What To Do Is Easy
As Long As You're Willing to Die Doing It
In all my time in the Doomosphere, working with people in support groups and through social media, I hear consistently that being a #Doomer is advocating quitting and giving up. When I say I’m not advocating that at all, and counter that giving up, to me, is participating in the ongoing ecocide by Global Industrial Civilization, people want me to list what I suggest is action, or in the parlance of Collapse Acceptance, what responses are appropriate for the thing we call a predicament instead of a problem.
Now, I’m not a newbie to the nature of debate and strategy. And one thing I know about both is that the dumbest thing a person can do is make a list and take a stand. So here’s mine.
Be a good member of the community of life, work daily with something alive that is not human without trying to control it.
Enjoy, to the best of your ability, the daily gift of life on Earth among the community of life
Support Universal Basic Income for all, a livable sum. The money’s not real, stop being petty.
Cease all development, military force, industrial projects, including logging and fishing
Remove all threats to biosphere from existing and spent nuclear facilities and weapons
Dismantle all weapons systems including bioweapons, plagues, viruses
Remove all dams, rewild all rivers and deltas
Terminate scale agriculture and animal production
Mobilize vast numbers of trained death doulas, able to assist families as population dwindles.
Convert all empty buildings to livable, free housing
Compassionately ramp down advanced medical and pharmaceutical services
Consider ways to assist migration of plants and animals
Prepare for refugees, or prepare to be a refugee
Figure out how you’ll end your life if/when you must, and help others do the same
Lists are silly things, I realize that. By hanging targets on the wall, people know exactly where to throw the tomatoes. And the easiest role in any debate is the Pragmatic Skeptic. But here’s how all kinds of activism work: You gotta be the first one on the dance floor, grooving to your inner funk. So let’s dance.
Drawing down civilization with a planned collapse will hasten death for many. Not by suicide or any purposeful euthanasia, but by the rapid drop in medical care options that a drawn down planned collapse version of civilization could offer. People would die a bit sooner, and some who got sick and would previously had the treatment protocols to extend their lives would die. The truth is all the ways people die would rise as population falls. And don’t forget the climate will continue to be a rage of calamities, forcing people to flee lands that once were habitable turned barren and unlivable. So, lots of work to do individually, in families, in communities to get our minds and arms around a new kind of death acceptance. Respectful, but not like the way it is now. This culture is not well constructed to be pliable with our death rituals.
As an added ironic-at-best, macabre-at-worst benefit, the scale of the work detailed above would require enormous continued leveraging of industrial scale demolition, hauling, and disposal (whatever that means, there’s no away). This effort would be powered by the same old dirty fossil fueled mega machines that pollute currently so we’d maybe offset the loss of the Aerosol Masking Effect for a bit? But also increasing the co2 with additional emissions. So, a double bind. Don’t hope for much, then you won’t be disappointed.
The work being done will be deadly, OSHA will have trouble keeping up with complaints. It would be a massive undertaking to remove dams, let alone come up with (for the first time in the history of ever) a way to safely store nuclear waste. Addressing SuperFund sites, toxic manufacturing residue, military base decommissioning are all harrowing things to even consider. People would work themselves right to death on these punishing projects. Hard to say if anyone would even volunteer to do the work. I’m certain this culture will never be mature enough to even be in a place of deciding it needed to be done, much less testing if anyone would volunteer! But, in some mythical way, people with the skills and tools might enjoy one last big project hurrah. And they could just have fun with it, as long as someone kept making beer. Like I said earlier, queue the tomato tossing.
Which leads to the local resilience space, the land of preppers and permaculture types. Accepting collapse isn’t giving up, and all the same benefits to thinking of ways to harden your local loops of food apply. I’d always look for wild foods growing in a food forest arrangement over disciplined rows of non-native vegetable crops which offer no resilience whatsoever. Doing these things helps rewild your soul, leading you into your feral side. Recognizing and acquiring food by opportunity in your habitat is wild ass behavior, but you’ll have to dig deep, literally at times, because these are going to be hyper native, unfamiliar food sources if you’ve been shopping at the market. You will likely not be wandering about and find a tomato or patch of strawberries. Think wild through feral and see food. But skills open your heart and give you, well, skills. So if you are so inclined and they are available, do it. Follow your heart but try to avoid making internment camps for plants and animals. Wander and browse. Favor and disfavor some but not all to integrate into the community of life right around you.
And make community with neighbors. It’s hard because so much divides many neighbors in the socio-political sphere. But you know how every city that experiences tragedy comes out with a #SomeCityStrong campaign right after, and people talk about how neighbors came together? Absent a real tragedy (and assuming neighbors may not accept collapse as you do) it might seem hard to reach across the boundary, but doing so will pay dividends. Talk about the weather, the plants, the animals. If you live in a city, well, it will be harder to do but is still never a bad thing.
None of this means I think collapse will be one thing or another. For me, I’m on the side of the community of life, and I assert that homo colossus and our civilization opposes the community of life. I advocate for eliminating civilization though I understand the consequences of the aerosol masking effect, nuclear meltdowns, food system, economic, and social collapse. In terms of navigating whatever size, if any, bottleneck that process offers will only be well served by doing the hospice activities list I started with. And they’re all just good things to do, I offer. This isn’t torture. The machine isn’t getting healthier, and no one was getting out alive anyway. The least we can do is to live and die well, doing the next right thing to remove the blights to life we have built, erected, manufactured, and spilled alongside our mates in the community of life, bearing witness and testifying without carrying a savior complex.
I say collapse acceptance is freedom. And for me that doesn’t mean freedom from work or responsibility. For some it may mean laying flat, and I can support that, too. I honestly think people will flow to the right spot, like #CollapseStrong, people of the transition do. To mock this concept is to deny the existence of hospice care, as a practice and as a loving act of participation. I’m not sure many people are feeling fulfilled in civilization these days. A respite, an opportunity to live with dignity and love in an awake and aware community of collapse accepted is a gift.
A core lie is that people cannot handle suffering at scale. That’s one thing people can absolutely do. And you don’t have to choose to explore this reality. It’s chosen you. Welcome to Hospice.
Postscript
This list was the subject of one of my conversations with Michael Dowd, which can be viewed here:
And the Final, Final Word
Let me be abundantly clear that this list is pure fantasy. There is not now, nor will there ever be, a variation of this civilization that could even consider the scope of the mountain to climb this represents. But I simply refuse to throttle my realistic, initial assessment of the direction the conversation might head - pulling out of the ditch of grief and realizing that this is about work, not more naval gazing. Hard ass, soul nourishing, and deadly work. Let’s fucking go. You first, I’m cleaning up the tomatoes.
There is not now and never will be a request or option to pay for this content. There is also no space for comments. That’s not because I don’t care what you think. It’s because if you have something to say, I encourage you write your own commentary somewhere. And leave the comments off. I’m not a pinata, and you shouldn’t be, either.