Slow Down: The Future Is Already Here
I wrote the essay below for a project called It Bears Repeating, a Best Of compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
I can’t tell you what an extraordinary privilege it has been to be invited to share my thoughts on the topic of our times and to now see my words nestled among these luminaries:
Volume 1: Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert, Tim Watkins, Mike Stasse, Dr. Bill Rees, Dr. Tim Morgan, Rob Mielcarski, Dr. Simon Michaux, Erik Michaels, Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth, Kevin Hester, Alice Friedemann, David Casey, and Steve Bull.
Volume 2: Foreword by Erik Michaels and Afterword by Dr. Guy McPherson, authors include: Dr. Peter A Victor, George Tsakraklides, Charles Hugh Smith, Dr. Tony Povilitis, Jordan Perry, Matt Orsagh, Justin McAffee, Jack Lowe, The Honest Sorcerer, Fast Eddy, Will Falk, Dr. Ugo Bardi, and Steve Bull.
My thanks to Tristan and Kate from Just Collapse for putting my name forward and to Steve Bull for building such an excellent project.
Here’s my contribution — please feel free to share your thoughts below:
Slow Down: The Future Is Already Here
By Jack Lowe, September 2024
[15 minute read]
If there were ever any solutions to climate collapse, we needed to have been living by them for decades already.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after absorbing countless papers, books, articles, films and podcasts on ecological overshoot and its symptoms — symptoms so diverse that they range from climate chaos to pandemics, migration and war, all interconnected in an extraordinarily complex and dynamic system.
None of these symptoms can be assessed and discussed in isolation because they all affect one another in ways that we’ll never fully understand.
Anybody who tells you differently is lying, ignorant of, or unwilling to face up to the surprisingly simple facts of the matter.
In fairness, it’s understandable.
Perhaps they have children or grandchildren to whom they can’t bear to reveal the truth. Perhaps they have an income to protect or a book to sell. Or perhaps, like most, they are simply incapable of facing up to their own mortality and remain obsessed with the typically human hubris that we can fix this and turn it around.
Whatever the reason, proceed with caution at the very least when stumbling across people who minimise our predicament. Maybe avoid them altogether.
You see, we really are in a tight spot. Yes, the impact can be softened here and there but, tragically, catastrophe cannot be avoided or fixed despite what people might say.
William Catton put it neatly in 1980 in his landmark tome Overshoot:
“Facts are not repealed by a refusal to face them.”
Mainstream commentary often revolves around endless stats, charts and graphs, which are undoubtedly relevant and useful but their meaning is rarely conveyed effectively — what those stats mean to you and me, for the daily lives of humans and other animals and, indeed, for life as we knew it.
In short: we are not in a problem with solutions, we are in a predicament with outcomes.
I’ve found this a very harsh lesson to learn over recent years and it’s really adversely affected my mental health and relationships throughout that time.
It’s a lesson that has removed my sense of agency (as I once understood it), my sense of superiority and my sense that we can do anything about it whatsoever other than to slightly soften the blow.
Ultimately, believe it or not, accepting this realisation has done me a fantastic amount of good, which I’ll come to later.
Up until March 2020 I had a vision for the future. I thought I knew how life was going to pan out pursuing the picture I’d been sold: be a good boy, go to school, get good grades, get a job for life and then revel in the sunlit uplands of retirement and grandparenthood.
I stuttered along trying to be that good boy but I never really felt like I fitted into the machine. I wanted to earn a living from my photography but boring adults would routinely tell me that that was a hobby and I would need a real job if I was going to be truly successful.
To cut a long story short, I followed my heart and tried my best to earn a living from my photographs. Sometimes it went well and sometimes it didn’t. That’s life, right?
One thing remained constant during that journey, though: I was fully devoted to the system and to the cult of busy.
But then came the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when I was forced to pause, reflect and look around in a way I’d never done before. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
The sham of modern life soon became apparent to me. The scales tumbled from my eyes and my naive aspirations for the future were shattered.
