Welcome to the Planetary Hospice - Our World
The earth is on hospice. All the signs are there — the weather patterns, the fires and floods, and hurricanes and tornadoes, the extinction of animals. Our planet is sick and crying for help and more and more, the research is saying that it may be too late. The earth is on hospice, in its final years.
https://medium.com/illumination/the-earth-is-on-hospice-378658d4e904
(review) - Planetary Hospice - Rebirthing Planet Earth | Zhiwa Woodbury
The pace of climate change continues to accelerate, and it now appears inevitable that the Great Anthropocentric Extinction currently unfolding will include the end of life as we know it. Characterizing this ‘Great Dying’ as equivalent to a terminal diagnosis for the human race, and assuming an ecopsychological perspective that sees a close relationship between planetary health and mental health, Zhiwa Woodbury applies the stages of grief to this Great Dying, exploring connections retroactively and prospectively between societal mental health trends in the U.S., our awareness of the severity of the threat we pose to the planet, and the stages of grieving the loss of life, and questions the role mental health professionals should play in this context.
Looking ahead from this same perspective, the author asks if it is possible to alleviate the pain and suffering that will be associated with the widespread extinctions, mass mortality, and forced migrations that are anticipated by scientific experts as a result of climate disruptions, beginning with the idea of what a “good death” would look like in relation to the end of life as we know it, applying principles from hospice and palliative care. Finally, he offers a hopeful vision that, with an expanding planetary hospice movement and appropriate containing myths, it might be possible to re-cast this Great Dying as a difficult, but spiritually progressive, death/rebirth experience for homo sapiens.
https://www.academia.edu/7506717/Planetary_Hospice
Going Dark - By Dr. Guy McPherson & Pauline Schneider
...More than 15 years ago, while editing a book about climate change, I
concluded that habitat for humans would be coming to an end soon due to
abrupt planetary warming. I knew we’d go extinct shortly thereafter.
However, the information was too traumatic to act upon, and so I locked it
away back in that dark little safe place in my head where I didn’t have to
think about it. The information percolated in the crock pot of my mind,
cooking, just like Earth...
...What I had not calculated into the scenario when I began the arduous process of forsaking civilization were;
1) abrupt climate change,
2) global dimming, and
3) uncontrolled meltdown of nuclear facilities.
These three factors create the perfect storm of “We’re SOL and there’s no turning back the clock.”
Abrupt climate change is under way, and it has precedence on Earth. It has no precedence with humans on Earth because abrupt heating removes habitat faster than most animals can keep up. Humans will soon join that undistinguished, never-to-be-seen-again crowd.
Global dimming is the Catch-22 of global warming. Greenhouse gases trap solar radiation and warm the planet, as most people know. But as industrial activity produces greenhouse gases that warm the planet, it also produces aerosols that act as umbrellas to cool the planet. These aerosols reflect incoming sunlight before it reaches the surface of Earth. Whereas greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for a long time, locking in ever-increasing temperatures for at least a thousand years, aerosols fall out of the atmosphere within about six weeks.
If we clean up our carbon-dioxide-spewing act, the sulfates fall out without being replaced and humans lose habitat on this jewel of a planet within about six weeks.
The additional bad news is the likely meltdown of more than 450 nuclear reactors throughout Earth due to a combination of continued abrupt warming and the resulting collapse of civilization due to the inability to grow, store, and distribute grains at large scale.
It doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to imagine the scenario we’ve seen in plenty of disaster movies. We’ve also seen it happen at Chernobyl and Fukushima, two ongoing nuclear disasters. Imagine Fukushima times 100 and no willing, paid people around to contain the damage.
What does that look like? It looks like lethal mutations resulting from bathing in ionizing radiation, until we can no longer procreate. It also looks like Earth’s atmosphere being vaporized as our only home is turned into a dead planet that will never come back from this extinction event.
And guess what? Nobody is working on any of these three predicaments! At this late stage, they have become insoluble predicaments. Forty years ago, we might have had a chance.
Acting even 20 years ago might have given us the chance to persist in a post-apocalyptic world. But today, the two chances of solving the predicaments in which we are embroiled are zero and none.
Earth is in Stage Four. She has little time remaining.
