Living into the Catastrophe

It has been a little while since I posted on Learning How Land Speaks. One reason is that in January we started a new operative inquiry Dwelling Places, exploring the living presence of the places we live. This inquiry was intended to provide narratives for a book I pitched (unsuccessfully) in response to the call from Humans and Nature Press. I hope to post accounts from the Dwelling Places inquiry shortly. In the meantime, here is a draft chapter from my pitch in which I tell the story of my own experience of living into and understanding the ecological catastrophe of our times, a narrative that brought me to the panpsychic co-operative inquiries featured in this Substack. This piece is rather longer than other Substack posts and extensively referenced; I hope readers will nevertheless appreciate this account of my journey over the past eight years.

When I first wrote about my life in the Anthropocene, Jakarta was flooded and monster Typhoon Kammuri was battering the Philippines. Western newspapers were full of pictures of the fires raging in Australia where thousands of people were fleeing and maybe a billion animals burned to death. At the time, Freya Mathews emailed me: ‘The gates of hell are officially open now in Australia. From here on, heaven help us all!’ When I revisited this writing sometime later, our papers were full of news from frozen Texas. Then we learned that Thwaites in Antarctica – nicknamed the doomsday glacier – is melting faster than scientists expected. As I update again, our attention is fixed on Hurricane Helene, which has devastated the southeast of the USA, flooding the so-called ‘climate haven’ of Asheville, North Carolina. We worry about the weakening of the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning (commonly known as the Gulf Stream). By the time you read this, some other unnatural catastrophe will certainly be occupying our attention.

This is the Anthropocene, the epoch when human actions dominate, even overwhelm, the process of the planet.[i] It is also the Sixth Extinction, in which the loss of lifeforms is up to 1,000 times the background rate.[ii] It is easy to focus on carbon emissions and the consequent global heating, but the ecological emergency that confronts the modern world is a rupture in the Earth System as a whole, a rupture whose impact extends to all the major spheres of the planet: air, water, rocks, ice, and living things.[iii] The complex array of feedback loops which maintained the stability Earth within habitable limits through the geological epoch of the Holocene have been thrown out of kilter.

I am eighty years old. As I look back, I see my life has been overshadowed by the gathering ecological catastrophe. I have a childhood memory, strangely both clear and hazy, that was an intimation of things to come. As a small boy in the 1950s I am sitting at the kitchen table turning the pages of a weekly magazine – possibly Life or Picture Post. I come to a dramatic black-and-white double-page spread showing a filthy smokestack, illustrating an article predicting a future environmental crisis. I ask my mother about it, and her reply lovingly brushes my concerns aside, forbidding even the thought that lies behind the question: “You don’t want to think about that, dear”. But clearly the notion that life on Earth was precarious lodged in my mind.

Throughout my adult life this early intimation was reinforced: I was just eighteen in 1962 when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published.[iv] I recall trying to imagine a mother bird crushing her eggs as she sat to incubate them because the shells were so thin. This was followed by a plethora of warnings: in 1968 by Buckminster Fuller’s challenging proposal that we live on ‘Spaceship Earth’;[v] in 1972 the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report pointed out the modern economies were on a trajectory leading to overshoot and collapse;[vi] in 1987 the Brundtland Report initiated a debate about the possibilities of ‘sustainable development’;[vii] in the 1990s Al Gore’s movie told of An Inconvenient Truth of climate change;[viii] there were many more. The first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio in 1992, since when we have been beset by increasingly alarming reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and twenty-nine inconclusive meetings of the Conference of Parties. We now can read almost daily of rapidly melting icecaps, record temperatures, violent storms, the bleaching of coral reefs, extinction of lifeforms, chemical and plastic pollution, all indicating that ecological catastrophe is on us faster than even the pessimists thought. Maybe The End of the World has Already Happened, as philosopher Tim Morton proposes in his BBC Radio 4 broadcast: we no longer live in the world our civilization was adapted to.[ix]

Through this exact same period, the English middle-class society, of which I am firmly a part, moved out of the austerity that followed World War II into the dubious delights of consumer society: the words of Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1957, “You’ve never had it so good,” rang true.[x] My first visit to a candy shop with my mother when we didn’t need ration tokens is clear in my memory. Around 1960 a store called Goods and Chattels opened in London that sold inexpensive, stylish homeware – for a while bright coloured enamel teapots and mugs were all the rage. Habitat was founded in 1964, bringing the fresh Scandinavian style to moderate incomes. Clothing boutiques opened in Soho’s Carnaby Street in the 1960s, offering mod and hippie styles; Mary Quant was our fashion icon. We began to eat better, be more conscious of what we wore, drive modern cars rather than struggle to keep pre-war models on the road, have wine with meals, holidays abroad. We learned to be consumers. It didn’t take long for that novelty to become habit and expectation: we decided that an ever-increasing standard of living was our right. I recall my mother telling me when I bought a high-powered sports car in the late 1960s, “You deserve it” – and even then, I was not quite sure why.

