I was taken by this strapline in a news report on climate change…

“We have no choice but to take direct action to put our bodies on the line because petitions, sign-waving, and chanting—we tried that for the past 50 years and it hasn’t worked, and we’re out of time,” said one arrested activist.

From Climate Campaigners Decry ‘Absolutely Horrendous’ Brutality Against Protesters at Fed Summit

A book called, ‘Limits to Growth’ was required reading for my degree in Human Ecology starting in 1979. It was published just over 50 years ago.

Limits to Growth was the first widely publicised model for climate change. It has kind of been forgotten because critics rightly pointed out it’s proposed timescale for catastrophe was missed. However it was clear that this was an estimate of a thing very difficult to predict. Change, it said, would be non-linear, ie it would get worse faster over time but the rate was nearly impossible to calculate with their early modelling. It proposed a ‘Business as Usual’ sceanario as the worst case scenario. Evidence from 2023 suggests this is the best description of what is happening now.

The Limits to Growth+50 – Club of Rome

And nothing much has changed.

Part of what I want to do with my work is to use story writing as a form of personal research to explore the worst case sceanario from a factual and imaginal point of view. I started this as a series of performance peices meant to be a serialised story. In the setting planned this did not work but I continued writing. This was entirely fictive, but was informed by objective evidence. I reconnected to my degree which was a science degree, to see what had changed since the early 80’s. Sadly, not much had changed. That’s why the strapline captured me.

In fictive writing the story kind of tells itself. It has a life of it’s own and a hand in what is written. In the writing of the story. I went to a place several times where the medium term outcome was total nuclear war. Putin was dropping hints about this regards Ukraine at the time. So I took a break. I let it incubate. I wanted a more optimistic prospect. What was clear from my research was that we are taking part in an experiment, and we cannot say how it will end. This is an adventure of uncertain outcome. But this gave me hope. I wondered if a non-linear narrative might work. Could there be a number of different outcomes? This was really much more accurate.

Then my two main Mac’s died or started to expire. I stuggled to write on what other tech I had to hand. I have now replaced them and my writing can continue.

What is emerging is a story which explores as a starting point, a reality ‘as if’ the earth wants rid of us. It has a classic protagonist and antagonist. The outcome of their struggles, again in a classical form, are new forms neither of them anticipated. In writing I hope to find what these forms are. Some will be imaginal, fictional, and some more factual, except, as Club of Rome, Limits to Growth show us, we cannot accurately say what form this will takes. Except it won’t be pretty. At the end of the 4 year bachelor of science degree, on reflection, the consensus was that the shit was definately going to hit the fan. But we were young and thought we could outwit this outcome. Now I am not so sure.

By the beginning of October I want to have the story out as a series of podcasts. My intention is to use this work with art as research to suggest some ways of being that retain optimism in the face of what I do think is inevitable. Maybe accepting the inevitability of the shit hitting the fan will be the catalyst for change. My beleif is that we cannot change the whole world. The world is full of people who start their prognosis with “We all have to….”. This is not realistic. I want to get to “In order to not be laid low by this I am going to have to…” I want to see if the story can suggest some fictive ideas about how to be not be rendered depressed and useless by anxiety as individuals. To ask “What if it is inevitable. What can I do to survive?” I think this is what more people will find is unavoidable for them.

I hope to put together a kind of magazine, a collection of related posts, centred on the theme ‘End Times’. This will be put online and I hope to do a paper fanzine kind of thing with QR codes to online content. So I will be posting stuff that I hope to curate or collate into a coherent form by mid October.