The crock pot in my brain is just about boiling over at this point and I realize I am going to have to admit my own mortality is imminent. That’s nothing new to me, or to any of us. We all knew, even when we were kids, that one day we were going to die. Most of us didn’t think it would happen for a long time, but we knew it would happen, eventually.
Most of us could not have imagined we’d be taking the entire living planet into the abyss with us. Or that there would be no one left to write dirges for us, or tell the story of how hard we fought to save our home and all Her lovely creatures.
When a patient is in Stage Four cancer with days to live, do the doctors keep telling her they are going to save her? Do they tell her they will invent a cure to turn back the clock? Of course not: That would be lying. Medical doctors who are decent human beings arrange for the patient’s hospice care so she can be comfortable and have a chance to say good-bye to her loved ones in a safe space. In hospice, patients can complete relationships and be spared a death of agonizing pain or loneliness, much less filled with the false hope of a miracle cure that is never coming. (Stephen Jenkinson has done a great deal of work on this topic—he calls it the “death trade”—and it is worth taking the time to read his books and listen to his interviews.)
It was the horrific combination of abrupt climate change, global dimming, and nuclear reactors’ melting down that led me to conclude that my own crock pot was done. I fully embraced the terrifying reality of our situation, in all its tragic beauty. We are going extinct, and soon. The only reasonable way for me to walk into this strange and alien future is with the analogy of hospice. Every one of us, together. More than seven billion people saying good-bye to each other in hospice. We no longer need worry about careers, reputations, mortgages, where we’ll get our water from, warlords, pandemics, or the truly mundane aspects of life such as washing dishes, taking out the trash, or doing laundry. In the end, these mundane tasks seem oddly bittersweet.
On a person’s deathbed, she is generally either alone or surrounded by the people she loves. She isn’t thinking about anything except the people who meant something to her during her life. Because at the edge of extinction, only love remains.
Planetary Hospice - Posted by Guy McPherson - Sep 26,
2018
https://weeklyhubris.com/planetary-hospice/
It’s Time to Pursue Hospice, by Guy McPherson
How shall we act in the face of the greatest existential threat our species has ever encountered? The approach offered by Extinction Rebellion is to declare a climate emergency. This approach has been adopted by several government entities around the world. It is a fine starting point.
If declaring a planetary-scale emergency is the starting point, what follows? Where do we go from here?
If we are all going to die – and we are – then how shall we proceed, as a society? If our species is going extinct in the near future – and it is – then how shall we proceed, as a community? These are the two critical questions I pose to you today. These are the important questions I would like the Council, and all of us, to ponder during the coming days and weeks.
How we respond to these two questions defines our humanity. Is there a better measure of our character than how we face our individual death and the demise of our species?
I’m here to ask these questions. Unlike Socrates, I’m here to do more than ask difficult questions: I will also propose a response. Before I reveal my response, I would like to read a short passage from Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Written shortly after Frankl was a prisoner-of-war in Nazi Germany, Man’s Search for Meaning was published. It has inspired millions of people, including me.
“Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any set of circumstances.”
I would add that we can choose not only our attitude, but also our actions. Again, what better measure of our character than how we respond in the face of impossible odds?
I support Extinction Rebellion in its call for a climate emergency. However, abundant evidence indicates it is too late for a declaration of emergency to prevent our imminent extinction. The strategy I propose goes beyond sounding the alarm. I propose planetary hospice.
Lest you believe otherwise, I am not proposing we “give up” the fight against climate change. However, as the best-informed doctor in the room, and probably on the planet, I believe it is time to accept that we are in Stage 4 as a species. I’ll repeat that, because it’s important to understand: The living planet is almost certainly in the fourth and final stage of a terminal condition. Neither hope nor action will stave off the Sixth Mass Extinction. Neither hope nor any known combination of actions will slow or stop human extinction. It is long past time we admitted hospice is the appropriate way forward.
How do people act when they accept their imminent demise? How do people respond to palliative care within hospice? A quick look into these issues suggests a path forward for this community.
Physicians, especially oncologists, used to lie regularly to their patients. Through the 1960s, lying was considered perfectly appropriate. After all, hope was viewed as unimpeachably good, and removing hope by presenting the facts was therefore undesirable.
