Welcome to the Chaoscene

As David Graeber and David Wengrow showed us in their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), being an isolated individual is not the norm for human beings; it’s an extraordinary and costly achievement, and a phenomenon tied to particular social conditions.

Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not be able to last – in a world where anthropogenic climate change is a constant and growing threat.

Adaptation work builds agency. It counters the attitude of ‘There’s nothing I can do’/‘I’m too small to make a difference.’ This is because, unlike decarbonisation work, it is by definition focused, local, concrete and tangible. One then reaches the point of people being able to say to themselves something like this: ‘Our climate concern isn’t just

All the evidence shows that communities with strong mutual ‘social capital’ prior to a disaster hitting have a far better record of rising to the challenge of climate disasters.