Re-entering the Wild: Disruption, Resilience, and Empathy in the Emerging World

As we emerge from Covid, everything is on the table for good and bad: a potential climate apocalypse, unprecedented progress in human rights and science, definitions of gender, digital automation. It may be that this virus was merely the opening scene in a story that, from this angle, seems almost unimaginable. As our twentieth-century institutions increasingly fail to adapt to the accelerating exponential change of the twenty-first century, we are called upon- individually and collectively- to adapt, to create, and to navigate a new world. In an age of technological hypnosis and fluctuating polemics, it seems an impossible task, but is this different from our ancestors who set out barefoot across continents or in small boats across unknown oceans? Could it be that, with the hard yards of ten thousand generations and their stories deep in our bones, we are built for this? Combining mythology, neuroscience, ecology, psychology, and poetry, writer and educator Ian Ramsey will discuss how we are re-entering the wild that countless generations of our ancestors inhabited, and how it may hold the seeds of our next evolutionary leap. How such a journey needs more than fluffy optimism but requires a gritty activism of the soul, and the imagination to dream a new world.