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Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today in our series on the History of Bad Ideas, we're going to be talking about an idea that is probably the most recent of all the ones we've discussed in this series.

It didn't really exist until the very end of the 20th century and it's only really taken off in the last few years.

But now that it's become widespread, it's also really hard to avoid.

I'm talking to the American historian Gary Gerstel about what's wrong with the idea

that we are living in the polycrisis.

Gary, we're talking about an idea today which in the context of this series is, I think,

by some distance, the most recent idea that has the most recent coinage, polycrisis.

As a word, my understanding of it, it was first used right at the end of the last century, the end of the 20th century. It started to be used.

1998, 1999, I think, at the first two times, it probably had been around before, but got picked

up. Originally in French writing about the ecological crisis by authors who wanted to say, it's

a mistake to think that the crisis facing planet Earth is a single crisis.

So we shouldn't think of it as the environmental crisis or the climate change crisis.

They wanted to say it is multiple overlapping crises,

...