They were aspirations sold to us by the runaway machine of neoliberalism and the industrial complex, an omnicidal machine that’s blatantly incompatible with the biosphere.
How could I have been so silly as to have missed the blindingly obvious? Why couldn’t anybody else see it? Why wasn’t anybody warning us?
Oh, hang on…that’s right…there are people warning us — those climate activists and scientists who’ve been trying to warn us for decades.
I had been environmentally aware on some level for as long as I could remember but clearly nowhere near enough.
At last, I started listening and just in the nick of time to do something about it, or so I thought. After all, that’s the message being pumped out in all directions from the likes of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.
“Wake up! Act Now!” they were shouting at us.
“Oh blimey, they really mean it!” I thought.
I can’t remember what first alerted me to the true state of the climate but it will doubtless have been something posted on Twitter that finally pricked my conscience enough to send me down the appropriate rabbit hole.
And it was even enough to make me join Extinction Rebellion in 2022, a month or so before those extremely hot days when temperatures tipped over 40ºC here in the UK.
The mercury hit a scorching 39ºC in my hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne. People often don’t realise how far north we are in the North East of England — Newcastle is on the 55th parallel north, the same latitude as the likes of Moscow and the Aleutian Islands.
So, it had finally dawned on me that this was serious stuff! Furthermore, I was well-placed to fight climate change in hand-to-hand combat.
In those moments, the climate conversation had worked on me — I’d woken up just like the activists demanded, so much so that I’d even become one of their flock.
I was going to recycle like I’d never recycled before and campaign to have so many wind turbines and solar panels built that they could be seen as far as the eye could see.
I was going to protest until my shoes were all worn through and my larynx eternally sore from yelling “ACT NOW!” at the top of my lungs.
This was the way to do it, right? This was the way to win the war, right?
Wrong.
Never one to rest on my laurels, I kept looking and learning. And, boy, was I in for a shock.
In January 2023, I read Jem Bendell’s infamous Deep Adaptation paper and it knocked me for six when I realised that I’d been way off the mark in my understanding. It particularly struck me that the paper was written in 2018, so when he mentioned timescales, I immediately had to deduct 5 years from them.
Collapse was happening much faster, much sooner and much more inevitably than I’d realised.
It wasn’t until June 2023 that I fully absorbed the meaning of ecological overshoot — that our problem isn’t just emissions or plastic or sewage. Our problem is everything.
That in itself is a huge concept to wrap one’s head around, especially if locked into the fatigued paradigms of the climate movement, a movement which has tragically failed because, in my humble opinion, it has failed to convey the true meaning for people’s daily lives whilst also perpetuating the illusion that it can be averted and fixed.
I found it even more disheartening that, despite best efforts, my comrades in Extinction Rebellion seemed unwilling to peep too far beyond those paradigms and face our predicament head-on. My wife pointed out to me that if I’d reached a juncture where the conversations were causing me pain and I was spoiling other people’s experience of being in Extinction Rebellion, then it was probably time to leave.
So, with a heavy heart, that’s what I did. I say ‘with a heavy heart’ because I love the people I’d got to know. They are good people. They are part of my community.
However, yet again I felt I didn’t fit in. I’d raced past them and was already on a different point of the learning curve, one where I realised our energies were totally misaligned with our actual predicament.
So I continued learning and sharing my findings on Twitter, my main outlet for all this stuff and the more I learned, the more I realised that it isn’t just climate activists who remain stuck in the quagmire of the tired old stories that we intently tell ourselves — it’s eminent scientists, journalists and commentators too.
I found this staggering, not least as the facts of the matter are so simple to comprehend compared to those convoluted stories that comfort us in some way shape or form.
So, what are the facts of the matter?
When the population of any species grows so large that it destroys its own environment and begins to be consumed by the symptoms of its own waste, that population is in ecological overshoot — it has overshot the carrying capacity of its once habitable environment.
As I see it, humans have grown so vast in number that — when combined with our ridiculously self-centred behaviour — we overshot the planet’s capabilities to sustain us many decades ago.
