This essay was profound and articulated beautifully so many things that I've been internalizing and thinking about but not knowing how to express, including my feelings about the ending in Parable of the Sower (!). This was so right on: "Collapse is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed." Thank you for your beautiful writing.
The sequel to Sower was not so very utopian. 😔 scared the bejeezus out of me if I’m honest.
You said something that has been on my mind a lot. I want to preserve and somehow build new at the same time. I can’t spiral into the signs of apocalypse all the time, I’ll go mad. Following the links to the work on the Great Turning. Thank you for this piece. 🙏🏼
My field is religious studies and theology, so I recognize my bias, but I do think that the apocalyptic force of collapse is probably the the most powerful mythical frame animating secular spaces right now. It gives people a form of certainty, which has (with the collapse of the myth of progress) very clearly gone missing. It’s something to believe in, even if it feels terrible. And the only thing the myth really demands that we embrace is also potentially confirmed by something like entropy, so it remains credible if your mind tends to only affirm what’s scientifically credible.
I’m with you on the feeling of being burnt out on collapse. I’ve spent a long time unable to think outside that frame, and I’ve just come to feel as if, even if we are in collapse, I want to help people live in the world they have (I’m a mom, which is probably part of it). I’ve also been noting that the collapse discourse has been shifting quite a bit. It’s become much more oriented around AI, for one thing. I do also think that more people are returning to religious traditions as a kind of reaction to the ubiquity of collapse. The algorithm tends to feed me people who are making more peace with uncertainty. But I don’t think that this necessarily has mass appeal.
Such a helpful perspective, thank you! It is really hard to talk to the average person about collapse or about present and future disasters but lots of people want more connection with neighbors, community gardens, better options for so many things so this make so much sense as a way to move forward.
Until last spring I'd been at the coal face of collapse for about five years. Read all the books you mentioned and more. Watched countless interviews and read the same amount of reports and articles. Moderated a Facebook that dealt only in the topic. I know enough to believe collapse is here, runaway and unstoppable. As Nate Hagens would say, the only way now is through.
There is a huge difference between understanding that on an intellectual level and then somehow passing into acceptance, embodying it. I don't know what it is that pushes one from the first to the latter but when acceptance comes to the marrow of your bones it feels easier to walk the talk. Make the decisions that mean you're living with integrity with your beliefs and loosen slightly the vice like grip that until then I had on collapse.
These days I spend most of my time trying to grow as much food as I can but it's incredibly difficult when that knowledge has not been given to you from an elder when growing up. Learning how not to do it from square one takes years, learning how to do it comes even later. Even then the knowledge that we would have all had just a handful of generations ago worked well only in a stable climate and it's already changed enough to make it hard for even those that know what they're doing. Neither did they have the plethora of foreign invaders to deal with, a gift from global trade that means some crops are almost impossible now, chestnut weevils, chestnut gall wasps, marmorated stink bugs, fig beetles to name just a few. Yet, despite all of that, it's still our work to do it seems as Maslow would I'm sure agree.
Maybe there is a critical mass of perceived complexity that pushes one into acceptance. The more one digs around in this topic the more complex it becomes, the waters get muddier not clearer and maybe that helps loosen the grip. I'm thankful for whatever the reason or reasons are as staying in the awareness space with high revving parasympathetic nervous system is not at all healthy.
Apologies for the lengthy comment. The article triggered a flow of thoughts that I wanted to get out/down.
Thank you, Anya. You absolutely nailed it. The smug knowingness of some (read: some) of the “polycrisis” folks who’ve tried to engage in conversation (or ongoing planning work) about collapse this year just sits all wrong. “HI, we’re a group of very wealthy moderately spiritually educated unceasingly healthy people who meet regularly in nice places to dream the world we’ll run off and build in natural fibre and earth tones and organic everything after the evil systems we’ve never stopped benefiting from come down around our ears.” It’s as though collapse is being magically rescripted as a golden opportunity to optimize. Your photos show so beautifully that collapse is already here for many communities globally (and more than a few locally), and that the work must be on behalf of those communities now and not on behalf of our impeccably curated post apocalyptic utopias later. Thanks for the clarity, insight, and wickedly deft prose.
I hear you, Anya! And I am also leaning into the small acts/projects that remind us that we are capable of creativity, connection, and collaboration. I am a big fan of the stealth actions that surprise and delight, get people talking, and inspire similar moves. These can be contagious in the best way! Fun is good, and humor heals. We need comic relief, and subversive silliness that engages may be our best way to respond to 2026. ❤️
Thanks for this insight. Ultimately, what’s left out of collapse convo, is that we are all going to die. And what are the practices of dignity that can allow us to die as well as one can, not without fear or suffering, but hopefully less panic. I tell myself, the sixth mass extinction isn’t coming, I’m in it—maybe even born of it. The first mass extinction, which if you need a guy to blame you could blame plants, lol, (but obviously it’s more complex than that) spanned a million some years. This is life on earth folks—no utopia, just wild roaring life and death. May we find the grace to navigate it as well as we can with less illusions ans more presence.