More recently, and with much discussion among medical doctors and ethicists, it has become acceptable to tell the full truth to patients. Based upon research conducted during the last few decades, hope is no longer viewed as a motivator for many patients. In response, physicians tend to reveal the full truth to patients. It seems the medical community is ‘catching up’ with common sense in concluding that hope is a poor motivator for action.
It’s time to tell the full truth. It’s time to pursue hospice, with as much honesty, integrity, and compassion as we can muster. It’s time to admit that ignoring the decades-long warnings about climate change have led directly to the expected outcome. It’s time to comfort the afflicted, which includes each of us.
I am often asked for advice about how to live during these tenuous times. In response, I recommend living fully. I recommend living with intention. I recommend living urgently, with death in mind. I recommend the pursuit of excellence. I recommend the pursuit of love. In light of the short time remaining in your life, and my own, I recommend all of the above, louder than before. More fully than you can imagine. To the limits of this restrictive culture, and beyond. Live like you are dying. The day draws near.
Each of us was born into a set of living arrangements over which we have no control. The scorched-Earth policies we have adopted and implemented during the last two centuries have led to the expected outcome: a scorched Earth.
The time for blame has long passed. The time for shaming others has long
passed. No blame, no shame: At the edge of extinction, only love remains.
Let’s pursue hospice as one expression of our love.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/06/its-time-to-pursue-hospice-by-guy-mcpherson.html
Welcome to the Planetary Hospice
-Carolyn Baker
Recently, I’ve noticed some longtime environmental activists verbalizing a new perspective on climate change that some would label as defeatist. Dave Pollard, for example, says this:
(blockquote here)
“No one is in control. The enemy, if there is one, is not a cabal of elites,
but a set of co-dependent collapsing systems that every one of us has a
vested interest in trying… to perpetuate — systems we have all helped
co-create and are almost all dependent on… The question we must each ask
ourselves, I think, is this: If we acknowledge that our systems and hence
our civilization cannot be reformed or ‘saved’, what can we do now that will
make a real difference, for the future, in our communities and for those we
love?”
(/)
Or how about this from Wen Stephenson writing in the Nation:
(blockquote here)
“End the dishonesty, the deception. Stop lying to yourselves, and to your
children. Stop pretending that the crisis can be ‘solved,’ that the planet
can be ‘saved,’ that business more-or-less as usual — what progressives
and environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years and more — is
morally or intellectually tenable.
“Let go of the pretense that environmentalism as we know it — virtuous
green consumerism, affluent low-carbon localism, head-in-the-sand
conservationism, feel-good greenwashed capitalism — comes anywhere near
the radical response our situation requires… The question is not whether
we’re going to ‘stop’ global warming, or ‘solve’ the climate crisis; it is
whether humanity will act quickly and decisively enough now to save
civilization itself — in any form worth saving.”
(/)
Isn’t this just giving up or giving in — the pathetic whining of defeatists?
I don’t think so. To me, these new perspectives are utterances of surrender, but also of extraordinary courage.
To explain what I mean, let’s take the standard agenda of those who want to ‘do something’ about climate change. That agenda states that everyone must agree that climate change is happening; understand that the situation is so dire that humanity’s living arrangements must be radically altered; and sacrifice their economic security and industrial profits to significantly reduce carbon emissions.
The problem is that none of these steps will reverse global warming, because more than 30 self-reinforcing feedback loops make this process irreversible. So using activism to end catastrophic climate change, defeat capitalism, and prevent the extinction of species (including our own) is not going to be enough.
Instead, we should ask a different question: are we willing to put love into action even if we ourselves don’t physically survive? If the answer is ‘yes’, then two things are essential. First, bearing witness to the deepening horrors of climate chaos; and second, committing ourselves to compassionate service to all other living beings — since they are going to suffer with us.
By practicing ‘good manners’ toward all species, we can make their demise easier along with ours.
Very often, people who receive a terminal medical diagnosis report that — while the initial announcement was heartbreaking, terrifying, and profoundly unfair — they also experienced a kind of liberation in the process. Learning that they only had a limited time to live altered every aspect of their lives, particularly their decisions about how they wanted to engage with the remainder of their days, and their relationships with other people.
In the same way, accepting the reality of near-term extinction is liberating and agonizing at the same time. It’s liberating because — beyond our own physical survival — something far more meaningful and momentous becomes available to us in the shape of a new form of activism.
