Are We Doomed?

On fear, faith, and action in the midst of terrible destruction.

A no trespassing sign marks the boundary of a tar sands mining operation in Utah, 2014. Photo by the author.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass.

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Recently I shared my feelings of despair and grief over what is being done to the natural world with a friend. He responded in the best possible way: “Those feelings are important,” he said, “and you shouldn’t suppress them.”

Environmentalists, like all people today, are often pressured to be positive, to have solutions, and to look on the bright side. Barbara Ehrenreich, diagnosed with breast cancer, came face to face with this tendency, which she calls a disturbing ideological force in American culture. It “encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate,” she writes.

We can all understand the desire to be positive. Wallowing in negative emotions can become an addiction that leads nowhere except into a self-destructive spiral. The intersection of ecological collapse, stressful and alienating modern life, and mental illnesses — many of them “diseases of civilization” — is a grim place.

But for others, relentless positivity in spite of dire circumstances is just as much of an unhealthy coping mechanism, an escape from reality. The zeitgeist of our time is grim. We are living the spiraling endgame of industrial civilization: a senescent empire crumbling under the weight of its own moral corruption and foolish quest for eternal growth as the ecological foundations of life itself teeter on the brink.

On the whole, the oceans are dying. Ninety percent of large fish are gone — and that data comes from a twenty-year-old study. Coral reefs are collapsing. Human activity is driving a mass extinction event; conservation biologists estimate that as many as 150 species are lost each day.

Emissions are climbing. Pollution is increasing. Population is rising. Meanwhile, economic inequality is at it’s highest level ever. The rich grow ever richer as the poor work to the bone, grow sick, and die. Meanwhile, popular culture glorifies technology and wealth. We live in a culture ruled by patho-adolescents ruled by sociopaths.

And yet.

I choose to honestly look at the horrors of ecological collapse and to willingly feel the pain of living in this breaking world, knowing full well that it harms me, since I am part of the land and the land is part of me.

Yes, it hurts.

But to turn away — to lie to myself, to bury the discomfort — is its own form of harm. So, in spite of all that is wrong, I make a conscious choice to find beauty and motivation to fight.

Finding grace in the midst of terrible destruction is its own form of resistance.

And when I carve out a fortress of sanity for my own soul, I help provide a bastion for others to flock to, just as I’ve had to lean on others at times.

As

Chris Hedges

writes in his piece The Cost of Resistance:

Revolution is not, ultimately, a political calculation. It is a moral one. It is grounded in a vision of another world, another way of being. It is driven, in the end, by a moral imperative, especially since many of those who begin a revolution do not survive to see its fulfillment. Revolutionaries know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

This abiding joy and warmth fuels me. Perhaps that’s unusual for a radical, but the righteous anger you’ve probably seen me express in articles or videos is love, expressing itself.

This is why I do not accept the idea that “we are doomed.” The crises we face are unimaginable in scope and apocalyptic in impact. It is irrefutable that the future is almost certain to be grim as ecological collapse intensifies, warlords and despots rise, and refugees flee rising seas and violence.

And yet, even in the worst moments, resistance is where we find the spark of human dignity. It lives on when we are kind to one another. When we share amidst scarcity. When we stand up for justice even when victory appears impossible.

Three good reasons the future matters: my nephews, and Cooper's Hawks. Photos by the author.

It is a common misunderstanding that, in war, one strives to kill every last one of the enemy. But, as the strategist Carl Von Clausewitz reminds us, the true objective in a war is to destroy the opponents will to continue fighting. The dominant culture that we live in today, defined by capitalism, individualism, and greed, inculcates in us a sense of learned helplessness.

Creating compliant populations is essential to all colonial systems.

As Stephen Cope writes of colonial India in his The Dharma in Difficult Times:

“As he traveled, Gandhi became increasingly upset, and he alternated between despair and anger. What enraged him most, according to his own account, was not just the poverty but the lethargy and despair that he encountered everywhere. He felt deeply the plight of a colonized people, many of whom had given up—had completely surrendered to increasingly heavy-handed British rule. Had his people forgotten the spiritual genius of their ancient culture? Everywhere he went, Gandhi found a lack of self-esteem, of basic cleanliness, of pride of workmanship, and of place. He found a people sunk into a sense of helplessness. This is what colonialism does to the colonized, of course. It engenders a lack of self-respect. A lack of what we would today call ‘agency.’”

Our world today, ostensibly “post-colonial,” has simply evolved. Our minds are colonized through relentless social media and apps. Our privacy is colonized as every data point of our lives is privatized and sold. Our communities are colonized by vampiric landlords and property managers. And our governments are colonized by lobbyists, billionaires, and transnational corporations. It’s no wonder we feel doomed.

This is something that we need to overcome. When we become apathetic, when we say “there is nothing that can be done,” we are surrendering. I, for one, do not mean to surrender until ever last tree, every last fish, and every last human being is dead. As long as there is wildness and beauty in this world, there is something worth fighting for—and there is no time to waste wallowing in how bad things are.

It is ironic to me that many doomers have a roof over their head, food, education, voting rights, the ability to organize in their communities, and clean water. For those of who have these privileges, there is much that we can do. And yet, some do not take action. In our time, the doomer and the consumer exist side-by-side, both allowing the status quo to continue, one in apparent blissful ignorance, the other in morose despair. Both attitudes facilitate inaction, isolation, and powerlessness. They parallel each other, neither considering that an alternative pole is possible: one that sets itself in conscious political opposition to the dominant forces destroying life on our precious planet.

There is a world beyond hope.

I no longer hope that we will be able to reverse global warming in my lifetime, or that capitalism will fall in the short term. I no longer believe there is a magical turning just around the corner. But I am equally certain that capitalism will eventually fall, and the climate will eventually stabilize (albeit in geologic time). I am certain that if humans are to survive, we must regain our sense of biocentrism — our affinity for the living world of which we are a part. I am certain that our actions matter; that each tree and meadow protected today could preserve key genetics for the coming climate bottlenecks; that our intelligent, determined effort can shift the course of events — even if only in small ways.

As Paulo Friere has written, “The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naïveté, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism.” Yet, he continues, “I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative… the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion.”

So, what can we do? We can have faith. We can act. We can work to protect the future no matter how much hope there is. Often, we will lose. I have much experience with this. But as I often say: the only way to guarantee failure is to never even try. If we defeat ourselves in our own minds by believing that we have no chance, and we fail to take action — this is the only way to guarantee that we are doomed.

So, today I’d like to express my love and appreciation for those who take action — or who will. Action is beautiful. It is the antidote to despair. The first step is thinking. Then, our thoughts become words. Our words can become deeds. And deeds can transform the world.

If you would like to hear more about this subject, you can listen to an interview I did with Michael Dowd — may he rest in peace — on his “Post Doom” podcast back in 2020. While much in my life has changed since that time, the content is relevant to this topic.