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.
Greta Thunberg rules! Listen to her speak truth to the world direct.
I’m going to the strike. I’m taking my kids out of primary school. I don’t care if they get it yet or not. They need to know that i care and that they are going to. Why? Because climate scientists have been pointing this out for over 25 years, since they said (at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992) that overwhelming indications pointed towards massive damage being done to the earth’s biosphere by modern industrial society. Since then, unfortunately, it’s been mostly business as usual: mass media has supported politics aligned with global corporations, to continue supporting the damage done, in the name of profit. It’s frustrating to know this and to watch people – even intelligent, open-minded adults – clutch at straws and try to believe that we can continue to destroy the earth and not pay the ultimate price.
Sometimes, it takes an innocent or an outsider to destroy our illusions and smash the bubble of lies we have woven for ourselves. The Emperor has no clothes! Now, again, a child has come to wake us up. This is kinda embarrassing. How is it that a strike has to be called by children, who want to leave school to try and make political leaders realise that they have to act now if we are to save the environment from irreversible damage? It’s not like we have lacked credible science or anything … no less than the IPCC – that’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading international body for the assessment of climate change, and a source of scientific information and technical guidance for Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – has been trying to wake us up for years.
But we all love a good story, especially when it means we can enjoy creature comforts and believe we are chosen to live in the lap of luxury, not merely by the good fortune of technological development and historical serendipity, but because … we are special. That is the power of myth. A powerful myth convinces you that you can have it all; you can enjoy life here and now and in the body, as well as knowing that you are destined by the forces of the universe to carry on in splendour and majesty beyond this mortal coil. Doesn’t that sound great?! Yeah!
And to think, without destroying our planetary home, we could have all of this, with a sophisticated understanding of how myth works within and without. In the world and in our hearts and body/minds, we are star dust, evolving to be at one with eternal consciousness, unlimited … unless we choose not to. And then we become forgetful, worldlings, limited, socialised, attached, adult. And then, we need the children, the fools, the artists, the whimsical, the poets, to remind us. That we are more. As Marianne Williamson put it, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”
So don’t just let the kids lead the way! Strike! Join them (and us). Why can’t we organise and resist the devastation of the world as adults? Because we are so caught up in the myth of technological progress and plenty that we are drunk on it. We can’t always see the truth so obviously dangling before our eyes. But Greta can. The kids can. And we can wake up to it too. It’s about time. Let’s speak out and make our kids proud. They’ll remember this, when the damage really starts to hit in the near future. They’ll know that we cared enough to strike out, against the mainstream, for change. And that we never gave up.
What can we say about the recent IPCC report and its 12-year timeframe?
Climate scientists have long been balancing on a thin wire, trying to communicate the peril we are in without sounding alarmist or as if they have a political agenda. From an environmental activist point of view, they’ve been criticised for being too patient and cautious. Yet one thing we can be sure of now is that their language has gotten more urgent as time has passed and more evidence has accrued that we are passing the tipping points of a planet safe for human habitation. The IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have gone over review after review of their predictions, based on the best modelling we have at our disposal, and everything points to things being worse than they ever predicted. Oops – party stopper!
The Guardian article on the recent IPCC report is here
So let me try something, by putting this in everyday language … can we finally say, without sounding alarmist, and with the knowledge that we are starting to look really foolish and cowardly if we don’t, that we are now officially at the precipice of ecological collapse, as the environmental devastation of global capitalism runs amok and governments fall like dominoes to far right aggression? Can we talk about it yet? I’ve written before about how and why the “big man” caricature wins in dangerous times and it’s sad to see that I was right, in early 2016, and that it just keeps getting worse; now see Brazil’s new far right champion.
To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, I went back to the origins of large-scale civilizations to see what we can learn from them. When people get scared, they look for protection – even if the gang leader is the most threatening character in their world! In fact, that’s how classic standover tactics work: pay the thugs to make sure no-one harms you, with the strong insinuation that if you don’t, those very thugs will burn your house down overnight, whether you are in it or not. Now the house is the planet and the thugs are transnational corporations and the politicians that protect their interests. I don’t think we can hide from that anymore. What might have sounded like conspiracy theory 20 years ago is mainstream political analysis nowadays.
We’ve got to keep working on resilient communities; securing our own local food sources, finding ways to become less dependent on fossil fuels, getting together and sharing and taking care of each other. But we may need to start extending things like refusing single-use plastic and demanding food without poison in it, to actions based on the civil disobedience model. Here are a couple of examples:
Extinction Rebellion are standing against the unprecedented global emergency of the ecological crisis and the sixth mass extinction we are in the midst of, by asking for massive truth bombs about the real dangers we currently inhabit, shorn of media white washing and political inaction. They also feature a cool wallpaper-like set of visuals that neatly convey their core messages:
And Deep Green Resistance state that“Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
I loved reading Henry David Thoreau when I was first in university. He loved nature and fought for the truth; and it was he who coined the term civil disobedience. It is supposed to mean turning away from the law as it is encoded by vested interests, when you can tell there is a greater truth arising from reality. As I reiterated recently: Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 we have known that industrial civilisation threatens the health of our planet. It is time we started to really act like this shit is getting real and getting out of our comfort zone. We deserve better, so do the next generations, and so do the animals and plants that have so far survived the onslaught of modern technological civilisation. And hey, we might even enjoy getting down to it! Maybe it’s not the end of the party after all …
The Guardian article on the recent IPCC report is 