Introducing: The Encroaching Apocalypse or A Glorious New View
Welcome to The Future. Or maybe welcome to Ancient Wisdom. Let's see.
In October I had the grand privilege of presenting a talk I spun up with the esteemed Satyajit Das at the NSW AdaptNSW conference. We titled it A Banquet of Consequences: Implications of Inaction in The Decisive Decade. The reactions were remarkable - from tears of despair to others offering a standing ovation. I received well over 100 messages or approaches from the 500 person crowd that day and in the days following. Something hit a nerve. In the post conference survey it was both the favourite and least favourite part of the event.
The theme of the conference was "deep understanding, bold action”. I’ve worked almost exclusively in the baffling world of physical climate risk and its implications for people, households, communities, regions, nations and economies for a couple of years now. The implications are almost no different to when I did an honours thesis on the implications of a changing climate on the Sydney metropolitan basin at university in 2007. Almost no different - back then though, one of the most imperilled parts of the city - the north west region and flood plain of the Hawkesbury River - was still predominantly an agricultural basin. No more. Hello tens of thousands of black-roofed, no green space, lack of infrastructure-d communities, concretised into the (flood plain) ground homes. That decision already has and will continue to have direct adverse implications for those in that part of the world, and indirectly on all of us.
Das is a renowned financier who’s most (in)famous for predicting the GFC before it happened. He’s written a stack of phenomenal books and his prescient take on the ills of finance and understanding of the structures of global economies and commerce means he’s had a front row seat when it comes to (not) addressing climate change. Add to that an appreciation that humanity places itself above the natural world, and sometimes it’s quite easy to understand why climate change has been, is and will continue to perpetuate slow violence on populations here, there and everywhere.
This talk felt like a culmination though. A synthesis of his work and my work that came together at the right time and the right place. His understanding of the drivers of global markets and the people in them and my own experience attempting climate action within and around organisations seemed to fit like hand and glove.
It was the inspiration in some ways to this series I am launching today - ‘The Encroaching Apocalypse or A Glorious New View’. It’s about the anecdotes and stories and evidence and philosophies of why (meaningful seems too implausible a word to aspire to and use as framing) action on climate change beyond some (still inadequate) renewables investments in some markets remains a delusional fantasy. It’s also about what the hell do we do.
Two of the most influential pieces of work I’ve read in my career are by legends of the corporate sustainability sphere. Paul Gilding’s 2011 book The Great Disruption and Duncan Austin’s 2019 essay Greenwish: The Wishful Thinking Undermining the Ambition of Sustainable Business.
Gilding’s work articulates a future scenario (he predicted occurring in around 2019/2020) where the climate crisis becomes an irrepressible moment by which humanity launches a war-like mobilisation to address, reverse and re-build the modern economy. The aspiration is this book is largely unmatched in my reading of non fiction climate or sustainability writing. We can do it. It encapsulated the hopes of the ‘Yes We Can’ Obama moment. Like seemingly everything Obama hope era though, it can be difficult to remember a moment in our global populace where it did seem possible and likely that things would and could improve.
Austin’s essay on the other hand poses a really simple question - how can it be that never before has so much work been done on all things sustainability while just about all indicators of societal and ecological health degrade? He hit reality right on the head. How is that possible? Since then, this paradox has only continued to grow. Never more reports, never more reporting, never more data, never more people working to address, never more awareness. Never more emissions. Never hotter. Never more plastic pollution. Never more wealth inequality. How?
Das and I don’t hold close the idea of a sudden society-wide awakening.
But we need it. And how? Where is the creativity, where is the novelty, where is the madness and the anger and the resistance and the outright petulance? What else do we need for that awakening at both individual and societal levels?
