Editor’s note: “I think hope is really harmful for several reasons. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and they blind us to real possibilities. Does anybody really think that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anybody really think that if a democrat would have gotten into the White House that things would be ok? Does anybody think that vivisectors will stop torturing animals just because we stand outside with a sign?
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand out there with that sign. What it means is, do we really believe that they will stop because we do that? And if you don’t believe that, what does that mean? The book I have just recently completed is really centered around this question. Do you believe that the culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to obtain a sustainable way of living? If you don’t, what does that mean for our strategy and for our tactics? We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that we don’t ask that question. The reason we don’t ask that question is that we’re so busy pretending that we have hope.” – Derrick Jensen December 1st, 2004
The Sixth Mass Extinction is not a future risk—it is happening now, and human activity is the sole cause.
Food Web Collapse: Phytoplankton (the base of marine food chains) have declined 40% since 1950. Insect biomass is dropping 2.5% annually, threatening pollination and soil health.
Conclusion: The biosphere is unravelling faster than evolution can adapt. Humans are not exempt—we are apex predators in a collapsing food web.”
Derrick Jensen told us about hope almost two decades ago and explained that the reason people think we need hope is through cultural conditioning, and this is how he describes hope, quote:
“Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”
Going back to
my first article here, the first thing one should determine is whether the situation being looked at is a problem or a predicament. A problem, by definition, has an answer or a solution. A predicament is often called different names such as dilemma, but Wikipedia calls it a “
wicked problem.” Under the word
dilemma is a less complex definition, where we once again see the word predicament under the “See Also” section.
Here is the entry for dilemma on Wikipedia.
Something that is a problem one has agency over, meaning that there is a solution which is both attainable and feasible. Therefore, hope actually prevents one from attaining that goal, quote:
“When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.“
So, in reality, for almost any problem, what we need is not hope, but COURAGE!
Of course, much has changed over the last 19 years since that article was written in terms of how the predicaments we face have become far worse. Still, nothing has really changed about society making any real efforts to abandon technology use and civilization. When I say things like that, I often get criticized for what is assumed that I want “to live like a cave man” or that I am “Malthusian” or that I just want to “give up.” I wrote
The Cycle of Life specifically for those folks.
Now, for the bad news: predicaments don’t have solutions, they only have outcomes. Yes, my regular readers are most likely very tired of reading that same message over and over and over again. But here’s the catch – courage is great for predicaments too!
An article by Frank Moone gives us details on what to do. In it, he says that:
“Hiding out, giving up, or doing nothing is not an acceptable response.“
Of course, unfortunately, there are people who will do
just that. Simply telling people what an acceptable response is won’t necessarily get them to comply. There are literally hundreds of books out there that describe the exact same things, but again, only people who
want to do that will actually follow through. It really is absolutely not one bit different to people who read my articles versus people who couldn’t be less interested. No interest = no compliance, not that any readers will comply either (of course, I haven’t actually ever asked anybody to do anything – I’ve only made general recommendations). There are literally millions of people who simply
do not care. Is it because of ignorance? Doubtful – as they’ve been told; they choose not to believe. Of course, belief is irrelevant to how the system works. It will continue to work the same way whether one believes in it or not, which is the great thing about facts. Not believing in them doesn’t change them.
The most important part about Frank’s article about “active acceptance” is what it doesn’t tell you. Sadly, the article is based partly on fear. Notice how it talks about survival? Here’s the part I disagree with, quote: “Leave a legacy of wisdom and care for future generations.“
Articles on “how to survive” are literally everywhere. Prepping handbooks, food preparation and storage, books about weapons, bunker building books,
Earthships, Transition Towns,
The Venus Project, and every other type of preparation manual, book, concept, and living arrangement are available at your nearest library or bookstore or online. I’ve written about countless ideas all based on the same premise.
Fear of death. But what if survival is highly over-rated?
What if there ARE NO future generations? What if the generation being born today is the last one? Needless to say, not everyone is going to be interested in accomplishing something they see no need for because they see it as a waste of time when they could be doing something they are actually
passionate about. Focusing on surviving isn’t
Living Now. Focusing on surviving is more or less similar to focusing on Dying Now. One must choose how he or she wants to live –
do you want to run towards life or away from death?Frank’s article is good – don’t get me wrong. But it repeats the same message that so many articles promoting survival do – let’s deny reality and promote false hope. One can fear death and choose to focus on attempting to evade it, but this is really the definition of insanity because humans have a natural instinct for survival to begin with (so one doesn’t have to really spend all their time remembering to survive) AND you still won’t escape it. Now, if one really wants to spend their time doing that, then no harm, no foul. If, on the other hand, one isn’t afraid of death and has no interest in such endeavors, then they shouldn’t be shamed for something they see no motivation for or satisfaction in.
Just because I’m passionate about reducing the amount of energy and resources I use doesn’t mean that I think it is OK to try to shame others into doing this as well in a misguided effort to reduce the planetary ecological footprint. It’s just not going to happen. The billionaires certainly couldn’t give two craps about what I’m doing one way or the other and they certainly aren’t going to change their lifestyles to accommodate what I think is important. My message is for people to accept our predicaments for what they are, discover what they are truly passionate about, and work towards that end, at the same time enjoying life and nature and being grateful for what still exists today.
