Decades ago at schools and universities, David Brower delivered “The Sermon,” describing the history of Mother Earth covering a 6-day time span beginning midnight Sunday from her inception to the present. Life first appears Tuesday at noon. Saturday at 4pm dinosaurs appear; by 9pm they’re gone. Four minutes before midnight our proto ancestors show up. 1.5 seconds to midnight agriculture is hatched. One-fortieth of a second before midnight comes the industrial revolution. Since Brower’s birth in 1912, we’ve used up more of Mother Earth and our relatives than in all our previous history.

What is called Western Civilization (W.C.) is the fundamental driver of this epoch’s mono-culture value system. As Anthropologist Wade Davis describes, the range of cultures and languages expressing distinct sets of values other than W.C. still number in the thousands—though “on average, every two weeks some elder passes away and carries with them into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.” W.C. has exceeded all requisite limits for living in balance with Life’s needs. This planetary home, inherited by right of birth, manifests all the signs of mono-culture overshoot. Also known as the Sixth Mass Extinction, this die off epoch is being directed and produced by the on-going promotion of W.C. Recent sign posts sounding the overshoot alarm include Rachel Carson: Silent Spring (1962), Meadows et al: The Limits to Growth, A Report For The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972), Jerry Mander: Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television (1978) & In The Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations (1991), and Richard Heinberg: The Party’s Over - Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003), & “Searching For A Miracle: ‘Net Energy’ Limits & The Fate Of Industrial Society” (2009).

Chris Jordan  | |  Midway: Message from the Gyre (2011) On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here. In the heart of the great Pacific, a story is taking place that may change the way you see everything. Full length movie: ALBATROSS (1:37:20, 2009-18) ALBATROSS is offered as a free public artwork.

In the last half-century, W.C. has proceeded without abiding by the limits to growth that governs all living systems. It has also stubbornly ignored alarm bells some humans have continuously sounded with ever greater urgency. When considering any endeavor, Intellect knows only how to pose the question, Is it possible? while Wisdom adheres to asking, Is it appropriate? At this juncture in human history the root of the ecological catastrophe now fully engaged has been fueled by the adamant rejection of the wisdom Oren Lyons articulates above.

The era of supreme existential threats we have inaugurated began with the creation of the atomic bomb. A tremendous amount of creativity went into building a nuclear weapon. Tragically, the results of such exercise of intellect has not been balanced by equal considerations of wisdom. In October 1962 a result of human intellect came within seconds of transforming Mother Earth into a radioactive wasteland. At the critical moment, President Kennedy and Premiere Khrushchev were able to avoid the looming abyss of non-existence and extinction of most Life here. Given current day hysteria about a Russian boogie-man, their story of learning to trust each other is even more revelatory now in what it reveals is possible when one can see the truth of one’s so-called enemy.

Beyond the danger of extinction caused by the increasing risk and possibility of nuclear war (some former US officials think this time period is even more perilous than the Cold War was), the exponentially expanding ecological crisis has established its own pre-eminence as another prospective (possible?) extinction timeline of the human project. The vantage point explored in Collapsologie Immersion goes beyond quantifying only catastrophic global over heat unfolding. It is essential to apprehend the fuller composition of this dilemma of our own making by understanding the equally significant tributaries feeding into the river Collapse. The additional branches focused on here include:

1. systemic collapse as it pertains to humanity’s extreme dependence on electricity,
2. digitalization of knowledge,
3. ecological & energy costs of the Internet’s expanding footprint,
4. actual health-ecological-social costs of making “renewable energy” machines via coal, petroleum, wood, and uranium energy inputs, and
5. people exercising reason, intuition, and imagination with coherence and clarity on the challenge of how humanity may yet seed successor cultures.

Billed as “a work of history”, The New York Times Magazine devoted its entire August 1, 2018 issue to a narrative by Nathaniel Rich on “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” The starkly narrow worldview making up this essay drove the motivation to write the critique: “Losing Earth? Realign with Original Free Peoples’ Great Law and Find Her Again.” A portion of this highlights Lenape/Shawnee scholar Steven Newcomb who, speaking at the Arizona state capital House of Representatives in 2012, points out a fundamental blindspot of US society in particular, and W.C. in general, that can still be acknowledged, addressed and redeemed. As Newcomb explains:

What I see is that the non-Indian society has actually deprived itself tremendously; by dehumanizing and sub-humanizing Indigenous Peoples they have deprived themselves of being able to learn from the vast amount of knowledge and wisdom that Indigenous Nations and Peoples have been able to accumulate over thousands and thousands of years going back to the beginning of time as expressed in our oral histories.

That’s what needs to occur. Once this understanding of respect for the Original Laws of the Land, for the Original Nations and Peoples of the Land, once that begins to occur then there is going to be more of a flow of communication and that knowledge that’s been buried and suppressed is going to rise up. If you want a clearer understanding of what that knowledge and wisdom entails look at the book called 1491; New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C Mann. It’s an amazing exploration and understanding of just how incredibly wonderful and rich and vibrant and intelligent Indigenous Nations and Peoples and their cultures and spiritual traditions have been and continue to be at this time.

Newcomb closed his 2015 address at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Toward a Paradigm Change for Mother Earth, with the imperative wisdom: “Respect the Earth as our Mother and have a Sacred Regard for All Living Things.”

In Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization (2006), Derrick Jensen writes:

If I’m going to contemplate the collapse of civilization, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries. Webster’s calls civilization “a high stage of social and cultural development.” The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “a developed or advanced state of human society.” All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, helped me not in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: define high, developed, or advanced, please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of “a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society”?... I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts—that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities ... Ultimately, then, the story of this civilization is the story of the reduction of the world’s tapestry of stories to only one story, the best story, the real story, the most advanced story, the most developed story, the story of the power and the glory that is Western Civilization.

Western Civilization has run its course. Its drive for mono-cultured homogeneity was its own undoing. At this stage I am exploring and giving consideration to Jem Bendell’s framing seeing “collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable, and extinction as possible.” Doing so provides “a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a new creativity about what to focus on going forward.”

As indicated at the top, while late to the game of grasping a greater appreciation of what we are actually dealing with today, a highly motivated eagerness to explore, discover, and learn informs the expanding nature of this witness. The intention is to distill and encapsulate what we are creating and causing, and choices we have to exercise our remarkable powers of intuition, creativity, reason, wisdom, and response abilities. The design purpose is to craft an insightful and provocative nexus of critical analysis and ideas fashioned on the extensive form presented in the Chernobyl Directory.

We are living through the conclusion of Electronic Civilization (E.C.) as we have known it over the past 100 years of its scaled up development. This epoch is nearing its end because of the continued and increasing toxification and alteration of the biosphere by energy sources that have fueled the industrial age: coal, petroleum, uranium, and wood (called “biomass”). In recent decades, electricity has become absolutely indispensable to the continued operation and existence of this system of human society and culture. Kate Crawford’s and Vladan Joler’s 2018 nonpareil investigative analysis, Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical Map Of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources, presents a breathtaking exposition of how our techno logic world operates. Such probing research illuminates and sharpens understanding of the world-wide extractive processes and global supply chains that both make our electric way of life possible while simultaneously destroying our planetary home’s web of Life and Life support system.

A fundamental component in smartphones, computers, solar panels, and machines with microprocessors is a form of silicon not found in the natural world. Thomas Troszak outlines this in “Why do we burn coal and trees to make solar panels?”:

All modern technology including “renewable” energy depends on the non-renewable resources that make it possible. For example, every step in the production of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems requires a perpetual input of fossil fuels—as carbon reductants for smelting metals from ore, for process heat and power, international transport, and deployment. Silicon smelters, polysilicon refineries, and crystal growers all require uninterrupted, 24/7 power that comes mostly from coal and uranium. Additional mineral resources and fossil energy are needed for constructing PV factories, process equipment, and manufacturing infrastructure. The only “renewable” materials consumed in PV production are obtained by deforestation—for wood chips, and by burning vast areas of tropical rainforest for charcoal used as a source of carbon for silicon smelters. Both media and journal claims that solar PV can somehow “replace fossil fuels” have not addressed the “non-renewable reality” of all the global manufacturing supply chains necessary for the mining, manufacturing, and distribution of PV power systems. Some often-cited accounts of solar PV production exclude raw materials and silicon smelters from the PV “supply chain” entirely, which obscures the profoundly non-sustainable basis of PV technology. A more complete overview of commercial PV production is presented, from the sources of raw materials to the deployed array. 38 references from published articles and industry sources are cited. (2019-11-18 revision)

Without the enormous power requirements from non-renewable energy inputs it would be impossible to produce solar and modern wind power machines in general and the electronic innards of microprocessors—especially pure silicon—in particular. It is critical to grasp the implications of what is needed to produce what are euphemistically called clean energy machines, and the fact that solar and wind are not scalable as any kind of substitute for the lavish, embodied energy lifestyles enjoyed post-WWII by “first world” societies. Doing so provides the vital RED ALERT wakeup alarm necessary to begin to ground awareness of what we are actually dealing with regarding the global ecological emergency we have been bringing to a rapid boil for decades.

In July 2018 Dr Jem Bendell (Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria, UK) published the paper “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Bendell had taken unpaid leave to study the latest climate science to better apprehend the current state of the world. As he observed, “climate change is ... an indicator of how our human psyche and culture became divorced from our natural habitat.” The bulk of the paper’s abstract states:

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change. The approach of the paper is to analyse recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies, as provided by academic journals and publications direct from research institutes. That synthesis leads to a conclusion there will be a near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of readers. The paper reviews some of the reasons why collapse-denial may exist, in particular, in the professions of sustainability research and practice, therefore leading to these arguments having been absent from these fields until now. The paper offers a new meta-framing of the implications for research, organisational practice, personal development and public policy, called the Deep Adaptation Agenda. Its key aspects of resilience, relinquishment and restorations are explained. This agenda does not seek to build on existing scholarship on “climate adaptation” as it is premised on the view that social collapse is now inevitable.

In October 2019, Bendell gave the opening keynote, “Hope in a time of climate chaos” at the conference of the UK Council for Psychotherapy. His perceptions and observations about our culture’s unthinking allegiance to hope as a means to avoid and suppress emotional pain begins to get at the underlying dynamics of fear and denial. He posits that we risk making matters worse if such emotions remain unrecognized, unacknowledged, and covered over by moves to anger, blame, and hatred.

Regarding climate chaos, dangerous indicators are accelerating environmental feedback loops, especially the loss of sea ice in the Arctic. One volatile feedback is that by reducing the whiteness of surfaces reflecting the Sun’s rays back into space, more of them are absorbed into the ocean causing further warming of water causing further melting of more ice. This reduction of white surfaces on water—and land—is reducing what is termed the albedo of the planet: the amount of solar radiation reflected straight back into space.

