Facing collapse head on—climate change

The value of fiercely facing certain things. Indigenous wisdom, shifts in social order, and more.

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This is part of my series, Making sense of things: Navigating tensions of progress and collapse to arrive at collective healing. Check out part 1 and part 2 to catch up.

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It is helpful to see the ways that the world is not falling apart. There is a part of me that needs this. To, as Max Roser puts it, know that change is possible.

As a development practitioner I see this firsthand in the programs and projects I am part of. People making their way out of poverty. Less babies dying from basic things like diarrhea. UN leaders shifting their leadership styles to be more conscious and relational. Not to mention, digging into data grounds me. It helps me orient my sense of things into concrete findings. With data science tools I can have a discerning eye towards the slant of a news article and how it presents data. I can unpack the methodology used behind a statistic to see how credible it is. 

But it still does not add up to me… how can we live at a time of such supposedly great global progress, as well as a time of such collective pain? If we are in an age of global prosperity—or, at the very least, global progress—then why does it not feel like we live in one? Roser’s and Rosling’s critiques of media literacy and education are helpful, but do not strike me as complete. I do not think it is as simple as people being ignorant or needing more data tools. I think there is something deeper happening here. 

Not to mention for every statistic that shows that we’re doing better as world, I can find one that shows the exact opposite. We are doing better in maternal health, but seriously failing in terms of global inequality. Air pollution is getting better but waste production is getting worse. 

Which takes me down a rabbit hole of researchers and thinkers who argue that the reason why the world is in so much pain (my words, not theirs) is because we live in a time of societal collapse. Yes, depending on what circles you run in, you might be wholly familiar with this area of public discourse or be surprised that it exists. For those who this is new for, this field of study is a lively and contentious one that spans multiple disciplines, from history to anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and more. At the core of its inquiry is: why and how do societies collapse, and what does this research tell us about the times we live in now? 

So the question stands within my sense-making journey: what does exploring the times we live in from the view of collapse offer me, and how might it help me be in relationship with the world’s pain?

Looking climate change square in the eyes

Climate change and ecological crisis are at the center of many collapsologists’ analyses of the state of the world these days. The reality of the climate crisis is no longer a public debate. There are plenty of legitimate debates within what do about the crisis, but the question of whether climate change is real is no longer intellectually sound. Research models and evidence abound showing us the trajectory of global warming we are on. Not only that, but hotter summers, increased wildfires, erratic weather patterns, and more high-stakes natural disasters puts the reality right before our eyes.

To lay it all out—the way that much of the world operates is pushing us up against our planet’s ecological limits, and with that comes the risk of economic, social, and environmental breakdown. We are a planet of 8 billion people and counting, and the extractive nature of our economy has created grave imbalances, in terms of exceeding planetary boundaries and breeding extreme inequality. Like a web of dominoes, runaway climate change has the potential to trigger a cascade of effects, each one feeding into the other, which some project will result in the breakdown and, possible, collapse of industrial societies as we know it. Increased extreme weather feeds into food shortages and economic shocks that become harder and harder to come back from. Mass migration of people looking for refuge and uptick in resource wars as safety and security become scarcer. Species loss at unprecedented levels. Clean air and water in decline. Health issues and structural inequality exacerbated. 

More and more people are becoming aware of climate change, both due to scientific and news reports, as well as firsthand accounts of natural disasters. This means that more and more people are grappling with this reality and the host of normal feelings that come with it. Research conducted by Yale’s Program on Climate Communication shows that the percentage of Americans who are “alarmed” about global warming, which is the highest response level within their 6 response options, has tripled since 2014 and now has the highest percentage of responses. Nearly 60% of Americans are either somewhat or very concerned about climate change, according to 2021 Pew Center research. 

Eco-emotions is a catch-all term used to describe the range of feelings that many deal with as it relates to climate injustice. From depression, grief, rage, overwhelm, anxiety, dread, and more. Glenn Albrecht offers us one of the most widely used definitions of ‘eco-anxiety:’ “the generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse (p.50).¹” Collapse.  

The power of facing the music

There is an urgent need to meaningfully respond to the ecological crisis, and some practitioners believe the most responsible way to do so is to face the possibility of collapse head-on. Jem Bendell, former Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria has emerged as a leading voice within this movement. His 2018 paper “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” moved beyond language of possibility and spoke to readers directly about his conclusion that societal collapse due to climate change is inevitable and will happen sooner than we think. 

Bendell arrived at this conclusion after spending a year deep in the climate science. As an academic and practitioner, he felt obligated to break free from the standard narrative within his professional field that says we as society must focus on reform. Instead, believing that ship has sailed, he frankly put forward his understanding that we are heading towards collapse and must grapple with that reality and organize our actions accordingly. In his paper he offers a four-part meta-framework he calls the Deep Adaptation Agenda that can be applied to everything from policy decisions to personal development. 

The narrative of collapse that he arrived at through his own sense-making journey drove him to deviate from the norm and do something different. Since his 2018 paper, he has seen how “people are being radicalised to act differently in their whole lives” by fiercely and compassionately facing collapse. He has found that it has been a “powerful motivator” to many “whereas optimism can be demotivating on environmental issues.”

Bendell’s work uses a narrative of collapse to help people face the music when it comes to the climate crisis. From this view, climate anxiety and eco-grief are normal byproducts of facing this reality and he offers resources to help support people with them. There are other researchers, though, who explore the rise in climate anxiety, and collective anxiety more generally, from a different direction: as a social phenomenon and an indication that society’s social order is in a state of collapse in and of itself. 