Of course, we now see clearly that the growing ecological catastrophe and the consumer revolution are two sides of the same coin. The latter was part of the Great Acceleration, the exponential rise in population, energy use, pollution, and consumption of all kinds that took off in the middle of the twentieth century.[xi] For many, the Great Acceleration is seen as the start – or if not the start, then a quickening – of the Anthropocene. My life has been an embodiment of this Great Acceleration, characterized by astonishing increases in both material wellbeing and ecological disruption.

As professor at the University of Bath, I taught and researched ‘sustainable business practice’ – a phrase that now seems laughably archaic.[xii] I remember conversations with colleagues back in the 1990s, agreeing, “We have another ten years to address this, then it will be too late”. Yet here we are now, halfway through the third decade of the new millennium, with little really changed. Is it still nearly too late, as the latest IPPC report argues? Or has the moment, if indeed it existed, actually slipped from our collective grasp?

These are practical questions about reductions of carbon emissions, about changing patterns of production and consumption, about housing, farming, transport, healthcare. But more than that, as writers of colour are increasingly pointing out, we cannot separate climate change from the exploitations of colonialism and slavery. As African American blogger Mary Heglar puts it, climate change is not just a man-made problem, it is a white-man-made problem. It didn’t start with the Industrial Revolution, ‘It started with conquest, genocides, slavery, and colonialism. That is the moment when White men’s relationship with living things became extractive and disharmonious. Everything was for the taking; everything was for sale’.[xiii]

So the ecological emergency presents us with essentially moral questions. As writers such as Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, and Roy Scranton point out: it forces us to look at human fragility and transience, to recognize that the global civilization we call ‘the developed world’ or ‘Western Civilisation’ is in its death throes.[xiv] This certainly means the end of the dominant culture as we have known it in the West: we have to let go of all the assumptions about identity, freedom, success and progress that we have held so dear. It may even mean the end of human species, along with many other life forms. As Bringhurst puts in, ‘You, your species, your entire evolutionary family, and your planet will die tomorrow. How do you want to spend today?’[xv] There are no obvious, easily available solutions: we can either cover our heads in denial or commit to living ethically in a broken world. Most of us will probably do a bit of both.

Above all, living ethically means being willing to look squarely at the truth of our situation – while acknowledging the limits of our understanding. It means cultivating capacities of courage, self-control and self-awareness, compassion and justice. As Jan Zwicky points out, following Socrates, these are qualities of the excellent human being through history. It is easy for me to write this: how does it feel to the citizens of Jakarta, Ashville, or Valencia flooded from their cities, to the Australians fleeing catastrophic fires? But living ethically does not mean we have to get it right all the time: as Bringhurst puts it pithily, you might not save the world, but you can at least save your self-respect.[xvi]

As I move into my ninth decade, I can see how my generation was complicit in the Great Acceleration: as much carbon dioxide has been emitted into the atmosphere in the past thirty years as in the whole history of humanity to that point. We are guilty of missing the evident signs: NASA scientist James Hansen and his colleagues published studies of global temperature rise in the early 1980s; Hansen himself testified to US Congress in 1988 that he was ninety-nine percent certain there was a clear cause and effect relationship between carbon emissions and global warming. His warning was dismissed by Congress and even though much quoted, ignored by liberal bien pensants. This was a time that we knew… but looked away.

As I studied this tangle of crises, and as it informed my teaching at the University of Bath, I was also on a personal experiential journey which was shaking the foundations of my worldview. In the 1990s I joined the Dreamweavers’ Lodge, exploring Earth-based spirituality through Native American Medicine Wheel teachings.[xvii] As apprentices we undertook a cycle of ceremonies, starting with a twenty-four-hour vision quest alone on a hillside; and continuing through increasingly challenging encounters with natural and spirit teachers. At the culmination of the first ceremonial cycle, we were to discover our ‘sacred name’ and to call a sign from the Universe – usually a shooting star – as recognition and confirmation. I remember being deeply sceptical about this – why would the Universe respond to my call? – but nevertheless engaged in all the preparatory work, and one evening made my way in the dark to the top of a hillside in rural Wales.

