Collapsing

When I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse many years ago, describing how societies choose to fail or survive, I became reacquainted with the idea of ‘collapse’. Since then, I have read many books relating to the topic, and recently decided to write this essay, for a number of reasons.

First, I wanted to clarify my own thinking and put down on paper what I thought were the most important concepts around the topic.

Secondly, to summarise the main ideas of two authors who have greatly influenced me: Iain McGilchrist and Jem Bendell.

Thirdly, based on my experience as a counsellor, to point out that avoidance and denial are not helpful strategies, and to encourage people who feel helpless to go through the process of acceptance, not resignation.

Lastly, because the media is adept at criticising and blaming, and promoting ‘solutions’ based on new technologies – technologies that will more than likely give rise to other problems.

And, in relation to climate change and social upheaval, because media outlets and many commentators are prone to put sole responsibility on political figures and governments, and paint a picture of doom and gloom. Taking a different approach, I would like to expand the conversation, explore alternative views, and put forward other possibilities.

At school I vaguely remember learning about the end of the Roman Empire and about extinct civilisations but never thought deeply about what it meant for people living in those times. Diamond explains the concept of ‘creeping normalcy’, which refers to slow trends concealed within normal fluctuations. If, for example, economic conditions, education and hospital systems, adequate housing, air and ocean pollution, traffic congestion, gradually go downhill, it is difficult to recognise that each successive year is on average slightly worse than the year before, so one’s baseline standard for what constitutes ‘normalcy’ shifts imperceptibly.

Historian Ronald Wright writes: ‘Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success’. A ‘progress trap’ being our attempt to solve problems caused by progress with the same methods and mindset we used to ‘progress’.

I grew up with the threat of nuclear war and the gradual realisation of the impact our way of life had on the environment – reading books such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and having lengthy discussions with friends who were organic farmers and espoused ideas based on respect for the land and nature.

I also performed in a show adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World and participated in endless debates about the future.

My childhood was spent in the Swiss countryside, and I have always enjoyed roaming the fields and forests. I feel lucky, as apart from common sense, research shows that children need wilderness.

Writing principally about the USA, David Orr, in his book Dangerous Years, notes the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten. The consequences of such disconnect with nature include estrangement from each other and ailments such as asthma, obesity, heart and lung disease and autoimmune malfunction.

Isolation from nature also contributes to feelings of disconnection, loneliness and lack of the usual social and ethical standards – attitudes that breed nihilism, a debilitating sense of purposelessness.

Orr tells us that readers of his book who are over the age of sixty, have lived through two and a half doublings of the human population and were the primary beneficiaries of the global boom that consumed 95% of all the oil ever burned. He adds: ‘the fossil-fuel age changed more than the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans. It drastically changed how we think about distance, time, work, and nature as well as what we think about. And in the briefest moment of history, we came to believe that the miraculous and extraordinary are merely normal’.

A good economy would facilitate the indicator of social health called ‘happiness’. What we know is that the US economy generates high rates of depression, autism, loneliness, violence, and addiction. Unrestrained and minimally regulated capitalism has led to greater concentration of wealth, economic monopolies and an ecological, social and political crisis.

Three years ago, I listened to an online talk by the nonagenarian eco-philosopher and spiritual activist, Joanna Macy. Afterwards, she emailed participants a paper by ethicists David Schenck and Larry Churchill. Their essay sketches the climate derangements likely by the year 2031 and offers six adaptive maxims, drawn from ethics work in intensive care units and hospices, to guide us through the devastation and transition following environmental and social collapse. Listening to the talk and reading the article had a strong impact and re-ignited my interest in the possible risks facing us in the near future. I will come back later to those maxims, as I believe they are a useful guide.

Iain McGilchrist

A friend introduced me to McGilchrist’s book, The Master and His Emissary, published in 2010. Iain McGilchrist’s background is in the humanities and science, most precisely neurobiology. He worked as a psychiatrist and is well aware of the rapid rise in mental health problems. Ranging from philosophers to scientists, past and present, he draws from a rich trove of thinkers. His language is meticulous and clear. In the second part of his 1400-page tome, The Matter with Things, Our brains, Our delusions and the Unmaking of the World, he delves into consciousness and the sacred, taking us from problems of the individual to those that beset our struggling civilisation.