Even more critical—which is almost completely ignored in the IPCC process—is the potential for massive methane feedback in the Arctic. As our activities melt the permafrost and melt the ice under the seabed, methane hydrates (frozen crystals since the last ice age) begin to melt, releasing methane gas. If the methane is at or less than a certain sea depth, the gas will reach the water surface and escape into the atmosphere. Methane is a much more concentrated greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Dr Peter Wadhams, the UK’s most experienced sea ice scientist, has made more than 50 expeditions to both polar regions. His most recent book, A Farewell to Ice (2016, isbn.nu, libraries), describes in vivid detail the changes in the Arctic he has observed and studied for more than 40 years and the dangers inherent in the approaching end of summer ice in the Arctic Ocean. In March 2019, interviewed by Stuart Scott of ScientistsWarning.org on Methane Hydrates & Arctic Research, Wadhams emphasized the gravity of the new situation we are now in:

[I]t’s not a sort of stable, slowly varying thermodynamic situation now. It’s a new dynamics. And that’s what’s important. I’m not saying there’s going to be a giant outbreak of methane that will cause a huge increase in global temperatures. But I am saying that that is a possibility that’s suggested by what’s been observed by the people who actually go out there and do measurements. An increasingly small number of Arctic people actually do measurements in the Arctic.

if it did happen, it would be very, very serious. I mean it would be a step change in global temperatures of, well, we’ve done an estimate it might be 0.6 of a degree. And that’s only with a fraction of the methane in the sediments of the Siberian Sea coming out.

But if you had 0.6 of a degree—or more, it may be—then in one step I think people need to think what that would do. I mean we’re concerned about warming, global warming, and we bandy about figures like saying two degrees is the maximum we can allow by 2050 or preferably one and a half. What we might really get is four degrees by 2100. These are all assumed to be temperature changes which occur gradually—not that gradually, increasingly fast—but not catastrophically.

But if this two degrees for instance happened in one year, and suddenly, because of a vast release of methane, what would it do? ... if it all happened suddenly in one year we would just be completely flummoxed. We wouldn’t have a clue what to do, and the effects would be as great as two degrees in 30 years. But they will be happening instantly. Nobody as far as I know has modeled what the impact of a large step change temperature in climate would be.... [T]he finite probability that there will be a catastrophic methane release means that we have to do the research on what would be the consequences of such a rapid release.

But we’re not doing it. Nobody’s doing it. Because everybody’s so afraid of giving any sort of credence to the possibility of a big methane release that they don’t want to even look at what the consequences could / would be. And so that’s really very, very scientifically bad.

Remember there was a book some years ago about what will be the consequences of a nuclear war? The new concept of a nuclear winter came out of that—that it could produce a complete loss of habitability of the planet because of nuclear winter.... somebody went to the bother of working out what would happen if we had a nuclear war. But nobody’s doing that analysis for a methane catastrophe or large methane emission. And they should. It might might not be that bad. But it might be very serious indeed.

Fear can be a potent driver of denial. Choosing to ignore, dismiss, and/or reject the evidence of the mass extinction we are both living through and causing is making this situation far more dangerous. Beyond the possibility of significant methane releases in a short timespan, prior computer modelling predictions of how rapid atmospheric and temperature shifts will occur are being superseded by observed non-linear changes. The measurements of non-linearity in recent years is central to understanding increasingly chaotic climate trends as they suggest impacts will be far more rapid and severe than past predictions based on linear projections.

IMAGE: The Conversation, CC BY-ND

With indicators of rising temperatures and collateral escalating extreme weather, increasing global social and political instability, and the expanding catastrophe of 1,000,000 species threatened with extinction, it is essential to prioritize what must be addressed NOW to avoid the most dangerous looming extinction scenarios. In Jem Bendell’s assessment (above) that posits “collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable, and extinction as possible,” the nuclear weapons and power dyad are irrevocably intertwined in the expanding ecological catastrophe currently engaged.

Nuclear war is more likely today than at any time since 1989. While Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War is working to pursue The Call for the US to lead negotiations with the other nuclear weapon armed states to eliminate nuclear weapons[1][2], the FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was overwhelming passed by the House of Representatives on 11 December 2019. This bill accelerates the new arms race and funds almost every element of the trillion-dollar plan to replace the entire US nuclear arsenal with new, more deadly weapons.

The flip side of the nuke tech coin are the 400-plus nuclear power-stations operating around the globe. The 2011 catastrophic triple meltdown at Fukushima hints at what will occur at many other installations if electric power ceases for any length of time. The used control rods in onsite spent fuel pools contain 5 to 7 times more radioactivity than is inside the nuclear reactor. Further, all fuel pools are located outside the concrete containment vessels housing the reactors. Even if controlled shut downs of the reactor cores are successful, the spent fuel pools—extant at every site—require 24/7 offsite electricity to pump water to cool the thermal heat constantly emitted from the extremely radioactive fuel rods as well as to maintain a high water level to diffuse the escape of radiation.

