Almost-always-falling-apart

This issue of Interstices coincides with a period of crisis: a global pandemic set against a backdrop of climate change and ecological disaster. Crises, times of intense difficulty or danger, signal turning or tipping points. They are unstable moments depending on emergent conditions, at which small changes might have big effects. Crises frequently demand urgent action, but also destabilise conventional patterns of thought, generating complexity and making simple solutions improbable. Previously successful strategies seem suddenly inadequate, and sometimes a surfeit of purported solutions does not change anything at all. Crises spill over economic, national, ecological, and biological bounds to form an overwhelming milieu or predicament, rather than a collection of discrete, well-bounded problems. Even where solutions are clear (stop burning fossil fuel, vaccinate), the path to those solutions can be unexpectedly complex. On edge, people rush to find certainty in ever-hardening positions; but fixed frameworks seem to generate antagonistic camps more likely to exacerbate crises than defuse them.