"We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish"Dezeen Pooran Desai | 3 January 2025 A perfect storm is upon us, and to confront it designers must this year help to lead a fundamental shift in the way we see the world, writes Pooran Desai."We have two years to save the world." So said Simon Stiell, United Nations climate chief, in April last year. We are now nine months – more than a third of the way – into those two years. We have run out of time. We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish. "Reimagine".......... Take this option and by 2050 we'll be enjoying a planet where the living systems on which we depend are regenerating and able to support a population of 10 billion. We are crossing numerous interconnected climatic, ecological, social, economic, technological and geopolitical tipping points We will be improving our personal health and the health of our communities. We will have transformed from a consumer species, consuming the rest of nature, to a regenerated one, working as part of the rest of nature and returning the living planet to a healthy state. The second option is far less comforting. In this option we continue with our consumer economy with some incremental moves towards circularity and targets like net zero. They avoid saying it in public, but multiple scientists have told me they genuinely fear that if we follow this path, by the middle of the century we will be trying to survive on a planet only able to support maybe one or two billion people.
A stark choice. Why two polar outcomes? It is because we are crossing numerous interconnected climatic, ecological, social, economic, technological and geopolitical tipping points which interact and cascade in ways that move us away from a stable state. Climate change leads to drought, collapse in food production, mass migration and war. The big question we need to ask ourselves: can we tip from a degenerating to a regenerating state? I think so, and I believe it is simple. The good news is that a paradigm shift in science, culture and consciousness is emerging. This rebalancing from reductionism to holism, from rationality to intuition, from science to art, and from materialism to a sense of the sacred will be essential for resolving the polycrisis.
Leading scientists are calling for us to fundamentally change how we teach science Architects and designers work at the nexus of art and science, and so will be critical in manifesting the reimagining. In science the paradigm shift is a revolution every bit as dramatic as when Copernicus deposed the idea that our planet is the centre of the universe. There is a growing and profound dissatisfaction with reductionism and materialism. Focusing on the detail and the parts, we are realising, fails to explain how the world hangs together. In medicine, contradicting all reductionist hopes, we now know that genes predict only 5-10 per cent of disease at most, and that the whole planet. https://www.dezeen.com/2025/