Subsistence agriculture is the easy part in the sense that it works and is possible otherwise we wouldn't be here. As Benjamin Bramble put it recently, the plants grow themselves, it's growing the humans that is the hard part.
I believe in more people growing more of their own food! And also my husband started a regenerative silvipasture project a few years ago, and I have observed that it is super hard and complicated to grow enough food to feed yourself. Most of us who work in the information economy have little grasp of how complicated it can be and how much time it can take, with seasonal variation, of course.
If you've got enough land for silvopasture you're doing pretty good! I do work in the information economy to pay the bills but I've also spent the last decade organic farming and at one point was growing around 25% of my food. I'm hoping with switching away from trying to make money with vegetables to more staple crops I can get that higher in the next couple years.
This hit me at exactly the right moment -- as I'm early in my journey through learning about these crises, I'm working hard not to spiral or run toward the "certainty" of a collapse narrative. Really grateful for this writing right now.
While I have a soft spot for homesteading videos on YouTube, the constant blanket negativity everywhere, with little nuance or perspective (let alone action), often leave me frustrated. If nothing else, it flattens all problems together, conflating media exposure with material problems, and not distinguishing the trivial from major issues we need to focus on together.
Most importantly, I’m jealous you figured out how to do links in picture captions. But after that, this is a great post and I’m really looking forward to your book.
Thank you for this. It resonates deeply. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I find “collapse awareness” oddly comforting and I think it may have something to do with what you’ve laid out here. But after more than 3 decades with shoulder to the wheel on democracy, environment and food system policy work, I’ve grown more and more aware of the interconnectedness of these issues and for me, it has come down simply to: we are not living in right relation to our planet or each other. Something fundamental has got to change. Last year, I took a spiral workshop for the first time and this year I’m looking forward to your class.
It will be wonderful to have you! I think what I would add is: something has got to change, and because it must change, it will. That's what unsustainable means.
This essay was profound and articulated beautifully so many things that I've been internalizing and thinking about but not knowing how to express, including my feelings about the ending in Parable of the Sower (!). This was so right on: "Collapse is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed." Thank you for your beautiful writing.
I'm so happy to hear it resonated for you!
The sequel to Sower was not so very utopian. 😔 scared the bejeezus out of me if I’m honest.
You said something that has been on my mind a lot. I want to preserve and somehow build new at the same time. I can’t spiral into the signs of apocalypse all the time, I’ll go mad. Following the links to the work on the Great Turning. Thank you for this piece. 🙏🏼
Thank you for reading! We are the great turning.
My field is religious studies and theology, so I recognize my bias, but I do think that the apocalyptic force of collapse is probably the the most powerful mythical frame animating secular spaces right now. It gives people a form of certainty, which has (with the collapse of the myth of progress) very clearly gone missing. It’s something to believe in, even if it feels terrible. And the only thing the myth really demands that we embrace is also potentially confirmed by something like entropy, so it remains credible if your mind tends to only affirm what’s scientifically credible.
I’m with you on the feeling of being burnt out on collapse. I’ve spent a long time unable to think outside that frame, and I’ve just come to feel as if, even if we are in collapse, I want to help people live in the world they have (I’m a mom, which is probably part of it). I’ve also been noting that the collapse discourse has been shifting quite a bit. It’s become much more oriented around AI, for one thing. I do also think that more people are returning to religious traditions as a kind of reaction to the ubiquity of collapse. The algorithm tends to feed me people who are making more peace with uncertainty. But I don’t think that this necessarily has mass appeal.
Thanks for sharing! I hope peace can have mass appeal!
There is a historical precedent for it! And that was the moment that also gave rise to the environmental movement…
Such a helpful perspective, thank you! It is really hard to talk to the average person about collapse or about present and future disasters but lots of people want more connection with neighbors, community gardens, better options for so many things so this make so much sense as a way to move forward.
Thanks Anna!
A succinct and well rounded summary thank you.
Until last spring I'd been at the coal face of collapse for about five years. Read all the books you mentioned and more. Watched countless interviews and read the same amount of reports and articles. Moderated a Facebook that dealt only in the topic. I know enough to believe collapse is here, runaway and unstoppable. As Nate Hagens would say, the only way now is through.
There is a huge difference between understanding that on an intellectual level and then somehow passing into acceptance, embodying it. I don't know what it is that pushes one from the first to the latter but when acceptance comes to the marrow of your bones it feels easier to walk the talk. Make the decisions that mean you're living with integrity with your beliefs and loosen slightly the vice like grip that until then I had on collapse.
These days I spend most of my time trying to grow as much food as I can but it's incredibly difficult when that knowledge has not been given to you from an elder when growing up. Learning how not to do it from square one takes years, learning how to do it comes even later. Even then the knowledge that we would have all had just a handful of generations ago worked well only in a stable climate and it's already changed enough to make it hard for even those that know what they're doing. Neither did they have the plethora of foreign invaders to deal with, a gift from global trade that means some crops are almost impossible now, chestnut weevils, chestnut gall wasps, marmorated stink bugs, fig beetles to name just a few. Yet, despite all of that, it's still our work to do it seems as Maslow would I'm sure agree.
Maybe there is a critical mass of perceived complexity that pushes one into acceptance. The more one digs around in this topic the more complex it becomes, the waters get muddier not clearer and maybe that helps loosen the grip. I'm thankful for whatever the reason or reasons are as staying in the awareness space with high revving parasympathetic nervous system is not at all healthy.
Apologies for the lengthy comment. The article triggered a flow of thoughts that I wanted to get out/down.
Thanks again. 🙏
Thank you for reading, for engaging so thoughtfully, and for your own work to address what we are going through.
Thank you, Anya. You absolutely nailed it. The smug knowingness of some (read: some) of the “polycrisis” folks who’ve tried to engage in conversation (or ongoing planning work) about collapse this year just sits all wrong. “HI, we’re a group of very wealthy moderately spiritually educated unceasingly healthy people who meet regularly in nice places to dream the world we’ll run off and build in natural fibre and earth tones and organic everything after the evil systems we’ve never stopped benefiting from come down around our ears.” It’s as though collapse is being magically rescripted as a golden opportunity to optimize. Your photos show so beautifully that collapse is already here for many communities globally (and more than a few locally), and that the work must be on behalf of those communities now and not on behalf of our impeccably curated post apocalyptic utopias later. Thanks for the clarity, insight, and wickedly deft prose.
Hey Jody! Happy New Year! Pretty deftly put yourself.
I hear you, Anya! And I am also leaning into the small acts/projects that remind us that we are capable of creativity, connection, and collaboration. I am a big fan of the stealth actions that surprise and delight, get people talking, and inspire similar moves. These can be contagious in the best way! Fun is good, and humor heals. We need comic relief, and subversive silliness that engages may be our best way to respond to 2026. ❤️
I love fun! Thanks for your perspective, Maya!
Thanks for this insight. Ultimately, what’s left out of collapse convo, is that we are all going to die. And what are the practices of dignity that can allow us to die as well as one can, not without fear or suffering, but hopefully less panic. I tell myself, the sixth mass extinction isn’t coming, I’m in it—maybe even born of it. The first mass extinction, which if you need a guy to blame you could blame plants, lol, (but obviously it’s more complex than that) spanned a million some years. This is life on earth folks—no utopia, just wild roaring life and death. May we find the grace to navigate it as well as we can with less illusions ans more presence.
Yes the fear of death, denial of death is a big factor here!
Electric airplanes.
Sigh.
😢
Thank you for sharing about The Work That Reconnects. It is, and will continue to be, some of the most critical wisdom of our lifetime. 💜
Absolutely agree!
Subsistence agriculture is the easy part in the sense that it works and is possible otherwise we wouldn't be here. As Benjamin Bramble put it recently, the plants grow themselves, it's growing the humans that is the hard part.
I believe in more people growing more of their own food! And also my husband started a regenerative silvipasture project a few years ago, and I have observed that it is super hard and complicated to grow enough food to feed yourself. Most of us who work in the information economy have little grasp of how complicated it can be and how much time it can take, with seasonal variation, of course.
If you've got enough land for silvopasture you're doing pretty good! I do work in the information economy to pay the bills but I've also spent the last decade organic farming and at one point was growing around 25% of my food. I'm hoping with switching away from trying to make money with vegetables to more staple crops I can get that higher in the next couple years.
Congratulations Anya. Welcome, and thank you for your counterentropic contributions to the pools of loving awareness
This hit me at exactly the right moment -- as I'm early in my journey through learning about these crises, I'm working hard not to spiral or run toward the "certainty" of a collapse narrative. Really grateful for this writing right now.
Thank you for letting me know! Not running toward certainty is a lifelong practice for me.
Incredibly grounded thinking - thank you, Anya.
Thank you Mor!
While I have a soft spot for homesteading videos on YouTube, the constant blanket negativity everywhere, with little nuance or perspective (let alone action), often leave me frustrated. If nothing else, it flattens all problems together, conflating media exposure with material problems, and not distinguishing the trivial from major issues we need to focus on together.
yes exactly!
Most importantly, I’m jealous you figured out how to do links in picture captions. But after that, this is a great post and I’m really looking forward to your book.
Thanks Logan!
Thank you for this. It resonates deeply. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I find “collapse awareness” oddly comforting and I think it may have something to do with what you’ve laid out here. But after more than 3 decades with shoulder to the wheel on democracy, environment and food system policy work, I’ve grown more and more aware of the interconnectedness of these issues and for me, it has come down simply to: we are not living in right relation to our planet or each other. Something fundamental has got to change. Last year, I took a spiral workshop for the first time and this year I’m looking forward to your class.
It will be wonderful to have you! I think what I would add is: something has got to change, and because it must change, it will. That's what unsustainable means.