Perhaps there’s a better way of thinking about Collapse and Renewal.
Current events can be seen through very different lenses.
"Catastrophe is in the air. Days ago, the largest peer-reviewed process of all time confirmed that we are in the midst of the greatest planetary crisis we’ve faced since we came down from the trees. July was the hottest month ever recorded; the Earth is hotter than it has been at any moment since the beginning of the last Ice Age. Heat waves settle across entire continents, floods rip through Germany, China and Japan, drought stalks Myanmar, Venezuela and Mali, wildfires explode across the Pacific Northwest, the Mediterranean and Siberia. Our scientists tell us humanity is unequivocally responsible for these events. 'In the past, we’ve had to make that statement more hesitantly. Now it’s a statement of fact.'”
"This is the story of collapse. It’s the oldest one in the book, and we are all intimately familiar with its lurid details. It’s on the front page of every newspaper and at the top of all of our feeds. You can tune it out or turn it off, but you cannot ignore it."
"And there is anther story, the story of renewal.
"That IPCC report makes grim reading yes, but there are also reasons for hope. A decade ago the world was on track for a particularly terrifying climate future. China was building a new coal plant every three days and global emissions were increasing at a rate of 3% per year. Ten years later, we’re in a very different place. Clean energy is now definitively cheaper than dirty energy, making climate change a solvable problem by expanding the universe of the possible. In the past, nations faced an impossible trade off between climate disaster or material impoverishment. Today, thanks to the efforts of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, that trade off no longer exists."
"We’ve begun fixing the problem. The world has produced more electricity from clean energy — solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear — than from coal in the past two years. 32 countries have absolutely decoupled their emissions from economic growth, and global emissions will start falling this decade as the energy revolution takes hold. Is it enough? Not yet, but the darkest climate futures of a decade ago are no longer in play. With continued effort it’s possible to lower the curves even more. It will take heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation and visionary commitment. It will mean making profound changes in our societies, economies, our ways of doing things. The good news? We know how to do it."
"Perhaps there’s a better way of thinking about Collapse and Renewal.
"Instead of expecting them to follow each other in sequence, like they do in our stories, what if we consider them as things that happen in parallel? In making sense of the world, what if we give up trying to figure out whether we’re in the upswing or the downswing of history and instead, make peace with the idea that we’re in the middle of both — the long-awaited fall from grace and the journey to the promised land.
"This idea, of a ‘Great Turning’ existing side by side with a great collapse, is one we first came across in the work of ecological philosopher, Joanna Macy, and it’s become one of the cornerstones of our worldview. It accepts that the signals for disaster are everywhere we look, and so are endless examples of human progress, environmental stewardship, ecological restoration and extraordinary acts of kindness, all densely entwined and far too complex to resolve into a simple three act structure."
This is an important and ultimately very hopeful article. Living is never about collapse or renewal. It is always about both.