Propping, Prepping, Planting

In the throes of collapse there are three broad responses that are being taken. It is important to note from the outset that although each of us may prefer, or gravitate towards, one of these responses, we can all respond from all three of these ways, sometimes at the same time.

Propping

Propping involves taking part in the current system of Business As Usual (BAU) whereby we carry on as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary is happening. Propping continues to prop up the current industrial-growth system, even if we recognise that collapse is occurring.

Propping continues to extract, exploit, and destroy natural systems and bioregional spaces. Propping continues to pollute and spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Propping keeps buying and consuming. Propping is not just buying the merchandise of consumer society, it is also buying into the myths, stories, and worldviews that prop up the paradigms upon which the current system rests.

Even so-called “green” solutions continue to prop up BAU and help to continue plunging deeper and deeper into collapse. We have known for some time that the minerals and ores required for a greening of energy supply are insufficient to undertake that transition.¹ We have also known for some time that the extraction of the minerals and ores are damaging local ecosystems and exploiting, often indigenous, communities.²

The grieving process suggests that propping can be seen as denial and/or anger. Collapse can be, and is, denied by many. Denial allows, and enables, propping to continue unabated. Anger is a propping approach that says, ‘damn you all, I’m gonna…’ (fill in the blanks.)

Prepping

Prepping – a.k.a survivalism – has its roots in the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Cold War (and associated nuclear threat) of the post WW2 decades. More recently prepping has been associated with preparing for environmental (especially climate) collapse. There are many varieties of prepping with most of them entailing some form of hoarding and storing supplies of food, water, medicines, guns (in some places), and becoming self-sufficient in energy (mostly solar panels.) The covid pandemic introduced a novel take on prepping – stockpiling toilet paper!

Prepping seeks to preserve comfort, convenience, and certainty, albeit in a much-diminished sense. In the vocabulary of the grief process, prepping is a form of bargaining. ‘If I do this, then I will survive,’ a prepper supposes.

Prepping is an individualistic response to collapse. Hence, prepping is unable to be sustained and certainly not for a long period of time. Social, environmental, systemic collapse is not a short-lived event. Collapse is likely to play out over several generations.

The ultimate form of prepping is the building of spaceships designed to transport individuals to Mars and then survive on that planet. This form of prepping is literally pie in the sky thinking.

Planting

There is a famous quotation from the Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore who advised that, ‘The one who plants trees, knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.’ The quotation is highly relevant in this time of collapse.

Planting trees knowing that one will not sit in their shade is the action of someone with a view toward the future and towards caring for generations to come. Planting trees at this time is also an allegory for how one approaches collapse from the acceptance phase of the grieving process. Planting trees that go on to bear fruits of kindness, compassion, appreciation of beauty, empathy, joy, equanimity, forgiveness, love, and other healthy values is a worthy thing to be doing as we experience the collapse of all we have known. Such fruits, hopefully, will be of use to those humans who do emerge from the other side of collapse.

Planting (whether trees, vegetables, fruits, or values and ethics) then is an act of unselfish wisdom. It is planning for (at least) seven generations into the future.

We are entering a bottleneck in the project that has been the human journey. Our human population could be halved within the next forty years and keep decreasing thereafter.³ A previous bottleneck in our human evolutionary journey saw our ancestral human population decrease by almost 98% from about 100,000 hominins to around 1,000.⁴ If humans today face a similar sized bottleneck, then the population could reduce to just 160 million.  

In the meantime we can plant ideas into our own lives now; becoming comfortable with less, simplifying, recognising when enough is enough, and frugality. It means planting worldviews that diverge from those of BAU and unlimited growth. We can plant the paradigms of diversity and unity (the two are not opposites, but complimentary.) We can plant the concepts of ubuntu and interbeing. Ubuntu is a Xhosa word loosely translated as I am because we are. Interbeing is a word coined by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, meaning ‘the many in the one and the one containing the many.’

Finally, it is worth repeating that these three broad responses to collapse are not discrete behaviors. Each of us can, and often do, vacillate from one to the other and back again.

Notes:

1. e.g. William Grace, Critical minerals and the energy transition, Energy Strategy Reviews, 9 January 2026.

2. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/23/un-indigenous-peoples-forum-climate-strategy-warning

3. Alessio Zaccone & Kostya Trachenko, Global population crisis scenarios predicted by a general nonlinear dynamical model, Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, 22 May 2026. I would advise reading just the Abstract of this paper unless you are highly versed in differential equations and other high-level mathematics.

4. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fau.search.yahoo.com%2F  sourced 13 October 2026

Moloch Has the Wetiko Disease

I first heard of Moloch in my late 20s when I read Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. (1)

The third stanza in Part II of that poem reads: 'Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!' Whatever, or whoever, Moloch was, I certainly understood to be frightening character. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I learnt more of Moloch, and indeed, the meaning of Howl itself.

Moloch is a judgmental and nasty diety, mentioned in Leviticus 18 where the Lord supposedly tells Moses that, 'you shall not let any of your descendants pass through the fires of Molech.' Moloch demanded child sacrifice by fire. 

Most often Moloch is understood to be a Canaanite god although some scholars claim that Moloch is a form of sacrificial practice. If Moloch is a practice then it is not known to which diety. Whether a god or a sacrificial practice, Moloch is something to be feared.

Images of Moloch began to become popular in the 18/19th centuries, depicted as a bull (or lion) headed creature with wings and arms outstretched over a fire on which children were placed and sacrificed.

John Milton, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, describes Moloch as a 'horrid king besmeared with blood of human sacrifice and parent's tears.'

Moloch the loveless! Indeed.

In Howl, as I later learned, Ginsberg casts Moloch as industrial civilization where poets, artists, radicals, jazz musicians, psychiatric patients, and other outcasts are sacrificed (like children.)

Since the 19th century Moloch has been used as a metaphor for social, economic, and military oppression. 

In this century Moloch is often cast as a metaphor for our current predicament. For example the best-selling author, sarah wilson, describes Moloch as an invisible "force" that 'arises in competitive scenarios that sees us (often unwittingly) give away or destroy what we hold dear in exchange for a short-term gain but that, ultimately, will leave us all categorically fucked.' (2)

No matter whether we encounter Moloch in the Bible, in the poetry of Milton or Ginsberg, or in the words of sarah wilson, Moloch is an apt metaphor for the current intertwined complex crises we are experiencing. We could name this time of multiple crises a polycrisis, a metacrisis, a predicament, or simply as a right-royal mess. 

Collectively we are sacrificing what is dear to us for short-term gain, and often doing so without recognizing or understanding the dangers of doing so.

Moloch infected

For many centuries Moloch has been infected with the wetiko disease, although only recently has this been diagnosed by the indigenous peoples of Great Turtle Island who have known of the disease for many generations. (3)

Jack Forbes (of Powhatan-Renape and Lenape descent) defines wetiko as 'the disease of cannibalism (mental and emotional as much as physical) without sacredness and with no respect for the cycle of life and death.' (4)

Forbes went on to claim forthrightly that the disease was understood as being of an individual and sporadic nature, and 'not part of a system of cruelty.' He also recognized that not all Europeans show wetiko tendencies, but that the European culture is the major carrier of the disease.

Moloch has been requiring child sacrifice in the lands of the Bible and Europe for millenia. Moloch and his (unwitting) followers became infected with the wetiko disease many generations ago and now, as sarah wilson warns, is demanding the sacrifice of our world in a cannibalistic, wetiko infected, orgy of exploitation and destruction in the name of progress and uninhibited growth.

Can a more appropriate metaphor than Moloch infected with the wetiko disease be named to signify the social, environmental, and personal collapses we are witnessing?

Sadly, being able to name these does not mean that Moloch can be exiled nor that wetiko can be cured easily.

However, it is a start.

Notes:

1. Allen Ginsberg's Howl was first published in 1956

2. sarah wilson, i eat the stars, Penguin Books, 2026

3. Wetiko goes by many words depending on the local language in Great Turtle Island, e.g. wendigo, wendego, windago, windiga, wentiko, wijigo, windagoo, and many others, indicating that the disease was well known throughout the continent.

4. Jack D Forbes, Colombus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, Seven Stories Press, Revised edition 2008. First published 1992

 

Inter-generational Dyschronia

Dischronometria (sometimes abbreviated to dyschronia) is a dysfunction in which the individual is unable to estimate the amount of time which has passed. Although usually applied to individuals, does our culture show signs of inter-generational dyschronia?

There certainly appear to be signs that our culture does so. Being unable to accurately assess the amount of time that has passed, we also seem incapable of fully appreciating the changes that have taken place over that period. Notably, we seem to be unable to recognise the amount of change that has taken place in the epochs and ages before our individual births.

The pictures that accompany this blogpiece illustrate how dyschronia can distort our ability to identify changes over time periods extending beyond our own individual lifetimes.

Our lifetimes, when measured against the aeons of earth history, are fleeting. Without the ability to step back from our limited lifeline it is very easy to miss the significance of change.

