So what's the first thing to do? It's to stop being ordinary. So they say, "tha mal gyi rtog shes spang ba," "abandon ordinary thoughts and ordinary attitudes," ordinary experience.

also what it requires is to recast the individual as a non individual

capitalist philanthropy and the subtitle of Healing Wealth in Time of Collapse

cooperate with ‘the perpetrator’ empathetically

here's a bunch of new practices or at least old practices that have been recovered or at least reverse engineered in which people can deeply recover a lot of the experience and the learning of what we're talking about here

we can reverse engineer practices for people that help them to do uh the recovery and also the development of the cognitive light cone of right of a recovery of a lot of of what is lost for people in the meaning crisis

we go from not  understanding it to apathy in the span of an afternoon which is another issue. Um, so so  what should we do?

upport cross-divisional thinking and that the best ideas are already in a company and it's just a matter of sort of um getting people together

a good projects always benefit from cross-divisional from cross-divisional cooperation from asking some guys from outside not because they are showing the better um the better solution but usually they they give a good they give a good question they ask questions that nobody ever asked before and thereby giving you some kind of some kind of New Perspective

recommends that ToC construction should be participatory, involving stakeholders who represent different perspectives and roles within the intervention

you can take a lot more than you are and have a lot more information

there are many um and that that pulls us into 00:00:26 reaction mode that has been long steeped in industrial responsiveness which is to the first order

How to Safely Delay or Stop Your Period

Consider pushing your company to change its own banking

this Earth shot as we call it that we're aiming for at Earth species project is for machine learning to decode non-human communication and then that new knowledge and understanding that results 00:06:42 from that would reset our relationship with the rest of Nature and you know this is a to me a really compelling as a potential unlock in addressing the biodiversity and climate crisis that 00:06:56 we're saying to help us find new ways to Coexist on the planet with other species

I think the first thing 00:04:49 we have to do and what governments have been reluctant to do is to say we've got to stop making it worse now the government is saying we've got to start adapting to the changes yes we do but we 00:05:04 have to stop making it worse which means for heaven's sakes we've got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we can

Learn more about what business can do to halt deep seabed mining

The posture of democratic citizenship is avowal of rights and obligations of membership in a civic community. The rationale for this is the moral and political goodness of a civic way of living and the shared promise of human self-realization through interdependence. As such it is the exemplary, most inclusive form of membership; it is a precondition for the sustainability in the modern secular era of other expressions of membership in our lives—social, economic, kinship, familial, and intimate.[17] Again, citizenship avows—makes a vow, takes on a trust—on behalf of a future of moral and political potential toward which it is reasonable to strive. Citizenship is iterative and ongoing; it provides continuity and provokes innovation; each generation of democratic citizens begins a new story of the demos and continues an ongoing one.[18]

visitationszoner

The most important thing about research is to know when to stop.How does one recognize the moment? When I was eighteen orthereabouts, my mother told me that when out with a young man Ishould always leave a half-hour before I wanted to. Although I wasnot sure how this might be accomplished, I recognized the advice assound, and exactly the same rule applies to research. One must stopbefore one has finished; otherwise, one will never stop and neverfinish.

we term these individually constructed networks by the aggregate namepersonware. Serving as a medium between the individual and the social world, personware provides aself-reinforced and self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationships with society. It is boththe sense-maker and the sense being made of social reality entangled into an interactive autopoieticconstruct. It maintains a personal line of continuity that interfaces with the broader societal threads bymeans of concrete intentional cognitive selections. These cognitive selections determine how individualminds represent (encode) the state of affairs of the world in language, how they communicate theserepresentations and how they further decode received communications into an understanding of thestate of affairs of the world that eventually trigger actions in the world and further cognitive selections.At moments of decision, that is, attempting to make a choice to affect the world, the human is thusmore often than not symbolically pre-situated. He enacts a personal narrative of which he is hardlythe author and to which almost every decision is knitted in.

Consequently, theshape of the gridlock [9], in which further progression towards an ever-greater executive capacity givento a selected group of institutions has become nearly impossible, is not an anomaly to be overcome.The gridlock is the only configuration in which the global system could have settled. It isthe configuration any system is bound to adopt when it is composed of a multitude of differentlypositioned, differently oriented, heterogeneous decision-makers, operating in different dimensionsand scales, none of which universally dominant and all are co-dependent and constrained by others.

