Dear you,

Hope the weather is sunny and atmospherically funky where you are. It’s a cold wet day here in Canberra.

Early afternoon and it is as grey as a pot of old floor wax with a temp around 8 Celsius and a wind chill that would send even Bear Grylls cremaster muscle into spasm.

Just got back from the supermarket, with my wheelie shopping trolley dripping all over the kitchen floor. My shoes are still a bit muddy. My dog sees this magnificent opportunity and grabs one to run leaping and flicking and tossing it all over the house. Chasing him is only encouragement so I unpack the ingredients of tonights curry before attending to the mud-pocalypse. 

Winter has been particularly mild so far this year. Usually ANZAC day marks the first morning frosts, yet here we are in June, frostless and somedays even wearing T-shirts.
It has been nice and pleasant in an existentially uneasy way.

Which brings me to…

Reading right now: Breaking Together by Prof Jim Bendell.

This is a book about the current collapse of the world (ie. environmental, economic, societal, and spiritual…the whole enchilada) as we know it. A topic on which I sit ensconced on the doomer end of the spectrum.

The capitalist drive to enclose, extract, commodify, and exploit the worlds natural resources in order to fuel its insatiable need for economic growth has screwed us all over.

The current extent of this collapse is hidden in plain sight and it will play out in a non-linear, unpredictable way with the enormity of the incoming impacts mostly hidden from mainstream public awareness. But we are locked in now.

Breaking Together is not a “green” handbook. It’s not about finding ways to improve your recycling. Breaking Together is a philosophical primer for the crisis. It sets out the empirical evidence for a crisis and the likelihood of societal collapse. It then encourages the reader to see clearly and critically what is going on. Then it encourages a free, personal response. The free part is important. Just joining a chanting throng is not going to make a difference. Reproducing the errors that got us into this mess is not going to get us out. It’s time to start again, to develop a critical and open understanding of where we are at and then work with like-minded people to achieve positive and useful change. Change which is revolutionary and appropriate to the enormity of our crisis. Collapse, according to Bendell, is inevitable. Considering that every other civilisation has collapsed eventually, why should we be any different and why should we question his view? Our choice is what sort of collapse we want. Are we going to cling to the old ways, fighting each other for the final scraps amidst the ruins of our world? Or are we going to clear our minds of our destructive ways, rethink our world and break together, collapse together, gracefully supporting each other through the transition?
— Book review by Chris Jerry.

I have only just started this (quite large) book, and according to some reviews it may lean towards the wordy and repetitive. I may skim-read bits. But the content is important and the message is one of analytical, practical, cold hard hope.