Subsequently, I’ve watched numerous interviews and presentations on YouTube and was inspired to buy his two-volume opus. A basic contention of this erudite writer is that the two hemispheres of the brain have two diverse ways of perceiving the world. The right hemisphere looks at the world holistically. It is about relationship, process and flow. It sees the world as fresh, unique, never certain, but full of potential. The left hemisphere looks at the world analytically, seeking to break it down into things that can be manipulated, and exploited. It grasps what is familiar, certain, disembodied, and abstract. Imagine a chicken: The bird needs to use the left hemisphere of its brain to focus, to find grain or insects to eat but also needs to use the right side, with its broad attention, to scan for possible predators and potential mates. One of the durable generalisations about the brain hemispheres has been the finding that the left hemisphere tends to deal more with pieces of information in isolation and the right hemisphere with an entity as a whole.

In The Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist explains that twice in the history of the West – in ancient Greece and then in Rome – a civilisation started out with a harmony of the left and the right hemisphere but, as it moved more towards the left hemisphere’s take of the world, it collapsed. And, in our present world, it is that same trajectory unconsciously unfolding for a third time.

McGilchrist argues we are out of balance. In our cultural history, he traces the signs of a steadily more assertive left-brain modus operandi. While the positives of this development abound, medicines and vaccines, planes and trains, warm homes with glowing screens, something is also lost with the ascendancy of the ‘part-seeing’ left hemisphere. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, he believes, the unopposed action of the left hemisphere: ‘The things that used to alert us to the inadequacy of our reductionist theories are fading away. There were: the natural world, the sense of a coherent shared culture, the sense of the body as something we live in not merely possess, the power of great art and the sense of something sacred that is real but transcends everyday language.’

We are becoming more ‘machine-like’, says McGilchrist, and goes on to discuss Artificial Intelligence (AI) that he calls ‘artificial information-processing’. If it is employed wisely, AI has the potential to be extremely helpful. It may even assist us repair the damage done by industrialisation. AI’s purpose is to give us control but, to succeed, we must let go of control to some extent. We must also let go of the left hemisphere mechanisms: bureaucracy, micro-management and ‘strangulation by systems’; we must work with Nature, not in opposition. He asks what will happen when reliance on machines depletes us of our skills or, in the case of a shortage of resources, an extended power failure, or the breakdown of civil order or war, we can no longer rely on machines. How resilient, resourceful will we be? He stresses the danger of increasing power through implementation of AI is the likeliness it will be used for evil ends. ‘And once a pernicious regime’s AI reaches a certain level, it can destroy any attempt to resist it, bringing the prospect of a totalitarianism that has no end.’ He continues: ‘All decisions affecting humans are moral decisions … Every human situation is unique, its uniqueness arising from personal history, consciousness, memory, intention, all that we mean by the word emotion, all the understanding gained through and stored in the body, all that makes us humans and not machines. Goodness requires a virtuous mind, not merely following rules.’

McGilchrist’s thesis is timely because it reaches us at a moment when humanity faces deepening crises. What are those crises exactly? McGilchrist lists them as attacks on Nature, tyranny of ideology and propaganda, the effects of artificial intelligence, denigration and abandonment of intuition and imagination, and the need to regain a disciplined spirituality.

Orr agrees that reductionism is a well-documented flaw in Western thinking. Reductionism is a tendency to reduce problems to their component parts and thereby isolate them from their larger context. The other major flaw being a bias towards short-term thinking.

Andrew Leigh in his book What’s the Worst that could Happen, looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing that the rise of populist politics and charismatic politicians makes catastrophe more likely, with their primary focus on their followers’ immediate grievances. Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long term risks. Taking a broad overview, he outlines the biggest existential risks as: pandemics; climate change that could render vast swaths of the earth uninhabitable; the dangers of runaway superintelligence; nuclear weapons; asteroid impact or volcano eruption; populist politics and the death of democracy.

