Indicators of Ecological Collapse

A detailed accounting of the facts of the polycrisis

Biodiversity collapse in real time: a license plate covered in hundreds of dead insects. I don’t know who this car belongs to; I stumbled across it in a parking lot this summer. Brutal. Photo by the author.

Hi everyone,

This is a draft that’s exclusively for paid subscribers (don’t worry free subscribers, I’ll publish this for everyone in coming months). It’s based on a document that I helped to create going on 20 years ago for a small non-profit. The data in that original document (I’ll attach it as a PDF at the bottom for those who are interested) is now outdated.

This re-worked version is, in one form, planned for a section of a forthcoming document I’m working on with CELDF (on that note, I just published a fantastic interview with Aashis Joshi on the CELDF Truth and Reckoning podcast, so head over there and check that out. It was so good I’ll probably repost it here, too).

Despite how difficult it is to both write and read something like this — a semi-comprehensive catalog of our ecological crisis, aka just how screwed we really are — it’s even harder to be ignorant. Knowledge isn’t power, but it sure helps. As long as it doesn’t paralyze you.

But this isn’t a time to stick your head in the sand. The point of this document is to present the unadorned facts, directly and without equivocation. Gather your courage. Fuck ignorance. Adult knowledge is required in order to understand what’s happening and formulate effective action to change the future. Since this is a draft, feel free to give feedback in the comments.

And if you’re new here, this is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts - like this one. I can’t do this work to the extent that I do without support from readers, so thank you!