Seeds of Renaissance
White paper · No. 3 · March 2026

The Second Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction

By The Seeds of Renaissance research group24 min readVersion 1.2
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AbstractWe argue that the converging crises of our time share a root in how we make meaning, and that a renewal on the scale of the first Renaissance is both necessary and possible. We set out the case in four steps.

1Real risk

The risks we face are not separate emergencies but symptoms of a civilisation whose foundations are cracking.1 Ecological overshoot, political fracture and a loss of shared meaning reinforce one another, so solving them one by one will not be enough.

Every great turning carries within it the seed of rebirth. This paper is about that seed: what it is, where it grows and how it can be tended. For the longer argument, see the full report.

Ink drawing of a tree and its root system
Fig. 1The visible and the hidden: a tree and its root system, in section and in plan. Scale bar 200 cm.

2Root cause

Beneath the crises lies a way of seeing that divides the world into parts and forgets the whole.2 Changing that way of seeing is slow work, and it is the work this movement exists to do.

  1. See Part 1 of the full report for the evidence on converging risks.
  2. On attention and the divided way of seeing, see McGilchrist (2021).