This research began with a conversation at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where Andrew Merrie, my friend and scientist described the environmental polycrisis in two words: "global weirding." "What we see is all over the place," he said. "It's weird even to us."

The term plays on global warming, but names something more specific. Rising temperatures aren't producing one predictable trend, they're producing a scatter of contradictions: heat spells and drought in some regions, flooding, cold snaps, and more violent storms in others (Friedman, 2007). The planet isn't warming so much as it's becoming unreadable.

That unreadability has a shape. Our ecosystem is fragile the way a supply chain is fragile, not diffuse, but concentrated at a small number of choke points, where interdependencies compound until cause and effect stop lining up.