The first two chapters of my book: Hope and Relief

Welcome! Get started on my Book Serialisation here! Let's go...

Jun 18, 2024

I am serialising my next book about collapse, and how to live in, and through, the madnesses and sadnesses. Here on Substack. One chapter at a time.

Below are the first two chapters. (Here’s the post where I explain why, and how, I’m producing this book in this manner, and what my longterm plans for it are in case you missed it last week.)

The first few chapters will be free to everyone. After that, the bulk of the book will be available to the paid subscriber community. Many of the chapters will be accompanied by writers’ tips and insights, with an invite for you to contribute to the content and to ask me your (writing? collapse? spiritual?) questions. It’s kind of the point of my serialising things - to enable a conversation.

If you’d like to further support the project, you can “buy me a metaphorical coffee” from time to time, via this cool widget. It allows you to help me along with a $5 “donation”, to help pay for what is, I guess, voluntary work:

Finally, you might like to let everyone you know about this book and what we will be covering here. I think there are a lot of people out there looking for better explanations and needing to be held in the world.

Oh, and do note: The whole book, as it progresses, will be available on the home page under “My Book Serialisation”. You’ll be able to go back and read bits again, read it in chunks and so on.

The audio version…

Since so many of you asked for an audio version, here you go. I will do this with each chapter. It will come with stumbles, as I won’t be editing it…cool?

0:00

-27:32

Writing notes

This is the first two chapters of the book. It will follow a very honest introduction “warning” people about what they’re getting into. This subject is not easy to fathom, digest, or be part of, and everyone will need to be aware of this before embarking.

I tend to write introductions as I go, adding layers and set-ups and warnings as the book matures (the current WIP introduction sits at 4000 words of stream-of-consciousness notes); I file it after I’ve finished the rest of the book.

Now, in the absence of this “softening” introduction for all of you here, I invite you today to read this first section with trust(?) that it will all head somewhere…and somewhere beautiful. This is my commitment to everyone, and to myself. Of course, you are also invited to decide that this subject is just not for you right now. It truly isn’t for everyone.

My books tend to need quite detailed introductions, or prefaces. They provide the cautionary notes, but they also explain the style and format of what is to follow. I try to write in a way that best enables the information to be taken on board. With First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, for instance, the format had to be “bitsy” because the anxious mind is bitsy and only able to take in short slabs of intensity at a time. To best serve those who most needed the book, I had to meet them where their minds were at.

And so with this book the style is consciously non-linear because collapse is radically non-linear. I loop in scientific, philosophical and personal perspectives. I have had to let go of there being a beginning and an end. Instead, I establish a thread, or a path, and I start treading it…with you lot! There are a bunch of other devices I’ve used to help with the RX (reader experience). We can touch on them later, and how I go about selecting them, if you like.

HOPE

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
- T.S. Eliot

One day, an age ago, a bunch of Greek Gods decided to curse humankind with terror, jealousy, suffering, greed and wars, bundling them all into a box that they entrusted to poor old mortal Pandora. At the last minute, Prometheus decided to toss in hope as well. For some trickster good measure.

The Gods warned that the box was not to be opened. But temptation got the better of Pandora (she was, after all, only mortal). She lifted the lid and, in an instant, all the troubles and woes were released upon a previously naive humanity. As she slammed the lid shut in horror, hope was left trapped at the bottom of the box. And so it remained, forever lodged in human consciousness as a thing that exists, but always out of reach.

For decades, as a climate activist, I preached hope. I’d be asked, Sarah, do you think humanity can still wrangle its way out of the climate crisis? Will we be able to bring along the deniers, the uber-rich, Elon? Can we do it in time? Is there… hope?

Yes! Yes! I’d cry. There’s still hope! I would use sporting analogies and tales of superhuman feats that saw us escape calamity at the eleventh hour as evidence that if we hang onto hope we could make it. Of course, I was careful to talk of an “active hope”, drawing on Rebecca Solnit’s thesis that real hope is optimism combined with action. (To blithely - hopefully - sit back and believe that someone else “out there” will magically fix things was as dangerous as pessimism, people like me would say.)1

Hope is a bright, shiny thing. It forever dangles just ahead, luring us onward and keeping us engaged in the fight, and engaged in life. And hope has been particularly crucial to the climate movement. Dodging the largest existential crisis any of us can fathom requires all of us heavy lifting all at once. Without hope, would any of us – or enough of us - bother? If we were told we probably wouldn’t “make it” or that the best we were shooting for was a fifty per cent chance, would we still support wind turbines and divest our pension funds? Very possibly not. So, you can see, we had to have hope that things would turn out so that… things could actually turn out. Hope was what would save us.

