After my friend and mentor, Michael Dowd, died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2023, I wrote a eulogy of him and lifted up his work in the Post-Doom community. As part of that, I listed several of the prominent people he had interviewed on the subject of collapse awareness and a post-doom response to that awareness.
As I went through Michael’s interviews, I noted that some his interviewees were known for their anti-trans rhetoric. For instance, James Howard Kunstler, author of the non-fiction The Long Emergency (2005) and the fictional World Made By Hand series. During his interview with Michael, in the midst of talking about anti-science attitudes, Kunstler gratuitously dropped in a transphobic comment. Kunstler’s comment was not that surprising, given that, since 2016, he appears to have gone down the rabbit hole of reactionary conservativism, Trump cultism, and COVID conspiracy theorism. What did surprise me, though, was that Michael did not edit Kunstler’s comment from the interview, especially since other parts of the interview were edited.
And then there was the radical feminist, Robert (Bob) Jensen, who Michael also interviewed in 2020. Six years earlier, in 2014, Bob Jensen had published an article titled “Some Basic Propositions about Sex, Gender, and Patriarchy” in which he critiqued what he called “transgenderism”, the “transgender movement”, and “trans ideology”. [FN2]
In response, MonkeyWrench Books collective cut all ties with Jensen, who had been their active supporter for years. Monkeywrench declared it would no longer carry Jensen’s books. They stated, “While Jensen’s article does not specifically advocate for physical violence against trans women, his statement both attempts to erase the experiences of trans folks and contributes to a dangerous culture of transphobia.” But none of this came up in Dowd’s interview of Jensen.
And then, of course, there was Derrick Jensen (no relation to Bob Jensen that I am aware of), one of the founders of Deep Green Resistance, a radical environmentalist group. Jensen and DGR are also known for their anti-trans rhetoric (which I’ve written about here). Again, Jensen’s transphobic positions did not come up in the interview. He mentioned briefly that he had recently been dropped by two publishers because he “stands with women”, coded language to be sure, but that was it. Anyone listening to this interview, not already familiar with his transphobia, would probably have no idea what his opinions on the topic were.
I don’t mean to criticize Michael posthumously for interviewing these individuals. They are some of the leading voices in what I call the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community. I bring this up to highlight the question of what we should do when we agree with some but not all of what a prominent person says.
This dilemma came up for me recently when I noticed that my own intellectual idol, Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, had jumped the gap from green anarchism to a transphobic reactionaryism. I had quoted Kingsnorth dozens of times and often at length in my previous writing. So I decided to go back and add a footnote to all those posts, indicating that I did not endorse his writing after a certain date (spring 2020). And I continued to quote him, always with the asterisk. But when my editor questioned why I continued to quote him at all, I hesitated. It’s a good question and one I’ve been struggling with.
This dilemma is complicated when the author’s ideology shifts after they create the work which you admire. For instance, Paul Kingsnorth began his environmental activism in 1992 with the British road protests, started editing at The Ecologist in 1999, wrote his first book, One No, Many Yeses (an account of the anti-globalism movement around the world) in 2003, founded the Dark Mountain Project (a network of anti-civ writers and artists) in 2009, and published his collection of essays (which was to have a profound influence on me), Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, in 2017. [FN1] That’s a quarter century of serious, dedicated, leftist advocacy and activism. While there were some signs of a shift in Kingsnorth’s thinking as early as 2017, it wasn’t until COVID that his work took a hard turn and, in my opinion, jumped the gap to a conservative reactionaryism and transphobia. It’s easy enough to critique the Paul Kingsnorth of 2025. But what to do with the Paul Kingsnorth of 1992 or 2017?
I realize this whole discussion is framed by my privilege. I am not directly affected by transphobia–though I think we are all affected by it indirectly and because I believe the anti-trans movement is the vanguard of an incipient fascism in the U.S.
I am a cis man, writing about what to do when another cis man starts saying transphobic things. This distance I have from these issues is a privilege, but it also a kind of disability as a writer, since I can only imagine the impact of my words on others who have direct experience with these issues. As a result, I may be too easily dismissive of the problematic writing of authors with whom I identify.
Perhaps I am even framing the question wrong. Maybe the question isn’t “Should I still be quoting pre-2020 Paul Kingsnorth?” Maybe the right question is “Who am I not quoting when I am quoting Kingsnorth?”
When I quote Kingsnorth, I am a cis-het White man of European settler-colonial descent living in the industrialized north, holding up the writing of another cis-het White man of settler-colonial descent living in the industrialized north. When I continue to quote from Kingsnorth’s older writings, I am choosing, by omission, not to hold up the writings of others–trans people, indigenous people, etc.–who may write on the same topic.
This seems like a good time to lift up the work of Margaret Killjoy. Killjoy is a trans woman who writes about anarchism and collapse. She is also the creator of the podcast, Live Like the World is Dying. I especially recommend her essay “We’re All Preppers Now”, which looks at individual preparation as a part of community preparedness.
Killjoy writes, “The best thing you can do for yourself, for your own self-interest, is build resilient communities.” She goes on to say that skills are more important than gear and relationships are more important than skills. Killjoy has a refreshingly communitarian take on gear and skills:
“Reducing your reliance on others isn’t meant as a way to distance yourself from society, but instead to allow you to minimize your impact on others. Reducing your reliance on others, when you can, is itself a way of giving to the community.”
“Conflict deescalation and group facilitation are as important as first aid and radio communication.”