The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into anExistential Opportunity

The projected timing of climate departurefrom recent variability

What happens if the world gets too hot for animals to survive? By Matthew Huber | July 20, 2022 

Open-Ended Intelligence

The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing theEpistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “LifeConditions” (Lebenslage)

Is our planet doubly alive? Gaia, globalization, and the Anthropocene’s planetary superorganisms

Intentional programming

The trajectory of theAnthropocene: The GreatAcceleration

Menu Workshops Mortality Awareness Preparedness Project About Us Mission History People Contact About Becker Biography Becker’s Synthesis Books Related Works Becker Fans Resources Terror Management Theory Webinars Educator Resources Book & Film Reviews Interviews Lecture Texts Audio Recordings Video Resources This Mortal Life Becker in the World Death Acceptance Religion and Death Anxiety Art and Artists Climate Talk Discrimination and Racial Justice See All Blog Store The Denial of Death and the Practice of Dying

ind outside Brain:a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition

so this is white light passing through a dispersive prison and this is a visible spectrum from about 420 nanometers in the violet through 500 nanometers and 00:00:18 the green 580 yellow 610 and orange and 650 red and some of the slides that have this along the bottom axis so how dependent I'll be in color what do you 00:00:30 think we depend on color a lot a little lots okay

I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. 00:00:41 So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. 00:01:16 (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, 00:01:40 context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.

so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it

Mobilization Systems:technologies for motivating and coordinating human action

Peter Whybrow: “When More is Not Enough”

We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C

cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy

you are probably somewhat unfamiliar with the term biosemiotics is not in widespread use um and but it represents a very very 00:00:17 important reference point when we come to theories of embodied cognition the founder of biosemiotics is typically held to be jacob von xcool 00:00:29 biosemiotics is a field within the broader domain of semiotics which considers the manner in which meaning arises through various forms of mediation such as signs indices indexes 00:00:42 symbols and the like

so that's me trying to do a synoptic integration of all of the four e-cognitive science and trying to get it 00:00:12 into a form that i think would help make make sense to people of the of cognition and also in a form that's helpful to get them to see what's what we're talking about when i'm talking about the meaning 00:00:25 that's at stake in the meaning crisis because it's not sort of just semantic meaning

Dogen and Nagarjuna’s Tetralemma #6 of 21

The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute

THE LOGIC OF THE CATUSKOTI

Jan Westerhoff on Nāgārjuna

No Four Ways About It: Nāgārjuna’s Tetralemma

i really think this last one the coordination systems how do you get large groups of people to organize much better 00:16:44 that holds some of the most promise

Understanding our situatedness, blowing up assumptionsWhat are the things your brain has been conditioned to believe as “true”? What should you re-examine, pull apart and re-assemble with intention?

"Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".

we're going to talk in this series 00:01:10 about a series of papers that i just published in the in the journal sustainability that that series is titled science driven societal transformation

Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earthpoints to the need for transformative change

