In a week when Planetary Living Treasure David Attenborough turned 100 and Australian and UK electors turned science deniers into rock stars, I got lost in a book about our new age of extinction and the collapse of global civilisation. Such is life in these turbulent times.
Members of our species, and our species alone, know that one day they will die. We celebrate that special knowledge on birthdays, our countdown to that inevitable end. My week started with a wonderful, cinematic 80th birthday party for Tony, who I knew at school, so the two of us are more or less in the same place on our life’s journey.
My sense of death has evolved slowly. When my grandfather died my mother told me and my twin sister, aged five, that he’d gone to sleep and wouldn’t wake up. We knew he was old and sick, but even so we felt wonder, even awe, in this moment. More shocking were the deaths of a classmate from cancer and of a high-school teacher and his wife in a car accident.
It still startles me a little to hear of a death of someone familiar, but while I can still be shaken by any violence or distress that might accompany death, the dying part no longer bothers me. At my age – and I’m sure this applies to many adults reading this – death has lost its shock factor.
Death on a planetary scale is the subject of a new book by Australian author Sarah Wilson, titled I Eat the Stars. “Sometimes as an antidote/to fear of death/I eat the stars” were lines of a poem by a brilliant young Canadian astronomer, Rebecca Elson (1960-1999), written after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Says Wilson, we were told over decades, rightly, that there was hope if we acted to stop emissions immediately, but we didn’t act immediately so hope is off the table. The collapse now underway is unstoppable. All we can do is allow it to happen and put our minds to the aftermath.
Becoming collapse-aware is not “doomist”, she writes. Collapse isn’t some fringe conspiracy theory but a phenomenon tracked in universities and institutes around the world. If you think things are this bad, “you’re not alone and you are not imagining things.”
Having contemplated at length, over many years, the things that Wilson is concerned about, and having previously said that that the war against warming is lost, I should have been prepared for this book, but I wasn’t.
Wilson’s insights into our awful predicament are both mind-blowing and empowering. Her book’s subtitle – How to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world – is a hint of this.
Our individual deaths are not the only ones we as humans need to contemplate, says Wilson. Humanity itself – “the grand experiment that is the human endeavour” is facing an existential crisis brought on by climate change and other excesses of our industrial economies. Thinking about this bereavement, writes Wilson, “I feel my heart splinter.”
Wilson points to “a third death in play in a collapsing world… the death of the ‘old normal’ – all those structures, assumptions and mindsets that make up our postindustrial civilisation… We are now at the structural limits to the growth that it relies on. And we… literally can’t afford to keep it going.”
Past hegemonies like the Roman and Mayan empires and the Qing dynasty, says Wilson, lasted 250 to 300 years. For over half a century we’ve been warned that the complex civilisation we’ve grown up with is now close to its end – about 270 years after its inception at the start of the industrial age. Except that this civilisation is global.
Wilson rejects talk of hope, a word often used by scientists and commentators wanting to reassure people. We need truth, not hope, she says. Or as Cameron, one of her online correspondents, put it, “I wouldn’t want my doctor to keep a terminal diagnosis from me. I’d rather know what is going on, how long I’ve got, so I can prioritise my life.”
Beyond truth, we need something else, revealed most clearly in times of crisis. The powers of love and kindness are most keenly felt when we’re confronted with our insignificance in the scheme of things. “We get stuck with the electrifying truth,” says Wilson: “I don’t matter, but in my stead all that is eternal does.”
The truths in this book are confronting, but they’re also liberating. Keenly aware of readers’ vulnerabilities, Wilson leaves us not cringing in fear but strengthened in the knowledge that we’re not alone.
Wilson writes about what’s really happening, while the world of One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage is a fantasyland. That’s humanity. Messy.