The climate crisis is not simply an isolated technological challenge. It’s part of a much larger “polycrisis.” After all, everything is interconnected.

The magnitude of this “system disequilibrium,” as Canadian author, social scientist and Cascade Institute executive director Thomas Homer-Dixon calls it, can cause a sense of hopelessness, but it is resolvable — with major changes in the ways we conduct ourselves on this small planet.

That’s the message of a comprehensive new study. The World Inequality Lab’s “Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries” — by 45 authors using databases compiled by more than 200 researchers from around the world — states that “it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously.”

The pillars are rapid decarbonization of energy systems, a shift from overconsumption toward “sufficiency” (including reduced labour hours and raw materials use and large changes in food habits, land use and forest cover) and a “drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power” between and within countries.

This will require significantly altering the power structures that now govern our world and that are driving us toward calamity. It would include “hefty wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change in diets and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors, such as industry and mining, to education and health,” the Guardian reports.

The majority of humans would benefit, as it would double the incomes of 89 per cent of the world’s population by 2100 and keep global heating below 2 C above the preindustrial average. It would also reduce the average workweek to about 2.5 days, increasing leisure time.

Wealth inequality would be sharply reduced, with the poorest half of humanity increasing its portion from two to 30 per cent, while the billionaire class would see its share fall from six to 0.05 per cent.

“Close to 90% of the world’s population would double their income between 2026 and 2100, and once leisure and a habitable planet are counted, more than 99% come out ahead,” WIL co-director and Paris School of Economics professor Thomas Piketty and others wrote in a Guardian article.

Piketty says the ideology of people currently in power or rising in the United States and many other countries can’t deliver what most of humanity needs.

“At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of cooperative redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the climate, but also on social grounds,” he told the Guardian.

Homer-Dixon argues that, although the interrelated crises may seem dire, they also present opportunities. That requires understanding how they connect, and how feedback loops exacerbate the problems. For example, fossil fuel consumption leads to climate change, which produces economic costs. “As people feel less economically secure, they support authoritarian leaders, but that then leads to a backlash against green policies, undermining efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption.”

The opportunity, he says, is that this “delegitimizes the existing way of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are hunkered down and don’t want anything to change.”

The Cascade Institute and the WIL report attempt to understand the holistic nature of the polycrisis to find solutions. Given that one underlying cause is wealth hoarding and inequality, the backlash from the ultra-wealthy and their political backers will likely heat up. The “Global Justice Report” notes that average per capita gross national income worldwide would increase for almost everyone but, “The exception would be the mega-rich, who would be highly taxed because they are most responsible for the climate crisis.”

As well as taxing the overly affluent, the report recommends measures such as “a global justice fund to finance the energy transition and oversee an increase in education and healthcare spending” and “a world sovereign fund, which would rebalance global holdings of public and private wealth closer to proportions last seen in 1970.”

It concludes that a better, more equal world is materially possible. “What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.”

It’s a coalition we should all get behind.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

The post Connected crises contain opportunities for a better world appeared first on rabble.ca.

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Ricky and Royce Marnell, 28-year-old fraternal twins from Orlando, Florida, have seldom done anything apart. Together, they competed on the wrestling team throughout their childhood and adolescence. On weekends, they’d venture to the nearby park to play football. When boredom struck, they’d head to the garage for a friendly game of ping pong. When it came to college, the brothers attended Florida State University (which they swear was merely a coincidence), where they also roomed together. Although they have different careers as adults — Ricky is a data analyst and Royce is a 3D artist — they find time to collaborate on a podcast about their twinness. They also share the majority of their friends.

Although the twins were in separate classes in elementary and middle school, Ricky took the lead on cultivating friendships. Royce was shy and uncomfortable, and he struggled to form social connections. So when Ricky, the extrovert, made plans, Royce tagged along. “It was also just always easier to lean on Ricky and just be friends with his friends because I didn’t have to put in any work,” Royce tells Vox. “They were always there.”

