Whichever way you cut it, we’re in for darkening times. That much is assured. We need to start talking about this if we want to survive, for as long as we can, with any shred of dignity. And there is a challenge, raise the bar! We want to be going down fighting, but with the good fight in mind, the one where we take care of each other, compassionate beings knowing our destiny was always death beyond whatever we could achieve in this lifetime, not reacting harshly to this bottom line, remembering there were never any promises, holding out a helping hand whenever we can.
So I took part in this course, Leadership and Communication during Societal Breakdown, with Jem Bendell and Katie Carr. Jem has been writing the Scholars Warning letters since November 2020. They outline the risks of societal collapse and argue that we desperately need our so-called leaders to act on climate science. It’s like a gathering of educated adults acting like a heroic Swedish school kid, or something crazy like that. I’m proud to join hundreds of these wise souls from dozens of academic disciplines including climatology, environmental science, psychology and sociology.
Of course, i no longer believe we will effect meaningful change in time to avert disaster. That is no longer the point, for me and those others who know the data, the habits we are stuck in, the longer picture of civilizations collapsing one after the other into the desert sands. After 30 years of environmental activism, i accept our imminent demise and work to Save Our Souls instead. Send out the Morse Code, like climate scientists did at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Yes, 30 years ago now!
Jem also commented meaningfully on this anniversary here. His work to raise awareness of just how dire things have gotten is often called ‘doomism’, but critics miss the point – without facing reality squarely, we will never change. Like the Extinction Rebellion movement, he follows the psychological realisation that anticipating massive disruption and even the breakdown of industrial consumer societies helps inform those of us who are highly motivated for radical action. Welcome to Deep Adaptation at a glance!
Signatories of the Scholars Warning letters are now connecting with each other and exploring potential collaboration and future action, through the Leadership and Communication during Societal Breakdown Course. Alongside Jem’s expert knowledge about the ways conventional leadership is failing us in terms of facing possible collapse, facilitator Katie Carr holds the group in empathic listening and collective investigation of the question: what makes a good leader in the current historical context? Both Jem and Katie embody the leadership that is a strong contender for the answer to this question: it’s as good as we can approximate to a circular counsel, as focused on supporting each other as coming to any kind of necessary consensus. Along with others, i paid it forward, so if you want to pursue this course of action start here.
Dismayed as i am since those heady days when we seemed to still have hope – to turn the ship around, to convince world leaders and the public we actually had to, to become green and sustainable – i work mostly in the field of psychotherapy nowadays. At least we can hope to help people who turn to face the dangers now cascading across the horizon to breathe, to care for each other while we still can. But it isn’t enough to hold off the grief. The other night i slipped out behind the laundry to sob so that my children didn’t have to see the inconsolable fear and grief in my eyes. They don’t need to witness this yet; their futures will be impoverished enough, compared to the relatively benign, even beautiful decades i have enjoyed.
Entering the course i was convinced by the NTHE data and that hasn’t changed. So it was a great relief to recall how much meaningful work, alongside other people, brings you back around to life, to what is important. I know this from my work in the ecotherapy field, especially seeing the enormous benefit that community gardens have brought so many, both here and in the UK. But this went beneath my comfortable intellectual understanding, to bring me back into the fold. I’m most comfortable on my own or with nature – inner or cosmic, i can usually find happiness, or at least solace, in philosophy or dreaming. Other people – who even are they? Strangers, sometimes friends, aliens … my weakness.
Thankfully i find enough inner resources to reach out, on the odd occasion, and link up with some external ones. People shouldn’t be thought of as resources – neither should natural elements – but sometimes we need to find a shoulder to cry on, a hand to lift us up, someone else to help us to understand we might be backing ourselves into a corner.
It doesn’t matter what we think or pray the future holds. What matters is what we do with our time. If you are concerned about ecosystem and societal collapse, climate chaos and all the other disaster coming down the line, let me extol the virtues of doing something about it. Not as if we are going to find some miraculous way out of our catastrophic dilemma – but as if we could still find something in each other worth holding onto.