But then it didn’t.

Save us.

Did it.

Because reality caught up and all the things that we hoped would not happen, happened.

Didn’t they.

We did not stop emissions. Our leaders did not stick to the Paris Agreement. And so the planet kept heating, with temperature rises now accelerating. In 2023 we casually exceeded that 1.5C threshold we’d so desperately hoped we wouldn’t. We are currently on track for three, possibly four, degrees warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, quite possibly sooner. NASA modelling led by prominent climate scientist James Hansen indicates ten degrees Celsius of warming might be “baked in” to our future climate due to the greenhouse gases already released.

For a long time, we convinced each other the back-to-back floods and record-busting temperatures were anomalies. We said “unprecedented” a lot and at the end of news articles about some climate issue or other the expert scientist would add, “but it’s not too late to act” or “there is still hope!”.

But that just became ridiculous, right?

Ten years ago we were told there was hope if we acted immediately.

We didn’t act immediately.

More years passed, more deadlines were missed, and more “code red” warnings issued by the UN.

We still didn’t act.

The stop sign hit the windscreen and we failed to brake.

Q: But what about the green energy transition, won’t that save us?

Look, I had truly hoped it would. I told everyone who’d listen it was going to. If we could all just electrify everything – switch out gas guzzlers for EVs, gas cooktops for induction and support solar and wind investments – we would right the ship.

Wonderfully, we’ve been switching to renewables at an impressive rate. It’s a glorious thing to witness. But (goddamn) we’vealso been dialling up our use of fossil fuel energy at the same time.

It’s a paradox, right. And it has a name. Jevons Paradox describes how when humans invent a new form of technology or bring in new policies geared at saving time or money or energy, we wind up increasing overall consumption and negating any efficiencies we were shooting for. Take washing machines. They were meant to save time and resources. But we wound up just washing our clothes more often. We invented more fuel-efficient cars, and drove more.

It's what we humans do.

There’s also this sad addendum: The production of all the stuff required for the hopeful energy switch-a-roo (solar panels, batteries, turbines) chews through way more carbon budget than anyone expected. And a shit ton of rare earth minerals. Which are …rare. And there really are not enough of them to do this transition. Plus their extraction is rife with exploitation, like most rare things are. In Congo, cobalt pillaging has contributed to the displacement of seven million people and caused untold “grievous human rights abuses”.2

Yes, sunshine and wind are gloriously renewable. But solar panels and wind farms are just not.

And we need to finally get honest about this.

Q: What about nuclear? And geoengineering; those sun visors and sulphur clouds? What about offsetting and abating, can’t these human ingenuity solutions save us?

Sadly, too, that’s now unlikely. Not because they couldn’t at some point down the track. The problem is, there’s just not enough time left to get them off the ground and make an impact in the window we have. This is our issue, friends: We’ve used up our window!

I mean, none of us like to say it, but we were warned. We were given a deadline of 2030 to halve emissions (so that we would not exceed that 1.5C temperature rise before 2100). Given not a single country on the planet is on target to hit that goal (and that we’ve already flopped over the 1.5C threshold), our no-more-excuses-this-is-final deadline is… yesterday. Nuclear plants, to take one example, realistically take 20 years to approve and construct, while also requiring an exorbitant amount of fossil fuels.

There’s also, arguably, not enough geopolitical – or climate - stability for any kind of large-scale, multi-border solution like a planetary sun visor or nuclear plant. And, sigh, there so very literally isn’t enough land on the planet to plant all those offsetting trees that airlines and fashion houses like to placate us with. There never was.

We need to get really, really honest about this, too.

Which is not to say some magical, resource-negligible, immediately installable invention categorically won’t spout from somewhere in the next year (or less), funded generously by an actual-non-narcissistic billionaire. But to pin hope on this feels, yes, like a massively dangerous distraction.

