The Future of the “Spiral Paradigm” in Climate Action

Climate change is a vortical situation of increasing turbulent conditions called the “sixth extinction.” In this chapter I begin with the two-dimensional Archimedean spiral (the coiling rope), move on to the three-dimensional corkscrew spiral (or threaded screw), and on to the three-dimensional double spiral of upward and descending movement with many nested vortices. The latter is more necessary to understand climate change, and our possible future in it, than the flat spirals. Ironically, Plato wrote about the double-twisted spiral with its nested vortices long ago. We are in a double-spiralic helice, a vortical phenomenon with centripetal and centrifugal, upward-ascending and downward-descending waves, and left and right turning whorls. It is worse than this. We need to challenge spiral symmetry thinking. There is no reality axis around which the spiralic helice is spinning, and there is no symmetry. There is no uniformity to the spiralic vortices of turbulence of the sixth extinction.