This question must arise, at least for those of us who love nature: are we allowed to enjoy watching it rise up and smite us from the face of the earth?
There are two parts to this question; loving the power of nature and resenting the powerful ignorance of humanity. But they come together when we feel a sense of righteous satisfaction, witnessing the brutal beauty of nature showing us humans just how unimportant we are, in the scheme of things.
Anyone that despises the way humanity has considered itself to be so high and mighty may be forgiven for a sniff of misanthropy. I have always loved the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which places this in context beautifully. Like so many tyrants, autocrats, dictators, oligarchs and bullies before and after, this “big man” styles himself a “King of Kings,” believing his works to be oh so high and mighty. Yet, around the ruins of his sculpted form:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias painting by Charles Griffith
It has been said many times since, but it also applies to us, in smaller, everyday ways. We fade, fast, while life – the universe, our world – lives on. The Biblical chapter Ecclesiastes calls out the ultimate vanity of our ‘conceited self-indulgence’. Jung called out the modern Eurocentric world’s ‘godalmightyness’ while working on the alchemical process as a soul path. Arrogant pride is like a drug and it’s one we’ve always struggled with. The Oracle at Delphi advised not only that we should seek to Know Thyself, but also warned that Surety Brings Ruin – paraphrased commonly as ‘pride comes before a fall.’
And i can’t carry out this conversation without mentioning my main man of antiquity, a genuine culture hero for humanity, Prometheus. A true son of the Goddess, who has the gumption to steal into the heavens and nick out with fire, bringing it back down to poor humanity, who until then were a snivelling lot, living without cooking, warmth or even control over our own interior lighting. That name Prometheus should be engraved in memory forever (oh, wait, the whole point is that there is no future; sorry, i keep forgetting, in so many little ways, every day – that’s material for a future post, no doubt).
But we never learn. Somehow, we seem biologically predisposed to reinvent the wheel of pride every generation, like boys need to learn to run around together and spear kangaroos or woolly mammoths or bears, and if they don’t, they turn into sullen teenagers incapable of better than a grunt … oh wait, isn’t that exactly what happened when we were banned from taking them out bush for initiation ceremonies? (Yep, another future post, thanks to Paul Shepard and his incredible Nature and Madness; what we’ve lost without initiation ceremonies)
Prometheus: master thief, troublemaker, jester, culture hero. And look what happened to him … chained to a rock for 10,000 years, with his liver eaten out every morning by an eagle, to have it grow anew each day, only to be torn asunder by those fearsome, powerful talons again and again. This is the violence of life and death, as Tennyson declared: Nature, red in tooth and claw!
This magnificent Zeus and the imagery of Prometheus is from a mural at the Melbourne Fire Brigade, designed by Harold Freedman.
Bloody Zeus. The gods are ruthless, which is why we must be chained to this rock of earth, bound to the adamantine demands of our myths, strengthened by discipline, determined to suffer unto truth. Not popular, i recognise, compared to donuts, air conditioned buildings, chocolate, fast cars and dishwashers. Understandably. I like all these things too. But that seems to be the rub; easy life, horrible cost. What’s coming, we can see now, is the death and destruction on an unimaginable scale of all that is beautiful in humanity and what we know of the plant and animal kingdoms.
If we deserve it – if we can take some pleasure in watching human civilization unravel – it is mostly because we let powerful bastards run the show. And it’s not like we – the people, most of us, most of the time – wanted this. Power breeds on itself, profit builds arrogance, and while we all share in a little of this shame, it is those ruthless enough to thrill to it that are mostly to blame. However, as we all know, the poor will be more downtrodden, will die first and hardest, while the wealthy who profited the most will watch it on big screens in their bunkers.
What is left, but to enjoy the victory of life over stupidity and to align ourselves with what survives death; some element of spirit, or consciousness, the spark that animated us in the first place, the great mind or the god/goddess matrix, the serpent flying out of the cosmic soup, the light …
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It’s nice to have the company of like-minded souls on the downward slide.