Of paramount importance to this new form of activism is how we deal with grief. Conscious grieving is an integral component of the maturity required to balance compassionate action with the discerning acceptance of our predicament.
For hundreds of years, members of the Dagara Tribe in West Africa have practiced grief rituals because they believe that both the Earth and the community need periodic releases of this emotion. Without doing so, they say, the heart becomes hard, which is toxic for the community. Always a collective rather than a private ritual, the Dagara report that grieving together solidifies the community and makes conflict resolution easier. Perhaps more surprisingly, members of the tribe also experience a deepening of joy.
In his book Entering The Healing Ground, Francis Weller shares his conversation with a Dagara woman immediately following a grief ritual, who displayed a radiant smile and seemed to exude joy from every pore. When he asked her how she could be so happy she replied, “I’m so happy because I cry all the time.” Her response echoes the profound words of William Blake: “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.”
Recently, I was personally shaken by the death of my longtime activist colleague and friend, Mike Ruppert. After decades of political struggle and physical health challenges, Mike took his own life on 13 April 2014. Thousands of people attribute their own awakening to our planetary predicament to Mike’s efforts. The legacy he left is enormous, yet everyone close to Mike witnessed the reckless abuse of his body and the emotional wounding which ravaged his psyche, finally leading to his suicide.
As with many activists, Mike was only capable of surrender by terminating his physical life. He had every right to choose that path, but I believe his demise is a cautionary tale against what I call ‘heroic activism.’
Heroic activism is activism in which we do not grieve. It invariably leads to burnout and compromised bodies and psyches. Rather than being self-indulgent, conscious grieving and other forms of self-care are important spiritual practices that honor and protect the bodies and minds required to advance the work that needs to be done to prepare society for the end of life as we know it.
With practices like these, the coming catastrophe does not have to result in widespread fear, panic, dread or hostility. Instead, we should think of ourselves and the Earth as entering a hospice.
Many people who have spent time in hospices report that it has been the most meaningful of their lives. It provided a sacred space in which to reflect deeply on their lives: to evaluate relationships that were enriching; to make amends and restitution with respect to relationships that were difficult and painful; to provide service to others in their hospice environment; and to prepare mindfully and reverently for death.
On a much bigger scale, this is what is needed as a response to climate change. The ‘great dying’ cannot be practiced in isolation. Never before have human beings required loving community to the extent that they do now.
Does this mean giving up and giving in? Not at all. Instead, we must live life as if every act, every task, and every kindness expressed to one’s self and others might be the last. Live and act with gratitude, generosity, compassion, service and an open heart that is willing to be broken over and over again.
It’s time to ask admission to the planetary hospice, and to become hospice workers for the Earth community.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/welcome-to-the-planetary-hospice
In Defence of Inaction - How to Save the World
I have, of late, had a falling out with many of my fellow ‘progressives’, similar I suppose to that of Paul Kingsnorth, who is being savaged by Naomi Klein and others for giving up on the environmental movement and non-local activism, and by humanists for losing faith in our species’ capacity for innovation and change.
I should say at the outset that I agree that our political and economic and legal and educational and social systems are dreadful, unfair, teetering, and totally inadequate to our needs. I agree that this is a world of horrific inequality, inequitable and unjust privilege, massive suffering, and outrageous patriarchy. I agree that corporatism and corruption and propagandist media are rampant and destructive and destabilizing. I agree that militarized police and torture prisons and drone killing and massive global surveillance are repugnant and a fundamental threat to our personal safety and security and the very principles upon which our nations are founded.
And I fully acknowledge that the fact I’m white, male, boomer generation and relatively wealthy provides me with enormous privilege compared to others, including relative freedom of movement, freedom from fear of harrassment and assault, and greater social, political and economic opportunity.
But when I hear arguments that “we need” to stand up for our ‘inherent’ rights and freedoms, and wrest ‘control’ of the levers of power from the obscenely wealthy elite, and denounce and protest injustice and inequality, and acknowledge and renounce our role as privileged oppressors, as the first steps to a true social revolution in and political and economic reform, leading, somehow, to a radical redistribution of wealth and power, and a more just society, I am reduced to despair.
I used to believe people, and perhaps some other creatures, had ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’. I believed that someone was in control. I believed there were answers to the predicaments we face.