If spent fuel pools lose off-site power, their water containment will boil away without the cooling pumps. Once the more recently retired-from-reactor fuel rods make contact with air they will spontaneously ignite causing radioactive fires and releasing on-going lethal levels of radiation into the atmosphere. Actualization of this scenario will create vast areas of uninhabitable radioactive wastelands and profoundly compromise the integrity of the gene pools of all biologically complex Life on Earth including homo sapiens. (As of May 2017, it does not appear there is any change in the lax manner spent fuel pools continue to be operated with the tragically inadequate “laissez-faire attitude” detailed by Allison Macfarlane, former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)

As described in the 2009 documentary, Into Eternity - A Film for the Future, Finland is the first country to enact into law building a nuclear waste repository. Called Onkalo (meaning “hiding place”), the repository must last for 100,000 years and will take 100 years to complete and be sealed up. Among the plethora of highly significant questions raised, the film portrays the incomprehensibility of how to leave intelligible warning messages for future beings to not dig or disturb this mausoleum of lethal man-made radioactive matter that will last into eternity.

In 2007 the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated there are more than 200,000 metric tons of spent nuclear spent fuel worldwide. Just as Peter Wadhams emphasizes the critical need to assess risk of varying thermodynamic instability, so it is with assessing risk analysis of catastrophic radioactive contamination of the biosphere from runaway spent fuel fires: “When you assess what’s happening, what are the nasty things that are going to be happening to the planet, what may be happening, we should be doing a risk analysis.”

Unsinkable, 2013     60x107" Depicts 67,000 mushroom clouds, equal to the number of metric tons of ultra-radioactive uranium/plutonium waste being stored in temporary pools at the 104 nuclear power plants across the U.S. These waste pools must be cooled with hundreds of thousands of gallons of constantly circulating water, and many plants have inadequate or nonexistent backup cooling systems in case of power loss. In the U.S. and around the world, the waste pools are under-protected, over-filled, and vulnerable to earthquakes, storms, malfeasance, and human error. In 1997 the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a calamity at just one of these waste pools in the U.S. could cause 138,000 American deaths (more than the number of Japanese who died in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima), and contaminate 2,000 square miles of our land. go to source and Click the image to zoom Chris Jordan

Donna Gilmore is the Founder of SanOnofreSafety.org. She and her coalition are indefatigable in their pursuit of performing risk analysis of the burden to the biosphere by man-made nuclear waste contamination arising from nuclear power plants in general and the shutdown San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in particular.

This website is a public resource for factual information about the serious safety issues with the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and the tons of nuclear waste stored just a few miles south of San Clemente, California. Most of the information is from official government and scientific documents.

Since the San Onofre reactors are permanently shutdown, our main focus is on the management of the nuclear waste. Mismanagement of nuclear waste at San Onofre could affect the entire country and more. A major radiation release at San Onofre could require a permanent evacuation of parts of Southern California, damage the nation’s food supply, jeopardize our health, the environment, and our national security. It could affect the economic and political stability of California, the nation and potentially other parts of the world.

• California is the eight ranking economy in the world, virtually tied with Italy and the Russian Federation, and larger than Canada, Australia and Spain.
• More than 40 percent of containerized imports enter the country through California ports, and nearly 30 percent of the country’s exports depart through them.
• California produces nearly half of the U.S. grown fruits, nuts and vegetables. California remained the number one state in cash farm receipts in 2011, with its $43.5 billion in revenue representing 11.6 percent of the U.S. total. U. S. consumers regularly purchase several crops produced solely in California.
• San Onofre is located adjacent to the primary vehicle transportation artery between Los Angeles and San Diego (I-5) and Mexico, and is home to one of the largest military installations on the West Coast (Camp Pendleton).

The information on this website is extensively research and fact checked by our coalition of volunteer local citizens and organizations living within the danger zone of San Onofre. We have joined forces to inform the public about critical issues that are not being resolved by those responsible for protecting our safety from a nuclear disaster. There is limited information available from the mainstream media, so we are sharing this information with the public, in layman terms and as concisely as possible.

To be the most effective at this time, it is necessary to be open to the potential that extinction is actively possible and truly allow this awareness to sink into the depths of our souls. The legend of the Shambhala Warriors from Tibetan tradition is helpful here. As told to Joanna Macy, the Shambhala Warrior is a metaphor for the Bodhisattva, the hero figure in the Buddhist tradition who is motivated by the desire for the welfare of all beings.

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

“You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.

“Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made.

“The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training.

“How do they train?” I asked.

“They train in the use of two weapons.”

“The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one,” he said, lifting his right hand, “because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see.

“But insight alone,” he said, “can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world’s pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.”

Arlit Uranium Mine, Niger Mine footprint prior to 2013 Footprint growth, Wired, 6 Dec 2013 IMAGE: Copyright Digital Globe Welcome to Arlit, the impoverished uranium capital of Africa, by Lucas Destrijcker & Mahadi Diouara, African Arguments, 18 Jul 2017

Pablo Servigne and Rapaël Stevens have written clear and well-reasoned analyses of the state of our world. Read their June 2015 interview: “‘We are experiencing a mosaic of collapses’: the announced end of industrial civilization.”

If you are moved to participate there are a number of avenues to explore. As Rupert Read describes in This Civilization Is Finished, “[we] invite the reader to join a project of saving our common future ... to transform this civilisation, or at least to build lifeboats [that] take values worth preserving through ... collapse”.

How do we build lifeboats? Jem Bendell’s framing of Deep Adaptation is helpful. A good introduction to Deep Adaptation is the 14+ minute video+transcript recorded for ScientistsWarning.TV in January 2019. The essence of Deep Adaptation takes in “the four Rs”:

1. Resilience: What do we most value and want to keep?
2. Relinquishment: What must we let go of?
3. Restoration: What skills and practices can we restore?
4. Reconciliation: What can we make peace with to lessen suffering?

