Beyond collapse: Carrying stories of care
Collapse is an overwhelming moment in life, but only one thread of a larger story.
Like most people I have stories of collapse. Times when I have crumpled and crashed, overcome physically, emotionally or both. Like the time I collapsed one night on the kitchen floor, my awareness and control obliterated by a fever. Coming to, gazing at the ceiling, waiting for the strength to crawl to my bed. This is what I think of when I hear the word collapse: being powerless and prone. Which is why I feel uneasy that collapse is fast becoming a buzz word as a description of the times we are entering into or already inhabit, depending on where we live on Mother Earth, or in our minds and hearts.
My questioning of collapse terminology is not because I deny the likelihood of systems crashing as climate upheaval and biodiversity losses escalate. Collapse with its meaning of falling abruptly and completely is a very real thing in both the biological and medical world. The possibility and dangers of human created systems collapsing such as the electricity grid or transport systems is also very real. So I get that collapse is a relevant, necessary and illuminating word for our times. But what troubles me is that collapse is fast morphing into the story of our times, a bleak cultural narrative of epic proportions, which lands in the body with an overwhelming thud. And if we narrow our gaze to just that moment, we may well fall to the floor and stay there, without a guiding story when we need it most.
I have long been on the lookout for guiding myths and names for this era. Something which encompasses crisis and challenge, constraints and creativity, uncertainties and possibilities. Many that are proposed often start with the word great, like Joanna Macy’s flipsided terms of The Great Unravelling/ The Great Turning or Amitav Ghosh’s naming of The Great Derangement. They all have important psectives too offer, but for me ‘Greats’ grate a little, risking hubris when we most need humility. This too is my problem with the proposed naming of our current geologic era as the Anthropocene. Yes, human activity markers from extractive cultures are showing up in the geologic record but will the action of Anthropos really determine this era? or will it be the story of the living world’s response to the excesses of modernity? Does this naming take us beyond a control/collapse binary? Does it offer wise Earth-centric counsel when we most need it? Not for me.
Modernity and empire love the epic and heroic, but my love is for humble stories that invite self-reflection while bowing respectfully to Earth as life giver and taker. Episodic tales which stay close to the bones of life through times of loss and learning. Such earthy tales provide an antidote for the dysfunctional nature of modern technologies and futuristic fantasies cooked up within an immature worldview imbued with greed, desire, denial and hubris. Grappling with these emotions have long been the subject of Earth-centric myths and folktales speaking of the wisdom and necessity of restraint, respect, relationship, reciprocity and renewal in life.
When we look at modernity as a cultural myth, we can see how unmoored it is in its beliefs of creating infinite growth in a world where the human desires of the rich will always trump (pun fully intended) ecological realities. I could go on but there are plenty of critiques you can read elsewhere of the madness and tragedies of modernity, if you are not already feeling it your bones.
Modernity is hyper-focused on boundless ascent which is why collapse is emerging so powerfully from its long and deep shadows. But to find our way now, we need stories which can move us beyond a powerless witnessing of the chaotic rise and fall of Empires towards wise action and grounded hope.
A number of stories have held me over my two decades of climate engagement, many of them ancient myths as I write about in my book Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves [1]. But today I want to talk to you about a story that has come to me more recently through the gift of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry. This tiny book is packed with stories which acknowledge the dangers and losses of our times while showing us how we can create communities and cultures that care for all beings through good times and bad.
Kimmerer’s stories re-mind us of Indigenous traditions of Honourable Harvests, community gifting and support, and a deep knowledge of ecosystems. Drawing on both her Potawatomi culture and her training as a botanist, she re-imagines our world through a lens of abundance not scarcity, gratitude not fear. She writes: “Recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more”. Good medicine for planet and soul.
Kimmerer speaks of the energy flow of the living world where “materials move through ecosystems in a circular economy and are constantly transformed. Abundance is created by recycling, by reciprocity.” Our living world’s circular economy has sustained and furthered life for 4 billion years while capitalist economics have wreaked global havoc in a bare few centuries. For Kimmerer the wisest way forward is clear, although far from certain.
