Did you say, “Polycrisis”? By Natalie Armitage
Storytime.
One day, Steve, the founder of a green tech start-up, broke ground with an idea. A lightbulb moment occurred in a coworking space in Meeting Room 3, where he almost knocked over his plastic filtered water bottle. While swiping on Bumble, feeling proud of his newfound “Poly” identity while dating multiple women, he had an even more evolved idea.
“What would happen if we managed to label every single symptom of patriarchal white supremacist colonialist imperialism, with all the consequences of extraction by the West into one, without actually mentioning any of it?”
Wow. Is it possible? If it is, things would get a lot more forever comfortable. He developed his idea alone in his head…
“What if we could carry on disassociating without being interrupted by news cycles of guilt? We won't have to print anything that says “Genocide”, we don’t have to unpack anything at social gatherings when things get a bit ‘political’, but we CAN look really good using a different big word. We can vaguely allude to ALL of the screaming problems in the world happening simultaneously. (How very inclusive of us?) We could also sound informed, aware and clever without mentioning or doing anything to risk losing our capital?”. This was truly the best idea Steve ever had, right after purchasing a share in a new build in Dubai without ever going there. It was a minimal effort, worse than the bare minimum, didn’t require any education, yet remained sellable and profitable for the continued extraction of raw minerals. Steve made a Google Calendar invite for a team meeting immediately and was sure he would be able to take over a new department because of it.
Okay, that was not a real story. Steve is someone I made up. Adam Tooze, however, is a real person. A U.K. chap who studied at the London School of Economics, Yale, Kings College, and Columbia University is now performing on tour at the World Economic Forum as an economics and history expert, an inspiration for a fictional but relatable man like Steve.
In a moment in history where all white middle-class people globally across all Western countries are urgently required to act, some are cooking something spectacularly ‘laboursome’ for Black and brown folks, distracting and potentially worse instead. One of these is a new catch-all reductive term circling the Philanthropy and NGO world: “Polycrisis”. Now, in itself, it is factual. We have many, many problems and atrocities happening at once. What it does do, though, is focus on the “diversity of problems” all around the world and not the leading man in the middle of it all.
But credit where white man credit due; he wasn’t the first. Adam re-popularised the term from European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who got it from a French theorist called Edgar Morini, who said it in the 90s, referring to (the same) ecological alert being loosely identified from the 70s. In his new and updated recycled version, Adam says:
“The key things for me are economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. And those four things, they don't reduce to a single common denominator. They don't reduce to a single factor. The polycrisis term has a real utility descriptively, because it's arm-waving. It's going, ‘Look, there's a lot of stuff happening here all at once’. And that precisely is what we're trying to wrap our minds around.”
This is a direct response to Mr Tooze, Mr Juncker, Mr Morini and all the well-meaning liberals trying to wrap their minds around the fact that many things are happening at once. There are many apparent commonalities between all three white men repeating the same thing over decades, but let’s pin just one down, shall we? Let’s talk about one glaringly obvious single common factor they suggest doesn’t even exist.
The Fossil Fuel Industry
The Fossil Fuel Industry is built on the back of all living beings on Earth. It is the deep mining of what is essentially stored solar energy deep in the Earth's core that humans are not meant to take from, at a rate too fast for the Earth to manage, which has set the whole world’s ecosystem off-balance. This ecosystem affects absolutely all living beings. The sea, the trees, the air, the ability for nature to regulate and for people to actually live. It also doesn’t need to exist if everyday people had more capacity to explore living off other energy options that don’t have such a drastic effect.
Instead of that happening, renewable energy options are being used for other mass production industries. It is one of the biggest, if not the main sector, responsible for the climate crisis. The foundations of the Fossil Fuel industry were laid deep into the fabric of the Colonisation. British Petroleum’s (BP) original name was actually the First Exploitation Company. The company's first big break came when Winston Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty, persuaded the British navy to switch from coal to oil for its fuel. The Fossil Fuel industry is deeply entrenched in the enslavement of African people by various European projects that enforced White Supremacy on the rest of the world, ensuring that centuries of debt to them are eternal. This has also given way more space and scope for other extractive industries, like Cobalt, for obscenely fast-growing demands for technology to wade in. The Cobalt powering your iPhone is the reason we are seeing massacres in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The enslavement of Africans has not ended; instead, it has just been remodelled through capitalism with the same people at the top.