The biosphere is collapsing at an extraordinary rate, the likes of which hasn’t happened since life began all those billions of years ago.
Simply put, we are now living through the consequences of our behaviour up until the 1960s and we cannot just turn it off like a tap.
No amount of emission reductions, carbon capture, recycling, campaigning or ACTING NOW is going to halt this. It’s here to stay and it’s only going to get worse.
It has happened so quickly and rapaciously that it’s as if an asteroid has struck Earth, which is why the storyline of Adam McKay’s brilliant film Don’t Look Up works so well as a metaphor.
And remember, this is a metacrisis, so we cannot just discuss the climate in isolation.
To my mind, the five major threats are:
- patriarchy
- climate chaos
- pandemics
- runaway fossil-fuelled AI
- runaway fossil-fuelled war
Many know and discuss the first three but I’m routinely pained when the latter two are overlooked in the context of collapse, when otherwise very intelligent people seem to lose their ability to think and fail to join the searingly obvious dots.
For example, power black-outs are already happening across the planet just to keep the juice running to AI data centres. Those data centres are prioritised over domestic power, so when there’s not enough energy in the grid to support both, domestic power loses.
While temperatures soar, people’s air conditioning is cut in favour of the corporate machine. It really is that simple and it should tell us all we need to know about the omnicidal machine that keeps the pedal to the metal at all times, driving the wheels of the human enterprise deeper into the quagmire.
Yet still we continue prompting AI, generating articles and imagery, building it into the core of our ‘smart’ phones and even into our weaponry, all hastily fuelling our demise and still we insist on talking about climate solutions.
It is literal insanity.
And speaking of weaponry, we haven’t even properly touched on the topic of war, which is, at the very least, a parallel threat to the incredible forces of climate breakdown.
As one very simple example, the US military is the single largest carbon-emitting institution on the planet, yet so few people seem to know this or are willing to address it.
As another example, the carbon emissions during the Gaza genocide alone are estimated to be the equivalent of 20 small countries, let alone taking into consideration the resulting death and destruction, along with the pollution of the once fertile lands that has now rendered them barren.
People held in high esteem — folk purported to be great thinkers — cite ICC reports as some kind of gold standard yet those reports have failed to include the deathly impact of military activity.
Indeed, in 2022 I asked a famous climate activist:
“How can we have a meaningful climate conversation when military activity is overlooked?”
He paused for a moment to consider his answer and replied:
“Yep. We’re screwed.”
Despite that succinct response, his public message remains the same — that we can rebel, and turn things around — and he’s far from alone.
Do you see? There are so many major forces at play that make most climate conversations moot at best. It’s all so incongruous and ridiculous.
This kind of talk means that people like me are labelled a doomer. I have a problem with that particular label as it’s pejorative and othering — yet another flaw in the human condition that’s sealing our rapid demise.
I prefer to describe myself as a reluctant realist, as somebody who has actually done something that so few seem willing to do — undertaken the emotional labour of looking deep into the abyss, grieving for our situation and then accepting it.
As an active messenger, I’ve then shared as much of these thoughts, findings and feelings as widely as possible, predominantly via Twitter but also in real life within my community.
So what do we do? And what’s the point?
Firstly, we must collectively pay attention, acknowledge and lean into our predicament.
As Indi Samarajiva wrote last year:
“To accept defeat against nature (whatever that means) is not an end to discussion. It’s a start.”
The fastest thing we need to do is slow down and, whenever possible, stop.
That can mean…
- walk more
- drive less
- drive slower
- consume less meat and dairy
- buy less
- travel less
- work less
…anything that helps to stifle the omnicidal machine to which we’ve become accustomed.
These are things that many of us have agency over right now. Today.
There’s a more comprehensive list in this tweet if you’d care to take a look.
Will we decide to slow down? No. We’re too addicted to our high octane lives, absurdly obsessed with material wealth even though the warning lights are flashing faster and brighter on the dashboard than ever before.
In all honesty, I’ve come to realise that I don’t need to concern myself with these things because — if you really are paying attention — you’ll notice that nature is already slowing us down.