But now I realize that there are no rights or freedoms. The concept of rights and freedoms is a sop that the rich and powerful of this world use to appease the fury and frustration of the poor and disenfranchised. The ‘granting’ of rights and freedoms means nothing, because they can be and are taken away whenever those in power choose to do so, and are simply ignored when they interfere with the exercise of power or accumulation of wealth by those who allowed them to be granted.
We don’t have freedom of expression, or speech, or assembly: Under the current surveillance state I can be stopped, arrested, held indefinitely and incommunicado, tortured, ‘disappeared’ or simply killed, by a drone or in a secret gulag, whenever someone in power decides I’m a threat to that power.
Likewise, there is no ‘upward mobility’ for just about any demographic segment of our human population worldwide; most people are trapped, socially and economically, right where they are, no matter what may happen to the place where they live.
There is no true democracy, anywhere: the real decisions are made in secret meetings between bought politicians (many of them in power fraudulently or due to gerrymandering and other corruptions of the ‘democratic’ process), who represent only their rich and powerful donors, and the bankers, lawyers and corporate executives. The ‘laws’ and ‘regulations’ are just smokescreens to make it look as if the people’s interests are being considered.
There are no rights of recourse against corporate abuses: most industries are oligopolies, and corporate law is designed to protect them and their wealthy shareholders and executives from the wrath of outraged citizens, while enabling these corporations to sue citizens who pose any threat to their profits or ‘leadership’.
All that’s happened over the past three decades is that the illusion of rights and freedoms has largely disappeared, as those with wealth and power ratchet up the rhetoric that militarized police, torture prisons, ubiquitous surveillance and the oppression of dissent are ‘necessary’ for public safety and security (especially the safety and security of the rich and powerful).
There are no rights or freedoms. There is only power, and its exercise in the interest of further enriching the rich and further concentrating power.
I used to be outraged and angry about all this, but now I’m just letting it go. It’s just too easy to see this as a moral struggle, as a fight against pathology, greed, and tyranny. I don’t think it’s that simple. I think everyone’s really trying to do what they believe is best, not only for their loved ones but for everyone. I know some of these people, and their stubborn, destructive wrong-headedness is completely understandable to me (from their strange but deeply-held worldview).
Increasing concentration of power doesn’t mean is that there is an ‘elite’ in control of everything in our society. Vast wealth and power does not translate to control, especially in a world where all our systems are collapsing simultaneously: our economic systems, running on the fumes of belief in perpetual industrial growth; our nearly-exhausted energy and resource systems, utterly dependent on ample and cheap oil (one barrel of oil replaces 12 person-years of labour, and we currently use 100 million barrels per day); and our climate systems, which have long passed the tipping point to catastrophic change comparable to that of the ‘ice ages’ (though in the opposite temperature direction).
The rich and powerful are as much prisoners of these massive, complex, crumbling systems, as much cogs in the machine, as the rest of us: they just get better wages and benefits than the rest of the inmates, and will until the systems fall apart, at which time they’ll be no better off than anyone else.
No one is in control. The enemy, if there is one, is not a cabal of elites, but a set of co-dependent collapsing systems that every one of us has a vested interest in trying (insanely) to perpetuate. Systems we have all helped co-create and are almost all dependent on.
David Korowicz, in his study On the Cusp of Collapse, explains how our massively complex global human systems are far beyond the control of any coordinated group of people:
Our daily lives are dependent upon the coherence of thousands of direct interactions, which are themselves dependent upon trillions more interactions between things, businesses, institutions and individuals across the world. Following just one track; each morning I have coffee near where I work. The woman who serves me need not know who picked the berries, who moulded the polymer for the coffee maker, how the municipal system delivered the water to the café, how the beans made their journey or who designed the mug. The captain of the ship that transported the beans would have had no knowledge of who provided the export credit insurance for the shipment, who made the steel for the hull, or the steps in the complex processes that allow him the use of satellite navigation. And the steel-maker need not have known who built the pumps for the iron-ore mine, or how the oxygen for the furnace was refined.