From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac

Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation

The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

The Space Between Two Worlds

Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050

it's really worth reading some of the things 00:18:00 that they're saying on climate change now and so what about 2 degrees C that's the 46th pathway that's the thousand Gigaton pathway the two degrees so you 00:18:13 look at the gap but between those two just an enormous that's where where no English edding we're all part of this and that's where we know we have to go from the science and that's where we keep telling other parts of the world begun to try to achieve the problem with 00:18:26 that and there's an engineer this is quite depressing in some respects is that this part at the beginning where we are now is too early for low-carbon supply you cannot build your way out of this with bits of engineering kit and 00:18:39 that is quite depressing because that leaves us with the social implications of what you have to do otherwise but I just want to test that assumption just think about this there's been a lot of discussion I don't know about within Iceland but in the UK quite a lot me 00:18:51 environmentalist have swapped over saying they think nuclear power is the answer or these one of the major answers to this and I'm I remain agnostic about nuclear power yeah it's very low carbon five to 15 grams of carbon dioxide per 00:19:03 kilowatt hour so it's it's similar to renewables and five to ten times lower than carbon capture and storage so nuclear power is very low carbon it has lots of other issues but it's a very low carbon but let's put a bit of 00:19:15 perspective on this we totally we consume in total about a hundred thousand ten watts hours of energy around the globe so just a very large amount of energy lots of energy for those of you I'm not familiar with these units global electricity consumption is 00:19:30 about 20,000 tarantella patelliday hours so 20% of lots of energy so that's our electricity nuclear provides about 11 a half percent of the electricity around the globe of what we consume of our 00:19:42 final energy consumption so that means nuclear provides about two-and-a-half percent of the global energy demand about two and a half percent that's from 435 nuclear power stations provide two 00:19:56 and a half percent of the world's energy demand if you wanted to provide 25% of the world's energy demand you'd probably need something in the region of three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to be built in the next 30 00:20:08 years three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to make a decent dent in our energy consumption and that assumes our energy consumptions remain static and it's not it's going up we're building 70 so just to put some sense 00:20:21 honest you hear this with every technology whether it's wind wave tidal CCS all these big bits of it technology these are going to solve the problem you cannot build them fast enough to get away from the fact that we're going to 00:20:34 blow our carbon budget and that's a really uncomfortable message because no one wants to hear that because the repercussions of that are that we have to reduce our energy demand so we have to reduce demand now now it is really 00:20:48 important the supply side I'm not saying it's not important it is essential but if we do not do something about the men we will not be able to hold to to probably even three degrees C and that's a global analysis and the iron would be 00:21:00 well we have signed up repeatedly on the basis of equity and when we say that we normally mean the poorer parts of the world would be allowed to we'll be able to peak their emissions later than we will be able to in the West that seems a 00:21:13 quite a fair thing that probably but no one would really argue I think against the idea of poor parts the world having a bit more time and space before they move off fossil fuels because there that links to their welfare to their improvements that use of energy now 00:21:27 let's imagine that the poor parts the world the non-oecd countries and I usually use the language of non annex 1 countries for those people who are familiar with that sort of IPCC language let's imagine that those parts of the 00:21:39 world including Indian China could peak their emissions by 2025 that is hugely challenging I think is just about doable if we show some examples in the West but I think it's just about past possible as 00:21:51 the emissions are going up significantly they could peak by 2025 before coming down and if we then started to get a reduction by say 2028 2029 2030 of 6 to 8 percent per annum which again is a 00:22:02 massive reduction rate that is a big challenge for poor parts of the world so I'm not letting them get away with anything here that's saying if they did all of that you can work out what carbon budget they would use up over the century and then you know what total carbon budget is for two degree 00:22:16 centigrade and you can say what's left for us the wealthy parts of the world that seems quite a fair way of looking at this and if you do it like that what's that mean for us that means we'd have to have and I'm redoing this it now 00:22:28 and I think it's really well above 10% because this is based on a paper in 2011 which was using data from 2009 to 10 so I think this number is probably been nearly 13 to 15 percent mark now but about 10 percent per annum reduction 00:22:40 rate in emissions year on year starting preferably yesterday that's a 40 percent reduction in our total emissions by 2018 just think their own lives could we reduce our emissions by 40 percent by 00:22:52 2018 I'm sure we could I'm sure we'll choose not to but sure we could do that but at 70 percent reduction by 2020 for 20-25 and basically would have to be pretty much zero carbon emissions not just from electricity from everything by 00:23:06 2030 or 2035 that sort of timeframe that just this that's just the simple blunt maths that comes out of the carbon budgets and very demanding reduction rates from poorer parts of the world now 00:23:19 these are radical emission reduction rates that we cannot you say you cannot build your way out or you have to do it with with how we consume our energy in the short term now that looks too difficult well what about four degrees six that's what you hear all the time that's too difficult so what about four 00:23:31 degrees C because actually the two degrees C we're heading towards is probably nearer three now anyway so I'm betting on your probabilities so let's think about four degrees C well what it gives you as a larger carbon budget and we all like that because it means I can 00:23:43 attend more fancy international conferences and we can come on going on rock climbing colleges in my case you know we can all count on doing than living the lives that we like so we quite like a larger carbon budget low rates of mitigation but what are the 00:23:54 impacts this is not my area so I'm taking some work here from the Hadley Centre in the UK who did some some analysis with the phone and Commonwealth Office but you're all probably familiar with these sorts of things and there's a range of these impacts that are out there a four degree C global average 00:24:07 means you're going to much larger averages on land because mostly over most of the planet is covered in oceans and they take longer to warm up but think during the heat waves what that might play out to mean so during times 00:24:18 when we're already under stress in our societies think of the European heat wave I don't know whether it got to Iceland or not and in 2003 well it was it was quite warm in the West Europe too warm it's probably much nicer 00:24:31 in Iceland and there were twenty to thirty thousand people died across Europe during that period now add eight degrees on top of that heat wave and it could be a longer heat wave and you start to think that our infrastructure start to break down the 00:24:45 cables that were used to bring power to our homes to our fridges to our water pumps those cables are underground and they're cooled by soil moisture as the soil moisture evaporates during a prolonged heatwave those cables cannot 00:24:56 carry as much power to our fridges and our water pumps so our fridges and water pumps can no longer work some of them will be now starting to break down so the food and our fridges will be perishing at the same time that our neighbors food is perishing so you live 00:25:08 in London eight million people three days of food in the whole city and it's got a heat wave and the food is anybody perishing in the fridges so you think you know bring the food from the ports but the similar problems might be happening in Europe and anyway the tarmac for the roads that we have in the 00:25:19 UK can't deal with those temperatures so it's melting so you can't bring the food up from the ports and the train lines that we put in place aren't designed for those temperatures and they're buckling so you can't bring the trains up so you've got 8 million people in London 00:25:31 you know in an advanced nation that is start to struggle with those sorts of temperature changes so even in industrialized countries you can imagine is playing out quite negatively a whole sequence of events not looking particulate 'iv in China look at the 00:25:44 building's they're putting up there and some of this Shanghai and Beijing and so forth they've got no thermal mass these buildings are not going to be good with high temperatures and the absolutely big increases there and in some parts of the states could be as high as 10 or 12 00:25:56 degrees temperature rises these are all a product of a 4 degree C average temperature