Even when the pace of change occurs exponentially we can miss the significance because we are only witnessing a very small slice of time. We then project that slice onto our own relatively short lifetime, much the same way as a single frame of a movie gives us only a fragment of the entire movie.

Why is this?

A couple of graphs may help to demonstrate. 

Fig 1 shows the graph of an exponential function. As the graph shows, although growth starts out fairly evenly after a period of time the slope of the curve begins to steepen, and then steepens very fast.

This graph is a representational one and, on the x-axis, suggests a timeline stretching from 2000 BCE through to 2000CE and beyond. Nothing specifically is depicted by the curve. It is simply an indication showing what happens under exponential growth. It could be any of the following: population, resource use, carbon emissions, species extinction, etc.

The blue sided rectangle is intended to represent an individual lifetime. (Please note that this is not to scale.)

Fig 2 is the rectangle in Fig 1 extracted and stretched along an x-axis commensurate with the x-axis of Fig 1. This is to symbolise how an individual lifetime is perceived versus that of some 4000 years.

The first thing to notice is that the gradient of the curve in Fig 2 is significantly flatter than that of Fig 1. Thus, when change is viewed simply against one’s own lifetime, any change may seem to be linear and not changing especially quickly.

To push the metaphor further, it can be noted that against the background, the width of the curve in Fig 2 is much greater than it is in Fig 1. We could interpret this to mean that the individual whose life course this depicts views themselves as more significant than is suggested in Fig 1.

Without stepping back and seeing a wider picture, our sense of time can become condensed into the years that have elapsed since our birth and maybe a decade or two before that if we listened to the stories of our parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

The danger in this way of perceiving time and the changes that occur is that we miss how significant those changes are and hence, fail to act in ways that prevent or forestall any hazardous changes.

Those who are able to stand back and look at a longer timeframe are able to notice the steepness of the curves of exponential growth. Sadly, it seems, when these hazards are pointed out, many will deny the hazard because they are viewing time only from within their own narrow timespan.

Sigh!

Cities: Loss of Sensuality

Humans are sensuous beings. We delight in smells, tastes, sight, hearing, and touch. Of these, touch could be claimed to be the most sought after, or desired.

According to developmental psychologists, touch is the first sense developed by fetuses, beginning in the first trimester of pregnancy. Once born, the initial skin-to-skin contact is vital in the bonding of mother and child. If someone’s finger is placed in the palm of an infant, the automatic response of the baby is to curl their own fingers around it to grasp it.

Babies are comforted by being held, especially skin-to-skin, against the body of their parent. The benefits of this close contact flow towards the parents also. Parent’s blood pressure and hormone levels are regulated by the contact. Research shows that an adult’s oxytocin (a.k.a. the love hormone) levels rise during contact with a baby.

As babies grow and pass through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood, so too does sensuality grow and develop.

In western styled cultures, if we are brought up in a healthy environment, our expression of this sensuality develops in a healthy manner.  A healthy individual grows and develops within a healthy “family” and particularly within a healthy society. A healthy society remains healthy when those within it are also healthy.

Communication and a sense of bonded community are expressions of just such a healthy society.

Cities, however, weaken such communication and bonds. Cities are places of strangers, not of known community members.

Stanley Milgram, the American social psychologist, pointed out in 1970 that, ‘City life, as we experience it, constitutes a continuous set of encounters with overload, and of resulting adaptations.’¹ In citing Milgram’s research, Paul Shepard summarized the human response to these encounters and adaptations as showing an, ‘…inbuilt, predictable shutting-down response to high human density.’²

Milgram provides examples of these encounters, and Shepard adds further, more psychologically damaging, examples.

Milgram describes four methods by which city-dwellers respond and adapt to the overload resulting from high-density living.  

• Bystander interventions in crises are severely diminished.
• Lack of willingness to trust and assist strangers.
• Deficiency of civil niceties.
• Retreat into anonymity.

To these, Shepard adds a shutting down of contact with nonhuman fauna. This, he claims throughout his book, has enormous repercussions for growing children that continue on into adulthood.

All these adaptations slowly, but surely, diminish the sensuousness that we might have come to expect from our time in the womb.

Yet, it need not be so, Shepard claims. He cites the example of the !Kung people who, ‘…though living in small groups in vast savannas like to sit touching each other around their fires at night and build their huts close together.’

Certainly, the attraction of city life and dweller may be appealing, but in that life there is an enormous loss, most of which may not be consciously noticed.

