new ecozoic readers

  • SHATTERING

    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.

  • COLLAPSE AND DENIAL

    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.

  • COLLAPSE, POLYCRISIS, DECLINE, CONTRACTION

    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.

  • SANITY IN THE TIME OF ECOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN AND COLLAPSE

    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.

  • WHERE ARE WE IN HISTORY?

    In the early 21st century, do we who are Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) peoples and cultures really know who we are and what we are doing, or is there a serious chance that we are kidding ourselves; that we are simply wrong about the superiority of the ways we grasp and respond to reality; that today we are in a kind of trouble that is both far deeper and far different from that which we now think we are in?

  • Our Perspective on the World Today and a Way Forward

    “Mitigation of the present ruinous situation, the recycling of materials, the diminishment of consumption, the healing of damaged ecosystems—all this will be in vain if we do these things to make the present industrial systems acceptable. They must all be done, but in order to build a new order of things.”

    —Thomas Berry, “The Determining Features of the Ecozoic Era”

  • The Return to Solar Civilizations

    It is no secret that the current configuration of our global energy system is leading us to the edge of the abyss. Irreversible loss of the stable interglacial climate supporting civilization as we know it looms large and although it receives substantially less attention, so does the rapid depletion of nonrenewable energy resources. The repercussions of the indispensability of fossil fuels within Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) culture (to use Bill Rees’s term) are evident in frayed communities and ecosystems around the world impacted by unprecedented stressors and rates of change. If allowed to proceed unchecked, these nonlinear and accumulating harms threaten to overwhelm us.

  • Building a 100% Renewable Energy System Globally

    Technology is an extended tool that humanity can use for good or ill. How can we put technology in service of humanity and the global ecosystem to help secure a liveable [sic] future on Earth? We must transition to 100% renewable energy (RE) systems globally. This article describes how 100% RE systems can provide reliable energy globally 365×24 for power, heat, transport, and industry. We should reduce our energy consumption via energy efficiency and energy sufficiency measures in parallel so that we will need to build less RE capacity and can shut down fossil fuel combustion faster.

  • Ecozoic Studies

    The key question for CES for the five-year period that began in 2021 is “How are we—especially we of the Global North—to live well with Earth and all her beings so as to bring about a principled transition to an ecological age?” To respond to this question, we (especially we of the Global North) need to learn to live artfully and skillfully within Earth Community.

  • Invitation To Seedbearers

    Based on a combination of Thomas’s vision for the reinvention of the human presence on the Earth for a mutually enhancing relationship with other life forms and life systems and my Uncle Jim Berry’s circulars from the Center for Reflection on the Second Law (of Thermodynamics), I for the past decade have led a study group called “Seedbearers: Living between the No Longer and the Not Yet.”