We cannot hope to ‘fix’ these systems through political or economic or legal or educational reform, or putting some more democratically-minded group ‘in control’ of them. Fighting for possession of the steering wheel of a car careering over a cliff cannot produce useful change. Even trying to bring down our economic systems before they do even more damage is probably futile: It’s unlikely to significantly accelerate, mitigate or delay the inevitable collapse, and I’m not sure its effect on catastrophic climate change would be substantial either. There is simply no point trying to change any of these systems; it’s a waste of time, and, as Buddha said “Our problem is we think we have time.” But some would insist we try anyway, so at least “we can say we tried”. I think that’s a pathetic argument.
So here we sit, all of us, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, with no real ‘rights’ or ‘freedoms’, no hope of ‘reforming’ massive, self-reinforcing and entrenched systems utterly out of our control, coming apart because they are totally unsustainable, and no credible knowledge of what might work to even mitigate the imminent and catastrophic end of the industrial ‘growth’ economy, the end of the all-too-brief age of abundant cheap energy, and the end of a short few millennia of astonishingly stable climate.
The question we must each ask ourselves, I think, is this: If we acknowledge that our systems and hence our civilization cannot be reformed or ‘saved’, what can we do now that will make a real difference, for the future, in our communities and for those we love?
The insanely rational answer to this question, I think, is (a) probably nothing, and (b) it’s too early to know.
So if I seem impatient or annoyed when you ask me to be outraged or supportive in your movement to reform civilization, I’m sorry. I think it’s too late.
I’m in the process of writing a book of stories of how all of this might play out, just one scenario, the story of, in the short term, a Great Migration of billions of people towards the poles in search of livable habitat (what an amazing, terrifying and liberating journey that could be!), and, in the longer term, the blossoming of thousands of local communities, new and unimaginably diverse, self-sufficient, joyful and utterly alive human cultures, whose total impact on the planet will be, due to our much smaller numbers and minimal energy and technology resources, pretty insignificant. I need to write such a new story to be able to begin to let go of the old, civilized one.
Maybe that’s not enough. Maybe there’s more I could (I’ve stopped saying “should”) be doing: learning new essential skills and capacities, helping in the process of rediscovering how to build and live in community together, healing myself and helping others heal from the ravages of civilization’s innumerable, constant and monstrous stresses, and just trying to live a joyful, exemplary, modest and graceful life. I may get around to these things. But for now I’m just writing, watching, reflecting, trying to figure it all out.
It’s too early and too late, I think, to do anything more.
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2014/04/20/in-defence-of-inaction/
A Palliative Approach to the End of the World | by E.E. Demore | Human Parts
Appall: When we drape cloth over a dining table we call it a tablecloth; on a mattress, a sheet. Drape a cloth over a coffin, however, and it becomes a pall. It is a curious object, the pall, its purpose being to hide what we feel should not be seen. To make us forget what is beneath it.
Namely, death.
When we call something “appalling,” we say that something would be best covered up, tucked away where it is less likely to disturb our thoughts. (Notably, to call something appalling says less about the thing itself than it does about the person saying it.)
The word “pall” may have fallen out of popular use in the last few decades, but we have not stopped using palls themselves. Rather, the concept of a pall remains as ubiquitous and essential as ever. Palls grant peace of mind; they allow us to carry on with our lives. We depend on palls.
Yet, rarely are they pieces of cloth. Palls take all kinds of forms. They can look like a helpful euphemism, words carefully chosen to mask an abhorrent truth. A death becomes a “passing,” a funeral labeled a “celebration of life.” (more)
https://humanparts.medium.com/the-palliative-environmentalist-8a3a3fe77a72
On the cusp of collapse: Complexity, energy & the globalised economy - Resilience
The systems on which we rely for our financial transactions, food, fuel and livelihoods are so inter-dependent that they are better regarded as facets of a single global system. Maintaining and operating this global system requires a lot of energy and, because the fixed costs of operating it are high, it is only cost-effective if it is run at near full capacity. As a result, if its throughput falls because less energy is available, it does not contract in a gentle, controllable manner. Instead it is subject to catastrophic collapse.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-10-10/cusp-collapse-complexity-energy-globalised-economy/
Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times
A collection of probing essays and weekly meditations, this book addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization. Author Carolyn Baker offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the daunting future humankind has created.The author’s introduction to Collapsing Consciously articulates our current predicament of economic collapse, environmental degradation, and global conflict and expresses the confusion, anxiety, grief, anger, and despair we all experience when we take a hard look at the present-day global crisis and the likely future of the planet. But rather than showing us ways to prevent the collapse, Baker argues that the demise of our consumerist, corporate culture is inevitable, and that it is crucial to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the certain changes to come.Part 1 is a collection of seventeen essays which argue that while the collapse of industrial society cannot be prevented, its meaning extends far beyond tragedy and loss. These essays ask the reader to delve inward and discover the limitless treasures of the soul, as well as the gratification and exhilaration to be discovered in joining with community in preparing for the future.
https://www.carolynbaker.net/books/collapsing-consciously-transformative-truths-for-turbulent-times/
Phase V: 2017–, 'planetary hospice worker?'
