This book is a collection of essays written over the last thirty years and only recently have they wanted to come out of the writer’s closet. Some are pretty much in their raw state, still stunned by the daylight, others have been scrubbed up a bit for polite company. They are neither a work of scholarship nor are they twittery and tabloid. Hopefully I have found a middle way that reflects my own voice.
Over the years the emergent theme has not been the collective narcissism of “the end of the human race” (which would solve the problem in one swell foop) but something more difficult to think about—the death of the Earth itself.
In Part I: A Few Rough Beasts I talk, amongst other things, about indigenous consciousness; ancient and modern oracles that foresaw the coming troubles; the metastatic growth of growth; and the psychotic break with planetary reality of the USA and global culture.
In Part II: All the Rough Beasts (due in 2025) I discuss indigenous knowledge about the death of the Earth; ailments related to Earth changes; the revenge of matter; the subjectivity of science; the Earth as the ancestor of the Self; Jung’s Answer to Job; monotheism as a holocaust for the Earth; and finally some suggestions and remedies, perhaps.
The planned Preface ended up being way too long and it pushed and bullied its way to the head of the queue and wanted to be promoted to First Chapter. But no, that would have completely messed up the pagination and the index had already been done. Heroically, I stood my ground and told it to stay in its lane. But I did offer the consolation of a fancy title, What’s This All About? It seemed to settle down after that.
To think the unthinkable allows what does not have a home to find a home. Then it will not appear in matter the same way as it might have done. Perhaps.
It may be that this planet will die, is dying or has died—but we don’t know it yet. She may right herself without help or interference from us. I hope so. Or if her life is in danger she will let her children die without sentiment so that she may live. However, all possible futures may not be open, we may have gone past a tipping point, and there may not be enough time. God, Goodall and Attenborough won’t save us. So I ask the reader to welcome, as an unknown guest, the immigrant possibility that the Earth will die. (But that’s NEGATIVE THINKING you might say! I say, OK, no need to shout, if your positive thinking works so well, how come we’re in this mess? Go on, give it a try). Maybe we can prevent it, forestall it, or make suitable funeral arrangements.
The only tragedy would be to not see it coming and get run over like a possum in the headlights. For those who live in remote places like the northern hemisphere, a possum is a nocturnal marsupial, about the size of a raccoon, that somehow crossed the Tasman from Australia and has taken up residence in the New Zealand bush. About 30 million of them. They breed like, er, possums, kill the indigenous forests, and enjoy standing, hypnotised, on the white line at night. Marsupial roadkill.
Humans have exhausted the gifts that the Earth provides. A whole 1.7 planet’s worth. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. The great dying will gather pace until we hit rock bottom. Our grandchildren’s children will be bereft, left only with dust and diesel.
The trees have nearly given up. The animals have done what they can. 9/11, the GFC and Covid have tried their best to warn us. Monotheism has abandoned the earth for heavenly rewards. Indigenous peoples are now only 5% of the world’s population. 55% of the world’s population lives in cities. And our relationship with beauty has been lost.
There are mountains and oceans of evidence about the perilous state of the planet. There’s no need for more and we must ask, “What forces compel us to continue to deny the obvious?”—other than the obvious political and financial ones. We think we have time. Maybe we don’t. So let’s begin to make space within ourselves to entertain the thought that this planet of infinite beauty may die. Now stand back and watch the reactions, your own and others, to such a notion. Then read on. If all this sounds too weighty and depressing, please read the chapters on hope and despair, or you could just think about the whole thing as a “thought-experiment”. Failing that, let your grandchildren handle it.
It’s Latin for the death of the Earth. Is the Earth dying? Maybe. Is it already dead? Don’t know. Ecological activism, reducing waste, and reports on climate change are all fiddling around the edges, slant ways of talking about what cannot be said. We are killing the being that gives us life and in twenty, fifty, a hundred or two hundred years this planet may no longer be able to support life. But there is little space in the collective to think the unthinkable. The forces against—religious, financial, political, and psychological—are legion.