Extinction Rebellion and Economic Rebellion are creating paths of collaboration and community building to increase resilience as things continue falling apart. As well, the Public Banking Institute is a growing power house (see their Advisory Board) to reclaim the commons and reset the structures of exchange to serve Life’s needs.

The Campaign to Reduce Our Internet Footprint lists some of the 1000+ substances in each smartphone and questions for researching the supply chain of one substance. Such research is a first step toward understanding the true cost of a video and reducing your media footprint.

Rationing energy sources will become necessary and essential throughout all “first world” cultures. Stan Cox has analyzed and produced a great deal of insightful work on how to put this together.

Growing food is of primary importance. Industrial agriculture has eroded our soil and knowledge about cooperative farming, seed saving, and food preservation. The Greenhorns’ mission to recruit and support young farmers is a beacon. See Also: Richard Heinberg’s call for Fifty Million Farmers—2006 E.F. Schumacher Lecture transcript or abbreviated text; Navdanya, a network in India that teaches conservation and organic farming and promotes farmers’ rights. Regeneration International promotes the global transition to regenerative food, farming and land management to restore climate stability, end world hunger and rebuild deteriorated social, ecological and economic systems.

This short list scratches the surface; it is dynamic, not static. Ideas and suggestions are welcome.

PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER McLEOD, SACRED LAND FILM PROJECT Don’t sacrifice my land Children in community impacted by Ramu mine, Papua New Guinea

PHOTO: URBAN TORONTO

PHOTO: CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA

PHOTO: GETTY

PHOTO: GETTY

↑   Anatomy of an AI system:      
The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical Map Of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources
Kate Crawford^[Twit][MS] and Vladan Joler^{[Twit][UNS][li][GS] vid:[MCB][CD][UC]}
AI Now Institute and Share Lab, 7 Sep 2018

US Mine (Carlin, Nevada, 2007) Photograph by David Maisel

PHOTO: YVES HERMAN / REUTERS Tanks containing coolant for servers at a Google Data center Saint Ghislain, Belgium

↑   The Human Fabric of the Facebook Pyramid      
Share Lab, 3 May 2017

↑   Tracking Forensics Atlas Mapping:      
A. Tracerouting Top 100 Domains, B. ISP Guifi.net, C. Mobile Phone Permissions
Vladan Joler, Joana Moll, Andrea Noni
Critical Interface Politics [Research Group] Hangar, 2016-17

ARTWORK: GRACE GROTHAUS

↑   The Cloud Begins With Coal      
Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, And Big Power
An Overview Of The Electricity Used By The Global Digital Ecosystem
Mark P. Mills, CEO, Digital Power Group, Aug 2013, 45 pp.

Where Electricity Is Consumed in the Digital Universe

PHOTO: TIMM SUESS Grand piano in Pripyat music school (Chernobyl, 2009)

⇈   COLLAPSOLOGIE       Collapsologie is the study and elaboration of how industrial civilization as we know it collapses and if it does, what will replace it. Industrial civilization is the use of machinery powered by electricity or any form of energy to carry out various activities. Developed by Pablo Servigne[1][1a][2][3][4] and Raphaël Stevens in their 2015 book, Comment Tout Peut S’effondrer. Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes (How everything can collapse. Small collapsology manual for use by present generations), collapsologie is an applied and transdisciplinary science involving ecology, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, biophysics, biogeography, agriculture, demography, politics, geopolitics, archeology, history, futurology, health, law and art. This systemic approach is based on the two cognitive modes of reason and intuition, as well as on recognized scientific works, including the 1972 Meadows Report [†, Limits to Growth - The 30-Year Update], “A safe operating space for humanity” (Nature, 2009), “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere” (Nature, 2012), and “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” (Anthropocene Review 2015) From the Latin collapsus (past participle collabi, “fall from a block, collapse”) and the Greek suffix logos (ancient Greek λóγο ς lógos, “word, speech, reason, relationship”), the word Collapsologie is a neologism popularized by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens. A second book with Gauthier Chapelle was published in 2018, Une Autre Fin Du Monde Est Possible. Vivre l’effondrement, et pas seulement y survivre, (Another End of the World is Possible - Live the collapse, not just survive it). Coming in 2020: How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, [1][2], by Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Andrew Brown (translation) ↑   “We are experiencing a mosaic of collapses”: the announced end of industrial civilization       Interview of Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens by Ivan du Roy, Basta!, 8 Jun 2015 The birth of [Comment Tout Peut S’effondrer] is the culmination of four years of research. We have merged hundreds of scientific articles and books: books on financial crises, on ecocide, archeology books on the end of ancient civilizations, climate reports ... While being the most rigorous possible. But we felt a form of frustration: when a book tackles peak oil (the gradual decline in oil and gas reserves), it does not mention biodiversity; When a book deals with the extinction of cash, it does not speak of the fragility of the financial system ... It lacked an interdisciplinary approach. This is the aim of the book.... We have distinguished borders and limits. The limits are physical and cannot be exceeded. Borders can be crossed at our own risk. The metaphor of the car, which we use in the book, helps to understand them well. Our car is today’s thermo-industrial civilization.... Then there are the borders. The car drives in a real world which depends on the climate, biodiversity, ecosystems, great geochemical cycles. This earth system has the distinction of being a complex system. Complex systems react unpredictably if certain thresholds are crossed. [B]y reading all this data, we have become catastrophic. Not in the sense that we say that everything is screwed up, where we sink into an irrevocable pessimism. Rather in the sense that we accept that disasters can occur: they are looming, we must look at them with courage, eyes wide open. To be a catastrophist is neither to be pessimistic nor optimistic, it is to be lucid.... Our intuitions do not, however, lead to a Mad Max version world, but to images or stories that we find only too rarely in novels or movies.... It is not a question of having a naïve vision of the future, we must remain realistic, but there are other possible scenarios. It’s up to us to change our imagination.... Sadness, anger, anxiety, helplessness, shame, guilt: we successively felt all these emotions during our research. We see them express themselves in a more or less strong way among the public that we meet. It is by welcoming these emotions, not by repressing them, that we can mourn the industrial system that nourishes us and move forward. Without a lucid and catastrophic observation on the one hand, and tracks to go towards the transition on the other, we cannot get into motion. If you’re just a catastrophist, you don’t do anything. If you are only positive, you cannot realize the shock to come, and therefore enter into transition.