To understand this just a bit deeper, one must understand personal values versus personal traits and the psychology behind them.
Nate Hagens goes into detail on both the dark triad and the dark tetrad personality traits. One can claim specific values but have personality traits which oppose those values, which instantly points to the person being a liar (and potentially a pathological liar, which narcissists tend to be). Either way, traits will outcompete values in almost all circumstances. Most people’s traits and values are much closer in alignment to each other, but we all know people who fit into the dark triad and tetrad patterns.
I understand what many people in the overshoot community would like to see with regards to developing a
sustainable community. I would very much like that myself. I actually seriously considered embarking on building one myself (following in the footsteps of many other individuals who have done this). But then I read countless stories of struggles from others, and enterprises that turned into something far less grand than had been anticipated. Many of these projects failed and even the ones which have succeeded haven’t truly met up with the original expectations. The
MPP works just as prevalently in this regard as it does in mainstream society. I also knew about places in my own state which had originally been developed as utopian societies, such as the Kristeen Community,
New Harmony, and
Padanaram Settlement, which all failed as they were originally set up. The Padanaram Settlement is still in operation, but not like it was for many years. Like most places whose originator/founder has passed away, changes within the community have made it more like a regular town now.
I have attempted to point out many times that attachment to outcome is often associated with goal-setting and is generally ill-advised in the future that we will experience because of the fact that many if not most goals/outcomes will become impossible to meet. Some goals will be far more attainable than others, especially shorter-term ones versus long-term goals. Part of my advice comes from my own experiences. I have always been a rather goal-oriented person. Understanding overshoot means coming to terms with the reality that quite literally everything around us is changing and goals which once may have been attainable now no longer are, simply due to energy and resource decline and climate change, among many other symptom predicaments. This has been difficult to accept.
This is most certainly
NOT to say to give up on any goals that one is passionate about, but to recommend being flexible about goals. Be aware of the strong possibility that your life may come apart at the seams when you least expect it. Why you ask? Because of the
Technate of North America. Everything you thought you knew is about to change if it hasn’t already under the surface (or even
on the surface). I don’t agree with everything in the article (it does appear to be overshoot blind), but the systems surrounding us here in the U.S. are being taken apart, one by one. It is true that collapse doesn’t generally happen in a controlled fashion because it isn’t under the control of any single person or entity. I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
Meanwhile,
a new study shows that
peak carbon sequestration was in 2008, and since then the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by plants has declined by an average of 0.25% a year.
Another paper demonstrates that in 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, which was 86% above that of the previous year and hit a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6% ± 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened. The rate at which climate change is proceeding is increasing dramatically. This was accurately predicted many years ago but is now happening. See also
Carbon Sinks Are Becoming Carbon Sources.“A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this,” he said. But a collapse of the heat-transporting circulation is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture, he added. “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.”
THAT is the overwhelming theme I have been attempting to explain for the last four years here.
You cannot adapt to this. We’re not talking just about Great Britain, Europe, or anywhere specific.
Leon Simons says this regarding the rate of warming globally:
“As far as we can determine, this is the fastest rate of warming in the history of our planet!“
The rate of change will overtake the rate of evolution whereby evolution cannot keep up with the changes. Rather than fall into denial of reality, utilize
optimism bias, and attempt to
bargain to maintain civilization, one must comprehend that there is no escaping this and that
we lack agency (who exactly is
“we”?), despite unsubstantiated claims to the contrary by those who are busy trying to sell you a
fantasy that is not to be. Don’t fall into the hope trap – seek courage instead.
A new study on birds points out yet another symptom predicament I have repeatedly mentioned, especially recently – pollution loading. Here’s the poignant part of the article, quote:
“Ideally, you do not want these substances in your body, but in practice, it is virtually impossible for humans and many other living organisms to avoid them.
Recent research and a new method for detecting PFAS bring both bad and good news. The bad news is that we are finding PFAS in places we have not previously found them. The good news is that this means we have become better at detecting these substances.
“The biggest increase is in the livers of wading birds. We found up to 180 times more PFAS than previously,” said Zhang.“
Perhaps pollution loading is the reason HPAI H5N1 bird flu has been so deadly to birds and now mammals, which signals potential reasons why humans are becoming so much more disease-ridden as these chemicals, compounds, and toxins add up in our bodies. This is of huge concern because of the implications it has regarding those who think regenerative agriculture or permaculture will build resilience and rebuild the soil. Rebuilding the soil is a lovely idea, and it seems relatively easy to add nutrients to it through mulching and other soil amendments. But how does one rid the soil of microplastics, PFAS, PFOS, dioxins, salts, and a thousand other chemicals/chemical compounds? All of these pollutants are steadily increasing and doing so rather rapidly now due to increased wildfires, winds, extreme weather events, and extreme rain/flooding events.