Shifts in social order

For the past few centuries, social and political scientists have looked at the widespread rise in collective anxiety within a society as a sign that shifts are afoot in its social order. This has traditionally been examined within the context of modernity and post-modernity in Western Europe but is now being expanded to include our current age of climate and political change². The social phenomenon that a large group of people are experiencing something like climate anxiety is not only a reflection of changes happening at the individual level (as, for example, when someone begins to shift their perspective to include the reality of climate change), but—from a zoomed-out, sociological view—they also reflect changes happening at the societal level. 

Pulling from sociologist Lawrence K. Frank’s work, a society’s social order can be described as the “historically developed ideas, beliefs, and patterns of conduct and of feeling which each culture has evolved as the guides to human conduct and the management of group activities.”³ A collapse in social order means that these patterns of conduct that society has come to know and love are in a process of breakdown, which creates widespread anxiety. The way society has organized itself no longer makes sense within its current context therefore it is breaking down in order for something new to emerge. This view of collapse invites me to look at the world’s pain from a macro-perspective with curiosity about what is on the horizon as society evolves. 

Indigenous knowledge on collapse

Exploring the times we live in from the perspective of collapse can also invite in a shift of perspective, culturally and temporally. The threat of collapse is not new to many peoples throughout the world. The destruction of culture and one’s way of life has been known by communities affected by imperialism, enslavement, and genocide across time. 

Within Western imagination, the collapse of our modern way of life is often depicted and felt as something new. Many researchers and scientists refer to the current times we live in as the Anthropocene, a term used to describe this current epoch in Earth’s geological history in which humans have become the dominant influence on the environment and climate. But there are others, in particular Indigenous scholars, who argue that the Anthropocene’s framing is temporally myopic. 

Ecosystem and species collapse due to human activity is not new. For Indigenous peoples it has been in effect since the early days of colonial occupation. In Heather Davis and Zoe Todd’s 2017 article “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene” they “draw upon multiple Indigenous scholars who argue that the Anthropocene is not a new event, but is rather the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years.”⁴ 

With collapse comes new ways of being

Gleaning from Indigenous knowledge about collapse offers me a temporal shift that humbles and deepens my view of history. It also brings me to a place of reflection about what types of things are born from being in a state of collapse. Specifically, what ways of being—in terms of consciousness, spirituality, attitudes and beliefs, ways of life—may be in a process of transformation for us as a world right now that are spawned from collapse. 

In Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum’s article, “The Power of the First Generation without Hope” she shares her journey of learning from the Indigenous people of the Amazon forest who have faced collapse many times over. She reflects on the type of resistance born from this. One that includes “insolent laughter.” And how this way of being bore curious resemblance to things she was seeing within youth climate activists in Europe. 

“I remember[ed] that the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro said, ‘Indians [Indigenous/Native People] understand the end of the world because their world ended in 1500’.. [His] statement made an impact on me.. but I only understood it completely when I went to live in the Amazon and exposed myself to other ways of life. Other ways of life are also other ways of thinking. When I dived into this river of Other thoughts, I understood that the catastrophe isn’t the end, it’s in the middle. I understood this with my body, which makes all the difference, by living alongside people who had lived through various catastrophes, people for whom the world had transfigured itself various times…”

She goes on:

“When I started listening to the girls and boys of the student climate strike, what amazed me was how these young people in Europe, mostly white and middle-class, drew so close to the thinking of the peoples of the forest without ever having met them. Along what invisible pathways did their thoughts cross, how did this dialogue that happened without ever having happened come about?

“The history of the peoples of the forest, who already lived through catastrophe and face the threat of living through one again, the history of the teenagers who know they will have to live in a post-catastrophe planet, or an ‘in-catastrophe’ one. This perception of the world, that of an ‘in-catastrophe’ life, alters the whole body, as well as how this body is placed in the world. This is a body in a state of movement.”

For me, Brum’s writing moves beyond a sociological exploration of collapse towards a spiritual one. What ways of being transpire from experiencing the world as one “in-catastrophe,” and how can we help those ways of being develop in prosocial and healthy ways? How does viewing the world as being in a state of collapse invite forward new dimensions of moral clarity and spiritual knowing? New intelligences that live beyond the Western conception of the mind? What long-held, bone-knowing wisdom comes through when we allow ourselves to whole-heartedly look at our world from a place of collapse? Perhaps a new type of resistance. 

From this lens it invites me to look at the collective pain in the world as being related to the emergence of new ways of being. Maybe the pain itself is cracking us open to new ways of being. Or maybe the pain is a product of being cracked open. Either way, it leaves me with a curiosity about how to use my awareness of collapse to constructively work with experiences of pain to help actualize the wisdom and potential within it. How to soften our hearts and open our minds to learn from the peoples, cultures, myths and perspectives that have moved through transfiguration before.

Join me next time for a piece that continues down this line of inquiry on collapse… this time, with Big Data on our side that gives me new insights around economic prosperity’s relationship with decline across history. Stay tuned.

1. Albrecht, G. Chronic Environmental Change: Emerging ‘Psychoterratic’ Syndromes. In Climate Change and Human Well-Being: Global Challenges and Opportunities; Weissbecker, I., Ed.; Springer: New York, NY, USA, 2011; pp. 43–56.

2. Pihkala P. Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety. Sustainability. 2020; 12(19):7836. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12197836

3. Lawrence K. Frank. What Is Social Order? American Journal of Sociology Vol. 49, No. 5 (Mar., 1944), pp. 470-477 The University of Chicago Press

4. Davis and Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017, 16(4): 761-780