↑   Between the Devil and the Green New Deal      
We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming
Jasper Bernes, commune, 25 Apr 2019

↑   Burned: Are Trees The New Coal?      

BURNED tells the little-known story of the accelerating destruction of
forests for fuel, and probes the policy loopholes, huge subsidies, and
blatant green washing of the burgeoning biomass power industry.

Documentary, Alan Dater + Lisa Merton (2017)

↑   The Material Footprint of Global Consumption      
TRUTHstudio, 2014

↑   The Plastics Inside Us      
Originally titled Invisibles - The Plastics Inside Us (Orb, 2017),
this has been reworked (PapersOwl, Jun 2022)

Exeter, England. Polystyrene particles less than 50 nanometers long (in light fluorescent green) have infiltrated the gastrointestinal tract, antenna, and thoracic appendages of this freshwater plankter, Daphnia magna. Plankton like these are the bedrock of the marine food chain. Research is just beginning on the accumulation of nanometer-scale pollution in wildlife. No analytical methods exist to identify nanoplastics in food. Plastic embedded in tiny plankton wind up in fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, which are eaten by us. This tiny plankter’s plastic problem is your problem, too. (Photo: Corin Liddle) microscopic plastic fibers Dagupan, Philippines. A young boy climbs over plastic debris in a 50-year-old dump overlooking the ocean in this seaside town. Most of the biodegradable items have long since rotted, leaving a mountain of multicolored plastics that float out to sea on the coastal winds.

↑   Windfall (2010, 83 min)      
Documentary, Laura Israel - Director, Press Kit (21 pp.)

↑   Wind Turbine Syndrome, A Report on a Natural Experiment      
Dr. Nina Pierpont, (K-Selected Books, 2009, 294pp.)
Wind Turbine Syndrome & The Brain (PDF, 2010, 18pp.)
Your Guide to Wind Turbine Syndrome ... a roadmap to this complicated subject
Calvin Luther Martin (2010)

↑   A Problem with Wind Power      
Eric Rosenbloom, aweo.org (massive resource site), 2003-2006

The biggest problem with large-scale wind-powered electricity generation is the grid. A home system can work well because the fluctuating output (even in the windiest places it is highly variable) can be regulated by batteries, and another source (the grid or a gas-powered generator) is tied in to kick in when need be. This is the model where larger systems work in isolated villages, too.

But industrial-scale wind plants designed to supply the grid do not work well, even where the wind is superb. The grid is meant to respond to demand, constantly modulating the various suppliers to match the demand exactly. Wind plants respond only to the wind, forcing the more controllable “conventional” plants to change their output in response to wind production as well as to grid demand. And the need to respond within seconds to a drop in wind production requires a plant that runs more inefficiently than one that could run if the grid didn’t have to cope with the unpredictable fluctuations of significant wind-powered sources. That is to say, wind farms may actually cause more fossil fuel burning.

The huge turbines designed for the grid can’t work without electricity from the grid, either. They produce on average 25%-35% of what they are capable of, but they are using electricity (apparently free) 100% of the time. And a problem about sites with good steady strong winds is that they are too windy. The turbines can’t handle strong gusts and automatically shut down (typically around 55 mph). So “good” sites turn out to be very little more productive than less windy ones.

↑   How Much Energy Do We Need?      
Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Magazine, January 2018

Wind turbine blades at a landfill in Casper, Wyoming (Aug 2019)

↑   False hopes for a Green New Deal      
Rufus Jordana, openDemocracy, 29 Aug 2019

↑   Methane Hydrates & Arctic Research      
Dr Peter Wadhams interview, ScientistsWarning.TV, Mar 2019

Arctic region: East Siberian, Laptev, and Kara seas

↑   Understanding the Permafrost-Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf      
Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov and Evgeny Chuvilin, Geosciences, 5 Jun 2019

Figure 9. Distribution of oceanographic stations conducted over the ESAS from 1999-2017. Oceanographic stations performed by the authors (n > 2700) are shown as red dots; the ship’s track of IB Oden (2014) is shown as a solid black line; oceanographic stations performed by the cruise IB Oden (2014) is shown as a solid black line; oceanographic stations performed by the cruise participants onboard IB Oden (leg 1, n = 67) are shown as red dots superimposed on the black line.