So these scribblings are about the spiritual and historical ancestors of this profound contempt for matter, the fallacy of optimism, and the psychological children (grief, nostalgia, melancholy, depression, suicide, and loss of memory) that have been born from this chronic, monotheistic, and possibly terminal, illness.
A dose of robust and thoughtful pessimism is needed, not because it is the “truth” or more “right” but to compensate the mindless optimism that infects the collective. With optimism being so widespread (even Jane Goodall says there’s still time) it begs a swing to the opposite. I have no skin in this game—I would be glad if the Earth survived. But no-one seems to be thoughtful about the possibility that she will not. In the great democracy of ideas this one is an unwanted immigrant, with the exception of some science fiction writing and apocalyptic movies. (It seems that Hollywood, perversely, dreams for the collective). In other words, the possibility of her death has gone all denied, dissociated and unconscious.
Oh, they cry, he’s a pessimist! An acquaintance once said to me, “You’re a pessimist, you’re spewing doom and dread”. I thanked them for the compliment. It’s rubbish, they say! All this religiose talk about the end of the world. The apocalypse. The end is nigh. Been shouted about for 2000 years and hasn’t happened yet! But these opinions betray the psychology of those who hold them. The outward-looking conquistadors, eyes on the horizon of possibility, manifest destiny, hey-guys-let’s-go-to-Mars, anything-is-possible folks—all these have reached their limit but don’t know it yet. They will collapse into smallness—a land they never knew existed. We live on a finite planet.
I have no scientific evidence, if that’s what you might be looking for, for the notion that the Earth will die. On the other hand, there is no evidence that she will survive our new-kid-on-the-block occupation. And by the time any such scientific evidence arrives it will be stating the obvious and past its useful date. But I do know where the arrow is pointing. I also know that our collective short-sightedess, from denial or ignorance, only sees as far as climate change. The eye-opener might be when Phoenix and Las Vegas become unliveable.
Notwithstanding the forces and interests against such, I suppose if billions worked together then the ship could be turned around. But that degree of collective cooperation flies in the face of history or, if it does occur by force of circumstance, it may too little, too late. In the meantime there is a blank space, open country, a vacuum, that is all the more influential by its absence, that has been uninhabited by thought or imagination. This book might fill that terra nullius that was so eagerly explored 300 years ago. Now, not so eager but reluctant, unwilling, or “We can’t afford it”.
At some point the decline, long past reversible, will become obvious to collective consciousness. It will rise to the surface and become fast food at your favourite media restaurant. The deniers and sceptics and diggers and drillers will have passed away and we will think: “How did it to come to this?” Heroic optimism will not save the day and the keening and wailing will begin. This planet may no longer give life or hold life.
So there you have it. I have set the tone, stated my thesis, summarised the book, and got the possum off the road. Along the way I shall try my best to sneer at the starry-eyed demon of optimism, evade the monster of denial, drown unsuspecting readers in melancholy, gnaw at the roots of monotheism, and generally try to paint a picture of the mess we’re in. What follows is a long and winding, perhaps long-winded, riff on that sentence. None of this will kill you.
The tendrils of possibility, revolution, and disruption creep in from the outside the zeitgeist, never from the inside. New possibilities show up as an outlier, a group or party or movement that appears to drive social change. It’s often overly chuffed with itself and devoted to X or Y but really it’s an emerging archetype whose time has come and having its way with us (more on those later). The friction of the revolution always goes for the most vulnerable and flammable first—those with strong opinions and passionate views about everything; those who are as-yet unformed (adolescents and young adults); and those who are beholden to the collective (most of us).
This book will have little to say about climate change, environmental action, or sustainability. These matters are more suited for a final chapter and we haven’t reached the first chapter yet. So please do not assume I have a solution. The irritable reaching after fact and reason would interrupt a necessary suffering, a realisation of the full weight of our destructiveness. Then and only then might the collective turn to what it knows little of. The repair of the damage, if there will be such a thing, will have its own will and intention and needs to come in its own time.