How many video clips have you seen of flooded airports, for example, or cars being washed away as streets become raging torrents?
Or how many people do you know who can’t work as effectively as they once did because of Long Covid or other related ailments?
Nature is already firmly grasping the reins in the most efficient ways.
After all, nature just is. It is only ever objectively achieving equilibrium in an incredibly complex and dynamic system. That’s all. And that observation alone can be too much for many people to bear.
The ultimate ‘climate action’ is to stop reproducing and actively decide not to bring children into an increasingly tempestuous world that cannot be fixed. Such is our hubris that even that notion is seen as controversial when it’s actually just a simple, objective fact.
Next, we must realise that life isn’t all about us. We are a part of life, not apart from it.
We are all atoms in different forms. We are the soil, the birds, the critters, the creatures, the ocean, the rivers, the rocks and the sky.
To acknowledge that, as things stand, all the evidence points towards nature spontaneously creating life and all we seem set on doing is destroying it.
If we were to acknowledge our oneness, we might realise (as Bernardo Kastrup writes) that our purpose in this beautiful place is simply to pay attention and be the best possible conduit for nature to work through us. And that’s all.
How much simpler and more magnificent our lives become when we slow down, wind our necks in and accept that it’s not all about us and that, instead, it’s all about nature and we’re just here for the ride.
Life is death and death is life. We are all brothers and sisters. We are all the same. And that is perhaps the ultimate acknowledgment to make — that if we were to release our egos and our sense of self, and instead acknowledge our connectedness, our oneness, then what a revolution that would be.
How empowering to know that the revolution we seek already exists within us, and it would drive the billionaires and oligarchs mad for us to finally unite and make that leap of faith in one another.
It wouldn’t fix our predicament but it would at least soften the blow and make what little time we have left more tolerable.
The world is changing, and it’s changing fast. If you’re not seeing what’s unfolding by now, then it’s time to pay attention because the asteroid has already impacted.
If you feel unaffected by it so far, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
As William Gibson once wrote:
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
You know that bit in Don’t Look Up, the bit where the people in mission control start whipping off their headsets and dashing out of the room saying things like ‘I’m going home to be with my family’?
That’s where I’m at.
Yes, you might want to store some dried food. Yes, you might want to make sure you’ve got a way of filtering water. Yes, you might want to make sure you’ve got ways to generate heat and power. Yes, you might want to stash some cash.
But beyond those simple pieces of prepping advice, we don’t know what we’re planning for.
This active messenger wants you to know, at the very least, that we might want to consider creating new ways to spend more time with our loved ones and doing the things we enjoy most.
At the end of the day, the omnicidal machine is not our friend and life is literally too short — the future is already here and it’s getting more evenly distributed by the minute.
This isn’t negative or pessimistic. It’s realistic. Acknowledging the nature of our predicament with outcomes certainly requires courage, emotional labour and fortitude, but it is ultimately the most powerful action we can possibly take. Now. Today.
Recommended Reading:
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (1992)
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William Catton (1980)
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (2015)
Breaking Together by Jem Bendell (2023)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
More Than Allegory by Bernardo Kastrup (2016)
Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell by Bernardo Kastrup (2024)
Hello Jack, great article!
I was on the learning curve before you (thanks to the fracking attempt at Preston New Road, just 30 miles from me) and came to similar place as Jem Bendell just as his Deep Adaptation paper came out in 2018.
Michael Dowd’s work has also been an outstanding contribution to my life, as well as Dr Sid Smith’s work.
Am currently emphasizing what I call ‘doing a Derrick Jensen’. That is, I think the only task left for humans now is to leave the place a better place than we found it. In actionable terms, that means restoring habitat and creating habitat such that if a species gets to live another week or month or year, then that is a mission well done.