Jem Bendell

In Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse, Jem Bendell claims the collapse of modern societies has already begun. Jem Bendell worked for over two decades with non-profit organisations and the United Nations, and became involved in the anti-globalisation movement. His book is replete with statistics. He discusses the influence of money, capitalism, and corporations on our society, and gives a detailed analysis of climate change. He also emphasises the importance of meditation, allowing him to slow down and become more attuned to thoughts and patterns, taking us from society at large back to the individual.

Like McGilchrist, Bendell moves beyond his academic and professional background (sociology professor and sustainability researcher) to demonstrate things are much worse than most people will entertain. Unquestioned obedience to the god of growth and monetary systems has caused us to harm each other and nature to an extent that has undermined and broken the foundations of our societies. Chapter by chapter, the first half of this 500-page book presents a laundry list of ruin: imminent or ongoing economic collapse, monetary collapse, energy collapse, biosphere collapse, climate collapse, food collapse, societal collapse.

‘The quality of life in most countries and regions of the world peaked around 2016 and then began to slowly decline. There is no sound reason to expect a halt to this deterioration’, Bendell argues. Declining human development index statistics are one of many signals that societal collapse is not only possible, or even imminent – but already happening, right now. For example, if extreme weather led to widespread crop failures across multiple wheat-growing regions – a possibility known as ‘a multi-breadbasket failure’ – this would also trigger economic and political chaos. This, in turn, would make it much more difficult for the entire world to immediately transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy to avoid calamitous climate derangements.

American author, Charles Eisenstein, writes that, in most of the world outside the USA, it is not sceptics who pose the biggest obstacles to climate action, rather it is the indifference of the general public and the political class, but a frontal assault on denial is unnecessary and has not worked. He adds that, for the last twenty years, ninety three percent of all news in the environment category has focused on climate change and has neglected to talk about other critical issues such as loss of biodiversity, acidification of the ocean, depletion of the soil and so on. In his book, Climate: A New Story, he posits that the catastrophic consequences of climate change seem far off in time and space, and that people de-prioritise future impacts in favour of more immediate issues.

Around the world, deforestation, wetlands draining, industrial agriculture, hydroelectric dams and urbanisation make land vulnerable to catastrophic floods, droughts, and temperature extremes. In Eisenstein’s view, these practices are all addressable at the local level. To nullify what has been called ‘Stokes’ mechanism of denial and paralysis’, he advocates an alternative framework, focusing on local ecosystems. In my home habitats of Fremantle and down in Denmark, on Western Australia’s beautiful south coast, I know a number of environmentalists who embrace this role and vision.

Eisenstein continues by saying it is not only climate change whose effects are distant from everyday life – it is ecological destruction generally. This is especially true in the developed world. Thus far, the elite nations have been able to largely insulate themselves from the harm ecological destruction causes. To most people, it seems unreal. The air conditioner still runs. The car still goes. The credit card still works. The garbage truck takes away the trash. Schools are open in the morning, and there is food in the supermarket and medicine in the pharmacy. The routines that define normal life are still intact. If we wait for catastrophic events, then it will be too late. No one is ever persuaded to make major changes in their life’s commitments unless that persuasion is accompanied by an experience that impacts them on a physical and emotional level. Deep and active care for the planet comes through experiences of beauty and grief and not from fear of future ruin. He wonders what would happen if we revalued the local, the immediate, the qualitative, the living and the beautiful? We would still oppose most of what climate change activists oppose but for different reasons and in a less forceful way.

The Western mind does not easily comprehend the idea of the intelligence of nature. If we could, it would mean asking ‘what does the land want, what does the river want, what does the planet want?’. Science is beginning to recognise what many ancient cultures have always known. An invisible web of causality does indeed connect every place on Earth. Saving the rainforest because of its value to humans rather than for saving it to avoid the effect that destruction would have on the Earth as a whole, is the mindset lurking behind our problems: a mindset of self-interest. (And, one could say, a mindset of mutually-assured destruction.) Geneen Haugen in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth asks: ‘If we approached rivers, mountains, dragonflies, redwoods and reptiles as if all are alive, intelligent, suffused with soul, imagination and purpose, what might the world become? Who would we become if we participated intentionally with such an inanimate Earth?’