If you are looking for solutions to the mess we are in—drop the book right now, step away and put your hands in the air! You are the kind of reader who will end up frustrated, full of opinions, and feel you have wasted your time and money. Yes, but what are we going to DO!, you say. If you are willing to suspend the urge to heroic action for just a while then read on at your own risk. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
I don’t care if what I am saying is true or not. The possible future I’m describing may come to pass or not. But read on anyway. I don’t have much to lose. I am not an academic—I have no reputation to uphold, no papers to publish. I am at a late stage of my professional career so I have no credibility to protect. And I like to think that I don’t have any personal, political or religious beliefs that are really worth defending.
An Earth that is alive and fertile and healthy is not the subject of this book. She has been doing that for five billion years without our help, thank you. Saviours, meh! She doesn’t need them. A living future cannot be materialised until we feel the full weight of the condition we are in. Until that happens any assertion of hope and optimism remains false and insubstantial. We want a quick solution, cognitive-lite without the weight of experience, we want to sneak around the grief, the pain, the terrible choices, the humiliation, and the downsizing. But we may have overshot the tipping point and gone already past the point of no return. Even the best of ancient knowledge may not be able to save us.
Jung’s work has been invaluable in helping me sketch the arc of this book. But his scope was Gnostic and alchemical, limited mostly to the last 2000 years, and he held (in part) a primitive view of “primitive” peoples. In the tradition of the Enlightenment and scientific progress—and he was frequently at pains to be scientific—he said that culture evolved from less differentiated to more differentiated, from less consciously human to more consciously human. As we shall see, alongside our apparent ascension to bigger and better things over the last, oh let’s say, ten thousand years, there has been a complementary descension, a loss of consciousness, a gradual onset of spiritual dementia—a great forgetting about our place in the Great Circle of Life.
I have no idea if what I write is prediction, prophecy, fantasy, phantasy, or projection. I’d be happy with any of those. But there’s enough hard evidence for me to flatten my understanding into words, pull out the bath plug, and release it into the wild. I’ll talk about big things so please allow lots of slack for hyperbole, exaggeration, drama and the like. The problem is big enough such that it cannot be overstated. So there is lots of room for inflation.
The excesses of humankind are the cause of this great dying. We are a life form that has removed itself more than four paces from the community of life around us. We have fallen out of the Garden of Eden. There are two possible reactions to this state of affairs: The first is to ignore it, dismiss it, argue against it, or refuse to be aware of it. The second is to over-identify with it, to take it all-of-a-serious on one’s shoulders and start a protest movement. This position is as arrogant as the first. It breeds all kinds of -isms, paint-throwing, lab-bombing, tree-hugging, cow-cuddling, marching, de-platforming, cancellation, direct action, and coercion-by-principles. Both reactions are unhelpful.
These two themes—bigness, giantism, expansion, inflation, growth, smugness, and denial on the one hand, and guilt, over-responsibility, resentment, and opposition on the other—are not obviously related but they graze in the same paddock. They form the central theme of this book around which the rest twists and spirals.
Up until now, those who know better than I have softly and consistently discouraged the release of this book, repeatedly saying it’s not time yet. But the pace has quickened and now it is time.
So I write, tentatively, but with sufficient desire to feel it's worth the effort, about the coming catastrophe that is already here. The apocalypse, demise, disaster, collapse, crisis—call it as you wish—which means that this planet we live on, that has sheltered us, that has given us life and death and beauty, may die.
My life has led me to walk two different but parallel paths over the years—psychotherapy and its overly scientific cousin, clinical psychology; and work with indigenous elders and medicine people. I continue to be deeply grateful for the presence of those who do not wish to be named.
Michael Owen
Tauranga and Maenam