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

if the process of seeing differently is the process of first and foremost having awareness of the fact that everything you do has an assumption 00:00:14 figure out what those are and by the way the best person to reveal your own assumptions to you is not yourself it's usually someone else hence the power of diversity the importance of diversity 00:00:26 because not only does that diversity reveal your own assumptions to you but it can also complexify your assumptions right because we know from complex systems theory that the best solution is most likely to 00:00:40 exist within a complex search space not a simple search space simply because of statistics right so whereas a simple search space is more adaptable it's more easily to adapt it's 00:00:52 less likely to contain the best solution so what we really want is a diversity of possibilities a diversity of assumptions which diverse groups for instance enable

THE ECONOMICS OF IMMENSE RISK, URGENT ACTION AND RADICAL CHANGE:TOWARDS NEW APPROACHES TO THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

“harm-to-help”

The hyper-response aims to deflate or attack the hyperthreat by operating at the microlevel through “mesh-interventions” as well as at the macrolevel through realignment of great nation states and tribes.

We have engineered our way into a way of life that fundamentally depends on the destruction of nature at scale.

let timer; // Timer identifier const waitTime = 500; // Wait time in milliseconds // Search function const search = (text) => { // TODO: Make HTTP Request HERE }; // Listen for `keyup` event const input = document.querySelector('#input-text'); input.addEventListener('keyup', (e) => { const text = e.currentTarget.value; // Clear timer clearTimeout(timer); // Wait for X ms and then process the request timer = setTimeout(() => { search(text); }, waitTime); });

// Get the input box let input = document.getElementById('my-input'); // Init a timeout variable to be used below let timeout = null; // Listen for keystroke events input.addEventListener('keyup', function (e) { // Clear the timeout if it has already been set. // This will prevent the previous task from executing // if it has been less than <MILLISECONDS> clearTimeout(timeout); // Make a new timeout set to go off in 1000ms (1 second) timeout = setTimeout(function () { console.log('Input Value:', textInput.value); }, 1000); });

In order to execute an event listener (or any function for that matter) after the user stops typing, we need to know about the two built-in JavaScript methods setTimeout(callback, milliseconds) and clearTimeout(timeout): setTimeout is a JavaScript method that executes a provided function after a specified amount of time (in milliseconds). clearTimeout is a related method that can be used to cancel a timeout that has been queued.