And she writes about relationships differently than many preppers:
“Despite what capitalist society has led us to believe, healthy and genuine relationships are not transactional: preparedness relationships are not based on simple exchange like ‘I made him dinner, so he’ll fix my radios.’ It’s closer to ‘I made him dinner while he was busy doing childcare for several people in the community, and some of those people help me fix my car when it breaks down.'”
Go read the whole article here.
And while I’m at it, let me lift up another person, Carmen Spagnola, whose website actually drew my attention to Killjoy’s essay. Spagnola is herself a cis woman, a mother of a trans child, a witch and an animist, and a collapse-aware author and coach. She writes and teaches about collapsing in community. Spagnola is the author of Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times, which just came out this year. I’ve ordered a copy and hope to review it here later. Spagnola’s co-facilitator is Holly Truhlar, who I’ve quoted here before (and even invited to speak remotely at my local UU church during the pandemic).
I don’t say this to diminish the work of other-than cis-het White men in the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community. There are lots of prominent (mostly White) women doing amazing work. Some notable examples include Joanna Macy (who recently passed), Carolyn Baker, Trebbe Johnson, Brit Wray, as well as LaUra Schmidt & Aimee Lewis-Reau, the founders of the Good Grief Network, whose model of managing climate grief inspired my own (which you can read about here). There are others, but when I look at the faces of the prominent people in the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community, they appear to be overwhelmingly White and predominately male.
Of course, finding diverse authors writing on such a fringe topic as deep adaptation/post-doom takes more work. But isn’t it incumbent on me to do that work? Shouldn’t I be trying to center voices of people who don’t look or sound like me, anyway?
And this brings me to another nagging question: Is there something about post-doom/deep adaptation that is more attractive to White men? Is post-doom itself a function of privilege?
I found a Reddit thread on r/collapse which asked this question: “Does r/collapse have a diversity problem?” And if I had any doubts before, the responses of the (presumably) mostly White men left no question in my mind. I’m tempted to lay out examples here, but it’s kinda gross, and likely you can already imagine. (And, if not, you probably wouldn’t appreciate the problem anyway.)
I know someone will respond that Reddit has its own privilege problems. And they’re not wrong. But while the folks on Reddit may be particularly poor examples of the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community, I don’t think they are categorically different. My impression is that, not only is there poor representation of women and people of color (and maybe LGBT folks too) in the Deep Adaptation/Post-doom community, but it seems to suffer from all the same problems of privilege that predominate in the wider culture.
More than that, I wonder if there is something unique to the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community that draws people of privilege.
I think that it really only would come as a surprise to a multiply-privileged person that the systems which constitute our world are broken. The less privileged a person is, the less of a surprise it would be to hear that the world is ending. For a lot of people, it’s always been the end of the world. Indigenous activists and authors, for example, have observed that indigenous peoples already survived at least one apocalypse–the colonization by Europeans.
“It’s been the end of the world for somebody all along.”
— Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
The same is true of other people of color in the U.S., especially Black people. Margaret Killjoy, mentioned above, puts it this way:
“The shit is always hitting the fan for huge chunks of society. Poverty and marginalization are their own forms of apocalypse. “
In fact, the breakdown of the system isn’t really news to anybody for whom the system–capitalism, patriarchy, human dominance–isn’t working. That would include poor and working class people, women and LGBT folks, and wild other-than-human beings.
But a multiply-privileged person like myself–a cis-het male belonging to the professional/managerial class–is shocked and demoralized to discover the sham that is carbon-fueled capitalism and industrial human monoculture. Apparently, it is only well into late-stage capitalism that the contradictions of empire come home to a lot of privileged people like me.
So, no wonder the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community appears to be predominately male and White (and probably disproportionately cis-het too). And that’s why, I think, the community is at risk of devolving into a salon for a bunch of disappointed would-be masters-of-the-universe to go on congratulating themselves on having figured it all out. In other words, it is likely to become yet another (mostly online) intellectual ghetto for White dudes. And, like all such ghettos, it will be susceptible to those same mental illnesses which plague White dudes: transphobia, misogyny, fascism.
What’s the answer? I think the answer has to be that the Deep Adaptation/Post-Doom community (such as it is) can’t be an end point. It has to be a waystation–a pausing point on the way to a discussion with a wider community which includes peoples who have already experienced apocalypses and people who have been experiencing collapse all their lives. Rather than being the answer, Deep Adaptation and Post-Doom can only ever point the way to a more-inclusive conversation about the end of the world as we know it.
Notes
- The essays in Kingsnorth’s book were originally published between 2010 and 2016.
- This is a common theme in transphobic writing. Like Jensen, transphobic writers often write about transgender as an ideology or a “movement” or an -ism, but not as an experience of people. By doing so, they erase the experiences of trans folk. Jensen’s conclusion to his article was exemplary of this: “On the surface, transgenderism may seem to be a more revolutionary approach, but radical feminism offers a deeper critique of the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of patriarchy and a more promising path to liberation.” As Dexter Thomas observed in his response to Jensen’s article, “Jensen interprets transgender via the myopic lens of his personal ideology. He seems to have little or no genuine appreciation of the experience and perceptions of those who are transgender.” While cisgender people like Jensen debate the philosophical merits of “transgenderism” versus radical feminism as a challenge to patriarchal gender ideology, actual trans people are being attacked and dying at shocking rates. Transgender is not, first and foremost, a philosophy or a movement, but the experience of real flesh and blood people.
Another End of the World is Possible 