↑   World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity - 1992 and 2017 and beyond ...      
Stuart Scott, ScientistsWarning.TV, 3 Dec 2018

↑   Any Way You Slice It - The past, present, and future of rationing      
Stan Cox (NYC: The New Press, 2013)

↑   Is There a Ration Card in Your Future?      
Stan Cox presentation, 2013 Prairie Festival, The Land Institute

↑   The Campaign to Reduce Our Internet Footprint      
Katie Singer, Our Web of Inconvenient Truths

↑   Greenhorns      

↑   eXtinction Rebellion      
an international movement using non-violent civil disobedience
to halt mass extinction and minimise the risk of social collapse

Oxford Street, near Marble Arch in London, 22 April 2019     PHOTO: REUTERS

↑   Economic Rebellion      
Decentralized organising to leverate
our most powerful tool for change: MONEY

↑   Open Structures      
OpenStructures is an exploration on open modular construction
where anyone designs for everyone on the basis of one shared grid.

Presentation of the Family of Objects in the exhibition ‘Home Futures’ Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Design Museum, London (Nov2018-Mar2019)

 Newest Additions 

Limits  +  Extinction Psyche  +  Conflict Minerals Economic Collapse Energy & Information Electric Rubbish Electronics Toxics  +  Extraction Films Food Security  +  Global Supply Chains Green + Economy = Paradox Biomass Energy - The New Coal Wind Power Political Collapse Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Magazine  +  Jane Anne Morris Dmitri Orlov Jane Jacobs Ozzie Zehner

PHOTO: SASHA LEZHVEV, ENOUGH PROJECT Tantalum Child Miners in Congo, 19 Apr 2011

• ↑ Limits
  • Güney Işikara, “Is Degrowth an Alternative to Capitalism?,” Developing Economics, 5 Jan 2020
  • Sebastian Sippel, Nicolai Meinshausen, et al, “Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale, Nature Climate Change, 2 Jan 2020
  • Lotfi Belkhir and Ahmed Elmeligi, “Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations,” Journal of Cleaner Production, 10 Mar 2018
  • John Vidal, “‘Tsunami of data” could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025,” Climate Home News, 11 Dec 2017
  • Mike Hazas, et al, “Are there limits to growth in data traffic?: On time use, data generation and speed,” LIMITS ’16, ACM, 8 Jun 2016
  • Anders Andrae & Tomas Edler, “On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030,” Challenges, Huawei Technologies Sweden AB, 30 Apr 2015
  • Steffen, Broadgate, et al, “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review, Vol: 2 issue: 1, 16 Jan 2015
  • Barnosky, Hadly, et al, “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” Nature, Vol. 486, 7 Jun 2012
  • Gary Cook, How Clean Is Your Cloud?, Greenpeace International, 2012. 52pp.
  • Rockström, Steffen, et al, “A safe operating space for humanity - Identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change,” Nature, Vol 461|24 Sep 2009
  • Jean-Marc Jancovici, on The limits to growth — Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and Behrens William W. III — 1972,“, jancovici.com 2003-2011
  • Meadows, Randers, Meadows, Limits To Growth - The 30-Year Update, Earthscan, 2005, 363 pp.
• ↑ EXTINCTION
  • International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. Biodiversity is declining. Currently there are more than 112,400 species on The IUCN Red List, with more than 30,000 species threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibians, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 25% of mammals and 14% of birds.
• ↑ PSYCHE
  • Edward Curtin, “Hovering in Cyberspace,” Behind the Curtain, 24 Jan 2020
  • Ron Srigley, “I asked my students to turn in their cell phones and write about living without them. Here’s what they had to say.” MIT Technology Review, 26 Dec 2019
• ↑ CONFLICT MINERALS
  • This Is What We Die For, Human Rights Abuses In The Democratic Republic Of The Congo Power The Global Trade In Cobalt, Amnesty International, 2016, 92pp.
  • Peter Eichstaedt, Consuming The Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World's Deadliest Place, 2011
  • Jeffrey W. Mantz, “Improvisational economies: Coltan production in the eastern Congo,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2008
• ↑ ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
  • National Priorities Project:
    • Ashik Siddique, “Trump's 2021 budget cuts all federal agencies—except militarized ones,” 10 Feb 2020
    • Lindsay Koshgarian, “Trump's 2021 budget gives 55% to the military,” 10 Feb 2020
  • McKay Coppins , “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President - How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election,” The Atlantic, 10 Feb 2020
  • Aaron Mehta, “Trump seeks $46 billion for nuclear weapons programs in budget request,” Defense News, 9 Feb 2020
  • Michael Klare, “World War III’s Newest Battlefield - U.S. Troops Head for the Far North,” TomDispatch.com, 9 Feb 2020
  • Ryan Morgran, “Pentagon makes $35 trillion in accounting adjustments in one year; double & triple counted funds,” American Military News, 23 Jan 2020
  • Neta Crawford, “U.S. Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion,” Costs of War, Brown Univ., Nov 2019
• ↑ ENERGY & INFORMATION
  • Mark Mills:
    • “Old Energy, New Boom: Digital traffic will fuel the next dramatic economic expansion–but digital machines need the reliable and affordable energy that only hydrocarbons can provide,” City Journal, 24 Jan 2020
    • “Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era,” RealClearBooks, 11 Dec 2019
    • The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking , Manhattan Institute, 26 Mar 2019
• ↑ ELECTRONIC RUBBISH
  • Josh Lepawsky Reassembling Rubbish - visualization entry point to a 5 year examination of the issue of electronic discards (‘e-waste’), 2018 (takes time to load; LOTS of data)
• ↑ ELECTRONICS TOXICS
  • Amit Katawala, “The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction,” Wired, 5 Aug 2018
  • Ted Smith, Complicit, 2017 Documentary, Heather White & Lynn Zhang Directors (89:00). Exposes the dangerous working conditions in the China’s smartphone factories where one worker is poisoned from exposure to toxic materials every five hours.
  • Tim Maughan, “The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust, Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech” BBC, 2 Apr 2015
  • Ted Smith, Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry, 2006 (isbn.nu)
• ↑ EXTRACTION
  • Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society - The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, Harvard Univ Press, 2015, 320pp.
  • Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, “On the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism,” Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 31, 2017 - Issue 2-3.
• ↑ FILMS
  • Arctic Methane featuring Prof. Peter Wadhams:
    • A conversation with Peter Wadhams : The Methane Threat, 2018 (8:51)
    • A Catastrophe in the Making, 2017 (14:54)
    • Why The Sea Ice Matters, 2012 (19:34)
  • Silicon
    • How is silicone made anyway? Wacker Chemie (6:05)
    • Elkem microsilica production (4:46)
    • The Production Of Silicon Norwegian Univ of Science & Technology (7:56)
    • Silicon smelter factory in Kazakhstan (3:38)
  • Permaculture
    • David Holmgren Interview on Permaculture, Energy Descent & Future Scenarios, 2015 (1:27:41)
• ↑ FOOD SECURITY
  • Zia Mehrabi, “Food system collapse - Food security is uncertain under future climate change, but is there a threat of food system collapse? Now research assesses the probability of weather hazards occurring at the same time in the world’s major breadbaskets and reveals that the weather-related component of this risk could be increasing.” Nature, Vol 10, Jan 2020
  • Growing Small Farms - Permaculture, NC State Extension
  • Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, 2011
  • The Food to Farming Transition, Toward A Post Carbon Food System, Post Carbon Institute, 2009, 41pp.
  • quote from Carolyn Steel: Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2013), “Food Security in the West,” No Tech Magazine, No Tech Magazine, 1 Oct 2019
• ↑ GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS
  • N. Healy, J.C. Stephens, S. Malin, “Embodied energy injustices: Unveiling and politicizing the transboundary harms of fossil fuel extractivism and fossil fuel supply chains,” Energy Research & Soc. Sci., Feb 2019
  • Cargo Ships carry 90% of Internationally Traded Goods
    from Smoggy Seas, Zoë Schlanger, “If shipping were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter,” Quartz, 17 Apr 2018
  • Mark Graham & Håvard Haarstad, “Transparency and Development: Ethical Consumption through Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things,” Information Technologies & International Development 7, no.1 10, March 2011.