...Instead I have chosen to become a ‘planetary hospice worker’.
My role is to help people accept that a part of their life ‘must die’ – that reductive, ‘Western’, ‘refined’ part of themselves and their lifestyle, divorced from the natural world around them by a sterile and inhuman technology that clings like a parasite to their existence. This idea works at many levels, from our relationship to food, to the tools and mechanisms which we choose to include within our lives.
Of course, like any ‘death’, this is not collective; it is a deeply personal moment of transition – and the available solutions, and the options chosen to move towards your ‘death’ must all be personal too. This means there are as many unique answers to the ecological crisis as there are people on the planet.
Like any hospice worker my role is to explain the processes behind that ‘illness’, and provide support while people resolve themselves to that reality; allowing them to plan their path towards, and past the point ‘consumer death’ into something new.
I’m still writing this; now. Hence the specifics are still sketchy. An advance warning though: There will be camping involved!
http://www.fraw.org.uk/meir/about-5.html
The Public Health Crisis Is Planetary—and Nursing Is Crucial to Addressing It
If the Earth were our client, her status would be multisystem failure. She is not ready for hospice, but she does need intensive care to survive. Signs and symptoms include catastrophic wildfires, unprecedented and extended periods of severe heat, climate-related disasters of historic proportions, massive biodiversity loss, deforestation and desertification of the land, emerging infectious and zoonotic diseases including COVID-19, severe air pollution, and changes in water quality and availability. Each of these changes profoundly impacts the health of humans and often impacts structurally vulnerable populations disproportionately.
In September 2021, more than 200 global nursing, medical, pharmacy, dental, and public health journals issued a joint statement titled, “Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health.” Its authors wrote:
As health professionals, we must do all we can to aid the transition to a sustainable, fairer, resilient, and healthier world. Alongside acting to reduce the harm from the environmental crisis, we should proactively contribute to global prevention of further damage and action on the root causes of the crisis.
To accomplish these goals, we must work collaboratively to redesign our current model, shifting from illness care to health care based on principles of planetary health.
“Planetary health is a solutions-oriented, transdisciplinary field and social movement focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions to Earth’s natural systems on human health and all life on Earth.”
The planetary health movement calls for a great transition of all human sectors. Public health nurses are perfectly positioned to lead this transition because they have always addressed sources of harm, promoted strategies to protect our nation’s most vulnerable citizens, and advocated for policies that protect our water, air, and land. Now the planetary health paradigm connects the knowledge and skills of public health nursing to a global movement for change.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306877
Contribution to GTI Roundtable "Bounding the Planetary Future"
An exchange on the essay Bounding the Planetary Future:
Why We
Need a Great Transition
--Richard Heinberg - April 2015
“Planetary boundaries” research constitutes an important advance in our ability to identify and quantify the components of global overshoot. Permit me to suggest that all presentations on planetary boundaries should include a discussion of Liebig’s Law—an ecological truism that can be boiled down to “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” We don’t have to wait for all nine boundaries to be transgressed before global calamity threatens; all it takes to shred the ecosystem web is for one boundary to be breached far enough, long enough. Seen in that light, the fact that four out of nine identified boundaries are already far behind us should be cause for profound concern.
Nevertheless, Johan Rockström’s exposition follows the familiar and necessary formula: industrial civilization is propelling us toward planetary collapse, but there is still time to change civilization’s operating system so as to ensure survival and well-being for everyone, even as population continues to grow. I have used that formula in essays and lectures any number of times, and, each time I do, I catch myself feeling just a bit disingenuous. Yes, as public intellectuals, it is our job to prescribe the medicine we think will improve the patient’s (i.e., civilization’s) condition. But is our prescription really capable of curing the disease?
