2040

I’m terrified.

This is not an easy thing to admit to myself or to share outwardly. I’m terrified of what is happening in our world, and how little we seem to care, or if we do care how little we seem to be able to do about it. Daily I am seeing scientific reports and projections of just how soon environmental or societal collapse, or both, will occur. Possibly by 2040.

Twenty. Forty.

Nineteen years.

I will be 60. My parents will be 90 or dead. The newborns of my friends will be finishing high school, assuming school is still something that exists.

2040 is the date that was predicted for the end of civilization by an MIT study in 1972. Recent analysis shows we are right on schedule. For the end of civilization.

And I’m terrified.

Recently I’ve been asking myself a singular personal question: has the line been crossed? I admit when I first wrote the last sentence, I wrote “Has a line been crossed?” But this is not correct. It is not enough. It’s not “a line,” it’s “the line.” The literal existential line for humanity. 

I was born into privilege. Privilege of gender, of race, of geography, of finances, of love, of lack of genetic diseases, and of things that my privilege won’t let me see. I recall the late comedian Bill Hicks’ joke 30 years ago about how the news is all doom and gloom, but if you open your window it’s just birds chirping happily. This joke embodied my privileged life for four decades.

I believe it was 2017 when I first felt, on a visceral level, a crack in my illusion of reality. It was the worst year for forest fires in my memory in BC. I woke one morning and stepped outside into a Martian landscape. The air was thick and a grotesque orange-red. The sun a putrid off-pink. There was no wind. No animals, chirping or otherwise. Just a dead stillness. I did not know what time it was. Middle of the night or mid day, there was no way of telling from the environment and it didn’t matter. Time, too, matters only in privilege. 

The reverberations of that smoke-filled day echoed in me acutely for weeks, lingered for months, and then lessened over time. Despite this primal shock, it didn’t resonate in me as a line crossed. It was just another event that didn’t actually directly affect me in a substantial way. I climbed outside less and stayed indoors more that summer. Shortly thereafter I took a high paying job that had me on airplanes more in two years than in the rest of my life combined. The shock, felt so deeply, was transient. No line had been crossed in me.

Today I write these words in the middle of a singular heat wave on the west coast of North America. My province of BC is on fire. Parts of Germany, Belgium and China are underwater. A new disease has shown our global incapacity and lack of preparation for such things. And so many more disasters around the world. And experts are telling us clearly that this is just the beginning.

2040 looms.

In the face of our civilization’s collapse, we are led by the impotent and the idiotic. The US, still arguably the most influential country in the world, is led by those who appear to have been converted into cartoon characters who are all bluster and hypocrisy, then converted back into humans to lead a dying nation. The caricatures would be comical were they not real and wielding so much power over our fate. And we continue to vote them into power.

In Canada, we tend to think ourselves superior to the US madness. Even our worst recent leader, Stephen Harper, was well spoken and expressed consistent, cogent thoughts, even if his values were wildly different than my own. Today we have a handsome younger leader who marches in gay pride parades and famously said “Because it’s 2017” when asked why his cabinet had so many women.

But this is a façade. In truth, Canada is the highest per capita carbon emitter in the developed world, well ahead of the US we consider to be the worst in this respect, and 7th overall, trailing only tiny oil-rich countries like Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. The federal government recently passed, to much ignorant fanfare, a climate action bill that is in reality completely ineffective by design. The only party in Canada that seems to understand the immensity of our peril, the Greens, are in a federal shambles, poisoned by themselves in a way only the political left seems capable of doing so consistently. In BC, our left-leaning provincial government cannot even follow its own promises and self-created recommendations to stop the destruction of the tiny fraction of original forest still remaining in the province. And this is in my “progressive” province, which says nothing of neighbouring Alberta where so much of the population seems to have equated oil with their self identity and the very notion of freedom.

Around me, as Covid comes to the end of its most dominant effects on humanity, I see and hear no uproar for 2040. No great cries that the lessons of covid, forced upon us by our own actions and inactions, be heeded. No evaluation of how we, as a global society, can pivot to create even the possibility of future thriving. Rather, it is a resumption of what was. More travel. More stuff. More economy. More more.

There is a cliché that says it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. I think this needs updating. More and more, I think people (though not enough of us) can imagine the end of capitalism. Jacques Fresco beautifully detailed his vision of it in his Venus Project years ago. What we can’t imagine, Fresco included, is how to get there. We can’t imagine how to end capitalism. 

For my part, I write all of these words from privilege. It is easy to wax philosophical and to make the decision to simplify and minimize when you are already privileged. A client of mine recently shared their feeling that their life often feels like survival mode, where the concept of thriving seems so very distant. This is, I feel and fear, the primary experience of most humans, a direct result of capitalism that profits the few and suffers the many, and does so more and more as time passes. Yet we are collectively so caught up in this illusion that maybe, just maybe, we’ll be one of the big winners in the capitalism lottery, that we continue to celebrate billionaires as they wag their dicks on joyrides into space. So caught up are we that money equals celebrity, and celebrity equals something to be desired and worshipped. I am not immune to this toxic pull.

But something feels shifted with this new heat in my back yard, with my province on fire, coming on the back of covid. A line has been crossed. The line.

 I’ve been spending a lot of time questioning if I can ethically ever get on another plane. I would love to visit my beloved friends in Rome and Berlin. I’ve been reluctant to drive longer distances to some of my favorite climbing spots. I’ve been pondering where to live, and whether I can justify trying to play the “keep ahead of the apocalypse” game that only the privileged can play.

I am aware that all I can control is myself, plus whatever small influence I have on others, and that my actions, while so important and impactful for me, are irrelevant in the big picture in the face of so much momentum towards 2040. Do I massively alter and restrict my life, or do I accept the end of civilization and nihilistically take part in what time and luxury remains? When you see the iceberg coming, and see that the steering wheel has been locked in place, do you simply enjoy the martinis and the band in the remaining time?

Such questions leave me facing my own ethics and integrity. It is only my own mirror that I must reckon with in the absence of a greater societal mirror.

In considering to write these words, I’ve pondered why I would do so. Partially, I simply like to write when so inspired. It is a process that brings both clarity and some relief. Partially, I hope in some small way to encourage others to examine these issues for themselves. But mainly it is because I am grieving for this world, and for humanity, and it is always better to grieve with others.

If you would grieve with me, I grieve with you.