towards a planetary civilization.
Indy Johar argues that our current global issues stem from humanity's poor relationship with the Earth, necessitating a fundamental change in our approach.
The podcast emphasizes the urgent need to reevaluate societal values related to products, highlighting the mispricing that favors harmful consumables over sustainable options.
Johar advocates for systems thinking and emergent frameworks to redesign our social systems, promoting a deeper ecological connection and collective responsibility.
Deep dives
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The Crisis of our Relationship with the Earth
The conversation highlights that the issues we face, such as climate change, result from a deeper crisis in how humanity relates to the Earth rather than external factors alone. The current economic model hinges on extraction and externalization, allowing significant harm to the planet without proper accounting for associated costs. This problematic dynamic has led to feedback loops of environmental degradation that are now catching up with society's ability to tolerate them. Understanding this crisis is crucial for identifying effective paths forward to reestablish a healthier relationship with nature.
Shifting Perspectives on Value in Society
A central point discussed is the need to reevaluate how society determines value, especially regarding products that contribute to health versus those that are purely consumptive. For instance, a sustainable apple that promotes well-being is often priced similarly to a sugary drink like cola, which has adverse health effects. This mispricing reflects an economic model that fails to account for long-term environmental and health impacts, ultimately encouraging depletion rather than regeneration. Addressing this imbalance is essential for fostering a sustainable economy that recognizes true value.
The Role of Systems Thinking in Response to Complex Problems
Indy Johar emphasizes the importance of systems thinking in addressing interconnected global challenges. By using systems, emergence, and entanglement theories, new frameworks can be built to redesign social systems and redefine value. For example, reimagining how we view entities like trees—seeing them as self-sovereign agents within natural and urban systems—can shift communal efforts toward sustainability from mere conservation to an active partnership with the environment. This approach fosters deeper connections to nature and encourages collective responsibility for ecological wellbeing.
Pathways to a Resilient Future
To avoid catastrophic failure of our systems, a multi-faceted approach involving slingshot economic principles is necessary. This involves rapidly transitioning away from destructive practices while investing in resilience-building initiatives across food, energy, and water systems. There is a growing need to develop new frameworks that emphasize human dignity, stewardship, and holistic wellbeing over traditional extractive or consumption-driven models. Ultimately, fostering a cooperative relationship with both technology and nature will be essential for navigating the complex challenges ahead and achieving a sustainable future.
Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) re-imagines and redesigns systems for a changed world. The architect and Professor of Planetary Civics at Melbourne’s RMIT and the University of Sheffield has worked with and advised organisations worldwide. Including the Scottish Government, the Mayor of London and WikiHouse, solving complex, entangled problems. Using complexity, emergence and entanglement theories he is a rare expert in this space to provide the (only) path to fixing the world, which is to say fixing our relationship with the world.
This conversation goes to a level I’ve not been to before publicly. On his modelling, we don’t have any choice but to start building the world that comes next, for the current one has no viable pathway. He gives a vision for this this. And he gives a timeframe, too.
For this episode, I’m providing a forum where you can talk through how you feel about the ideas and your feelings with others. Indy has offered to chime in too: Join the chat on Substack HERE.
SHOW NOTES
If you are new to this collapse topic you might want to catch up via this conversation with Luke Kemp, the one with Meg Wheatley and this one with Corey Bradshaw.
There are some previous guests and topics that are referenced in this chat:
