First, I would like to pay tribute to Dean Walker, who coined the expression “Impossible Conversation” in his book published with that title in 2017 (https://livingresilience.net/the-impossible-conversation/).
In this short piece, I intend to sketch the difficulty (impossibility?) of engaging a significant conversation on the issue of the Possibility/Probability/Inevitability of a Societal Collapse. This post is a sequel to Hitting the Wall, where I explored how our reluctance to confront the brutal facts and our preference for positive and hopeful exchanges often leads to Denial and Delusion.
Inspired by Paul Chefurka’s Ladder of Awareness, I identify three different audiences depending on how well informed and conscious they are regarding the situation of our planet. The first audience does not really know much about the severity of our crisis and tend to believe that things are going well. The second is well aware of the problems and believes that, with ingenuity and technology, we can continue business as usual with minor adjustments to our way of living. The third audience have a much deeper level of awareness of the problems and solutions and concludes that we face a very wicked problem, a predicament.
Let us look at the three conversations.
1. NO PROBLEMO
Maybe I am talking to the wrong people most of my time, but my feeling is that a majority of people, including highly educated and well-read citizens, are still quite unaware of the state of the planet and tend to believe that Everything is All right.
When facing this type of audience, I am often torn between the urge to contribute to opening their eyes and the temptation to spare them the pain of awareness (and spare me the pain of listening again to the same platitudes about how good our times are — Factfulness, anyone?).
Having explored different narratives about the crisis, I found that the story of the seven spheres designed by Arthur Keller is a great eye-opener. It covers the whole spectrum of everything that is not all right with our planet: greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, ice melting, depletion of key resources (oil, lithium…), erosion of the topsoil and massive inequalities. If, after that nuclear explosion, your audience is still skeptical you can invite them to share their beliefs about the willingness and capacity of most of our leaders to face the task.
If you do your work well, then you will plant in your interlocutors’ belly a nice seed of worry, anxiety and fear. This will catapult them into the second cluster, that of people who believe that we can fix all that.
2. YES, WE CAN
As I said, this second group manage to dive long enough into the available information and conclude that the environmental problem is serious (levels 2, 3 and possibly also 4 of Paul Chefurka’s ladder). And the suffering triggered by that awareness combined with the very effective sustainability narratives from “credible” actors from the system (Green Deals, IPCC, Bill Gates, Michael Mann) leads many in this category to believe (an act of blind faith) that those solutions will fix the problem. This brings them back to people in the first cluster.
Engaging in the conversation with this second group is even more painful than with the first one. And the temptation to leave them in their belief that we can “save the planet” is even bigger, inter-alia because their awareness is surely driving them to adopt virtuous behaviours, like cycling, recycling and killing fewer animals to satisfy their appetites.
A key issue around this second impossible conversation is Hope. People want to believe that the future will be fine, and we will be even more enlightened than today. Clinging to Hope seems to be an intrinsic feature of us humans and people would rather die in a hopeful ditch than come out of the trenches and face the unfriendly fire of hopelessness.
A curious thing about this audience is that it seems to be populated by a growing number of what Derrick Jensen calls Bright Green Activists, i.e. people who forgot that the mission is to protect Nature, rather than the Economy and our way of living. In my conversations with this type of audience I realise how superficial the thinking behind “sustainability” tends to be. Sometimes, I have the impression that they think solar panels, windmills and electric cars grow on trees and do not imply the destruction of ecosystems for mineral extraction (see this horror story for lithium), the massive use of fossil fuels for their manufacturing, the harm caused by their installation (google about salmons and dams, birds killed by windmills, etc) and, most importantly, the need to replace them after a couple of decades of use.
As I said, this is a very difficult conversation and the knee-jerk reaction of the interlocutors will probably be to accuse you of being a crazy pessimistic doomer.
3. OOPS
Those who have the courage and stamina to dive further into the problem and the solutions eventually realize that those “solutions” do not address the root cause of the problem and mostly perpetuate and worsen the situation by applying green-washed approaches which possibly aggravate the predicament. When one accepts that there are no effective solutions, the first and often permanent effect is the feeling of being Fucked Up Beyond Any Recognition. That is a bad place to be. That is a place of Despair, Anger, Grief, Helplessness and Fear. That is why, many of us often feel tempted to go back and spend some time in 1) or 2).
If one stays long enough with the unbearable feeling that everything is FUBAR and avoids the temptation to find solace in Delusion, then one might be ready for Inscendence, Soulcraft, Indigenuity or any other practice of Reconciliation with what we really are.
Inscendence is ‘sinking back into the source of everything,’ during which we no longer belong to the world in our old ways… There in the presence of ‘the source of everything’ we hope to be suffused by and informed by what Berry calls ‘the guidance and the powers of the Earth’.”
Soulcraft or the Journey of Soul initiation proposed by Bill Plotkin is an invitation to embrace our unique ecological niche.
Indigenuity (a combination of indigenous and ingenuity) is an holistic approach to describe the types of initiatives that are integrally developing sustainable relations between people and its ecosystems.
This work will keep us busy during our dark night in the cocoon, experiencing with our full senses the dissolution of the busy caterpillar that we were programmed to be, embodying the goo that we become when our constructs melt. Letting go of our catterpillarness.
And, if all goes well, maybe eventually one arrives at Metanoia, the end destination. Metanoia derives from the Ancient Greek words μετά (“beyond”) and νόος (“understanding”). It is a sort of revelation, an apocalypse.
When you get there, you are ready to go extinct.
By Fernando García
May 2021