Iain McGilchrist quotes the physicist, David Bohm, when pondering the difference between animate and inanimate: ’when one analyses processes taking place in inanimate matter over long enough periods of time, one finds a similar behaviour to living processes. Only here the process is so much slower’.

This brings me to psychological factors underwriting much of human action and inaction.

In 1984, Roger Walsh begins his book Staying Alive: The psychology of human survival, with the following: ‘It is no secret that we have reached a critical time in our history, a time that may decide the fate of both our species and our planet’. He describes our current threats as actual symptoms, symptoms of our individual and shared mind-sets. Therefore, it is to our own minds that we must look for solutions. Without denying the importance of social, political, and economic forces, Walsh emphasises we must examine our thinking, and what lies behind it.

From the psychodynamic perspective, explains Walsh, what we call ‘defence mechanisms’ constitute the heart of individual psychopathology. Defence mechanisms operate by reducing and distorting awareness of suffering not only in ourselves but also in the world. ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’, wrote T.S. Eliot, and repression and denial are the crutches we use to help us avoid it. Denial leads us not only to deny the state of the world but also our role in producing it. Faced with the uncomfortable recognition of the vast discrepancy between our standard of living and that of the world’s poor, we often use rationalisation to justify the inequality, and our failure to do more to relieve it. When those defences and distortions are examined, we can see they represent unskilful attempts to deal with fear.

Walsh goes on to describe different approaches to resolve psychological dynamics: Cognitive factors containing a basket of thoughts, beliefs and assumptions. Behaviourism and reinforcement. Social learning and impact of the media. Immaturity and inauthenticity, both individual and social. Plus ‘the three poisons’: addiction, aversion and delusion. I like Roger Walsh’s book because it gives a succinct view of a global psychology. When I undertook studies to become a counsellor, I was able to explore these different approaches in more detail.

Dependent Arising, Systems Theory, and the Concept of Self

Indigenous worldviews and various spiritual traditions have understood interconnectedness. Modern science – quantum physics in particular – confirms that, at a molecular level, everything, humans included, emanates from the same ‘stuff’ that McGilchrist (and others) would name ‘consciousness’. What we know as ‘systems theory’ challenges assumptions about a separate, continuous self, by showing there is no logical or scientific basis for constructing one part of the experienced world as ‘me’ and the rest as ‘other’. Entities are ever-changing, because they participate in, and are subject to, relationships in a world constituted by relationships.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson had a strong influence on systemic thinking, denouncing our obsession with power and control, and arguing that technology-driven solutions often perpetuate the problems they sought to solve. (This message clearly resonates with others who I’ve mentioned above.) My training in systemic family therapy gave me a much better understanding and appreciation of that approach.

Roger Walsh, Joanna Macy in Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General System Theory, and Charles Eisenstein, to name a few, are influenced by Eastern concepts such as ‘dependent arising’, a Buddhist doctrine that postulates our notion of ‘the self’ is paramount in creating our present crises. Language and society, indeed our very perceptions of a world ‘out there’ distinct from the self ’in here’, encourages a conviction that, as individual selves, we are separate and distinct entities. Charles Eisenstein describes it as the story of separation; the essence being the separate self in a world of ‘other’. Put simply, since I am separate from you, your well-being need not affect mine; more for you is less for me. Flowing from this belief, we are in competition with each other. And the more control we can exercise over the forces of Nature, the better off we will be. To overcome this ingrained way of seeing ourselves and the world around us, the notion of self-interest must be replaced by one that includes other beings and the life of our planet. If ‘we’re all in this together’ is recognised not merely as a nice slogan trotted out during a pandemic, we need to live and breathe ‘togetherness’ rather than fall back into the trap of ‘othering’.

Sustainability

Could we power our present civilisation by hyper-efficiency and renewable sources like sun and wind? Some optimists believe it is possible, yet others see little convincing evidence supporting the fantasy that alternative-energy technologies could equitably fulfill our current consumption levels, let alone taking into account a larger, aspirational population, with an endless push towards higher living standards.

