I think we; Hom. Sap., are in a lot of trouble.

It is going to take a lot of money to fix it, and even in the best-case scenario there are aspects of it that are beyond fixing and we are just going to get a decades-long ringside seat as the wonders of nature transform before our eyes and slip through our inept fingers.

We have known since the 1970s. Fifty years ago, that we were living on borrowed time continuing to lean on fossil fuels and the unavoidable release of fossil carbon. All that dangerous excess that the biosphere cleverly hid away during two periods of extreme global warming – 90 and 130 million years ago. Until we started poking into the guts of the planetary crust and started digging the stuff up…

The industrial revolution has transformed humanity. In so many ways, the human family is better off than it has ever been. If this is going to be a little more than a blip on the geological record however, we need a second one – a more fully thought-through one. And fast.

In the 1970s, the best-funded distraction machine in history, funded by the most profitable industry in history got started. I believe what we have been subjected to over the ensuing decades will be seen as the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. That takes some doing; but leading our entire civilization into a dead-end where the only offered route forwards will mean the death of billions. With a B – that unimaginable horror awaits business as usual. As we (I trust!) begin to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, we cannot return to the old calculations. We need new ones…

Let me back up. Disinformation. Big money owns big media owns the conversation. Amplifies the voices that favour big money. Big money has been so heavily tied up with the fossil fuel industry as to be indistinguishable. The result has been those who cannot reconcile themselves to what mainstream science has been saying with increasing urgency, have been lauded and funded. False doubt. Amplified denial.

We are all just tribal primates playing the game to win. Whatever the game is. None of us knows what is going on. Science is the best tool we have to understand our circumstances. We had better listen.

“Sit, be still and listen,

because you’re drunk

and we are at

the edge of the Roof”

Rumi

It is overused in contexts it was never intended for, but Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief model is compelling. Denial. Anger. Bargaining, Depression. Acceptance.

The evidence is in our faces. The time for denial is long done. Anger comes next. We had better be ready for it. Trying the crime of ecocide and complicit fraud against Humanity for those who have funded the denial and disinformation machine may be what society needs to channel the conversation and move us all forwards.

Bargaining. That is coming quick. Can we have our cake and eat it too? The evidence seems pretty clear that the economic system that we have, despite the best intentions of its creators, has incentivized short-term thinking and profit over long-term survival. And those who continue to benefit the most have no in-built incentive to give it up. Excepting extraordinary compassion, based in the kind of intensity of messy, imperfect shared human connection that luxury by its design filters out. Designing the system to replace it is going to take everything that we can bring to the table. It is going to mean taking a stand for the next seven generations over the next bonus payment. And for many of us this is going to take massive political courage to create the structures that will allow people to save what is important to them as we change all that no longer serves us. It is going to be noisy.

Depression. We have seen through Covid the tip of the iceberg of mental illness and breakdown inherent in the way our current system operates. It is going to get tougher. This Pandemic is a symptom. And there is no going back to normal. This was a wake-up call, pure and brutally simple. Hom. Sap. are not separate from nature, we are part of nature, and nature does not particularly care whether we thrive or go extinct. From the perspective of nature it may look that the sooner the better for the sake of the whole Biosphere. We are going to need to get really really good at caring for one another.

Which brings us to Acceptance.

“If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.”

Thomas Hardy

If we are going to get out of this pretty mess we have created, it is going to take a conscious act of evolution, of collectively getting over ourselves and our small dramas and taking on becoming the mature species that we keep laying claim to. Living on a finite planet without trashing it, it turns out, is not as simple as it looked when an old book extorted followers to ‘be fruitful, go forth and multiply.’ It turns out that was poor advice. Even poorer advice has followed as we succumbed to the idea of more is better; mistaking mere trinkets for the actual wealth of our planetary home. The great open questions of how we actually find collective purpose and sort the signal from so much noise is the work to be done.

On my best days, I think we can pull it off. I see hopeful signs. On my worst I look at wonder what world my children will be living in that right now I only glimpse with grave concern.

I am working out where to put my finger on the tiller of collective fate, and learning how to push…