The Global Polycrisis and Liberal Democracy: Why We’re in Trouble and What We Can Do About It

Published by Adrienne Brown on 10/29/2025 11/05/2025

Join Thomas Homer-Dixon at the Mayne Island Agricultural Hall on November 29th, 7:00pm for his presentation on the “Polycrisis.”

It is increasingly clear that humanity is facing a combination of powerful and steadily worsening global stresses. These include climate change, outbreaks of disease, economic inequalities, the impacts of social media, and rising ideological extremism. There is also the danger of major war. At the same time, we are witnessing  a series of simultaneous and entangled crises. This “global polycrisis” is now generating economic and social problems that democratic institutions are failing to effectively address, and this in turn is lowering citizens’ confidence and trust in those institutions. With the polycrisis debilitating democratic societies’ problem-solving capacity, the most important question today is: What can we do to weaken its impacts and to create a more just and resilient future for our democracies and ourselves?

We are happy to have award-winning and internationally recognized author Thomas Homer-Dixon will be here on SḴŦAḴ | Mayne Island to share his knowledge and inspire us. He is founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, the former Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, and he founded the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation. 

Thomas’s books include: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?; Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, and most recently, Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril. As one of the world’s leading experts on the intricate links between nature, technology, and society, Thomas’s current research focuses on threats to global security. 

Please join us on Saturday November 29 for an evening of talk and discussion addressing the matter of the “polycrisis.”

Tickets Available Here.