Both the partial collapses that are taking place already and the possible systemic collapses of the future are opportunities for transformation. We remain convinced that it is possible to understand, to speak and to live the catastrophes and the sufferings that they generate without giving up joy or the possibility of a future.
This book tells of our discoveries in the fields of disaster psychology but also of our encounters on the paths of ‘collapsosophy’. It is aimed at people who want to navigate this balance of light and dark, without giving up their clarity of vision or their sense of reality, but also without renouncing their sense of a future which may be joyful, and in any case is of this earth. Because the question asked by Bruno Latour is the question of our generation:
Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a place on the earth that we and our children can inhabit? Either we deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land, to come to earth. From now on, this is what divides us all, much more than our positions on the right or the left side of the political spectrum.33
In this book, we report on streams of thought that may be unfamiliar to many readers. We also make connections between areas that may at first seem to have nothing to do with each other. We are aware that this could upset some people. Reading these pages will ask of you a spirit of openness, curiosity and understanding. But this is the nature of a transdisciplinary enterprise (see chapter 4).
This attitude of openness also involves a mistrust of the taken-for-granted labels, clichés and caricatures that are used mainly to discredit: survivalist, snowflake, fascist, leftist, new age, mystic, etc. These labels should not prevent us from looking at the complexity (or the emptiness) that may be hidden behind them.
Treat this book as a visit to a huge wild vegetable garden. Feel free to walk around and pick up what you like, or to learn about what you do not know. There is colour and life, there are fruits ready to pick and connections which still can’t be seen. And like the Kogi Indians, fill two saddlebags. Fill the one on the right with what speaks to you and suits you; fill the one on the left with what you disapprove of or what seems irrelevant today, so that you can come back to it later.
In the first part of the book, we explore the impact that the coming disasters may have on our mental health, as well as the ways in which we can recover. How do we absorb this news and this understanding? How do we get used to living with it, over the coming decades? How should we announce it to those around us? Do hope and optimism still make sense?
In the second part, we explore three ways of changing our outlook on the world, so as to help us find meaning, or at least to step aside a little. Why and how can we change our relationship to science and knowledge? Why and how can we open ourselves up to other ways of seeing the world developed by other cultures which are less ‘thermo-industrial’? More generally, isn’t it time to change the stories we tell ourselves?
And in the third part, we enter more deeply into ‘collapsosophy’. We start by approaching the essential question of the connections which we shall need to weave with ourselves, between ourselves, and with other living beings. Then we open up to questions that give meaning to our time and to our lives: the process of growing up and ‘becoming an adult’, the male–female relationship, the return to the wild, and the ways in which we can go through all of this together.
The impetus of this book is to explore, beginning from the knowledge, experiences and intuitions which each person already has. It is to share the joy of learning further, to provoke moments of realization, to explore our shadows, to meet with people who take us out of our comfort zone, to begin a dialogue with trees, rivers and salamanders, to accompany each other through suffering and mourning, and to participate together in the emergence of what is going to happen.
Notes
1 1. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, ‘Beyond “dangerous” climate change: emission scenarios for a new world’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, 2011: 20–44.
2 2. Ben Chapman, ‘BP and Shell planning for catastrophic 5°C global warming despite publicly backing Paris climate agreement’, The Independent, 27 October 2017.
3 3. Henry Kendall (coordinator), ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’, Union of Concerned Scientists, 1992.
4 4. Michel Salomon (coordinator), ‘Scientific ecology: The Heidelberg appeal to Heads of States and Governments’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 17(4), 1992: 299–300. See also Stéphane Foucart, ‘L’appel d’Heidelberg, une initiative fumeuse’, Le Monde, 16 June 2012.
5 5. William J. Ripple et al., ‘World scientists’ warning to humanity: a second notice’, BioScience 67(12), 2017: 1026–8.
6 6. For an analysis of the phenomenon of ‘gated communities’ in relation to the collapse, see Renaud Duterme, De quoi l’effondrement est-il le nom? La fragmentation du monde (Paris: Les Éditions Utopia, 2016).
7 7. ‘Millionaire migration in 2015’, New World Wealth, March 2016.
8 8. Alec Hogg, ‘As inequality soars, the nervous super rich are already planning their escapes’, The Guardian, 24 January 2015.
9 9. Evan Osnos, ‘Doomsday prep for the super-rich’, The New Yorker, 23 January 2017; Yarra Elmasry, ‘The super-rich are buying luxury apocalypse-safe bunkers for protection against natural disasters and nuclear attack’, The Independent, 10 July 2017; Emmanuèle Peyret and Coralie Schaub, ‘Fin du monde: les survivalistes à bunker ouvert’, Libération, 23 March 2018.
10 10. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). Translation by Catherine Porter from Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique (Paris: La Découverte, 2017).
11 11. For example, John Wiseman, The SAS Survival Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere, 3rd edn (New York: HarperCollins, 2014); Bob Arnot and Mark Cohen, Your Survival: The Complete Resource for Disaster Planning and Recovery (Hobart, NY: Hatherleigh Press, 2007); Jim Cobb, Prepper’s Long-Term Survival Guide (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2014).
12 12. Bertrand Vidal, Les Représentations collectives de l’événement-catastrophe. Étude sociologique sur les peurs contemporaines, Thèse de doctorat en sociologie, université Montpellier 3, 2012, p. 499.
13 13. Abraham H. Maslow, ‘A theory of human motivation’, Psychological Review 50, 1943: 370–96. This somewhat simplistic theory is used in most business schools.
14 14. Ruth Stégassy, ‘Devenir autonome. Entretien avec Kim Pasche’, broadcast by Terre à Terre, France Culture, 5 September 2015, https://bit.ly/2LU59dG. Developed in Frederika Van Ingen, Sagesses d’ailleurs pour vivre aujourd’hui (Paris: Les Arènes, 2016), p. 37.
15 15. Stégassy, ‘Devenir autonome. Entretien avec Kim Pasche’.
16 16. There are other theories which take account of the complex relations between different fundamental needs. See, for example, that of the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, Development and Human Needs (New York: The Apex Press, 1992).
17 17. Carolyn Baker, Collapsing Consciously (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013), p. 13.
18 18. Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). Translation by Andrew Brown from Comment tout peut s’effondrer. Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes (Paris: Le Seuil, 2015).
19 19. See Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2010); Carolyn Baker, Sacred Demise (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009); Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How To Face the Mess We’re