About
On this website our mission is systemic and solution-based: though we want you to feel the urgency of the threats our planet is facing, we don’t want you to become overwhelmed or hopeless.
We approach storytelling through a systemic lens.
This means tracing today’s climate crisis back to the processes that have shaped our social, economic, and ecological systems, while responding to the gaps left by mainstream media. We examine how these processes continue to operate across interconnected food, energy, cultural, political, legal, and ecological systems.
Icarus Complex is also a printed magazine that asks: what are the challenges and the potential weapons of action from an economic, political, legal and grassroots perspective? We take an in-depth look at the issues surrounding climate change with the aim of dissecting humanity’s icarus complex—the notion that we have jumped off a cliff, mid-flight, confident in our own momentum, but in denial about the impending crash if we do not change course.
You can find our latest print issue in our shop.
We believe that climate change should be recognised as the most essential threat facing humanity today, yet we do not want that recognition to be coupled with a sense of fatalism. We refuse to be complacent. On the contrary, we want to look at the issues and solutions around climate change in a holistic way, and inspire individuals and institutions to not only take, but also demand both institutional and governmental action.
We want to ask the right questions, so that we can help point to the right answers.
We believe that in order to provoke a paradigm shift, people must tap into their sense of empathy and justice. We believe that viable solutions can only be found in a society that sets itself above the toxic rhetoric of left versus right, us versus them, science versus religion, social responsibility versus business viability.
We want to help unify all the disparate voices that are fighting to implement change.
Our Approach is guided by a set of core pillars: historical grounding, value systems, dynamics of scale, narrative and framing. The goal is to illuminate these dynamics in ways that inspire action and cultivate hope by employing rigorous journalism, emotive photography and filmmaking, and immersive design.
A systemic approach does more than chart the emergence of dominant systems; it explores how these systems are experienced at both global and local scales, especially by communities whose livelihoods depend on the health of ecosystems. We therefore report on how communities imagine, organise, and assert self-determined, strategic pathways to challenge and untangle these systems – often questioning the knowledge frameworks that define what is valued.
Icarus Complex will attempt to navigate the fine line between rattling your sense of revolt and your propensity to switch off and bury your head in the sand. Through provocative articles we hope to tackle the big questions across systems, offering in-depth analysis of the various environmental currents. We want to talk to the movers and shakers of environmental policy and research about systemic solutions that take into account the economic and social realities of the world we live in. We want to draw attention to all the efforts that have been initiated by various organisations and grassroots movements to affect change.
And finally, we want to understand why there isn’t already a revolution on the way…because let’s face it, there should be.
Icarus Complex is a non-profit.