What heartens Kimmerer, and me, is recognising the creative possibilities that can emerge when dysfunctional systems are disturbed or even collapse. For it is in times of major breakdown or loss that cycles of regeneration kick in most powerful. Old growth succumbs to new growth. What is disastrous in the short term, like a pioneer species colonising a devastated forest, can set the scene for the emergence of a more robust ecosystem ahead.
Kimmerer describes how when a colonising species grows fast, it inevitably limits itself through lack of biodiversity and resources, and the stress of rampant competition. What happens next is that the colonising species collapses under the constraints of its own dysfunctionality. This then creates an opening for slower growth and more diversity, grounded in co-operative relations which nurture reciprocity and replenishment. The ecosystem strengthens and matures over time through the formation of communities and synergies between multiple life forms.
This story of ecological succession provides more than an analogy for these times. Human beings are ecosystemic beings. Whatever the disturbances and collapses that are occurring or will occur in our communities and planet, we are programmed as biological creatures to respond to and evolve in favour of the continuation of life.
The choice we have now is to work with or against this. As breakdown follows rampant growth, we can be led by cultures and knowledges which have the wisdom and experience to encourage what grows and sustains life, while restraining behaviours that deplete it.
Collapse is a high drama moment in the story of life on Earth, but it is only one thread of the narrative. Kimmerer is collapse aware but not collapse focused. She writes:
Succession relies in part on incremental change, the slow, steady replacement of that which does not serve ecological flourishing with new communities. But it also relies on disturbance, on disruption of the status quo in order to let new species emerge and flower. Some massive disturbances are destructive, and recovery from them may not be possible. Other disturbances, of the right scale and type, create renewal and diversity.
Our collective work now is to soften the disturbances on our doorsteps so that we can become allies in nurturing life’s restoration through incremental change, adaptation, and succession.
As disruptions and destructions reach our communities in all manner of ways, acts of kindness and generosity are already challenging modernity’s stories of ‘never enough’ and ‘you’re on your own’. Often led by those on the margins, we are re-membering how to pool resources and gather for action and care as we tend to losses, connections, breakthroughs, emergencies and emergence. It seems to me that no one word is sufficient to describe this devolving and evolving process we are now in. What we need more than a word or a phrase are stories bearing ancient roots and seeds of possibility for the future.
What do you feel about this? I would love to hear from you about what stories are guiding, sustaining and carrying you into caring action right now.
So what’s your relationship to hope in these times? My last post, ‘Hope: the question I am most often asked’ has been integrated into a scrapbook on Hope by
. It’s a tender, mindful interweaving of her thoughts with the writings of , myself and others. Catriona writes “In what became an unintended research deep-dive, I realised that people who grapple with hope are not faint-hearted.” Perfect reading for Easter.[1] One story I have written about a number of times in relation to the climate and ecological crisis is the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and Erishkegal, a myth of descent into the Underworld which predates the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. To explore its resonances, you can head to my book, Climate Crisis and Consciousness which I offer as a free pdf to all my subscribers (all you need to do is message me with your email).
I like your exploration, Sally. The idea of fostering connection as the most important thing is changing my daily life. Instead of going to the store to buy food. Buying food at the store becomes an opportunity to connect: with people, with food, with stories (of the food), with myself.
Also I’m very curious about where I can see beauty energy and nourishment in decay and death of … landscapes, ideas, identities, hopes and dreams. Feels as if we’re unbalanced. Only valuing creation and growth. Not wanting to acquiesce to the full cycle.
Unchecked growth - that’s how cancer operates.
Are we overlooking the sacred nature of dissolution? Honouring endings allows new beginnings. Resisting them creates suffering.
I saw some diseased leaves on a tree yesterday and noticed my immediate reaction of concern. The assumption that this is wrong. I paused and looked and looked until I began to see beauty in the pattern of the disease on the leaf.
I wonder if we aren’t being invited to go beyond the mind’s insistent opinions of right and wrong, good and bad, into a more direct communion with the ebb and flow of life. The unchecked activity of the mind drives separation.
I like your idea to find humility and small stories. Being with decay and dying in loving presence, what might we come to understand, to see?
In emergency,
loss, learn enoughness, emerge.
Earth-centric counsel.