Front and Back Covers, Volume 39, Number 2. April 2022

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 2POLYCRISIS: FROM DIVINE INTERVENTIONTO HUMAN AGENCYThe front cover image is of Thanatos (Death), the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, astride a pale steed and followed by Hades (as depicted by Gustave Doré in 1868). It serves as a haunting reminder of crisis understood in religious terms. In Christian theology, the Four Horsemen were given divine authority to kill by sword, famine, plague and through the beast; four original strands of polycrisis (Revelation 6:7‐8). Other eschatological traditions speak of entangled immorality, meteorological phenomena, geological violence and the coming of messianic saviours before the End Time.As our world faces an unprecedented era of interrelated and overlapping crises, we increasingly place human agency at the centre of our explanations. Yet we need to understand their underlying power dynamics and complexity better. This collection of articles invites us to examine how certain events trigger deliberation and critique of what constitutes a crisis and whether we can still identify cause and effect in an increasingly interconnected world. From socioeconomic forces to ecological thought and the coexistence of divine intervention, contributors explore how markets, solidarity, faith and future planning shape our responses to unexpected events spiralling out of control.We shift from the ‘crisis‐chasing’ evident over the last two decades to a meaningful critique of emergent multiscalar events. We interrogate the usefulness of the developing polycrisis paradigm to understand better the interrelated endless crises afflicting our planet today.BEES IN CRISISMarch 2023, northeastern Bosnia. A bee forager seeks out this Pink Pussy Willow, an early spring bloomer whose catkins offer up a generous supply of pollen, fuelling the hive's spring development.For the honeybees, who rely on environmental signs, such as temperature, to ascertain the seasons and sync their nest affairs with the cyclical rhythms of local weather patterns, soils and plants, willow catkin blossoms signal the beginning of a new foraging year. Yet, in the changing climate, local weather is unhinged from the seasons, and ambient cues are increasingly ambiguous and untimely.Plants, whose life cycles are likewise synced with environmental cues, interpret the changing atmosphere and respond with vigorous physiological changes. Warming temperatures and changing precipitation regimes in the Northern Hemisphere induce shorter and milder winters, earlier dates of greening in the spring and later browning in the autumn. Such changes are recorded by satellite imaging and are readily evident to lay observers.How exactly the plants and their companion insects will respond is unknown. Biologists know that responses to the changing climate and extreme weather will be idiosyncratic because ‘biodiversity’, the world of living difference, entails a vigorous differentiation of signage and meaning in an emergency.The thing to do now is to attend to these ontologically plural, interspecies signs of the times with methods and theories that are open to the unexpected and unintimidated by either the ominous or the meaningful quality of the world we share.This volume presents a joint endeavour in thinking about crisis as an ethnographic concept and an embodied, existential experience of discomfort from which to begin an earnest response.