In his book The Rare Metals War: The dark side of clean energy and digital technologies, Guillaume Pitron, award-winning journalist and documentary-maker, warns us the resources race is well and truly on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals – but they are running out. He reveals that, while breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependency – a dependency upon rare metals such as cobalt, gold and palladium. Critical minerals for batteries require, for example, transportation. Further, the International Energy Agency has calculated that a global transition from fossil fuels would increase demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals by 4200%, 2500%, 1900% and 700% respectively. This report notes that there is currently not the capacity to fulfil such demand, nor are there yet plans to build enough mines and refineries to do so.

Canadian Bernard Tourillon, Director of Uragold, a company that makes equipment for the solar industry, has calculated the ecological impact of photovoltaic panels. On account of their silicon content, producing just one panel generates as much as 70 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The 23% projected annual increase in the number of panels over the next few years will increase their power-generation capacity by 10 gigawatts every year but will generate 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere or as much annual pollution as 600,000 vehicles on the road.

Pitron describes the pollution caused by rare metals. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces more than half the planet’s cobalt, a resource indispensable to lithium-ion batteries used in electrical vehicles. Cobalt, he claims, is mined under conditions straight out of the Middle Ages. One hundred thousand miners equipped with spades and picks dig the earth to find the mineral, resulting in the pollution of surrounding rivers and the destruction of the local ecosystem. Mining activity also requires staggering amounts of water, diminishing the resources available to local communities living often on water-scarce land. Unimpeded mining for those rare metals will result in destruction of most of the remaining pristine places left on the planet. Meanwhile, the integrity of other pristine places is already being compromised by huge solar and wind farms that alter the beauty and the redemptive calm of the landscape.

Worried about the health of our planet, we install solar panels on our roofs, invest in batteries to store the energy, use heat pumps, buy hybrid or electrical cars, and make other environmentally-informed choices such as reducing our plastic use, building energy-efficient houses, avoid the temptation to ‘fast fashions’, all with a view towards making a difference. It is true that the production of energy from non-fossil sources is increasing worldwide and that the cost of producing some forms of renewable energy is comparable with or cheaper than fossils fuels. When we talk of renewable energies, we usually mean what is providing the electricity that most of us use in our everyday lives – electricity not produced by coal, gas, oil or nuclear fusion. However, such usage only amounts to 20% of the global ‘Total Final Consumption’, as the vast majority of the energy consumed by our industrial societies is taken up by agriculture, forestry, fishery, mining, construction, manufacturing and transport industries. Bendell tells us that, of the 20% of energy consumed as electricity, the portion generated by renewables is 30%, a small percentage. We also need to take into account the fact that the demand for global electricity is rapidly rising. Renewables have grown at a slower pace than energy demand.

I don’t want to continue with more statistics or more facts at this stage but I must admit reading of the problem with decarbonisation has left me pensive. Green technologies will improve. We will make headway in electricity storage and develop new materials with revolutionary properties. But Pitron wonders if, one more time, innovations will confirm the resilience of our species or if we should ask the following question: what is the logic behind this technological leap we embrace? ‘Can we not see the absurdity of leaping into an environmental sea change that could poison us with heavy metals before we have seen it through? Can we really advocate harmony through material wellbeing if it means the very opposite: new health problems and environmental chaos?’

Hope

Faced with the knowledge of these multiple crises, one is bound to feel despair and grief. Psychology tells us that a great deal of emotional pain results from disregarding or attempting to avoid feelings. The desire to escape your emotions is based on the (usually unconscious) presumption they will destroy you by their overwhelming force. But, from a therapeutic standpoint, if you can accept your fear and depression, it will restore the ability of your feelings to provide clues to help you define your values and for making choices. The importance of this understanding, I believe, cannot be understated. Yet it takes courage and commitment to stop the avoidance of difficult or threatening feelings and emotions and recognise the freedom that results from it.

Otherwise, we can deflect, and miss the boat. As Barbara Ehrenreich explains: ‘Americans have been working hard for decades to school themselves in the techniques of positive thinking and these included the reflexive capacity for dismissing bad news’. Therefore, the invitation is there to feel the despair and let the process of grieving happen, knowing there is light at the end of the tunnel.

