Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mainstream coverage of off-grid, self-sustaining communities like the one featured in this video tends to be glib and sensational (focusing, for example, on “trash homes”). It’s so much rarer to see in-depth coverage of the full social, technical and ecological aspects of such communities, or intimate glimpses into residents’ daily lives and motivations.
Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming. All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.
The Windigo diagnosis reveals that the threat we face is not only ecological or political. It is civilizational. It is rooted in a system whose deepest logic is to convert the living world into fuel for its own endless expansion.
Green AI will likely continue to stretch as different communities bring their own priorities and imaginaries to the term. But if its dominant forms remain tethered to extractive assumptions, it risks becoming little more than an alibi for the systems driving planetary breakdown.
The entire Community of Life—humans included—were better off when shrouded in the mysterious magic of the living world: held in awe, humility, and respect. We came into being inside the feedback loop, and threaten to destroy much when presuming to extract ourselves from its magical protection.
The question of who’s the real nut often arises for us collapse-aware folks living here in Crazy Town. Since Mr. Peanut is no longer returning their phone calls, Rob, Jason, and Asher invite Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist, professor, and host of the Team Human Podcast to answer the question.
Hunter-gatherers engaged fully in life with their psyches intact. They experienced far richer meaning and deeper relational being than we can now even imagine. That is what we must recover as we fight back.
As the current situation (March 2026) around the Strait of Hormuz continues to destabilise the global economy, it is timely to return to Alexander’s analysis outlining ‘the Disintegration of Empire’ (being Chapter Two of Entropia).
The question is no longer just how to succeed in the world. It is how to remain human in a time of unraveling, and how to become, in the deepest sense, both soulful and revolutionary: ruthless in understanding the material conditions of the age, yet still capable of love, grief, reverence, and fidelity to life.
The eclipse, then, is an invitation. Not a warning or a demand, but a quiet reminder that clarity is possible. Justice has not abandoned us. We stepped out of alignment with it, and we can step back. The shadow will stay as long as we remain in it, but it will fade the moment we stop standing in it.
While The Population Bomb is the book with which Ehrlich is most closely identified, he wrote dozens of others, including important and fascinating works on birds, human ecology, and conservation biology. He was as insightful as he was prolific, and his work deserves continued attention.
The news hasn’t improved since I started working on this article. Still, while doing so, I’ve found myself in the company of others — and that’s reminded me of something. When you make yourself go out into the world, however scary it might seem, and act to make it better, the world does sometimes shift. The atoms really do move.