Then there’s the “Faustian bargain” we’ve made with air pollution. When I first learned about it, I had to marvel at the neatness of the irony.

Since the industrial age, aerosol pollutants, which reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, have kept the planet about 0.5-1C cooler than it should be. But as we’ve nobly begun to fix the air pollution debacle (which kills up to 10 million people each year) this faux cooling effect has fallen – and by around 30 percent since 2000. Some have said this could double warming in the next few years.

Could you even make this shit up?

I could delve into tipping points and feedback loops riddled with unknown unknowns that get disrupted as we – with so much human hope and good intention! - try to further unfuck our fuck-upery. But I think I’ve landed this point for now.

For months, as I developed my thoughts around all this, I took to ringing and emailing various renewable energy investor mates, insurance company CEOs in my LinkedIn connections and climate scientists I respected, and I put it to them, Are we going to make it? How are those deadlines going? As many of you here would know, in the climate space it is frowned upon to talk frankly of our collective reality without couching it heavily in lashings of (false or otherwise) hope “You’ll scare people into inaction!” is the fear3.4

They all told me they’d not been able to say it as such around the usual hope-attached traps, but since I was asking so directly, the picture was no longer hopeful. At all. One prominent climate scientist and author told me they could no longer do media interviews. “I can’t push hope just to protect people’s emotions,” she wrote to me. A friend in the energy market space told me he was avoiding many social occasions now. “It’s got too hard.”

So as I set out to write this book, I hit a very sticky bit. We’re at it right here now, together. I had to declare that I no longer have hope.

Seeing the words on the page, I’m aware they sit so very awkwardly between us. And when I first said them out loud I felt I was betraying something or someone. The first person I said it to was Dad. He went quiet and put on his disapproving grimace. Then hot tears formed in his eyes and he said, “but what about your nieces and nephews”.

I know, I said.

It breaks my heart to say it, to type it. I no longer have ‘hope’ For me, hope that we would achieve something herculean and life-bettering with our predicament was what got me up every morning. It diluted my cynicism. It was my emotional ballast. My hope was an expansive belief in a fundamental goodness that could be galvanised and serve as a north star for a complex, flawed but ultimately loving species.

While hope dangled, we rose.

As the awesome environmental activist and spiritualist Joanna Macy said on a podcast recently, “lack of hope causes people to doubt their patriotism. Hope has been identified as so basic to the American value system that if people have a failure in that, they see it as lacking in moral commitment.”.

I think in many ways, our capacity to hope signalled we were essentially good and would, in final washups, make good things happen. We ache for this goodness in ourselves and each other. We do.

I met the actor Liam Neeson while I was grappling with this. He had reached out while I was camping in a remote part of Western Australia with my brothers, via his son on Instagram. He liked my way of living, he’d told me. The fact I’d walked away from the rules. We became friends, talking regularly for hours about death, God, the point of it all. I acknowledge it’s a strange pairing, he and I. But I think strangenesses dial up when you walk away from the rules. They come find you.

One night I was talking Liam through this chapter. Like Dad, he got upset to hear me say that I didn’t have hope. So I clarified a few things, and heasked that I write them down for all of you here.

OK, I still, to be sure, live to a hopeful vibe. I get up every day buzzing with an “onwards” energy. I continue to think there is something positive to fight for, to reach for. But hope is no longer the destination.

I’m also just as committed as ever to the climate fight, for reasons we’ll get to.

Plus, I have so so much hope for a lot of other things where it’s healthy and helpful for me to hope for them. I have hope that humans will keep coming back to love. I have hope, or faith, in human’s desire to survive. I have hope that there are a lot of brave people out there and that the bulk of us – or at least enough of us - will rise to the challenges before us.

I have hope that what comes next will be meaningful and beautiful. And that we will be moved to where we have always needed to go.

However, the particular hope that we have hung so much on, the grandest of hopes - that we can “fix” things and continue our comfortable, growth-based existence on the planet - is over.

And this changes everything5.

