Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What we face is a turning point between two futures: The Great Transition and the Great Unraveling. The Great Transition describes a future in which society is comprehensively reorganized to sustain itself in dynamic equilibrium with the Earth’s systems.
Our challenge now, in this new century, is this. Nourishing, replenishing, nurturing, renewing, endowing. What? Everything that we can. Everything from basic incomes to to trees to insects to glaciers to hospitals to schools to retirement to mountains and forests. Do you see how the theme of nourishment and replenishment is what flows through all our challenges, like a great laughing river, renewing a parched, weeping ocean?
Remember in the midst of your neurosis and discouragement as you consider the huge problems we face: training ourselves and the upcoming generations to face life on earth with a cheerful frugality is advancing the revolution in its own slow way.
But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
The viability of our civilisation is uncertain. While opening our eyes means we’ll confront darkness, keeping them shut means it’ll stay dark. Let’s dare to look and start building new worlds alongside the old.
When I look at the world today, I see the vast majority of academics, scientists, activists, and politicians ‘self-censoring’ their own work and ideas, in order to share views that are socially, politically, or even personally palatable.
That title was a tease. I have not made nor will I ever make full sense of me, but I want to connect the dots of my disparate – sometimes desperate – projects over many years and reveal the wholeness and practicality that links them all.
You can’t read the UN’s recent biodiversity report on the imminent destruction of one million creatures by human economies and not conclude that the environmental movement has failed, and spectacularly so.
Like John Michael Greer’s numerous other books on the subject of industrial civilization’s demise, this one reveals its author to be an astonishingly gifted guide to a future that most people refuse to contemplate.
The book is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. It will show the layers of values that form the norms of mainstream Western culture, and how these continue to shape our world today.
Since my paper on Deep Adaptation to climate chaos came out in July 2018 and “went viral,” there have been some criticisms of the concept and what people think it implies.
Life in the early phases of civilizational collapse is filled with absurdities that beg for artful satire. Where is Franz Kafka when we need him? Surely, he could offer a better metaphor than my hackneyed image of a house fire. But maybe it will do for now.
