What is the crisis?
Welcome to the whatisthecrisis.org. Here you will find information about a research project that explored the various crises we face from an interdisciplinary perspective. The research was published in the Ecological Society of America's (ESA) Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment journal under the title, What is the crisis? Defining and prioritizing the world's most pressing problems by authors, , , , and
The problems humanity faces are complex and interconnected. Globalization has many causes and many effects and can be described in many ways. Yet, at its core, globalization is characterized by "more links". Today, like never before, the world is an interconnected place. There are upsides to being a more globalized society--we recognize that no man, nor country, is an island. We live as part of an interdependent web. But there are also downsides. Problems, because they are more interconnected and cross many domains, are more durable--they are tougher to solve.
The major crises we face are not isolated to one region or one discipline but are interconnected and interdisciplinary. Whereas in the past, it was customary for tough problems to be solved by a single scientist--by "loners in labs"--the future will require that these intersystemic, interdisciplinary problems be solved by "teams at tables".
In 2006, research at Cornell University explored how a multidisciplinary faculty from one of our nation's top universities thought about "the crisis" we face. These researchers wanted to learn more about how scientists and scholars from across the disciplinary landscape think about the crises humanity faces. Researchers asked faculty members to complete the following sentence, "One global crisis we face is ______". Participants in the study generated 116 unique problem statements. They were then asked to sort these crises into categories and rate each one in terms of both importance and feasibility-to-solve. After statistical analysis using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, these responses generated a visual map--an "Ecology of Crises".
This research acts as a stepping stone to what might be thought of as a "global To Do List"--a set of items that we must attend to in order survive and to thrive.
For more information, please contact witc@thinkandthrive.com
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