I’m thinking just now, my breakup with hope is not unlike the drawn-out process of leaving a toxic relationship. For months, perhaps years, you try to explain away the tortured dynamic as a bug not a feature. You keep telling yourself things will change. You try even harder to find a way out of the disconnect. In hindsight, you see that you were in love with the other’s potential and not who they were right in front of you at the breakfast table as your nervous system jumped tracks. You also see that the delusion served you. By the time you break up, everything is all so ambiguous, implicating many versions of yourself, and you’re grieving so many things at once.

RELIEF

I’ll find a quote that sings to me to place here…open to ideas….
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When I put this idea of no longer having hope to you lot, you might recall that a very particular reaction emerged in the comments: Relief.

@Megg: “I find I can take a deep breath, it frees up all the energy I was using striving for hope, which I can now use to enjoy life and take in its preciousness.”

@Zoe: “I found myself doing a long exhale. I think hope has kept us confused - like little kids who know their parents are stressed but are saying everything's fine.”

@KarenEivers: “I now have permission to be scared. To think Faaaaaaaark. (It’s) a huge hug telling me I am not alone.”

Yes. Oh, goodness, yes.

With this bit, if any of you quoted don’t want your name/quote used, let me know!
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You see, we’ve all been hoping so hard for something, and telling all these hopeful stories to each other, but they no longer match the unfurling facts and the headlines that keep pouring in, and this has created a profound cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonances, the psychologists explain, tear at us.

We hope-full-y believed that if we voted in a progressive government we’d see change. But the new government got gridlocked by the system and approved more coal mines. We hoped all our friends and family would get the memo after another fire-ravaged summer. But they just consumed more and avoided the subject even more. It doesn’t make sense, we screamed out to the void and took to declaring that everyone was a head-in-the-sand moron.

As I was writing this, I received a news alert - a UN report has declared by 2030 the number of satellites orbiting the Earth could increase more than tenfold. As that happens, says the report, a collision becomes increasingly possible. This would create thousands of pieces of debris, which would trigger many more cascading collisions, resulting in all existing satellites being destroyed and making future space activities – and, presumably, the geopolitical stability of the world - impossible. Right on cue, the article came with the cheery rounder-outerer in the final paragraph, “but it’s not too late to act”.

Are they kidding?

How could any power on the planet enact a global treaty to stop sending satellites into space in less than five years6? Do they take us for fools? Are they fools? Is foolish cognitive buttressing all we have left?

Joanna Macy asks of us, “Do we cling to [hope] righteously because it is crucial, or because we favour the comfort of positivity?”

Humans can’t hold a lie or so much befuddlement in our being for long. We end up anxious, depressed and hating on the world and each other. Don’t, we.

Some of you might have experienced the same - when I talk about this kind of stuff, some people in my orbit (friends, colleagues etc) tell me they have hope because they have faith in humans, in our resilience, in our ability to find a way out of shit-awful scenarios. It’s true; humans have untold tenacity. But it has started to worry me that as these same people start to witness humans struggle to “find a way” to fix things, to cooperate and rise together, as we fail to cope with the scale, the competing interests, the complex intertwining factors, that they will lose this faith in humanity. Then what? I’m seeing it already. Humans are giving up on each other, turning their neighbours into enemies, because they’re unable to (we’re all unable to) live up to what we hoped for.

But when we quit the hopeful stories, or the “hopium” as the late reverend Michael Dowd called it, this cognitive dissonance is resolved. And we feel a profound - and very eerie - relief.

My friend Eleanor has been helping me get these first few chapters launched. In her notes, she wrote, “It’s a quiet, humble surrender, a waving of the flag at the end of our sad attempt to cheat the basic laws of nature”.

Nice.

All of which makes me think of the Stockdale Paradox.

James Stockdale was a POW for seven years during the Vietnam War, repeatedly tortured and made to believe he’d never make it out alive. He was one of the highest-ranking naval officers at the time and went on to become a vice-presidential candidate. After his release, Stockdale was asked which prisoners didn’t make it out7. “Oh, that’s easy,” he told the reporter. “The optimists.” Stockdale explained that certain men clung to the hope that they’d be out by Christmas, but then Christmas passed. Then they lived for Easter, and Easter passed. Eventually, these men who were hoping to hope their way out, “died of a broken heart”.

This is Precious

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