My scepticism led me to make quite a mess of the ceremony, even falling asleep in the middle of it. But eventually, still full of doubts, I performed the appropriate rituals, called for a shooting star, and lay back on the ground to watch the sky. The moment my head touched the ground, a brilliant star streaked right across the sky above me, from east to west, just as I had commanded. Was this an illusion? No, I was wide awake, fully present: this was a real star that I experienced, incontrovertibly, as responding to my call. I just lay there for a while, amazed and thrilled, then made my way back down the hill in a most extraordinary state of elation and confusion. How could this happen to a rational European male like me? For this extraordinary event cut right through everything I took for granted about the nature of the world.[xviii]

I continued this search for a deeper sense of participation. After I retired from academic life, I set out on two ecological pilgrimages at sea in my small yacht Coral sailing, mainly single-handed, round the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland. These were challenging voyages, both as adventures and as radical experiential inquiry with the wild world. They were also intended to provide the material for books that, while engaging to read, would smuggle in radical ideas about the human place as participants on a living planet.[xix] On these voyages I experienced moments when my sense of a separate self-identity disappeared, and I felt myself plunged into deep time.

One summer night, crossing the Celtic Sea, the wind suddenly dropped away, and the yacht Coral was becalmed. The moon had set, plunging everything into deep darkness; the sea merged with the sky at the horizon so there was nothing but starlight to contrast with the lurking quietness of the water. All I could do was wait and enjoy the night. I tipped back my cap and looked up past the green loom of the masthead light into the night sky, past the multitude of individual stars, past the patterns between them. I looked beyond into the smoky haze of starlight that filled the sky, faint but dense, profoundly dark and brightly lit at the same time. And with the gazing I was drawn into the infinity of the space above me, so that I felt I was both disappearing into and becoming part of the whole of everything.[xx]

I call such experiences, ‘moments of grace’:

Moments of grace occur when a crack opens in our taken-for-granted world, and for a tiny moment we experience a different world that is nevertheless the same world. It is a world that is not fixed in form, but forever changing: no longer divided into separate things, but one dancing whole.[xxi]

Over my whole life, I have seen wave after wave of calamity, now in these later years amplifying. After a productive and reasonably worthy life, there is a loss of innocence, as I am forced to acknowledge my own entitlement and indeed collusion. At the same time, I have experienced intimations of an alternative, a different, more intimate and less destructive relationship with Earth. How can I understand this predicament and possibility? And how should I respond?

The deeper origins of catastrophe

The climate and ecological catastrophe of our time is multifaceted: not just a technical problem, or a political problem; not a crisis that can be resolved rationally; it is not even, as some would have it, a polycrisis in which many intractable problems overlap. Philosopher Jonathan Rowson coins the term ‘metacrisis’ to encompass these and more:

The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.[xxii]

The argument goes something like this. The catastrophe of our time has deep roots in the worldview of the Western world. We can argue over the details, but broadly the foundational pathologies of western civilization – characterised by dualism, splitting of humans and nature, and a lust for power and control – has long historical origins. We might trace these back to the establishment of monotheism that started with early Judaism: the victory of the prophet Elijah over the priests of Baal in their altar-burning contest marks the triumph of a transcendental monotheism over Earth-based polytheism, and the establishment of a dualism between heaven and Earth.[xxiii] We might trace it back to the start of agriculture and the imperative to protect cultivated crops from ‘wild’ nature, and our land from those who would take it from us;[xxiv] and to the class hierarchies founded in agricultural surplus. This dualism was formalized by Greek philosophers in their preference of Theoria over Strategia and an emphasis on abstractive thought over practice.[xxv] These early trends were amplified by institutional Christianity, solidified in the Enlightenment and the dualist thinking of Descartes,[xxvi] and given an extra consequential twist when this worldview was twinned with late-stage capitalism coupled with a materially invasive technology powered by fossil fuels.