Let’s begin with the comment from the inaugural post in this new thread. If Teresita is right and most of us know deep inside that we are doomed in the near future, what do we get out of either facing this probability head on versus not thinking about it too much? As Teresita writes, “In a very human aspect we all want to live our lives … as if nothing was about to happen. Love needs to be circulating. The risk of depression and apathy is very high if we accept this truth just like that.”
So, let’s focus on attention and awareness. I want to face the truth of what is coming, so that i can live and die as consciously as possible. How to avoid sinking into depression, apathy, anxiety or fury, when we see that the human race is about to be culpable for the extermination of most life on earth, as the hothouse explodes into action over the next few years, if not decades? One way of thinking this through is to think in terms of investment and reward – a strikingly capitalist, or at least materialistic metaphor i know, considering we are talking here about values, psyche, heart and soul. But i’m going to try and stick to the here and now, the realities of our physical existence as much as possible, while we can. There will be time for the spiritual possibilities later.
Let’s roll the dice. Life’s a gamble, yes? We never quite know what the result of our actions will be. Let’s say we focus some attention on an imminent, planetary extinction event. What is the reward for this path? What is the reward, or possible set of outcomes, for avoiding this? Preparing the mind for chaos seems to me more valuable. What will we do when societal breakdown becomes one of the realities between now and then? When people are hungry, homeless, shocked, destitute, desperate? They will be looking for answers where there are none. The least we could do, as thoughtful people with the courage to look ahead, is to be ready with whatever little shreds of wisdom we can muster, like bits of flotsam on the flood.
I believe the horrors will be worse if we don’t prepare our minds, our hearts and souls for what seems inevitable. I want to live and die like a beautiful social primate, capable of self-awareness and generosity of spirit. We are all going to be challenged more than we can yet even possibly imagine. A bit of preparation can go a long way.
*NB: I’m going to try to keep these meditations short. Please Like, Share and Subscribe. Please leave comments, suggestions for the dilemmas we need to discuss, questions, debates, interventions etc.
Image: La Bête de la Mer (Tapisserie de l’Apocalypse) / The Beast of the Sea (Tapestry of the Apocalypse)
How then shall we speak of what is to come? It’s time to start talking about Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE).
It is the most momentous moment of our species, our swansong, the end. No more living or writing for posterity; that vanity is dust. Homer, Virgil, Dante, the older classics from the earliest recorded stories, will be consigned to the winds, along with all other human arts. And with us, so much other animal life, so many ecosystems, entire forests of life, wiped out. Let’s try to chew this down in bite size chunks, because i have had it marinating for a while, and i still can’t figure out how to talk about this in one hit. We’ll get to the nightmare scenario of 450 nuclear reactors popping because we won’t have the time or resources to decommission them safely later. And the new era of industrial flotsam and jetson, as entire cities scour the shore where once clean ocean passed by. Let’s cover that one later too.
For now, let’s stick with societal breakdown, the need for deep resilience as a minimum standard, the testing of all our mores, no matter how well rehearsed.
The floods smashing south eastern Queensland and north eastern NSW right now are off the scale. The megafires that threatened my home and torched billions of animal lives a couple of years ago were unknown until recently, too, Aboriginal Australians even saying they have no story for this scale – a sure sign it has not occurred for tens of thousands of years, for the length of their oral history.
This isn’t just anthropogenic climate change – this is ecosystem collapse. When the methane burps and so much more of the polar caps slips into the ocean that we see sea level rises in metres, we will know it is coming for good this time. The ocean wants us back and it keeps the lowest elevation real estate on the planet. That’s where we’ll end up. In the Deep.
Let me know what you think, what you want to talk about, how we’re going to process this together. Are you relieved someone is finally telling this story, even though it is about to end? Frightened, avoidant, carefree, devastated? I’ll add chapters, if you let me know how this conversation might unfold. We’re going to need a level of understanding we’ve rarely displayed before. I want compassion, empathy, spiritual generosity to lead. There’ll be plenty of nastiness to go around, without us adding to it. Let’s go.