Global companies in the Fossil Fuel industries exacerbate war, conflict, and weapons of mass destruction to be able to extract efficiently to meet the demand. They also literally fuel them. Violence and instability in regions where oil and coal can be extracted are consistently profitable. The more unstable a region, the broader the scope to extract from it by force. It doesn’t hurt Fossil Fuels to fund a few aid organisations to clear up the mess and a few renewable energy options as false hope to make them look better for PR - because the mass accumulation of wealth and power behind it is laughable in comparison. Britain’s military-industrial sector alone annually emits more greenhouse gases than 60 individual countries, such as Uganda, which has a population of 45 million people.
There is also a wild amount of evidence that fossil fuel industries have known about the impact they would have on Earth, which we have seen since they began. They don’t need educating by the people; they know more than we do. Stopping isn’t on their agenda; they are more concerned with not being interrupted.
Distraction techniques have greatly aided this aim. This is where the charity sector, Philanthropy sector and general “sustainable” businesses - who adapt us even more to a culture of extractivism - actually add to the Fossil Fuel Industry violence. Inventing buzzwords, fictional credit systems, international campaigns, building more gadgets that don’t work - you name it. Mainly because, by the time the world is on the brink of collapse (which is now), the extractivist capitalist system we regard as ‘civilisation’ is so deeply entrenched it appears irreversible, with an alternative way of life almost impossible to conceive. Even if it includes the extinction of people, lands, communities and cultures, the demand for fossil fuels has no sign of reducing, precisely as it was intended for those who profit from it.
Governments even showing up to argue with each other is a joke (with or without a library of charity sector policy reports as evidence) because the Fossil Fuel Industry is behind them all. Completely overriding every indigenous philosophy of balance and healthy exchange with nature, the Fossil Fuel industry has kept countries that have adopted extreme consumerism sustained and growing. It has also increased the over-exploitation and destabilisation of those dependent on the West financially. The fact that they have bulldozed over countries, communities, land and all the people on it to keep this system of extraction going is primarily written off to the concern of a few environmentalists. The demand has increased and grown exponentially due to capitalist demands, driving us directly into the climate crisis beyond the point of return unless we end it. That is the urgent part; we just need to end it.
Every crisis on Earth, every ecosystem, and every system of oppression are connected and layered. All of these are connected to Extractivism. The Fossil Fuel industry impacts all of that. This is the common denominator, which is arguably one of the largest in-built functions of White Supremacy for those who benefit from it the most. That is also why all three men missed that part when they invented yet another useless thing that delays any accountability.
Interestingly, around the 1970s, there was an ecological alert that a Polycrisis alluded to. We know that the most prominent Fossil Fuel players accumulated the most scientific evidence and knowledge that this would happen, and we would be here. Now we are, we can be entirely sure they do not need educating or persuading. They have known what was coming longer and better than us.
Now, I realise that all those using the term “Polycrisis” are very keen to label (in Adam’s words) the ‘arm-waving’ from somewhere in the Global South of literal destruction of life on earth. Still, we will need you to realise how ridiculous and intentionally avoidant this is.
Fossil fuel culture is one of the common denominators that many sectors are committed to ignoring. But if you aren’t convinced, why not try another mechanism of exploitation on for size; it will still take you up one of the many staircases of oppression that lead to the same destination of the 1% of wealth hoarders. Try White Supremacy, Imperialism, Colonisation, Patriarchy, Capitalism. The very fact that all of these lead you to the same place, yet the term ‘Polycrisis’ alludes to multiple crises happening ‘over there’, should tell you something.
Fossil Fuel Extraction connects unspeakable levels of devastation to most people on this planet. We know that Steve’s great idea, Adam's resurrection, Jean-Claude Juncker’s proclamation and Morini’s coined phrase for decades have all rested on looking in the opposite direction to this, the actual problem.
We do not have the time or energy to waste on inventing any more neo-colonial language to avoid the core structures of oppression we know to exist and be accurate.
Name them.