With world events and human failures being as they are, we may find it difficult to believe there could be ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. Joanna Macy describes another kind of hope she calls ‘radical hope’. The kind of hope that reappears after optimism has died, is a form of hope that can be relied on. It is generally a hope that doesn’t talk about, or think of itself, as ‘hope’. This means realising the dangers of ‘optimistic hope’, of dwelling in fantasyland and imbibing magical thinking. Firstly, we must own our grief and anger. Secondly, the realisation that blaming ourselves and others doesn’t help. Only when one reaches a certain level of despair can new resources of hope emerge. What is called for is a faith in a possible future, however improbable, embedded in action oriented to the situation.
Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si, invites us to a ‘sense of deep communion with the rest of nature and tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings’. The strength of his appeal lies in the union of concern for the health of the planet with concern for the poor and disadvantaged. He sees things not as separate issues but as different sides of the same coin.

Solutions

Iain McGilchrist does not give us a list of tasks to do because what we need to do is clear. He proposes that, unless we rediscover the sacred, we will not be able to avoid the destruction of our civilisation. The ever-proliferating crises we are experiencing can be seen to stem ultimately from a breakdown in our understanding of what it is to be a human being, and to lead a fulfilling life; what the world is like, and how we are in the process of destroying all that it has of value to give us. We need to change the way we think about ourselves. The crises have many causes such as polarisation, black and white categories, less empathy, and our lust for control and power. McGilchrist adds ‘We are not distinct from – over against – Nature: we emerge out of, live within, and return to Nature … Seeing this does not exclude the adoption of other perspectives, when required; but this particular perspective cannot be excluded or circumvented’. Central to his writing are the concepts of purpose, and on how to re-engage with the values that alone bring meaning to life. Above all, to resist the onslaught on truth and trust, without which a society cannot stand. He deplores that our strong reliance on the left hemisphere cuts us off from the deep pull towards something ineffable – ‘something’ that is a matter of experience, and that we call ‘spirituality’.

Jem Bendell identifies a disturbing trend of ‘panic-driven authoritarianism’ in contemporary politics, with governments and elites forcing the public to change their behaviour for their own good. He rejects this vision of top-down change as symptomatic of deeper problems within modernity. He advocates instead for an ideal of ‘eco-freedom’, defined as ‘that individual and collective state of being free and enabled to care for each other and the environment, rather than coerced or manipulated towards behaviours that damage it’. He argues human nature isn’t to blame for the climate crisis. Instead, the problem is capitalism. We do not need to feel ashamed our modern culture we have learned to be human within, is culpable for both genocide and ecocide, as are so many of our ways of working and consuming today. Instead, we can accept that likelihood and decide how to live from now on.

Breaking Together is not a big book of solutions to our predicament. Basically, Bendell is calling for us to rethink the entire Western project of modernity, beginning with a spiritual “rebooting”. Bendell believes activists should shift their focus to efforts at regenerating nature, to an agroecological revolution in farming, shortening supply chains, major economic redistribution and monetary reform. He is more clear-eyed than most about the fact that, even if middle-class Western climate activists might be willing in principle to sacrifice their own privileged way of life for the greater good of the planet, in practice this hasn’t happened on scale in the past fifty years.

Bendell contends ‘most existing trends will more-or-less continue without stopping until the method of human organising no longer resembles what we now call industrial consumer societies’, and that the ‘current creeping collapse of modern societies will be completed within a generation’ – by around 2045 or 2050.

The ethos he espouses is one of curious and compassionate engagement with this new reality, seeking to reduce harm rather than turn away from the suffering of others and nature. He offers four questions to help people explore how to be and what to do. ‘What do we most value and that we want to keep and how, is a question of resilience. What do we need to let go of so as not make matters worse, is a question of relinquishment. What could we bring back to help us with these challenging times, is a question of restoration. With what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality, is a question of reconciliation’.

Charles Eisenstein proposes a list of policies and changes he deems necessary. To name a few, promoting land regeneration as a new category of philanthropy, instituting a global moratorium on logging, mining, drilling, and development of all remaining primary forests, wetlands and other ecosystems, expanding the land protected in wildlife refuges and other reserves, establishing new ocean marine parks and expanding existing ones and, in the rest of our oceans, banning driftnets and bottom trawling. He ends his book by saying ‘all those policies and practices are within reach right now. The vision of a green world is not a fantasy; nor, however, is it realistic. What it is, is possible. It requires each one of us to dedicate ourselves, unreasonably and with no guarantee of success, to our unique form of service. It requires that we trust our knowing that a healed world, a more beautiful world is truly possible’.