As an example, about 6 years ago I helped plant some trees in a local park (I’ve helped plant 15,000 over the last 7 years in our borough). Today those trees are a good 7′ high, and today I had the pleasure of seeing a flock of long-tailed tits passing through. In other words, habitat has been created sufficient to support the food that those birds eat. To me thats a massive. Will it make a difference? Not to the world, not to reducing climate change nor obliterating oligarchy and patriarchy. But today those long-tailed tits maybe got a meal that they might have to travel further to get last year. So job well done.
The Derrick Jensen reference comes from a video he did some years ago. As an ecologist being active for over 20 years and seeing no difference, he was complaining why should he bother writing yet another book or article. And his colleague said, if by your actions, or that someone reads, a butterfly in South America gets to live a week longer, then it is worth doing. And thats it. I always remember that, and try to think of it often.
Hello Mark,
Thank you so much of reading and sharing your thoughts/experiences. I’ve felt daft at times for not realising sooner but I guess we can only meet it where and when we can.
Completely agree with you on the doing a Derrick Jensen strategy and wonderful to hear about the trees you’ve planted. We haven’t done anything on that scale but we’ve let our garden grow wild and my wife has built an incredible allotment which has become a haven for wildlife, not least in and around the compost wall she’s created — the wrens seem to love it!
You might have seen my photographs on Twitter over recent times of the starlings on our rose bush? I love how they seem to use it both as a sanctuary and a watch tower.
And of course, I have you to thank for the not a problem with solutions but a predicament with outcomes line. That alone has really helped me move forward and help explain it to others. So thank you once again for that.
If you have a link to Jensen’s video, I’d be very interested to see it.
Great piece. I’m with you. Slowing down, working locally. Spending time, not money. Savouring togetherness and trying to reduce the damage I do to the world. The earth will recover in millennia to come, it just won’t have humans on it.
Neatly put, Helen. Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.
Absolutely, Jack. Well put.
It’s funny, but this week I already had the feeling that there’s a disparate group of us who’ve all been on a similar journey of realisation over the last little while. Doing research, observing developments in the wider world around us, taking it all in and realising that collapse acceptance is necessary.
I’m sorry I’ve not been by here for the past many months. It seems a very articulate, measured, open, honest and civilised space. I need places like this to echo and express things I feel but cannot easily express ‘in everyday life’.
Bernardo Kastrup is a new name to me. I’ll have a look.
I’ve been starting to listen to some Michael Dowd recently. That led me to Paul Chefurka’s Ladder of Awareness, and the shock discovery that here was someone who’d put it all together more than 10 years ago. I’ve been looking for some easy ways into getting a broader overview of ‘indigenous wisdom’ (Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has been mentioned, along with many others). I want to read William Ophul’s ‘Immoderate Greatness’, and much more …
‘Reluctant Realist’ is a pretty good tag, not weighted in the same way as ‘doomer’, or ‘doomster’ (which I think has, for some time, kept me away from seeing if I fit there). I’d been thinking ‘realistic pessimist’, but I think optimism and pessimism are not very useful words either.
Anyway, good to know I’m not alone. My struggle now is to move fully from ‘awareness’ to ‘acceptance’, and find some peace, whilst being bound by my unavoidable commitments to others who haven’t woken up yet and some who aren’t old enough to burden with full honesty. I think this is a journey people need to make of their own volition and at their own pace, rather than being pushed towards. The implications are too great…
Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply, Mick. It’s good to see you back here.
I too find it disconcerting to stumble across folk who worked this all out decades ago. So much suffering could have been mitigated if more of us had been onboard. Hey ho. Here we are.
You could start your Kastrup journey via my Linktree where you’ll find a video and a book that I’ve been wading through (and very nearly finished). Both are highly recommended!
For example, power black-outs are already happening across the planet just to keep the juice running to AI data centres. Those data centres are prioritised over domestic power, so when there’s not enough energy in the grid to support both, domestic power loses.
Jack, could you give specific examples of this or suggest a source for information on AI vs domestic power?
Thank you!
Sure. There are many examples online of energy blackouts at the hands of AI (and crypto). See this piece by Bloomberg and this episode of The Great Simplification for a wider perspective.