In college, they moved as a unit, picking up friends wherever they went — at orientation, outside of the dorm, in the elevator. At Ricky’s recent bachelor party, almost all of the attendees were mutual friends made during undergrad.

From birth, twins’ lives are inextricably linked. Brought up in the same environment at the same time, these siblings often inhabit similar educational, extracurricular, and social spaces, contributing to the expectation that twins share virtually everything, from interests to abilities. Because of this overlap, it makes sense twins would have overlap in their social circles, too. But as twins age and forge unique identities in young adulthood, they may find themselves making friends independently for the first time — a shift impacting both the sibling and friend relationships.

The unique experience of being a twin influences friendship

Being a twin doesn’t necessarily help or hinder the friend-making process, experts say. But having a constant companion may influence how twins approach friendship. When twins actively want to be more alike, they develop a common social network, according to research. At the same time, they often acknowledge being too dependent on one another, which might hold them back from making more friends. 

“The research has shown that there’s no difference in the numbers of friends, but the closeness piece may be a little bit different,” says Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University. “If you have someone who knows you so well…that you really trust and feel like you can confide in, you’re probably not going to need that many other friends in your life to have that kind of deep friendship, intimate friendship with.”

When it comes to twin social circles, there is plenty of overlap, but twin type impacts the extent of the commonality. Studies have found that identical twins share a majority of their friends while cross-gender fraternal twins had far less overlap.

“If you think about identical twins, they are genetically the same. Their similar genes predispose them to like similar places, people, and events. So they naturally gravitate towards the same kinds of people,” Nancy Segal, a psychology professor and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University Fullerton, tells Vox. “Fraternal twins tend to go in different directions. They tend to have separate friends, and this is a trend that seems to remain fairly stable across the life span.”

Having a shared social network is usually a matter of convenience. One twin is usually more outgoing, Segal says, and may take the lead when making friends, especially if they’re in the same class as children. Even if they move in different social contexts and form relationships independently, it’s hard to avoid the other twin during playdates at home. 

Ironically, when kids are younger, they’re more likely to set clear boundaries with their twin, Kramer says: I want to play with Carly by myself today. Or they may hang out at their friend’s house without telling their sibling. It can be helpful to have these same frank conversations as they get older if they want to forge an independent relationship with a mutual friend.

In middle school, Royce Marnell remembers Ricky attempting to set such a boundary with him. Every day before class, Ricky and his friends would wander the halls with Royce tagging along. Ordinarily, it wasn’t a problem, but every once in a while, Ricky would tell his brother to kick rocks. “Ricky would just whisper in my ear, like, ‘Let me have this morning to myself,’ or ‘I want to talk to them about something and I don’t want you to be there,’” Royce says.

“Dang, I don’t remember doing that,” Ricky says. “I don’t really remember isolating Royce from my friend group because there was always guilt associated with that.”

That guilt was often reinforced by others in their lives: their parents and mutual friends asking why the other wasn’t invited. If Ricky wasn’t available to hang with a friend he made independently, the kid might reach out to Royce as backup. Their social lives, at times, felt out of their control. 

When a classmate only wants to befriend one twin, the rejection can send the other into a tailspin — because despite their perceived similarities, someone clearly prefers one to the other. “The existential questions about who we are and our personalities and [which] people like us, it heightens those concerns in a way that I think people with a different-age sibling just don’t [understand],” Kramer says. (As with all relationships, it can be difficult to articulate those unintelligible, intangible qualities that attract you to someone and repel you from others, even if they are a twin.)

As twins pursue independent lives, their friend groups diverge

By high school, twins start to forge their own paths and consider who they are as a unique individual opposed to a unit. Through a process known as deidentification, twins might play up their differences to minimize competition and jealousy, by, say, enrolling in different classes and extracurricular activities. “We see that during that time, there may be much more of an interest in each twin developing their own friendships,” Kramer says.

In college, this separation intensifies if the siblings attend different schools. On their own for the first time — not as one half of a pair, but as just another student — they embark on a potentially new experience of making friends solo. In her research, Kramer says fraternal twins are more eager to break free from their sibling, as opposed to identical twins who understand the inevitability of independence, but want to delay it.