Let’s face it: our patient’s condition is worsening. Further, we have seen cases like this before (i.e., there have been previous civilizations that overshot their environment’s carrying capacity), and in all instances, the outcome was dire. Nevertheless, following the discursive formula, a hypothetical treatment is proposed, consisting of energy substitution, massive resource efficiency improvements, wealth redistribution, and global governance; though it has never been tried, it seems to be our only hope.
A new school of environmentalist thought—sometimes labeled “doomerism”—holds that it is too late for such nostrums. The patient has no interest whatever in taking our medicine (sustainability proposals have been tabled at least since 1972’s Limits to Growth, but global elites have shown themselves completely uninterested in any course of action that does not promise continuing GDP expansion), and the disease is too far advanced (we have set in motion self-reinforcing geophysical processes that cannot be reversed). The most extreme doomers insist that near-term human extinction is now assured. Forget trying to save civilization, they say; think planetary hospice instead.
Doomerism has the virtue of willingness to look our predicament squarely in the face without flinching. But it has been criticized for underestimating the likely role of balancing feedbacks within both the environment and human society; further, it disempowers both its purveyors and its audience, who have a tendency to adopt an attitude of cynical, resigned apathy. Is there a third approach?
It seems to me we could start with a recognition that crisis is now assured. That does not mean near-term extinction is inevitable, but it does mean that this century will almost certainly see ecological, economic, and social upheaval on an unprecedented scale. The doomers are right in saying that it is late in the game, but wrong in simply giving up.
An alternative strategy would be to anticipate crises and use them to advantage. Such a crisis-led strategy would first seek to provide ways for people and institutions to adapt to coming changes in ways that create more community resilience and that meet basic human needs more sustainably over the long run. That would almost certainly imply different adaptive tactics for societies in varying stages of industrialization (or de-industrialization, as the case may be). A secondary strategy would be to widely and consistently publicize an ecological explanation for inevitable crises (overpopulation, depleting resources, pollution) that could at least partly reduce the social tendency to find scapegoats for declining economic conditions. This could avert a great deal of unnecessary conflict.
Crisis can be a teacher. All indigenous human societies eventually learned self-restraint, if they stayed in one place long enough. They discovered through trial and error that exceeding their land’s carrying capacity led to awful consequences. That’s why these peoples appear to us moderns as intuitive ecologists: having been hammered repeatedly by resource depletion, habitat destruction, overpopulation, and resulting famines, they eventually realized that the only way to avoid getting hammered yet again was to respect nature’s limits by restraining reproduction and protecting other forms of life. We have forgotten that lesson, because our civilization was built by people who successfully conquered, colonized, then moved elsewhere to do the same thing yet again—and because we are enjoying a one-time gift of fossil fuels that empower us to do things no previous society ever dreamed of. We have come to believe in our own omnipotence, exceptionalism, and invincibility. But we have now run out of new places to conquer, the best of the fossil fuels are used up, and the environmental consequences of burning them are starting to catch up with us. We can learn from crisis; cultural anthropology shows that. But, in this instance, we need to learn fast, and perhaps some organized effort to aid that process would be well spent. Planetary boundaries discourse could help explain to frightened masses why the world seems to be falling apart around them, while community resilience-building could help them adapt to changed conditions.
For the time being, most environmental activists will (and probably should) continue publishing new reports saying, “If we don’t change policies, terrible things will happen,” and, “If we do change policies everyone can live in peace and sufficiency.” I am merely suggesting that some of us might also be thinking strategically about what to do if world leaders do not adopt policies to drastically cut carbon emissions and redistribute wealth. Crisis-led community resilience seems to be the logical fallback plan.
Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. He is the author of twelve books, including Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, Snake Oil, The End of Growth, and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.
On Planetary Hospice and “Too Late” (video)
https://oneearthsangha.org/articles/on-planetary-hospice-and-too-late/
Earth Hospice
https://www.wildlensinc.org/earth-hospice/
(more commentary on Zhiwa Woodbury's paper)
In the five stages of grief over climate catastrophe, might we be further
along the path than we think?
https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2019/8/3/stages-of-denial-climate-crisis
Chapter One ~ Planetary Initiation: The Great Dying 2.0
https://www.global-witness.com/post/initiation-the-great-dying-2-0