Illustration above (by the author): Hybrid space-time as the new medium in which education evolves – autobiographical trajectories, dynamic networks across social spaces and phenomenologies merge into multidimensional constructs

David Chalmer’s beautiful metaphor of the ‘Extended Mind’ (Chalmers, 1998). Chalmers promotes the idea that media, such as, e.g., smartphones, have already begun to function as an extension to our mind, allowing us to navigate and manage an increasingly complex world

The reality is that Ukraine didn’t attack Russia, had no plans to attack Russia, and why would it? Russia’s military is 10 times larger AND they have nuclear weapons. It’s clear that Putin has created his own reality about the situation, one that isn’t shared by people who operate in facts. Besides, his actions cannot be justified merely because he believes his reality. He’s a damaged person who needs to stop what he’s doing before he shatters the lives of millions more.

Actually asking people to do this would be something of a last resort, said Ben McWilliams, a climate and energy analyst at Bruegel.<img alt="These US cities tried to cut natural gas from new homes. Republicans and the gas lobby stepped in" class="media__image" src="//viahtml.hypothes.is/proxy/im_///cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220217094013-01-cities-fossil-fuel-emissions-large-169.jpg">These US cities tried to cut natural gas from new homes. Republicans and the gas lobby stepped in"But who knows? It's an unprecedented situation. I could imagine a kind of political campaign, a real push by European leaders saying, look, if you can help us by turning down 1 degree on your thermostat, it's going to help. And you can see people uniting behind this, against Russian gas," he told CNN. "But ultimately, you'll need much more than this in response."One approach would be to replace around half the gas from other sources, McWilliams said. The United States is already shipping Iiquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe, and EU officials are also looking to countries like Azerbaijan and Qatar. The other half will need to come from cutting demand, McWilliams said, especially as Europe prepares for next winter.Heavy industries, like steelmaking and chemical production, will need to reduce their operations. Homeowners investing in solar panels and heat pumps could help take some pressure off heating systems.Tara Connolly, a campaigner with the international NGO Global Witness who specializes in gas, says that Europe must launch an emergency program to insulate homes, replace gas boilers with heat pumps and accelerate the transition to renewable energy."It is abundantly clear that Europe's gas dependence has provided Putin with the resources to engage in his bloody venture in Ukraine, whilst hampering Europe's response,"

Employing an evidence-based methodology, CitiIQ has created a comprehensive, objective measurement of a city.

The practices in this book were created to cultivate gratitude and the joy, kindness and well-being that gratitude brings. My wish for you is that your life is happier and better as you learn to practice living gratefully.

r3.0 promotes Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration. As a global common good not-for-profit platform, r3.0 crowdsources open recommendations for necessary transformations across diverse fields and sectors, in response to the ecological and social collapses humanity is experiencing, in order to achieve a thriving, regenerative and distributive economy and society.

let's stop let's just stop doing it and let's let's find other ways of measuring quality of life other than being flooded 00:21:22 by this great tide of plastic and metal and electronics 99 of which we simply do not need to live a good life

this is a fundamental issue of justice and equity so the top one percent uh in 00:09:22 terms of wealth around the world use 15 produce 15 of the greenhouse gas emissions which is twice as much as the bottom 50 percent whose total 00:09:34 emissions are just seven percent of the total so we're looking at uh a very small number of people grabbing the lion's share of natural wealth they claim to be wealth creators they're actually taking 00:09:47 wealth from the rest of us they're saying we're going to have all this atmospheric space for ourselves and incidentally all these other resources all the mahogany and the gold and the 00:09:58 diamonds and the bluefin tuna sushi and whatever else that they're consuming on a massive scale and this is driven by to a very large extent by their remarkable disproportionate use of aviation 00:10:12 there's one set of figures suggesting that the richest one percent are responsible for 50 of the world's aviation emissions but also by their yachts for example the average 00:10:24 um commonal garden super yacht um kept on standby for a billionaire to step onto whenever he wants um produces 7 000 tons of carbon dioxide per year 00:10:38 if we're to meet even the conventional accounting for staying within 1.5 degrees of global heating our maximum emissions per person are around 2.3 00:10:49 tons so one super yacht is what over 3 000 people's worth of emissions this is just grossly outrageously unfair and we should rebel 00:11:01 against the habit of the very rich of taking our natural wealth from us

today I'm here to describe that everything really is connected, 00:02:02 and not in some abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct, understandable way. And I am going to do that with three different stories: a story of the heart, a story of the breath, and a story of the mind.

Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.

The next day, I assumed we would begin our quest to find signs of hyperobjects in and around the city of Houston

A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.

Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”