By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
Deforestation is one of the most intractable and yet most potent drivers of environmental crisis. It is also among the four out of nine planetary boundaries that civilisation was already at high risk of crossing five years ago according to research published in the journal Science.
By Craig Collins, CounterPunch
The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs. Will we overcome denial and despair; kick our addiction to petroleum; and pull together to break the grip of corporate power over our lives?
By Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Resilience.org
We are not just presenting a 'top ten' of the century's bad news stories, we are mainly proposing a theoretical framework for hearing about, understanding and welcoming all the small-scale initiatives that are already facing up to the 'post-carbon' world, initiatives that are emerging at breakneck speed.
By Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Gauthier Chapelle, Daniel Rodary, Open Democracy
As Rob Hopkins and Joanna Macy say, we must lead with our heads, hearts and hands: understanding what is happening (collapso-logy), imagining and believing in other worlds, and finding courage (collapso-sophy) as well as gathering living forces to build alternatives and lead the fight against destructive powers (collapso-praxis).
By Gail Bradbrook, Jem Bendell, Resilience.org
As global heating speeds up, humanity can no longer assume to control our destiny. We can let that tough realisation sit heavily with us, but then breathe and redouble our commitment to life and love, no matter what the odds, opposition or outcomes
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
I think we need to talk openly and calmly about the possibility of societal or civilizational collapse arising from humanity’s present predicaments.
By Asher Moses, Voice of Action
Australia’s top climate scientist says “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” of civilisation, which may now be inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated.
By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog
Western civilization seems to be thrashing about like a feverish patient. Will it recover from civilizational decline, or is this the end of the road? Even with the best interventions by the money doctors, it might not return to its old self, patched up and ready for another go at it.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
The coronavirus pandemic is, among other things, a tribute to human ingenuity and our relentless pursuit of globalization, an impulse thousands of years old. Previous civilizations, from the Romans to the Mongols, traded aggressively and invaded new ecosystems. It didn't end particularly well.
By Kamran Nayeri, Our Place in the World
The fight for ecocentrism, like the fight for human emancipation, is a fight for universal values. Without ecocentrism, that is not just an intellectual point of view but a genuine love for nature and for life on Earth, there will be no humanity and no human emancipation.
By Charlotte Du Cann, Charlotte Du Cann blog
In a year where biblical calamities have rained down upon the world – as floods, bush fires and locust storms– this fracture has not emerged in the highly stressed natural world but from within a globalised human society. After ignoring the cries of Cassandra for decades, the horse has finally entered the gates of the cities, releasing billions of tiny invisible lifeforms that are no respecters of age, gender, wealth, position or race.
By Julian Cribb, The Guardian blog
We have only one rational choice: to choose to survive. This demands all necessary actions – although they spell the end of existing systems of energy, food, water, money, defence, transport and politics – and their replacement with new ones, universally dedicated to a viable, just and sustainable human and planetary future.