I want to explore why housing standards have been and look to remain so ill-capable of appropriately protecting inhabitants? Why executives in businesses think time is still on their side? Why some people have Seen The Light and others haven't? How to help transition people from apathy to care, and what do they need to survive the onslaught and anguish of failing planetary systems? What are the choice points we can make visible and build awareness of on a daily basis? What are the rules that need to be disobeyed, and how to disobey them? Why is the phenomenon of progressive decline so difficult to see when it’s right under our noses (did you know there were koalas in Sydney until the 1960s?)? What are the intervention points in our system today? What is the imagery and metaphors by which to build new stories and make hope out of? What do we do about loss, damage and collapse? What is life like on the precipice of losing it all? What is losing it all like? What is losing it all like and still being nonchalant about the climate crisis? How can there be so much nonchalance and so much devastation simultaneously? How do I prepper? How do we transcend current paradigms in the tiny interactions we have every day? What mindsets are required? What do we do in an economy without insurance? What can we learn about previous civilisation collapse to prepare for now? What are the stories that we tell ourselves that restrict or hold us in place? What can be learnt from Icarus, the boy who flew to close to the sun?
I’m excited and daunted to be bringing this to you.
Like all things Finding Nature I feel compelled to examine and imagine what could be possible, but I want to know more about the barriers and the blockers now.
More than anything, the remarkable modern master of creativity Rick Rubin offers clarity for me in my own pursuit.
I hope you learn from it, contribute to it, are curious about it, take something from it.
We are in this together.
This Week’s Podcast - A Primer on The Encroaching Apocalypse or A Glorious New View
This week’s show is part masterclass part introduction to this series part insight into the topics and questions and people I want to involve in this project.
Snippets from previous episodes that highlight the breadth of topics I want to cover are with Lesley Hughes, Alexander Pui, Kate Cotter, Sam Kernaghan, Regina Featherstone, Paul Oosting and Nadya Hutagalung.
Events are back!
Finding Nature Finds Nature
Finding Nature is finding nature. From 28 February - 2 March we will be taking a small group of sustainability and impact-oriented professionals to Barrington Tops at the invitation of elders from the Worimi people.
The intent of the expedition is threefold; 1) Take a group up to engage with the question; 'how can we support the building of First Nations food knowledge and products?', 2) Observe and support a cultural burn to help return the Bularr-Gulga Watuun, 3) Connect with self, each other and Country through designed activities and experiences
To hear more about the trip - logistics, costs, activities - we have an EOI session this Friday at 12pm. Sign up here.
Seeing The Forest Through The Trees - Picking ESG Data Winners
26 February, Surry Hills, 6pm
In a time of increased focus on sustainability disclosure, there is an ever-growing need to find effective ways to gather, store, manipulate and report ESG data. As the professionalisation of sustainability within organisations of all sizes has evolved and with the arrival of mandatory climate disclosures suddenly hundreds of new data and reporting platforms have sprung up. What has been a drip over the past few decades has become a pouring tap. Options abound. Questions emerge. Silver bullets are promised. Cynicism is activated.
To read more and get your ticket, click here.
I feel this. The revealing has happened, the cracks in the edifice of civilisation are visible, and the collapse is not just theoretical, it is lived. The hallmarks of civilisational collapse are very present and felt.
Arnold Toynbee talked of internal decay and where the positive deviants and creative minority loses it's ability to respond appropriately to the challenges. Those holding the current power losing touch with the needs of the people and the biosphere we all rely upon on this pale blue dot. Likewise Carrol Quigley alludes to civilisations growing through an instrument of expansion. Being a way of organising society that enables further growth. But, when these instruments become institutionalised (i.e. rigid, serving elites instead of the broader society), civilisations stagnate and decline. These are all present, playing out over some time and accelerating in cascades.
Ian McGilchrist’s core arguments are from the left-hemispheric dominance in thinking and being styles. We might also look to the work of Adrienne Maree brown’s Emergent Strategy which is all about how we organise in ways that mirror nature, rather than trying to force outdated models of control. Ginie Servant-Miklos, in the recently released Pedagogies of Collapse, points to an education and learning paradigm that prepares people not for sustaining the status quo, but for living through its end. This is the hospicing of modernity Vanessa Andreotti talks about in her book. So many good references to shift... many in the Finding Nature community might know of these... and more...
So what do we do? How do we be, together, through this?
The challenge now is not just to analyse but to be and to act in ways that are aligned with life, with the patterns of renewal, with the possibilities that emerge from the ruins.
Hospice the old. Midwife the new. Learn together. Stay human. Stay in circle. Keep weaving. 💜