PHOTO: Tuas Terminal, Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore “Tuas terminal is a next-generation container terminal being constructed by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA). “The mega-port will have the capacity to handle up to 65 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of cargo a year, making it the world’s biggest container terminal upon completion.”

• ↑ GREEN + ECONOMY = PARADOX
  • Kieran Cooke, “Germany’s green energy quest stalls,” Climate News Network, 8 Jan 2020
  • Don Fitz, “Dammed Good Questions About the Green New Deal, Here are 10 potential problems with dams.” CommonDreams, 3 Dec 2019
  • John Davis, “The Green New Deal and ‘Accursed Wealth!’,” Journal of Wild Culture, 24 Nov 2019
• ↑ BIOMASS ENERGY - THE NEW COAL
  • EU Biomass Legal Case - Save Forests, Save the Climate
  • Enviro Advocates Call Out MA Gov. Baker For Promoting Dirty Fuels As Renewable Energy, Partnership for Policy Integrity, Aug 2019
  • Mary S. Booth, Not carbon neutral: Assessing the net emissions impact of residues burned for bioenergy, Environmental Research Letters, Feb 2018
  • Burning Trees For Power - The Truth About Woody Biomass, Energy & Wildlife, Southern Environmental Law Center, Jan 2018
  • Mary S. Booth, Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How Biomass Energy Has Become the New Coal, Partnership for Policy Integrity, Apr 2014
• ↑ WIND POWER
  • Wind Power Investment Collapses as Germany’s Wind Industry Faces Total Armageddon, stopthesethings.com, 2 Dec 2019
  • Gene Thompson, Wind leasing: an all or none proposition, National Wind Watch, 17 Nov 2019
  • Tatsuya Ishitake, et al, Epidemiological study on long-term health effects of low-frequency noise produced by wind power stations in Japan, Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, 9-13 Sep 2019
  • Christina Stella, “Unfurling the waste problem caused by wind energy,” NPR, 10 Sep 2019
  • William Acker, Case studies that have convinced me that industrial wind turbines make people sick, Acker & Associates, (PDF) prepared Dec 2015 to Feb 2019
  • Mary Kay Barton, “Wind Power Destruction in New York State: ‘Clean’ Power Plan Problem,” MasterResource, 11 Nov 2015
  • Eric Rosenbloom, Health Effects of Noise from Large Wind Turbines, Commissioned for Wind Energy: A Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO, 2014
  • Environmental Impacts of Wind Power, Union of Concerned Scientists, 3 Mar 2013

UPC Kaheawa, Maui, Hawaii - “about 12.5 tons of steel in each [wind] tower foundation” (2007)

Rape of an Upland Plateau 2004-2005, Cefn Croes, Wales
local copy of the Photographic Record
from Cefn Croes Wind Farm Gallery