It’s a pretty hot topic at the moment. Have a look at the more recent story about the nuclear power station being fired up again in the US to cope with the extra energy demands too!
This was marvelous. I am now inspired to complete my own novel on climate. Long covid slowed me down…but I believe you. Courage to speak has returned. Thank you.
That’s great to hear Gareth and you’re welcome.
It’s as if we’ve stumbled through our lives, drunk on excess and distraction. This sobering-up withdrawal process is so painful. I have tried to live lightly on the earth, but didn’t really apply this wholeheartedly until surrendering gainful employment. And now, am part of conniving with the systems to applaud or support my offsprings’ livings, whatever that involves.
I’m humbled by your honest insights, Jack. The quiet needs of the natural world get savagely eroded, and the current savage wars bring that into sharp focus.
Lemmings spring to mind but how to be graceful and purposeful towards our end is a conundrum.
I haven’t read a couple of those you cite, and intend to do so. Keep on keeping on. With love.
Neatly put, Frances. Thank you so much for reading it.
As I touch on in the essay, I didn’t live lightly enough but am trying my level best to now do so within the system into which we were born. The dissonance feels strong and unavoidable, though.
It’s incredible that most don’t see or understand the simplicity and voraciousness of our rampant expansion and destruction. As species go, it’s strangely impressive.
Stage 5, eh?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_in_the_End_Times
There is more that we can all do, and that is to build up our local
Communities of support and mutual aid. Also plant diverse, locally appropriate forests with plenty of food and medicine producing plants, etc
Indeed, Kelly. All good things to soften the blow for those who aren’t suffering or who have succumbed already as the ‘future’ becomes more evenly distributed.
See the pinned tweet I referred to for thoughts along similar lines.
Thanks for a great insightful article Jack. My sentiments too. But where to from here? Do we keep fighting against fossil fuels, war, greed, corruption, and fighting for nature, or do we just enjoy what little time we have left? Obviously I’m not expecting an ‘answer’…. just interested in the discussion.
You’re welcome, Robyn. Thank you for reading it.
The answers are within the essay. Even the meaning of life is within the essay.
Might be worth a reread in the first instance and then we can take it from there?
Yes! This has given me new purpose. I’ve been collecting seeds of local, native plants in my area. I would like to grow some in my yard, but also plan to stead them in the area this spring. Building community is more challenging, but I feel ideas forming.
Good stuff…pleased to hear it!
Bang on re patriarchy being a major threat. I’m tired of suspended sentences for crimes against women and stupid old white men wars. Great essay
Thank you and me too, Trudi.
Thanks for your writing Jack. I grew up in Chester-le-Street, and now live in Invercargill, having woken up through Chris Martenson’s ‘Crash Course’ amongst other things back in 2008. It’s great to hear your story, I look forward to reading more from you.
Thank you, Nathan. And…wow…Invercargill. Isn’t that the world’s most southerly city?
Always wanted to visit but that’s unlikely to happen now.
In another article of yours, you call to the creatives, saying, “By imagining the world we want, maybe — just maybe — we’ll manage to make it happen.”
That was from January of 2023. Do you feel that imagining a world we want is still a worthwhile thing for creatives to do?
A thought-provoking question, Lisa. I do, though not quite in the way I would have meant at the time. As I mention in the article above, I’m never one to rest on my laurels. I keep thinking, looking and learning.
My understanding of ‘the world’ and reality has heavily shifted recently, mainly as a result of discovering Bernardo Kastrup who I mentioned above (and I’ve linked to one of his books in the list at the end).
If we consider our world to be our thoughts — our consciousness — then we certainly have the power to imagine the world we want. Kastrup writes that the only truth is experience — meaning what we personally experience in the eternal now. Everything else is comprised of concepts — images in the mind conjured by stories and myths.
That’s a powerful notion to sit with and contemplate.
With that in mind, it follows that we can decide to change our inputs, to be present in the moment and pay attention. And, to my mind, it then follows that we can be more grounded in reality — in our lived experience — and work towards the world we want.