We have ended up living in a perspective that describes the world as made of separate things, objects of nature composed of inert matter operating according to causal laws. These objects have no subjectivity, consciousness or intelligence, and no intrinsic purpose, value, or meaning. They lie completely open to exploitation, as indeed do many of the less fortunate human persons. We learn to understand mind and physical reality as separate. Humans – modern humans – and humans alone, have the capacity for rational thinking and action, and for understanding and giving meaning to the world.[xxvii]

These foundational pathologies now rise up to haunt us. They are re-enforced in every moment of our ‘civilized’ lives by a cultural and economic system that draws everything into its maw. As Charlotte DuCann, co-director of the Dark Mountain Project argues:

Modern civilisations deliberately block access to the living intelligence of the planet and put fierce doorkeepers and troll bridge guardians to stop anyone escaping the dominance of the rational mind.[xxviii]

At root, the problem of our times is metaphysical and so an adequate response must include a metaphysical transformation – or at least a deep understanding of the root assumptions of our culture. Systems thinker and polymath Gregory Bateson, many years ago, put it graphically:

If you… see yourself as outside and against the things around you... you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to ethical or moral consideration... If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or… of overpopulation and overgrazing.[xxix]

Unfortunately, this is not the whole story: the Western worldview is also based in violence and domination. Historian of science Stephen Toulmin shows how Cartesian abstraction arose as a response to dogmatic religious struggles and bloody violence of the Thirty Years War. There was a ‘a demand for a new certainty in the face of these appalling crises which neither humanistic scepticism nor religious dogma seemed able to meet’, a quest for a certainty in a formally rational theory abstracted from concrete reality.[xxx] Writer Amitav Ghosh also emphasises the violence at the heart of the Western worldview, arguing, ‘It wasn’t the ideas leading to the mastery; rather, it was the mastery leading to the ideas… Europeans of that period, of the sixteenth century especially, had emerged out of a history of incredible violence and incredible poverty’. The European elite unleashed violence first on farmers and peasant at home and then through colonial conquest on people and lands across the world. This ‘ideology of mastery’ lies at the root of exploitation of people and exploitation of Earth.[xxxi]

Thus, in the tradition of Western thought, persons – those beings capable of self-direction and rational choice – are necessarily humans and humans alone. In extreme patriarchal versions of this view, full personhood is even more limited to include only elite, white males.[xxxii] While this extreme view is challenged by feminists, new materialists, post-colonial thinkers, and others, and we may hope is passing, it still has significant influence. As Amitav Ghosh has pointed out in his exploration of the impact of colonial thinking on the planet, the questions of which beings make meaning, tell stories, and act with intention lies at the core of the planetary crisis (see epigraph for full quote).[xxxiii]

As the planetary crisis of climate change and ecological devastation gathers speed, Ghosh asserts the importance of listening to the voices of the more than human world:

As these events intensify, they add even ever greater resonance to [indigenous] voices, voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it. [xxxiv]

It has been a disconcerting experience, as one brought up to masculine privilege within a white middle class world, to come to realize how deeply our worldview has wrought havoc on Earth. The more-than-human world can speak, does speak, and must speak. And we must learn to pay attention and to listen. To discover how, to re-learn the language of Land, is the purpose of the series of inquiries that form the basis of this book.

---

Notes

[i] Human history and prehistory unfolded during the epoch known as the Holocene, a period of remarkably benign and stable climate. The idea that this is superseded by a new and more turbulent geological epoch, the Anthropocene, first emerged when the Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, frustrated at the scale of human damage to Earth systems, interrupted a colleague at a scientific meeting in Mexico, “Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene any more. We’re in the … the … the … (searching for the right word) … the Anthropocene!” Sometime after, he jointly published a paper in a scientific journal asking 'Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ So far these changes have been largely caused by 25% of the human population, those in modern industrial cultures, but Crutzen predicted that ‘mankind will remain a major environmental force for many millennia’. See Revkin, Andrew. "An Anthropocene Journey.". http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/anthropocenejourney/; Crutzen, Paul J. "Geology of Mankind." Nature 415 (2002): 23; Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R McNeill. "The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?" Ambio 36 (2007): 614-21. However, in 2024, The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) voted to reject the term. The term itself has been further disputed as misleading: Plantationocene and Capitalocene are alternative names for the same process given by (among others) Donna Haraway, emphasising the domination of capitalist modes of production; other suggestions include Ecoscene, Symbioscene, Misanthropocene and Anthobscene, self-explanatory neologisms. Chthulucene is a term invented by Donna Haraway to emphasize the deep dynamic symbiosis of which humans are part. See Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159-165.

[ii] Kolbert, E. (2014). The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history. Bloomsbury.