Eisenstein presents the opposite vision to an ecocide-driven collapse into a world where the entire biosphere has been converted to a giant feedlot and industrial park, where we manage the planet like a machine, with technological tweaks to its gross material components, where no species exists that has not been turned to human purposes. A world wholly toxic to life except within artificially maintained enclaves. In that world, human life becomes entirely dependent on technology, as we retreat from the ugliness we have wrought into an artificial or even a virtual environment. For humans, I think, living in such a world would inevitably bring increased despair and loneliness.

A change of heart

We really need a change in our intellectual emphases, our affections and our convictions. A change of heart, a profound change in moral consciousness that grows into a force for systemic change over the long haul. A shift to a gentler, more thoughtful, and more ‘ecologically competent’ human presence on Earth that begins by enough of us changing how we think and what we think about. If humankind has a better future, it will be as a more empathic civilisation, one better balanced between our most competitive, hard-driving selves and our most harmonious, altruistic traits.

As Jonah E Bromwich wrote for the New York Times in 2020, ‘even if the collapsology’s math doesn’t add up, does that make the dark conclusion any less meaningful? Or, put slightly more constructively: if there’s a non-zero probability of societal collapse, isn’t that something for us all to take very, very seriously? Isn’t that prospect worth devoting a significant amount of time and mental energy to?’

David Orr puts it succinctly: ‘The energy scaffolding of the modern world was built on fossil fuels that are highly concentrated, portable, and relatively cheap. Renewable energy in its various forms is diffuse, more difficult to concentrate, more expensive and has a lower power density and return on investment. Demographics and human behaviour also compound the difficulties posed by physics.’ The world’s population tops 8 billion heading towards a crest of perhaps 11 billion. Our material expectations and need for mobility are higher than ever and still growing. And there is good reason to believe we have already overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity. Against this backdrop, the odds of curbing the worst that could happen are fifty-fifty, give or take. For a sense of perspective, Orr says ‘no sane person would get in a car with those odds of a fatal accident’.

Why choose to maintain a standard of living based on waste, overconsumption, ecological ruin, multiple addictions, exploitation of the powerless and perpetual conflicts? It may be possible for renewable energy to power a less frantic society rebuilt around efficiency, social justice, frugality and, in the long term, a society that meets everyone’s needs but not their greed. It is up to us all to do what we can to make sure we have a landing as soft as possible. Because of the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, the Earth will undergo a substantial and rapid warming, a change that will last for hundreds and possibly thousands of years. Thomas Berry calls the ‘Great Work’ the task of moving modern industrial civilisation from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode of presence.

Can we beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex at its own game, the game of one force against another? Probably not. To be a positive agent of transformation we must feel the world outside of ourselves to have purpose, intelligence, and agency. By intuiting we are participating in a larger, ordering intelligence, possibilities start to emerge; possibilities that are not dependent on how much force we can exert.

Ethics

Now we can have a look at the six maxims offered by David Schenck and Larry Churchill.

Getting older, my understanding of ethics has grown, along with the importance of living an ethical life. Schenck and Churchill define ‘maxims’ as: ‘short guides for how to think and act, pointing out moral values which could guide our cognitive processes. Ethical norms that will serve us well in facing coming catastrophe, moral guidance for living in a depleted environment’, an ethic of care. Their emphasis is on moving ‘from a cognitive, observer understanding of our situation to a felt embodiment of our predicament, from intellectual knowledge to bodily acknowledgement’. Two ways to talk about surviving global warming are mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means lessening the degrading effects, usually through technological development. Adaptation means accommodating to a new experience, through moral, social, economic, and political adjustments. Both are needed but the authors believe mitigation of itself will fail and that collapse may be accelerated by failed engineering deeds.