This interdependence might hold twins back from expanding their social networks. In Kramer’s research, identical twins who attended the same college reported relying on their twin in moments of loneliness, perhaps to their detriment. “Some of them did say that they felt a little bit too comfortable with this arrangement because their sibling was always there and available,” Kramer says. “It didn’t put as much of a pressure on them to go out to be a little more extroverted than they might ordinarily prefer.”

Because the reality is, twins will have to live independently, even if they continue to live near (or with) their sibling. Employers and significant others typically don’t look for pairs. Having the social skills and confidence to forge new relationships without their twin as backup is valuable in the long term.  

It took until college for Jaclyn and Nick Lore-Edwards, 26, to transition from being known as “the twins” to simply “Jaclyn” and “Nick.” Growing up, the siblings had mutual friends; Jaclyn initially formed the relationships in elementary school, and those kids eagerly welcomed Nick. They both had the same interests — theater, books, dance, piano — and genuinely enjoyed being around each other, so they never had a reason to hang out with separate people. Being a twin meant strength in numbers.

“If I’m joining a new club and I don’t know if I’m going to know anyone, at least my brother is there and I can talk to him so I’m not just sitting by myself,” Jaclyn, a video editor and comedian, says. “I feel like that was definitely a big anxiety relief for me to always have him there.”

In addition to going to different colleges, their interests eventually diverged, and Jaclyn and Nick started meeting new people. Nick got involved with campus politics and model UN, while Jaclyn leaned into film and art, and each formed friendships with similarly minded people. Still, the act of making friends on their own was a relatively new experience. Having a twin, they say, was good practice for how to be a friend, not necessarily how to make them. “That was probably the first time I felt I have to do this alone,” Nick, a data scientist, says. “I can’t just rely on my sister to start talking to someone.”

While Jaclyn was the initiator in childhood, Nick thrived on his own in college: He came out as gay and gained confidence in himself. The friends he made knew exactly who he was and loved him for it. Jaclyn sensed that their high school friends, and by some extension her, had lost their luster, that the conversation really wasn’t that deep. “I could feel, when he would come home, maybe a little less interested in being with our friend group,” Jaclyn says. “That hurt my feelings. Me and you are best friends. But it wasn’t about me and our friends. He finally felt, I think, good at college.” Meanwhile, Jaclyn’s social circle was more intimate than Nick’s wide-ranging cohort, she says; her preferred friendship style mirrors that of a twin relationship. “I like having one really close friend or one person to go do stuff with,” she says.

Although they both live in New York City, they’ve still maintained their independent college friend groups. They represent the unique, individual adults they are now, not the packaged duo they once were.

While college was a period of mutual friend-making for Ricky and Royce Marnell, the twins from Orlando, their social lives did eventually split once they entered long-term relationships; their partners brokered their new adult friendships. After spending the first two decades of their lives under one roof, the Marnells now live with their significant others and with that comes responsibilities and obligations beyond their twin. Ricky’s planning a wedding; Royce just moved.

As a result of their progressing romantic lives, their shared experienced one has seemed to fracture. They don’t spend as much time with their mutual friends — if they do, it’s when college pals come to town — and instead most of their socializing is done with their respective partners’ friends. Before Ricky’s recent bachelor party, their group hadn’t gotten together in a handful of years. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s harder to make friends now without Ricky,” Royce says, “but I would say it feels more lonely.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

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Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C. 2. NB IMDb does not list a Alma Taylor film with the title The Girl Who Believed, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.

Alma Taylor (1895-1974) was a British actress, who peeked in the British silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. In 1915 readers of Pictures and Picturegoers voted her most popular British performer, beating even Charlie Chaplin. Taylor acted in over 150 films, among which some prestigious examples like Shadow of Egypt (1924) by Sidney Morgan.