The strain on human interactions, child development, and personal well-being from city living may be greater than any one of us imagines. As our urban centres continue to grow in size, the strain may at some stage reach breaking point, exacerbating social collapse.

Notes:

1. Stanley Milgram, The Experience of Living in Cities, published by American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Science, 13 March 1970.

2. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1982, p 98

3. Ibid, p 95

Photographic Memories

In a 1994 interview Paul Shepard, professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology, declared that we (humans) were meant to have ‘encountered a beautiful and strange otherness’ as our birthright. For Shepard this otherness grows out of a maternal relationship and is ‘surrounded by living plants, rich in texture, smell, and motion…(and) unfiltered, unpolluted air, the flicker of wild birds, real sunshine and rain, mud to be tasted and tree bark to grasp, the sounds of wind and water, the calls of animals and insects as well as human voices.’¹

Our birthright, in his delightful description, is of a child completely immersed within the natural world and sensuously enjoying that immersion. Shepard goes on a few lines later to state that these surroundings become internalized and incorporated as the self. This concept is reminiscent of the Buddhist notion of non-self, wherein the distinction between I and nature is non-existent.

Sadly, however, the birthright that Shepard would like for all to experience is no longer available to us. We have been stripped of a beautiful and strange otherness. The eco-psychologist, Chellis Glendinning, calls this Earthgrief.

The psychotherapist and grief counsellor, Francis Weller, picks up on Glendinning’s motif and Shepard’s interview answer. ‘We are born…’ he writes ‘…expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth…’ When we do not receive this, we experience a grief that we may not be able to put into words because ‘…we may not even realize (what) we have lost.’²

Weller calls this the Fourth (of five) Gate of Grief, and he admits to not knowing how we know we have been missing this birthright. He does, however, note that when we gain access to this knowledge ‘…a wave of recognition rises that we have lived without this love, this acknowledgment, and the support of this village all our lives.’

How does the recognition of this loss arise? If our birthright has been lost, how do we re-discover it, or remember it?

Photographic Memories

For most of the year we work, sleep, eat, and play in a sanitised and artificial setting. It is the environment we have been adapted to and coerced into since our birth.

Yet once, or twice if we are lucky, a year we get the chance to briefly escape the artificiality by going on holiday. Often, we take this holiday by camping by the sea, trekking in the mountains, or spending time in some other natural setting.

Such short periods of time spent surrounded by a beautiful and strange otherness evokes long dormant memories within our bodies and consciousness.

What do we do? How do we maintain connection with these memories?

Many of us may take photographs. Snapshots of holiday scenes and activities are possibly amongst the most oft taken of photographs. When we look at them later, we are reminded of a beautiful and strange otherness.

Yet, although the photographs are a vicarious substitute for the real thing, they do remind us of the birthright we were meant to encounter.

As we look at these photographs, we may experience a sadness because the experience was so fleeting. There is no shame in suffering a feeling of grief. For that is what is real, and is attested by all three of the authors I have mentioned in this blogpiece – Paul Shepard, Chellis Glendinning, and Francis Weller.

Anyone wishing to delve further into the Fourth Gate of Grief is encouraged to read his book.

Notes:

1. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, The University of Georgia Press, Athens & London, 1998

2. Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 2015

Dumbest Idea Yet

Eärendil

There have been some weird, crazy, and stupid ideas originating in the minds of humans over the years. The latest I have heard of has to be the dumbest yet.

The California based company, Reflect Orbital, has come up with the idea of putting arrays of mirrors into orbit around Earth to reflect sunlight back upon Earth at nighttime. The company claims that these mirrors will 1. enable lighting after dark and 2. increase the amount of sunlight available for solar panels.

The company’s stated aim is to launch and have operating 50,000 reflector satellites by 2035.

Reflect Orbital was founded in 2021 by an aerospace engineer and a mechanical engineer. In July 2026 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC, an independent agency of the US Federal government) granted the company a license to launch a proof-of-concept satellite to be launched as rideshare with a SpaceX mission sometime this year.

This satellite is to be named Eärendil, a character from Tolkien’s The Silmarillon. Eärendil sails across the heavens with a sparkling jewel bound to his brow. The jewel shines down it’s light and becomes the Morning Star. I wonder what Tolkien would make of Reflect Orbital’s first satellite, let alone 49,999 more of them?

In its decision to grant the license, FCC declared that the project is groundbreaking technology and that testing it is in the public interest. Somehow, the public does not agree. More than 1,800 public comments have been made about the project, with most of these opposed to the idea.

The founders of the company (both engineers) are obviously intelligent beings, yet their idea has to be one of the dumbest yet.

