Awakening to the Anthropocene

I’ve found this very difficult to write. I’ve been trying to set down these thoughts on paper for a while now. I don’t know quite where to start or finish and yet expressing it feels important for my mental health, if for no other reason.  

Ok, here goes: – it was a couple of years ago now when the stark fact finally emotionally landed for me. We are right in the middle of a crisis on a scale which has never before had to be faced in our entire hundreds of thousands of years of human emergence. This is an existential issue overshadowing everything else. We’re destroying the life support system of the planet with the interdependent emergencies of climate and ecology and well on our way into the 6th Mass Extinction (or rather Extermination in this case, since we are causing it). Just to place this event in context, the last previous Mass Extinction was all of 66 million years ago. I can’t remotely comprehend such scales. The biosphere is in a state of collapse. We’re committing ecocide, and amazingly, ecocide is still legal.

The covid 19 pandemic, terrible though it is, with tragically large loss of life, is still only a small crisis compared to the scale of what’s coming down the line with the climate and ecological emergency. And with our unprecedented exploitation of wildlife and wild habitat destruction, we will likely unleash further pandemics like covid and perhaps even worse ones. UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, said that, “The social and economic devastation caused by climate disruption will be many times greater than the current pandemic.” A New Age has dawned but it’s nothing that we might have wished for: it’s the new age of the Anthropocene – the geological age succeeding the Holocene epoch, and uniquely brought about by our human impacts on earth.

I’ve always been reasonably conscious of green issues and done my bit for recycling and the ‘environment’, but I had never seriously grappled with our planetary plight. Several years ago I began having bouts of feeling overwhelmed by anxiety; waves of formless angst and sometimes palpitations would consume me. I would wrack my brain trying to figure out what was the matter with me – I couldn’t think what psychological issue it was that I was avoiding and that I was unconscious of. At some point it suddenly dawned on me that my anxiety and angst wasn’t about some psychological issue unique to me; it was an unacknowledged reaction to the dire state of the living world. Underneath all the anxiety was grief; despair and lamenting at what we as a species are doing to all that I love most dearly, as a lifelong nature lover. This started to open the gates. 

Now I could feel my grief welling up more than the anxiety and I was aware that the grief stemmed from the love I have for this miraculous jewel of a living world and all its wondrous inhabitants. The terrible sickening loss: of loved animals, of forests, of ecosystems, of abundant oceans. The impending loss of species like the polar bear which can’t exist without sea ice; or pangolins, the Armageddon of insect life, and most importantly, the destruction of whole ecosystems and the people whose lives depend on them. Tears came to me upon hearing that the last male white northern rhino on the planet has died – his race pointlessly exterminated by us. The loss is like another little piece of my body hacked away. As Aldo Leopold said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

As a keen naturalist, throughout my life I’ve always kept abreast of news of the natural world and am subscribed to no end of conservation and nature magazines, feeds and newsletters. And the news which funnels into my inboxes every day is increasingly depressing of late, with stories of extinction, devastation and climate breakdown, punctuated with small sparks of hope from rewilding projects or saved habitat oases, which I would tend to hang onto, rather than focus on the bad news. I realised how all this had been endlessly building up inside of me with no release or acknowledgement; hence the anxiety, leading me to realise that I was full of grief. 

Now more conscious of what was going on inside me, my inner state seemed much more like a sane response to an insane trajectory of ecological collapse and climate breakdown. We have rituals for mourning the loss of a relative or friend, but when species disappear or go extinct, and whole habitats vanish, it’s harder to respond. We have no such rituals to process the loss. How do I mourn the vast disappearance of wildlife from the English countryside in the last fifty years that I knew and loved as a young man? It’s gone, vanished, unnoticed by most people.

 It was around the same time in October 2018 that I heard two words together – extinction and rebellion – an unusual and radical pairing of words, and this immediately struck a deep chord and galvanised me. I learned that a new grassroots movement, Extinction Rebellion, was having its launch and its formal ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ outside Parliament on 31st October 2018. Joining the group of about one thousand people at this inauguration, we listened to the then unknown Greta Thunberg and other climate activists, and I became an activist then and there. Here were people who felt the same as I did about our predicament.

Destruction of the living world was the emotional trigger for me to wake up to this calamity; it can be different for other people. For some it’s from seeing the suffering and devastation due to climate chaos that people in the Global South are being forced to bear. Carbon dioxide levels and degrees centigrade of global heating didn’t have emotional resonance for me, although now this moves me too, as I’ve learned more about its terrible knock on effects on people’s lives. It’s hard to face into the horrors of our predicament and yet I felt compelled to head into it and not flinch from the truth. I felt I couldn’t hide from what I now knew and I must just allow the grief to fill me and be present and not attempt to escape it. Grieving over our stricken world is surely a natural and authentic response to my body, the earth, being wounded and sickened. We actually are ecological selves if we start to let down the false dividing wall of hyperindividualism. 

