No. 7, June 2023

In the past five years my writing has moved away from educating about humanity’s onslaught of the natural world and my advocacy away from proposing resolutions to that onslaught. People who have been paying attention—people who care—have been advised. My interest has shifted now to helping privileged North Americans prepare to deal with the ecosystem’s responses. We have been part of the era of damage; now we are in the era of surviving the consequences. In particular I want to help younger people see the decline of a far-from-perfect system through a wider lens, one that includes not only such experiences as a person of my age might offer, but also the perspective of non-industrial cultures today and throughout human history.

In December 2019, six months after I retired and four months after my 65th birthday, I was shattered by my two-week-long, deeply experiential reading of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail.[1] My initial grieving, which lasted for more than three months, allowed me to absorb what I viscerally was experiencing. In going back through every page of the book for the first time since reading it over three years ago, the feelings evoked by the author then came through again. As I write this article, I am two months short of my 69th birthday.

The exponential rise of ecological and climatic horrors galloping across Earth have forced my reckoning with reality as it really is. I no longer regard the future as an inevitable human-led progressive arc. Indeed, I now view the ongoing collapse of biospheric health and climate stability as unstoppable. A second-order effect is that the collapse of industrial civilization—already well underway—is unstoppable too.

Do I think today’s economic, political, and social structures will collapse? Of course they will; all past civilizations have failed in time, and ours has reasons to break down that have never before existed. Our era, the Industrial Age, began and has succeeded by extracting and exploiting elements of Earth’s functioning. As Earth’s functioning is thus weakened and impaired, so eventually is our way of life weakened. The source of its strength will be an instrument of its downfall.

This essay is my months-long, deep inquiry—through writing and painting—in responding to the following concerns raised by Geologian Father Thomas Berry. It is also a meditation on the essence of life. While I primarily define myself as a professional visual artist, I have been writing about issues of global breakdown for fifteen years—and thus my two disciplines have merged in this exploration. This visual essay is a deeply personal reflection moving from Life to Overshoot, then to Sanity, and finally toward Ultimacy.

This issue is the first of a three-part series on where we humans are in human and planetary history. This issue is on collapse (endings), the following issue will be on cosmogenesis (beginnings), and the final issue will be on ecozoic practices (actions we can take to bring about a viable future for humans and the larger community of life systems).