Articles & Essays
Paul Kingsnorth*
*I cannot unequivocally endorse Paul Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. After that time, following his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Kingsnorth’s slide from Green anarchism to proto-fascism became undeniable. All the by Kingsnorth here come from before that shift.
Hear it read HERE by Michael Dowd
Hear it read HERE by Michael Dowd
Roy Scranton
Hear it read HERE by Michael Dowd
Hear it read HERE by Michael Dowd
Hear it read HERE by MIchael Dowd
Hear it read HERE by Michael Dowd
Derrick Jensen
David Abram
Other
“How Then Shall We Live?” series by Dahr Jamail & Barbara Cecil (Truthout)
Hear it read HERE by Michael Dowd
Books (Non-Fiction)
Fiction
“The most fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is not in their beliefs in individual freedom vs. collective good, or traditional values vs. social progress, in their intelligence or temperaments, but in their capacity for imagination. To conservatives, our society and its institutions seem the natural order of things, the logical outcome of history, and anyone who wants to change it is a malcontent or a dreamer. … SF posits that this world is contingent, provisional, not inevitable. And this is an inherently subversive proposition, because it means that the status quo is not necessarily natural or right, and could be very different, depending on chance … Science fiction is ultimately about possibility: the revolutionary possibility that things don’t have to be this way.” — Timothy Kreider, “How Science Fiction Made Me Liberal” (The Guardian)
Poetry
“Hope Is Not For the Wise“ by Robinson Jeffers
“Everything is Waiting for You” by David Whyte
“Escape” by D. H. Lawrence
“The Language of Stones” by Geoff Bartley
“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas
Music
Videos
Click here to visit my YouTube channel for interviews, recorded essays, and more.
Other Resources
Author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Co-Founder of the Dark Mountain Project
Deep dives into big questions about how we might live in a world losing its cultural and ecological bearings at a rapid rate
“I believe that the global industrial economy–what we might equally simply call the human empire–is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself, razing and homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and increasingly using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial machine which may one day supplant us. This is known as ‘progress’. Its cultural arm, individualist liberalism, is meanwhile engaged in stripping all meaning, truth and traditional support structures from our lives, in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as liberation. In opposition to this, I believe in a healthy suspicion of entrenched power, whether it is entrenched in leaders, states or corporations; decentralisation of economics, politics and culture; connection to land, nature and heritage; an attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty.”
Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?
Co-Founder of the Dark Mountain Project
Writing about the dark knowledge of climate change and the wider tangle of the mess the world is in, the role of art in a shadowed time, the role of the sacred and experiences of liminality
Author of the “Deep Adaptation” paper
Humanity needs to prepare for fundamental disruption of its current civilisation paradigms, due to climate change, with a likelihood of complete societal collapse. Unlike climate change adaptation, which aims to adapt societies gradually to the effects of climate change, Deep Adaptation is premised on accepting abrupt transformation of the environment as a consideration for making decisions today.
Check out his resource page: “Emotional Support in the Face of Climate Tragedy”
“Post Doom” with Michael Dowd & Connie Barlow
Conversations about “overshoot grief” and beyond
“Post-doom: what opens up when we remember who we are, accept what is inevitable, honor our grief, and invest in what is pro-future and soul-nourishing.”
Check out Dowd’s resource page which includes more than 1000 hours of audio recordings of texts on the topic of Deep Adaptation. Also check out his SoundCloud page with more recordings.
“Last Born in the Wilderness” with Patrick Farnsworth
Podcast about climate change, technology, psychedelics, and radical political theory
Including interviews with Dmitry Orlov, Bayo Akomolafe, Dahr Jamail, Trebbe Johnson, Derrick Jensen, Guy McPherson, Charles Eisenstein, Paul Ehrlich, and many more
Blog about “post-activism,” the post-human, and more
“Sacred activism is not activism+spirituality – not in an additive sense; it is what I call ‘post-activism’, or the kinds of commitments that invite us to ask new questions not only about what we are doing with the world but what the world is doing with us in the same gesture. In a posthuman relational world, the logic of the familiar is composted and the limitations involved in co-producing the ‘next’ are acknowledged. “
“Dark Optimism” with Shaun Chamberlain
Blog about activism and public interest research
“We are unashamedly positive about what kind of a world humanity could create, and unashamedly realistic about how far we are from creating it today.”
“Museletter” with Richard Heinberg
Blog about geopolitics, energy depletion, civilization and its unintended consequences
John Michael Greer at Resilience.org
Author of Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush and more
Articles about ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society
Gods & Radicals: A Site of Beautiful Resistance
An anti-capitalist Pagan community blog
“Holding in our hands the threads of anarchist, Marxist, anti-colonialist, druidic, feminist, occult, environmentalist, and esoteric thought, we began a dance around a center constantly plaiting, constantly weaving a fierce celebration of all that makes the world beautiful, all that we refuse to let be taken from us.”
“Together, we are walking away from the stories that our societies like to tell themselves, the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway. We are making art that doesn’t take the centrality of humans for granted. We are tracing the deep cultural roots of the mess the world is in. And we are looking for other stories, ones that can help us make sense of a time of disruption and uncertainty.”
Includes articles by Paul Kingsnorth, Derrick Jensen, and many more
“It is Orion’s fundamental conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.”
“It has always been a radical act to share stories during dark times. They are a regenerative space of creation and renewal. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the earth, we look to emerging stories. In them we find the timeless connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality.”
Includes essays by David Abram
“Working to ease the spreading devastation of the animate earth through a rapid transformation of culture. We employ the arts, often in tandem with the natural sciences, to provoke deeply felt shifts in the human experience of nature. Motivated by a love for the more-than-human collective of life, and for human life as an integral part of that wider collective, we work to revitalize local, face-to-face community – and to integrate our communities perceptually, practically, and imaginatively into the earthly bioregions that surround and support them.”
10-Steps to Personal Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate: This program helps build personal resilience & empowerment while strengthening community ties to combat despair, inaction, and eco-anxiety on the collective level.
The Climate Grief Groups invites those living with an awareness of loss due to climate change and the collapse of our environmental and social systems to create a safe space to share and witness those complex feelings—like grief, despair, fear, and guilt—which are increasingly common in these chaotic times, but which are often unwelcome in mainstream activist spaces.
Another End of the World is Possible 