Very naturally I began to change my lifestyle to align with a lower carbon footprint, to consume less and be in better accord with the earth. I made simple switches to green electricity, organic low-miles food, not flying, reinvesting my pension in green funds etc. I was already vegan out of ethical concerns and we don’t have a car. Yes, I am very aware that my personal habits have only an infinitesimally minute effect and that it is system change that is needed. Yet I feel it is also important to live one’s own life as much as possible in accord with the kind of world we want to bring about; it’s a matter of integrity. This change wasn’t motivated by guilt or virtue signaling and I don’t find this to be any kind of self denying austerity; just a natural alignment with what I value. And incidentally, becoming vegan or plant based, is the single quickest and most effective change that is within the power of an individual to make.

I realised I needed to better educate myself and so I read up everything I could on climate heating and ecological destruction, plus attended many lectures. It soon became clear to me that things are much worse than I had ever imagined. Just very briefly, without reams of facts: The Paris Agreement between nations aimed to keep global heating to well below 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures, yet it is fairly conservative, not legally binding and crucially, hardly any countries are on track to meet these targets. Then followed the IPCC 2018 Report, which said that global heating of 2C would be disastrous and that we only had until 2030 to half global emissions in order to prevent that outcome. 

Two degrees doesn’t sound much but it means many millions of refugees as a result of flooding, desertification and all manner of increased extreme weather events leading to crop failures, starvation, lack of water and wide scale societal collapse. We’re heading for what is termed multiple bread basket failures. Yet at the current level of commitments, the world is on course for a disastrous 3-4C  of heating according to the UN, and constantly scientists are warning of additional new causes of heating such as the release of methane from melting permafrost and seabeds and unexpectedly rapid polar ice melting. Arctic permafrost melting has now switched from it being a major carbon sink to a carbon source. And even if we miraculously stopped all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the lag effect in the system will still result in increasing global temperatures for decades – what is referred to as the committed warming. The climate during the last 10,000 years has been unusually stable and suitable for agriculture. Fortuitously this has coincided with our whole agricultural age. But now we’ve changed the climate to one which is no longer suitable for agriculture.

Great Barrier reef, before and after bleaching

Simultaneously, the ecological side of the emergency is even scarier since it is already considerably further along than the climate chaos and in freefall. It’s not predicted – it’s right here, happening now. The recent IPBES global report found that 1 million species are at risk of extinction, which is far far more than ever before in human history. The largest living organism on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, is dying. And habitat loss for wildlife keeps accelerating at a dizzying rate as the Amazon is burnt away into savannah along with the burning of rainforest in S E Asia & Africa. On top of all this, the domino effect of cascading feedback loops exacerbates the process with rapid and disastrous effects. We’re not psychologically built to confront this kind of stupendous catastrophe. 

This all regularly makes me feel like weeping and I’m still often anxious since starting to let out my grief, but it’s very different now, as I’m not avoiding the dreadful truth, and my anxiety attacks have ceased. Things look really bad but it’s clear to me that I must do the right thing as I see it, in full knowledge of our planetary emergency, whether or not it feels hopeful or hopeless. I’m not a powerless victim anymore, nor hiding from my darkest fears.

Action has made an enormous and empowering difference and I don’t feel that I have any choice now. I feel Life more intensely; everything matters much more; I have more appreciation and reverence for the sacred beauty of nature. In light of our emergency, what is worth doing? It sure helps me sort out the important from the superficial dross and chaff. It’s not altruism. It’s actually self preservation. My body is under threat and my body is the earth, fellow living beings and the web of Life.

My journey has led me to very many Extinction Rebellion non violent direct actions over the last two years in order to draw attention to our predicament and to exhort the government to take action. It’s led to my being fined, arrested and even spending a night in a police cell. It’s not that this is what others might feel to do, or ought to do, since we all have our own authentic ways of responding. But for me, I am compelled to take direct action – and I’m not acting against any particular individuals, as it’s our system which causes the destruction, with our built in fossil fuel economy, funded by big banks, short-termist governments and a neoliberal economic system predicated on perpetual growth at all costs.

To be brutally honest, knowing what I now know, I don’t feel we are likely to turn the juggernaut around in time. We might, and I hope we do, and I will do everything I can towards that result, but it looks pretty unlikely. More likely is that we have a chance to mitigate some of the worst effects. This civilisation is finished as philosopher Rupert Read has memorably said. I don’t mean that this is the end of civilisation, but that the way we are currently living cannot endure for long. The late capitalist system we have adopted based on perpetual growth, is simply no longer compatible with life on earth. It’s nothing to do with the old ideological dichotomy of socialism versus capitalism; it’s just that a runaway system based on growthism, even if it were to transition to green growth, far exceeds the carrying capacity of our planet. And it’s now been conclusively proven that green growth is a mirage: it’s just not possible to absolutely decouple material use from GDP on a global scale.