To end this article, I present
yet another excellent article from Dave Pollard summarizing the backdrop and leadup to the fiascoes unfolding currently in the U.S. but also many other nations as well. The bottom line is that reality is a cruel master, and many of the illusions we chose to believe in didn’t actually exist in the first place. Still, just like the monkeys fighting in the power station in Sri Lanka causing a nation-wide blackout, the same scenario is unfolding in the U.S., quote:
“And for all of that, these massive, staggeringly complex, bureaucratic systems are so easy to break! All it takes is a few monkeys!
Maybe, as we watch our exhausted, fraudulent, incompetently-‘led’ civilization falling apart all around us, we can finally open our eyes and see that it never has been what we believed it was, with all our smarmy talk of “freedom” and “democracy”. It’s been a sham from the start, but we believed the nonsense we’ve been told about it because we wanted to believe it. Take away everything we have, but you’ll never take away our belief in our human superiority, our manifest destiny, the myth of perpetual progress as we spread across the universe, and, most of all, our certainty that we will be saved.
So we have DOGE, perhaps the most blatantly, overtly incompetent gang of monkeys the world has ever seen, let loose in the ‘power factory’ by the Child King, the most incompetent business person in the history of civilization, wreaking havoc on every essential public service in the US.
And we have the incompetent, miseducated, sci-fi dreamer technophiles, with their wild untested ideas for Marvel Comics-style rescues of our ecosystems, let loose to play at geoengineering, sucking up billions from the dregs of the world’s fast-failing treasuries to play at making fusion energy, and carbon capture, and AI everything, and quantum everything, and starships to anywhere-but-this-fucked-planet, and carbon (and now water) cap-and-trade offset exchanges (for those that flunked science). Gotta be some salvation in there somewhere! It’s ordained!”
Watching this unfold is quite sickening, only buffered by the fact that most of us in the overshoot community knew that collapse would come sooner or later. I just think that most of us had wished that we might eke out a few more years first.
Thank goodness for some beautiful pictures at
Manistee, Michigan to distract one away from all of this for a bit!
Cheeses!
So many people are unconsicously feeling all these things, false hope, weak lone-wolf style ‘courage’. We are flies under the AI flyswatter that we ourselves invented. Really intelligent people I know are going nutso for no apparent reason. You just explained the reason, but the reason is not very satisfying.
Leaving us with the question, “Why? Why this? Why is this the outcome of the entire human race? Lao Tzu, Aristotle, Sitting Bull, Mother Therese? What stopped you from revolutionizing humanity thousands of years ago? Why did you permit us to follow such a misguided path? It is like knowingly allowing your kid to run into a busy street. Planetary suicide is not the only outcome of the opposing thumb, is it?” (See Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin)
Thanks for hanging in there all these years and piecing together the puzzle of our demise. It is not very happy making. It is outrageously embarrassing to brag about. Who will read my next book?
I agree, hope is of no use to us. But I think I detected a bit of hope from your opening quote by Derrick: “Do you believe that the culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to obtain a sustainable way of living?” Of course, I doubt anyone reading this would believe that. However, in just saying it, it seems to imply that Derrick, at that time, believed that a sustainable way of living was possible for modern humans. Given that “sustainable” means “can go on indefinitely” (absent some externally forced change, like an asteroid strike or rapid change in solar output), there is no sustainable way of living that includes the use of tools, because tools enable humans to access resources at a greater rate than would otherwise be possible. MPP means that humans are bound to ultimately live unsustainably.
I got rid of hope via a different route than perhaps others. Once I gave up the idea of human supremacy, human exceptionalism, I came to see humans as just another species, albeit a species with extraordinary abilities to access resources. Consequently, they will act like any other species, falling under the MPP but without a brake of predator species or weather changes – at least for now. So any ecosystem that humans inhabit can never reach a climax state. But there isn’t anything to be done about that. The consequences of evolution producing humans will have to play out. Like other species, we have no free will (see Robert Sapolsky’s work on that) and so can’t summon up some magical “us-ness” to control ourselves into slowly moving back to a primitive hunter-gatherer way of living – and say there. Why would anyone living today want to do that? Even those who consider themselves environmentalists wouldn’t want that.
Though part of me longs for collapse of modernity, I hold no hope that it will happen in a managed way that minimises pain for billions of people and other members of biodiversity.
There is hope that the total collapse of the global agricultural civilization will happen soon enough that there will be enough of the natural world left to restore a viable ecosphere after the humans are gone. The impending klimasturtz, a world-wide breakdown of atmospheric stability, is already well underway thanks largely to mass useage of nuclear and electromagnetic technology, and there is no possivble way to prevent it.
As large scale agriculture becomes impossible due to chaotic rapidly changing and unpredictable weather extremes most urban humans will either starve or recycle each other back into the food chain by fighting over what scraps are left in the supermarkets when the deliveries stop.
The sooner it happens, the more of the natural world will be left to recover from the Human Age afterwards. So let us hope it happens soon.
What is the basis of your hope? Or is this just something you want to happen? I guess hoping for something is simply the desire for a particular outcome, rather than having any basis for thinking that outcome might arrive.