Maxim 1: Work hard to grasp the immensity: Realise how hard it is to grasp the scope of the possible devastation for you and for others. Begin small. Asking people to go beyond their capacity can be unproductive.

Maxim 2: Cultivate radical hope: The key is knowing that there is almost always room for something positive to be done.

Maxim 3: Have a line in the sand: Know there are some things you will not do, some modes of living you will not embrace.

Maxim 4: Appreciate the unique opportunity you have to accompany humanity in this extraordinary transition.

Maxim 5: Train your body and mind. Learn breathing exercises, develop physiological capacity to deal with despair as despair is not just psychological but physiological.

Maxim 6: Act for the future generation of all species: speak for those without a voice, the poor, the future generations, other species. Speak for the forests, the seas, the mountains.

And lastly their warning: ‘The danger is numbing. We are already too tolerant of great suffering.’

The late American couples’ therapist, David Schnarch, was vitally important to my own growth. I keep drawing from his work. As we have just seen, besides healing and restoring nature, bringing more awareness to our thinking and behaviour, we need to develop skills such as resilience and self-soothing.

The skill of self-soothing is the process of calming ourselves down, speaking to ourselves lovingly and reassuringly and learning how to modulate our anxiety. It involves ‘turning inwards’ and accessing our own resources to regain emotional balance and feeling comfortable in our body. Our breathing is unlaboured, our heart slows down to its normal rate, our shoulders are relaxed. Self-soothing is our ability to comfort ourselves and care for ourselves without excessive indulgence or deprivation. It involves taking better care of our own heart. We could call it self-centring, not to be confused with being selfish and indifferent to others.

When feeling depressed seeking a distraction could be good strategy but there is a need for balance. Our society is a hedonistic society. Pursuing pleasure and keeping busy at all times, as encouraged by our culture, has a cost. I think it’s far more beneficial to stay with whatever you might be feeling, slow down, spend time alone. Cultivate gratefulness and joy. And, if necessary, seek professional help. In these challenging times, sharing our emotions, feelings and support for each other becomes paramount. It is what I understand Jem Bendell calls ‘breaking together’.

Conclusion

When I heard of the eventuality of societal and climatic collapse, it rang a bell straight away. My guess is, deep down, I knew it to be accurate, having noticed numerous signs over past years. Through my training and work as a counsellor, and my meditation practice, I became increasingly aware of the dangers of avoidance and denial.

My experience of reading about collapse is positive. The process has been healing and changed me. I am grateful to have found different authors to help me better understand what is happening, in greater detail, and coming from different perspectives. I bow to their courage and their unending work to help humanity through the transition. No one knows exactly what lies ahead. Yet we can prepare and take on board information and ideas that guide us. On a personal level, I can increase my resilience and help others through the process if invited to. I can pay more attention and, as a result, experience resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world and with the Cosmos.

Before departing academia, Bendell and McGilchrist were researchers and university professors. McGilchrist now lives on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, working as a scholar, and Bendell resides in Bali, where he is developing a school for regenerative agriculture. Their intention is to give us a realistic picture of what is happening. They call on us to resist the pervasive influence of social media and much of mainstream media, and to recognise that relying upon standard economic, political, and technological theories and practices to address the complexities of the twenty-first century will not work.

Both authors stress our interconnectedness. They describe what they experience: a world alive with purpose and intelligence. They are not trying to give us reassuring and simple answers, as they understand our world is immensely complex and that we are facing multiple crises. What is needed, they claim, is a change of heart. I agree. It is time to let the best, open and generous part of ourselves take over. ‘Listen carefully, and notice how listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love’, writes Stephen Batchelor in The Art of Solitude.

What am I left with? First and foremost, that despair is not an option. We want to aim for a soft landing for the sake of those who follow and for the well-being of the Earth. Anything that reduces the suffering of humans and of Nature is a step in the right direction. Choices we make daily, actions we take, everything counts. The transition may be difficult, accustomed as we are to immediate gratification and the comforts of modern society. Embracing the challenge, however, not only creates a sense of purpose but also can make us stronger, more empathic, and engender reciprocal responses from others.

By Daniele Prongue, Freo resident most of the time when not in Denmark enjoying the bush and the birds

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