Humans may be intelligent, yet incapable of wisdom. Intelligence might enable us to make or do something. Wisdom enables us to determine whether it is a good or advisable thing to do. This idea of reflector satellites is proof that wisdom does not derive from intelligence.

Let me briefly outline three reasons for this assertion.

1. Earth-based astronomy would be placed at risk. Astronomers have predicted that 50,000 reflector satellites would make the night sky 3-4 times brighter than present. Large, professional, telescopes may be immune in some way, as the company has said that it can mitigate this risk for these telescopes. But that does not allay the fears of amateur back-yard stargazers and children and youngsters wishing to focus their telescopes on the planets, moons, and comets of the night sky. The sense of wonder inspired by gazing at the night sky will be severely diminished.
2. It is estimated that 50%-70% of animal species are nocturnal or exhibit some form of nocturnal behaviour. These reflector satellites will hamper their feeding, mating, and sleeping patterns. For some, it will seriously impede their navigational abilities.
3. The circadian rhythms of humans are likely to be gravely disrupted. Circadian rhythm sleep disorder (CRSD) has been shown to be a factor in bipolar disease,¹ depressive disorders in young people,² and in fatigue, insomnia, appetite loss, irritability, headaches, and other health issues. Long term disruption to circadian rhythms impinges severely the underlying metabolic functions of our makeup. In turn, this can translate into illnesses such as Multiple Sclerosis³ and cardiovascular diseases.⁴

The day/night cycle has been a naturally occurring one for millions of years. Animal and plant species have adapted to this rhythmic cycle (some have even adapted to rhythms as long as five months or more).

Interfering with this rhythm is asking for disaster.

Reflecting light upon Earth during what is normally nighttime is the dumbest idea yet.

Notes:

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6812517/  accessed 7 September 2026

2. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00034-1/abstract  accessed 7 September 2026

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763414000104?via%3Dihub  accessed 7 September 2026

4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2657421/  accessed 7 September 2026

We Are Neanderthals

In 1856 the first recognised fossil belonging to the species Homo neanderthalensis (aka the Neanderthals) was discovered in the Neander Valley, Germany. Neanderthals inhabited Europe, Western and Central Asia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene epochs (approximately 800,000 to 12,000 years ago.) They became extinct approximately 40,000 years ago, although some may have survived a few thousand years longer in the Gibraltar region.

Another species, the Denisovans, were only recently identified, in 2010. The Denisovans inhabited Asia from about 200,000 to 32,000 years ago.

DNA studies of Neanderthals has been possible since the late 1990s, and their full sequence was published in 2010. Denisovans too, have had their DNA analysed.

One of the offshoots of these genetic analyses has been to discover that Europeans and Eurasians contain, on average, 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. People living in Asia, SE Asia, Melanesia, and Australian first nations people contain 4-6% Denisovan DNA.

Initially it was thought that the only people without any DNA from either of these species were sub-Saharan Africans. However, recently, it has been discovered that here too, Neanderthal DNA represents approximately 0.5% of their DNA. This has been cited as evidence for back-migration following the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa.

These genetic discoveries show that inter-breeding occurred between Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and Denisovans.

We modern humans (Homo sapiens) contain 1-4% Neanderthal DNA, or 4-6% Denisovan DNA.

We are humans with Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA.

That’s one way to look at it. But wait!

What if we took an oblique perspective?

What if instead of thinking that Homo sapiens contain Neanderthal DNA, we took the perspective that we are Neanderthal with between 96% and 99% Sapiens?

Ridiculous, I hear some scream.

Yet, we think this sort of thought many times. For example, I was born in New Zealand, as were my parents and all my grandparents. Yet, I can still identify myself as having Scottish, German, and English ancestry. I could, if I wanted, say I am Scottish, or German.

So, why not think of ourselves as Neanderthal, or Denisovan?

It is not as stupid as it may seem. It may even overcome some of the prejudice about Neanderthals that can be heard. It may also challenge the snide comments of “knuckle-dragger,” “ape,” or “caveman” that sometimes get levelled at those we think are stupid or inferior to ourselves.

Furthermore, thinking this way may help us recognise the benefits Neanderthal DNA offers us. Our immune system was given a boost, enabling us to ward off pathogens common in Europe and Eurasia and enabled us to survive in new territories. Our skin and hair were modified, supporting our ability to adapt to colder climates and differing levels of sunlight. It seems too, that our metabolism may have been influenced by Neanderthal DNA, allowing for adaptation to differing food availability.

Yes, it is possible to call ourselves Neanderthals, with Sapiens DNA.