I allude to this in the article above and you might want to take a look at the Kastrup video in my Linktree too.
An artist friend of mine recently said:
“I keep painting because I refuse to be manipulated into being depressed.”
…another way of expressing a similar sentiment in my words you quoted. By the way, he’s now a Kastrup fan too!
In summary, my answer is: “Yes!”
Does this help?
I’ll be writing more about this soon in a post about a sycamore tree. Watch this space.
As someone who’s been where you are now for a while, I just wanted to say welcome.
I also want to push back against the anti meat and dairy narrative. It very much depends on the context, the ” go plant based” narrative is part of the con. Meat and dairy are the most bioavailable foods we have, in some situations reducing intake may be a good thing but it is definitely not a given. Grow your own, forage responsibly, and support local regenerative food production is more appropriate imo. After all, industrial arable and horticulture production is also v toxic. The cows are not the problem, despite being painted that way. We’ve replaced wildebeest and buffalo with cattle, the emissions from ruminants, however, is pretty much the same. A belch is a belch and the carbon cycle doesn’t care if it comes from a wild or tame animal. Ruminants have been around for as long/longer than humans, they are getting scapegoated because selling waste products as vegan food is incredibly profitable, and gives people another way to avoid really opening their eyes. That’s why the corporations are all over it like a rash. Makes money and keeps folk asleep.
Thank you reading and thank you for the welcome, Shadiya. Thank you for your thoughts too.
A belch is indeed a belch. And, although the animals may not be the problem, humans are. The main difference between the two scenarios you describe is that Big Agriculture animal farming is filled with untold cruelty, waste, mismanagement and disconnection at the hands of humans — behaviour which is driving us deeper and faster into the quagmire.
To my mind, that is not a good thing and if we can tread more lightly with that in mind, then I think that is a good thing.
You’ll notice that I choose my words carefully, only suggesting what it can mean for people to tread more lightly and soften the blow.
Ultimately, with the pace at which life as we knew it is now unravelling, it’s all pretty much moot at this stage.
Thank you Jack for this excellent, lucid piece.
Thank you Shadiya for challenging the ‘go plant-based narrative’ both in your words and what you do as an organic farmer.
When I read Wilding, by Isabella Tree, five or so years ago, I found hope in my despair, because the Knepp wilding project shows how quickly and radically nature can regenerate if left alone, with humans intervening only to reintroduce vital species, eg beaver and other ancient native species. My hope was that wilding projects would spring up everywhere, capturing carbon, preventing floods, regenerating ecosystems, all within a natural cycle. Why have we not woken up to this possibility, to this glimmer of wisdom and hope?
You’re welcome, Patricia. Thank you for reading it.
Just to reiterate my reply to Shadiya: rather than a go plant-based narrative, you’ll notice that I choose my words carefully, only suggesting what it can mean for people to tread more lightly and soften the blow.
Consume less meat and dairy is not the same as go plant-based.
In answer to your question about wilding projects and why people haven’t woken up to it, that brings me back to reductively talking about climate in a metacrisis.
Some people do care and have woken up to it. Is it enough in the face of the other forces at play? No.
The patriarchy reigns supreme, the climate asteroid has already impacted, we are on the verge of a major bird flu pandemic, data centres continue to rampantly and exponentially consume resources, and we are a hair’s breadth from military annihilation.
That doesn’t mean that those who (like me) would like to keep nurturing nature should stop but it also doesn’t change the one simple and brutal fact I mention in the essay:
We are not in a problem with solutions. We are in a predicament with outcomes.
You write well, and speak the truth.
I feel I am on your exact trajectory, only slightly behind. I feel I could have written this, because it’s where I am at, ten months after becoming fully collapse aware.
It was freeing to look into the eyes of XR members, because the wall of denial isn’t there. But they also don’t quite see the whole truth (and also how their tactics backfire due to the public being angered at them when their commute to work is hindered (ironic)).
My relationships are also strained. I see people making babies, super excited and happy and in love them. It’s beautiful, and it’s delusional. I, of course, choose to not burst their bubble. Enjoy while you can. The ages 2-6 are wonderful.