Alma Taylor was born in London, on 3 January 1895. According to Anthony Slide, brunette, blue-eyed Alma Taylor was the Hepworth actress 'par excellence'. Beginning in 1907, she already acted with producer Cecil Hepworth, playing tragic young girls. She then co-starred with Chrissie White in Hepworth's 'Tilly Girl' comic series (1910-1915) about two naughty schoolgirls, as well as in 75 or more short and long subjects by Hepworth, such as the Dickens adaptations Oliver Twist (1912), David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley) and The Old Curiosity Shop (Bentley 1913). In those days , everyone helped out at the studios, so both Alma and Chrissie helped in the processing rooms when the weather was too poor to shoot. During the First World War and soon after Taylor contributed to the war effort by acting in such propaganda films like The Nature of the Beast (Hepworth 1919). Taylor clearly was the producer's favorite, and remained devoted to him for decades, starring opposite Ralph Forbes in the rather old-fashioned British countryside drama Comin' Thro the Rye (1923), a remake of an earlier version by Hepworth. After a temporal absence from the screen, Hepworth relaunched Taylor in his last film, The House of Marney (1926), with John Longden. In 1924, the Daily News named her, along with Betty Balfour, Britain's top star. Alma Taylor only starred in four non-Hepworth films: The Shadow of Egypt (Sidney Morgan, 1924) with Joan Morgan, Quinneys (Maurice Elvey, 1927), A South Sea Bubble (T. Hays Hunter 1928) with Ivor Novello, and Two Little Drummer Boys (G.B.Samuelson, 1928). In the late silent era she did some German films, including her part of Mrs. Barrymore in Der Hund von Baskerville/ The Hound of the Baskervilles (Richard Oswald 1929), a film longtime considered lost but rediscovered in 2009. With the coming of sound, however, Taylor's career dwindled and she had to satisfy with minor, matronly roles, in small number of films, such as Bachelor's Baby (Harry Hughes, 1932), Things Are Looking Up (Albert de Courville, 1935), Lilacs in the Spring (Herbert Wilcox, 1954), and Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (Frank Launder, 1957). Uncredited, she played a box office woman in Hitchcock's second vserion of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Probably her last part was the uncredited role of an old lady in the Titanic-drama by Rank, A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker 1958). Alma Taylor died in London, 23 January 1974. She was the wife of film producer and director Walter West (1885-1958), who in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the regular director of Violet Hopson, first with his company Broadwest (1914-1921) and then for Hopson's own company.

Sources: IMDB, English Wikipedia, Anthony Slide in Encyclopedia of British Film, www.allmovie.com, www.hepworthfilm.org/alma_taylor.htm.

“Ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” wrote A.S. Byatt in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami characterizes ice in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as a capsule that preserves the past “cleanly and clearly,” but possesses no future. In the ephemeral performance “MIZU,” frozen water takes on the form of a woman in an enchanting and emotive meditation on memory, time, and impermanence.

“MIZU” is the brainchild of puppeteer and director Élise Vigneron’s Théâtre de L’entrouvert and Companie Furankaï, which encompasses the work of choreographer and circus artist Satchie Noro. The composition highlights the fragility of our existence, the necessity of water, and “the passage from form to formlessness, from individual to cosmos,” Vigneron says.

The human body is around 60 percent water; the earth is covered by more than 70 percent. In “MIZU,” the title of which is named for the Japanese word for water (水), the human-size puppet double can be interpreted simultaneously as a unique individual and the dancer’s twin, with whom she communes and watches gradually disappear. “The melting of the ice reveals the nature of the double,” Noro says in a poetic statement. “The reflection slips away before I can escape it / After the ice, there is another material / A framework to explore / Dancing to find oneself again.”

The setting for the performance combines Noro’s interest in unique architectural apparatuses and environments outside of the traditional theater and Vigneron’s explorations of puppetry and creating forms with ice. Puppeteer Sarah Lascar controls the figure from the side and sometimes joins the dance to create a trio as is immersed in water.

“Mizu” is slated for performances throughout the summer at festivals and venues throughout Europe. Learn more on the production’s website. You might also enjoy revisiting Néle Azevedo’s “Minimum Monument.”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘MIZU’ Contemplates Fragility and Impermanence in a Poignant Dance with an Ice Puppet appeared first on Colossal.

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