[iii] I borrow this phrasing from Clive Hamilton. Hamilton, C. (2017). Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene. Polity Press.

[iv] Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Company. (1962)

[v] Fuller, Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. 1968.

[vi] The Limits to Grown marked an important milestone in challenging the assumptions of continuing economic growth. Immesnsely controversial at the time, it findings have been updated and generally proved to be valid. Meadows, Donella H, Jørgen Randers, and Dennis L Meadows. Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green, 2004.

Meadows, Donella H, Dennis L Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future. London: Earthscan, 1992.

Meadows, Donella, H, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W Behrens. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972.

[vii] Brundtland, G. H. (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford University Press.

[viii] Gore, A. (2006). An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Rodale Press.

[ix] Morton, T. (2020). We’re Doomed! BBC.

[x] http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20/newsid_3728000/3728225.stm

[xi] Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. (2015). The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, 2(1), 81-98.

[xii] We gave an account of this programme with narratives from participants in Marshall, J., Coleman, G., & Reason, P. (2011, 2023). Leadership for Sustainability: An action research approach. Greenleaf (2011); Routledge (2023). For research into the adoption of low carbon technologies see Reason, P., Coleman, G., Ballard, D., Williams, M., Gearty, M., Bond, C., Seeley, C., & Maughan McLachlan, E. (2009). Insider Voices: Human dimensions of low carbon technology. https://www.peterreason.net/wp-content/uploads/lowcarbon_insider_voices.pdf.

[xiii] Heglar, M. (2019). Climate Change Isn’t Racist — People Are. Medium. https://zora.medium.com/climate-change-isnt-racist-people-are-c586b9380965.

[xiv] Bringhurst, R., & Zwicky, J. (2018). Learning to Die: Wisdom in the age of climate crisis. University of Regina Press; Scranton, R. (2015). Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of civilization. City Light Books.

[xv] Bringhurst, R., & Zwicky, J. (2018), p.30.

[xvi] Bringhurst, R., & Zwicky, J. (2018), p.39.

[xvii] It is difficult to know the authenticity of these teachings, and I acknowledge the challenges of cultural appropriation. I don’t think this changes the validity of the experiences that arose through these practices.

[xviii] Reason, P. (2014). Spindrift: A wilderness pilgrimage at sea. Jessica Kingsley Publishers (originally published in Bristol by Vala Publishing Cooperative).

[xix] Reason, P. (2014). Spindrift: A wilderness pilgrimage at sea. Jessica Kingsley Publishers (originally published in Bristol by Vala Publishing Cooperative); Reason, P. (2017). In Search of Grace: An ecological pilgrimage. Earth Books.

[xx] Reason, P., ibid (2017)

[xxi] Reason, P., ibid (2017); Moments of Grace. EarthLines 9, (2015): 15-20.

[xxii] Rowson, J. (2023). Prefixing the World. Perspectiva. .

[xxiii] Helmuth, K. (2015). Tracking Down Ecological Guidance: Presence, Beauty, Survival. Chapel Street Editions.

[xxiv] Agriculture is often cited as the source of our dualist worldview. Although there is some justification, the truth is undoubtably more complex. For a thorough reflection on this, see Graeber, David and David Wengrove. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane, 2021.

[xxv] Mathews, F. (2016). Do the Deepest Roots of a Future Ecological Civilization Lie in Chinese Soil? In J. Makeham (Ed.), Learning from the Other: Australian and Chinese Perspectives on Philosophy. Australian Academy of the Humanities. https://www.freyamathews.net/downloads/Do_the_Roots_of_Ecocivilization.pdf.

[xxvi] Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press, 1990.

[xxvii] The history of the development of this worldview is well traced in Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1991.

[xxviii] DuCann, C. (2024). The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor. The Red Tent.

[xxix] Bateson, G. (1972). Form, Substance and Difference. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler, pp. 423-440. Italics in the original.

[xxx] Toulmin, op cit.

[xxxi] Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. John Murray; Ghosh, A. (2024). Beings Seen and Unseen: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh. Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/beings-seen-and-unseen/.

[xxxii] This view has been extensively documented by feminist writers going back to Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (Le Deuzième Sexe, 1949). Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. London: Cape, 2009. For a recent articulation see Salami, Minna. Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. New York and London: Harper Collins and Zed Books, 2020.

[xxxiii] Ghosh, 2021, pp.195,197.

[xxxiv] Ghosh, 2021:257; italics in original