I’m trying to figure out how to approach life moving forward, especially whether I should continue to look into collapse nonstop. Is it worth spending my remainding time doing that, given that I can barely slow even my family’s descent no matter what I do?
I started blogging about my experience, too.
Best wishes.
Thank you for reading, Jan. It seems we are indeed on a similar trajectory. I recommend reading the book in my list by Bernardo Kastrup – it’ll likely help to answer some of the latter questions for you as it has for me.
Thanks, I’ll get right on that recommendation!
What a great piece! Reluctant realist.. that’s so well-put. I am one, too, Jack, and your words mirrored my experiences. It took me a while to realise it’s not just climate change, but after that realisation the penny truly dropped and my eyes were opened, which caused a serious grief process to get underway. It’s as you say “everything”, that’s why it’s a “predicament”. I went through the grief alone back then, now I offer online groups to talk about so-called climate emotions in Germany where I live, because it’s so hard to deal with it all on your own. I believe our emotions are the key to understanding and wisdom. Sending you love and sincere regards!
Thank you, Zeynep. Great to hear how you’re helping people to work through their thoughts and feelings. We help to facilitate a listening circle once a month for the same reason — a very rewarding and cathartic process for all. Sending you love and sincere regards too.
Thanks Jack. Appreciated the realism and the general deep intelligence throughout. Great article.
You’re welcome, Michael, and thank you very much for your kind appraisal.
I would love to contribute, but I am in my 70’s and can’t afford to quit working. I try to work as little as I can, to have enough to get by, but donating to anything is beyond my means. But I wish I could. Your article is very affirming to me, and informative.
It seems the majority of us will keep working until we’re washed away or some other catastrophe befalls us. It’s perhaps the deepest tragedy of all that we’ve navigated our way into such a societal and cultural conundrum. Thank you for your reply, Janet, which is a contribution in itself. I’m so pleased that you found the article affirming and informative.
This is exactly the same journey I have been on. Sitting in my stationary car in traffic wondering how mankind can be so stupid, led to doing some Internet courses on climate change. Once started down that rabbit hole, I studied everything, including Weather and Paleoclimatology. All fascinating stuff. This led to me becoming active in XR, sitting in the road with people all around me getting arrested. Then using my studies to give the “Heading for Extinction” recruiting talk. I was reading articles which seemed to suggest an unbelievably bad future. So I read the science the articles were based on. Then the penny really dropped. It was even worse! I had to drop out from XR as I found that I was bombarding my colleagues with each awful revelation. They did not need to be more depressed, they already knew. Nothing any protester does can stop the catastrophe heading our way. The tipping points are cascading as we watch. I now find that I am fairly neutral and keep my concerns to myself. No one wants to see the man with the end of the world is nigh board. I do not feel bad for the people that will die. I lament for all the other species that do not deserve what man has done.
Thank you for your sentient comment, Nick, which really resonates with me too.
Brilliant read. I had similar experience going down the rabbit hole. I was watching Paul beckwith talk about the Arctic in 2020. It was pure grief, the penny had dropped. I’m much happier and content. Our predicament is amazingly simple when you stop and think about it.
Great post Jack.
Thank you very much, Richard, and I’m glad to hear you’re more content after putting in the emotional labour. It’s a tough ride, isn’t it?
Brilliantly put mate. This is essential stuff to read for anyone and everyone. Whatever we call this or percieve it to be, it’s about us all and will play a significant role in all of our futures, be whatever they be.
Thanks for putting this into one read. It’s as complete as it’s needed to be, saying as much as is needed to be said. And i was begining to wonder where youd gone, now i see what’s been keeping you quiet lately.
❤️
Thank you so much, Mark. It means the world to me that you feel this way about the words I’ve written — and I’ve got you to thank for Bernardo who’s been life changing for my mindset.
Wonderful article Jack.
Thank you, Gavin. It’s a relief to have parked so many of the thoughts and feelings I’ve been carrying into one place.