How I became 'collapse aware'

Richard Heinberg and his colleagues at the Post-Carbon Institute have outlined Four Ways to Decline:

Everything I know about capitalism, bureaucracy, denial, habit, how much slower our psyches move than our machines, says — and it breaks my heart, and my shoulders slump as I write this — we won’t.

I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending co

the politics of empathy, and the doomer part has to do with how impressed I am by the evidence that the habitat for our species on this planet is profoundly compromised and is in a cascading process of contraction and likely collapse. A-a-and that ain’t good. Not for us, and not for all the other species.

And then a strange thing happens: I feel fierce. I feel clear. I feel free. I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’ve got nothing left to lose. I’m willing to take risks that I wasn’t before. I say true things, things that are true but that you’re not supposed to say. And people notice. Hell, I notice. It turns out despair is its own kind of power, its own