This civilization is finished—that was the statement that made me start researching climate change. It was 2017, and I was in a pavilion-style tent in the back garden of the Panacea Society Museum, in southeast England. The society was formed after the last member of a millenarian group called the Southcottians died. The group were the followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott, who in the late eighteenth century predicted the end of the world, and her own role as the mother of the messiah. Her expected birth turned out to be the cancer that killed her, and the group lasted another two hundred years, waiting for an end that never came.
The speaker of this statement was Rupert Read, ecophilosopher, former Green Party politician, and one-time spokesperson of the activist group Extinction Rebellion. He was giving a talk, part of a climate and apocalypse conference sponsored by the Panacea Society, on how to seed the next civilization. He discussed what we needed to take with us for the next civilization, given that the end of this one was inevitable. By “civilization,” he meant industrial civilization, the West, the rapacious consumption of resources beyond the capacity of the Earth to provide. Limitless economic growth was just not possible on a finite planet. He was so convinced of his end-times prophecy that he went on to write a book with that statement—“This civilization is finished”—as the title.
I wanted him to be wrong, but as I began my own research into social and religious responses to climate change, I felt humbled by my own assumptions of continued prosperity. Read was not alone in making these fearful pronouncements. Extinction Rebellion, which he represented as a media spokesperson for over a year, undertook direct action around the world, stopping traffic in major intersections, blocking bridges, taking over parks, and gluing themselves to buildings, to get politicians and media to treat climate change as the existential emergency that it is. One of the protesters who glued herself to the ground outside the Shell headquarters in London was a lawyer and advisor to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meetings. One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, was even more blunt than Read: “We’re fucked,” he said: we’re facing not only the precipitous increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but, more imminently, social collapse and fascism.
Throughout my research from 2018 to 2022, I felt my fear grow at what I heard. It was not just the doom it spelled. Millenarianism, predicting the end of the world, has a long history. Christianity emerged from Jewish apocalypticism by claiming that the messiah who would bring about the Second Coming, the end of this world, and the start of a new better world had come—and was Jesus Christ. Since then, many groups and individuals have claimed to know the day and the hour of the messiah’s return, just as the Southcottians did. So far, they have all been wrong. Studying the beliefs of people who were generally wrong about the apocalypse had lulled me into a false sense of complacency. But now I was hearing it from climate scientists, professors of sustainability, and the secretary general of the United Nations: people with credibility, with something to lose, and perhaps crucially, with inside knowledge of how bad it was.
At the same time, I traveled the U.S. South and Northern Europe, contributing my own tiny piece to the great belch of carbon emitted into the atmosphere annually. I talked to people who didn’t want to talk about it, even though they lived on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and got hit by annual hurricanes that were rapidly intensifying. In 2022, Hurricane Ida inundated one of the communities I had visited in 2018. When I returned, houses were collapsed into the bayou, boats were still half-sunk in the water, and a marina that the fishing community had revolved around lay in tatters of twisted steel and hanging insulation, an empty cavern that had once been a social hub. Still, people there regularly told me they did not believe in this thing I called climate change, and some even suspected I was a liberal spy, writing some blog to ridicule them to the other coastal elites wherever I was from.
The painful bifurcation in responses that I encountered—reputable academics in Europe telling me that society was about to collapse, Louisiana fishers telling me this is just what life is like so toughen up and deal with it—gave me whiplash. I started terrified and got increasingly more afraid, because not only was the available data on climate change so alarming but also the social and political responses I was tracking were so muted. In the face of rapidly increasing carbon emissions at a rate unprecedented in the geological record, we just were not doing enough. Even politicians in Europe and the U.S. who did accept climate change was real weren’t proposing policies that were up to the scale of the problem. And there was a persistent faith in technology saving us. We would develop carbon capture technologies that would solve the problem. We would use particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to dull the heat until we decarbonized. We could electrify everything. These articles of faith were even built into the IPCC models.
Academics in Europe were telling me society was about to collapse, while Louisiana fishers were telling me this was just what life was like, so toughen up and deal with it.
