School of Collapse

For when we stop pretending

I’m standing underneath a vast tarpaulin sheet in a field - it seems like the sheet spans the entire field - it’s 5 acres perhaps - the ground is scorched and cracked - I have bare feet, dirty feet.

My arms are trying to hold up a part of the tarp sheet roof, like human tent poles, and there are loads of other people also holding up this moving, rippling roof - we are organised in small groups, I notice there are symbols and words spray-painted onto the underside of the roof and groups are gathered around under them.

Above me reads ‘water harvesting’, I see groups huddled under ‘soil building,’ ‘decolonising’, ‘grief work,’ ‘ecological literacy’, and lots more I can’t quite read.

There is an old woman standing next to me, ‘where am I ?’ - I mumble

‘School of collapse’ she says.

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I woke up to strong wind blowing through the tent and the sounds of a significant crew of rooks outside - I looked for my watch - 4.50 am

I’d been dreaming.

This was last Sunday morning during a camping trip with my youngest daughter.

We’d been walking the South Downs the day before, it was beautiful, elevated, ancient, spacious, wild - we could see for miles, the ocean to the south, but also searingly hot and dry, like everywhere, scorched earth, soil that was just dust, with no sign of rain in weeks. With these mad gusts of hot wind.

I’m writing here to log this dream, because it was so clear and vivid. And also because I’ve been finding this summer overwhelming.

A constant gnawing away in my gut.

A deep anxiety.

Like a feeling of being a passenger in a very slow motion car crash of which I seemingly cannot do anything to influence the outcome. A feeling of being muted in some way.

This mad mash up of contradictions - the joy of summer, wearing virtually no clothing for weeks, of warm skin, of always being outside and connection to the land, along with the horrors of a rapidly heating planet, the water sources drying up around me, trees dying, vegetables and plants weirding out doing things I’ve never seen before, insects vanishing, ripe blackberries in early July, and unprecedented wildfires raging across Spaceship Earth.

I’m not going to write here in depth about collapse, there are many others who are doing it with commitment and detail. Check out Sarah Wilson for example.

I did just search my Substack and podcast episodes for ‘collapse’ - it’s been featuring regularly over the years

Primal Anxiety

I revisited a Medium post I wrote in 2014 about food security and collapse and how to live comfortably with knowledge that terrifies you - I had referenced Llewellyn_Vaughan-Lee who spoke of a ‘primal anxiety beneath the surface of our western material abundance’

It was a helpful reminder - primal anxiety speaks to the feeling I’ve been carrying this summer.

12 years on and I’m guessing that primal anxiety must be growing for many more people, especially as the conditions we are living in are no longer abundant for most of us.

It’s hard to exist right now in this dominant reality of capitalist modernity.

To continue to function in this relentless extraction machine.

I can feel it sucking up everything, time, attention, money, energy, sucking up life, creatures, the living world, the waters to power the AI future, it’s like an insanity, hubris.

And I’m relatively privileged compared to many.

But if you’re in living relationship with the true operating system on the Spaceship, with the living world itself, the world we have not made - outside of the constructed reality of modernity which media, corporations and politics shape and contort - then you will know the collapse is well under way, because you see it and feel it first hand.

As my friend, collaborator and Regenerative farmer Hamish Evans wrote last week

“As I write, there are wildfires down the road in Wiltshire and the cracked yellow ground of fields around us indicate that we’re not far off. Whilst I run around with sprinklers on a drought stricken farm, selecting which thousands of plant lives to save and which thousands I have to let go, I am reminded of being on the streets 10 years ago as a teenager protesting about the governments lack of climate action, and demanding that the crisis be taken seriously, as it’s our futures on the line. Now it is our present moment on the line, we’re battling the sins of our ‘elders’ & politicians on the front line, and we’re beyond the point of no return, tipping points already in motion. But like with the plants, this does not mean we give up and stop irrigating and just say its too late – we need to get water to where its needed to save what we can, whilst also developing the deep adaptation and systems of resilience. This includes cultivating inner resilience and deep adaptation of our mindsets, stepping into our active gifts in service to life rather than procrastinating, ignoring or simply complaining”

Stepping into our active gifts in service to life rather than procrastinating, ignoring or simply complaining

Perhaps this is the invitation to School of Collapse.

Not a site specific school or any particular subject or curriculum

But an invitation to step in and meet the moment we are in.

The context we have been born into.

This age of consequence.

On our watch.

In our time in the human story.

Onboard Spaceship Earth.

The ‘Great Unravelling’ as the wise Joanna Macy said.

How long do we continue to pretend that it’s not happening, it’s not my problem, it’s not effecting me. It’s not here. I’m alright. Get on with it. FFS stop dooming, I’m going on holiday. More ice-creams ( I love ice-cream too)

How long do we keep pretending ?

That we can ‘grow the economy’ our way out of it.

‘AI’ our way of it.

‘Wealth create’ our way out of it.

‘Build more roads/infrastructure’ our way out of it.

‘That the young will sort’ a way out of it.

How long do we continue to pretend that the dominant political structures, political strongmen and their intimate entanglements with late stage extractive capitalism, the military industrial complex and mass media platforms are going to make the courageous moves urgently required to try and sustain life on this Earth, to protect the most vulnerable, to put life and care at the centre ?

I mean, really ?

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What would it be like to approach this moment as humble and curious un/learners ?

To learn together how we got here and how we can create the conditions for adaptation and regeneration.

Becoming students of our culture.

Becoming noticers and questioners of the dominant logics and assumptions that continue to uphold the human separation illusion which keeps us on the destruction path.

To un/learn and compost the expiring stories, beliefs, ideas and ways of thinking that we’ve been carrying of late that continue to perpetuate the accelerating collapse of the living world that creates the conditions for all life ( including humans)

To become active experimenters and participants in preparing the ground for healing, re-pair and regeneration in the places and communities we call home, finding what is ours to do in this time of great unravelling.

Finding our crews.

And discovering perhaps that there is so much possibility already being cultivated.

Young and old, human and more-than human - together.

And to do so without divisiveness and blame.

Learning to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Becoming students of not knowing.

Imagine the possibilities in that radical honesty ?

Of letting go of this absurd pretending - of stepping into and meeting this collapsing story with honesty, open hearts and creative minds - of what could be?

Perhaps in facing and tending to the collapse of modernity we might find the portal to a more beautiful world.

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This is not normal

I do not believe we should get used to this mayhem, to allow it to root as ‘normal’.

These are monstrous consequences we are facing - created through centuries of destructive, extractive and untrue ways of seeing, thinking and relating to each other and to the living world around us - this is not normal.

Psychopathic powerful men investing vast amounts of capital in violent military technologies and genocidal economies to ‘keep us safe’ is not normal.

Carving up the living Earth for ‘economic growth’, changing the planetary physics and destabilising the climatic conditions of the only living planet we know of in a miraculous cosmic universe which has evolved over billions of years to sustain life - is not normal .

Hoovering up the living world, poisoning the rivers, boiling the ocean, destroying trees, soils and more-than human beings to exploit, manipulate and convert into flows of capital is not normal.

Raging wildfires ripping through communities of human and more-than-human life - is not normal.

Weeks without any rainfall is not normal.

Arresting and criminalising peaceful protestors for standing up to genocide and planetary destruction is not normal.

AI data centres sucking up millions of gallons of sacred water to suck up our attention is not normal.

(And who even asked for this shit ?)

At what point do we finally accept the story of human separation from the rest of the living Earth and our more-than-human family for what it actually is ?

An illusion.

A spell.

The spell is surely breaking.

Welcome to School of Collapse.

For when we stop pretending.