I understand that this is a hard message and it’s a lot easier for me as a middle class white guy in a wealthy country to talk like this. Yet even here in wealthy countries like the UK, many people are poor and struggling just to get by, to pay the bills and feed their kids, in no small part due to the ever widening inequality caused by this system. And in many poorer countries, the majority of people are struggling just to survive, assailed by ever increasing extreme weather events. The Global South is so much more affected and it’s a cruel twist that it is our Western industrial countries that have caused most of the global historical emissions as a result of which developing countries are now bearing the brunt.

In truth we don’t know what will happen, or precisely when, and I feel it important to remain open and not adopt any fixed positions. It’s very tempting to feel that now we know, now we’re sure. I personally resist that temptation, since no one at this point can be sure, as it is all so immensely complex. There are those who have been termed ‘collapsarians’ or ‘doomers’ who are certain of the coming civilisational collapse, and may even be readying bunkers filled with provisions. Deep adaptation is another very popular and valuable approach in dealing with our current predicament, though I feel it too, can sometimes tend to state the societal collapse as being more inevitable that we can currently know.

Many people understandably don’t want to deal with the issue at all and distract themselves. Or they simply don’t have the headspace to contemplate these issues while struggling just to make ends meet. Others assure themselves that this is all a bit extreme and, ”Haven’t we heard alarmist talk like this from environmentalists for decades, anyway?” 

More people lately are flippantly cynical on the surface – “Yeah, sure, we’re screwed! So I may as well just get on and enjoy my life.” I don’t think the majority of these people are actually deeply cynical; it’s more of a defence in order not to have to face our terrible dilemma. Then there are the techno optimists with their unshakeable faith in science coming up with ways to enable us to keep endlessly consuming as normal with the aid of often hypothetical or unproven-at-scale technological fixes. Plenty of other people are left feeling disempowered: “What can I do anyway? Individual change isn’t even a drop in the ocean.” And there are those who find solace from the crisis through their transcendental convictions.

My own approach has been to stay with the grief, and not try to get over it. I’m finding that grief seems to be humanising me in unexpected ways; it’s humbling and has its roots in love of all creation, and it’s not oppositional. Far from having a paralysing and depressive effect, my experience is that eco grief softens the heart and frees me up. This is such a unique existential moment to awaken to, that it unmoors me from old certainties. How should I live in light of what I now know? Not that this predicament is anything we would ever wish for, yet in a certain way it is freeing as it throws into question my and our entire narratives.

So for me it’s a journey through the post doom doorway. The emotional pain arises out of a dropping of the veil of seeing ourselves as separate from the world. I know that eco pain and grief is hard to bear yet I feel it is a key corrective to the conventional narrative of seeing ourselves as being outside nature, looking on as dispassionate observers. It opens the heart, with the emotional recognition of our complete interdependence with all life forms, releasing our empathy. Love becomes the motivation; strength and fortitude comes from caring for our fellow beings and for this living jewel that is the earth.

I stay sane by walking and spending time in nature, interacting with wildlife, cultivating vegetables on my allotment patch, getting my hands in the soil, creating micro-rewilding projects; these are all replenishing and regenerative. And crucially I’m reminded and reconnected with what I love and why I am an activist. Like minded friends and activists are a key source of strength and support as well. Qi gong meditation keeps my feet rooted on the ground and in a degree of harmony between inner and outer, as a counterbalance to the global catastrophe. I’ve since learned that eco grief and eco anxiety are recognised psychological conditions and there are eco grief and eco anxiety workshops and that therapists regularly deal with this issue.

Being older, I will probably get to live out the remainder of my life before the worst collapses start to badly affect northern Europe. But for young people now, the future unfortunately looks really bleak, most especially in the Global South but also very much in the West too. We actually have to radically change our western lifestyles, to greatly reduce our extravagant consumption and wastefulness so that people in the Global South can just have enough to live on. At first glance that’s not an easy message for wealthy westerners, yet my own experience is of finding much deeper fulfilment and dignity by having less and living a simpler life. It’s primarily our energy and food production that is causing the worst of the disaster. We could have the best possible world with renewable energy, rewilding, no ecocide, no animal slaughter, and climate justice for the Global South. Or we can instead have the worst possible world – and this is what we’re plunging into now.

This civilisation is finished. I am called to give of myself for the sake of Life; doing what I can to the best of my ability and talents, whatever may be the chances of success, irrespective of feelings of hope or hopelessness. Knowing what I know, it would be complicit not to act. All I can do is to hold to sane values of truthfulness, empathy, simplicity, non violence, and refusing to demonise or polarise. After all, our ecological selves are so much bigger than that. 

“We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual ‘autism.’”

Thomas Berry