A lot of people who work on climate change turn to stone. That was what one of my interlocutors, Dougald Hine, told me. He had been in and around environmental and climate movements long enough to develop not only a critique but to analyze a structure. When people learn about climate change, it is often like a conversion experience. In a damascene moment, they are struck by the scale of the problem. Then the fear and trembling comes. They run around switching off the lights and recycling everything they can. Then they realize that it is not enough. These small actions are woefully inadequate compared to the scale of the problem. Then comes the catastrophism. While some find this experience so overwhelming they go numb, and turn to stone, experiencing mass extinction and climate change as another intellectual problem to analyze, others go even darker. Talk of climate emergency can justify anything to stop it. If it is the end of the world, what wouldn’t you do to stop it?
Often this process gets called climate grief. This world is dying, so we mourn it. Hine called this a dark-night-of-the-soul experience, echoing St. John of the Cross. I went through my own dark night as I undertook my research. When I began in 2018, climate activists were out in the streets calling it a climate emergency. Then in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world like a microbial meteor. Some days, it was hard not to feel like it really was the end of the world.
But I soon learned that this is not a helpful way to think. Climate grief can lead to paralysis, doing nothing and saying nothing. It can lead to ignoring the things you can do. You do not need right belief or complete knowledge to make changes. And climate grief can lead to doomism, as with those scientists, academics, and politicians who said it was too late, we were finished. Many of the doomers were white men, and I wondered whether the end of this world was to them, who benefited so much from it, the end of the world. I came to see climate grief as indulgence. And doom as the mirror image of denial.
Apocalyptic thinking can lead to poor choices. Not only denying what remains possible, but making choices based on assumptions of doom can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. During my research, I saw people following manipulators with easy answers, those who indulged their worst fears of social collapse and civil war and told them what to do about it (often for a price). I saw people justifying all manner of authoritarian measures to stop climate change, often wielding their children or grandchildren symbolically as the reason to keep out migrants or hoard scarce resources. But children are already suffering around the world now—because of climate change, yes, but also because of poverty, war, and genocide. If you must save the children, why aren’t you doing that now?
One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, was even more blunt: “We’re fucked,” he said.
But I understand these feelings. As I read more about social collapse, about being stranded without running water and food because of climate-induced scarcity and civil conflict, I began to worry more about my own vulnerability. At the time, I was living alone in Belgium with my toddler. If I had to run, where would I go? How would I get there? I didn’t even have a car; I rode my bike everywhere. These fears continued to run in the background of my mind, and, when COVID-19 began in 2020, and schools and businesses closed down, I made the unwise decision to move back to Arizona with my child’s father. I thought we would be safer. Just over a year later, a mudslide followed a forest fire in our small mountain town, and I had to flee. Not from the fire, but from him.
After that, I looked at climate change differently. Collapse can mean many things. It can mean the slow depletion of resources from climatic change, economic collapse, and pandemic that may have led the Norse colonies in Greenland to disappear in the 1450s. It can mean loss of water, power, and food after a sudden war, which is the reality in Gaza now. When you experience climate grief, it is worth thinking about what you are really mourning. When that fear comes, what does it look like? Are you afraid of violence or infrastructural breakdown or losing a prosperous middle class life?
None of these outcomes is inevitable. The quicker we change course on carbon emissions, the sooner the worst effects can be halted. In this effort, everything we do matters, as we are part of the systems we live in and reproduce. And it is worth thinking through why climate change talk continually invokes Christian motifs. Why learning about it brings on an experience like conversion, when nothing is the same afterwards. Why we look to technology or activism as a savior, as though we need a messiah to bring about a better world. And why, when faced with an enormous transition, we can’t seem to help but see apocalypse.
Christianity continues to permeate Western cultures, even for the non-religious. Its history and theologies give shape and form to unspoken assumptions and implicit norms. Even though climate change will keep happening, and we are going through ecological, social, and political transitions on an unprecedented scale, it does not have to be the end times. Despair is no way to live. Hope is not a prediction but a resource. The challenges are vast, but we keep going. Build something today that will make tomorrow better. Not because it will benefit you but because it is the right thing to do.