Going full circle. Long personal story
Around 2005 or so, I stumbled upon and read ”Limits To Growth”. I was just out of school, had my first job in marketing/PR and life was fucking good. I remember thinking back then, it can’t be that bad, and surely we will do something about it. Like most of us were thinking, I guess.
Over the next years, I didn’t really pay that much attention to any of it. The future seemed bright. Then came the 2008 market crash. And it got me wondering and thinking. And I started reading about it. I’ve always been a heavy reader but up til that point, it’d been mostly fiction. Unknowingly, I was entering Wonderland and would soon stumble down the rabbit hole.
I more or less devoured every book about economics, global trade, capitalism, complex systems and the like. I was making weekly trips to the book store and one day I found myself staring at Mark Lynas book, ”Six Degrees”. I obviously bought it. Read it and re-read it.
Enter the rabbit hole.
From this point I became the obnoxious ”DONT YOU UNDERSTAD WHAT WE ARE DOING” kinda guy. You guys probably know exactly what I mean. I read everything I could find, scoured the Internet, watched documentary’s and listed to radio and podcasts. I was horrified, got depressed and felt sorta useless. But there was really nothing I could do about it. So I guess I just pushed those feelings away.
The years passed. As they do. I kept reading, learning, kept being that ”fucking climate guy”. I was broadening my vision, figuring out how everything is connected. We had the 2015 Paris agreement, and I remember thinking, are we finally taking this serious!?
I quit my job, because I couldn’t maintain the very lifestyle that I knew was destroying the planet. I went back to school (I’m from sweden, so it’s real easy to do), and started studying climate, ecology, geology and sustainability.
This is the same time Greta started doing her school strike for the climate and I felt, maybe not a wind of change coming, but a breeze?
I finished school about the same time covid hit. Luckily I was able to get a job with an organisation working with climate, clean energy and sustainability. I might not have been thinking ”we can do this”, but more in the lines of ”we at least have a fighting chance, right?”
Three years of working for that organisation. Meeting people working with the same issues, talking to politicians, trying to make a real change, trying to get our government to understand the depths of the situation. The truth of it? I/we had accomplished absolutely nothing. I was beyond frustrated, I was lost. And I hit the wall. Sorta ”Mythbusters launching a fucking rocket at a brick wall” kinda level. This is two years ago. Almost to the day.
Being on the inside, working with the people who supposedly are the ones who can make a change, and realising they haven’t got the slightest clue about what’s happening and how it’s all connected. It’s all about the ecomodern dream of new impossible inventions that are gonna save us. Kicking the can, and burning the future for all coming human generations. And that’s it. There is absolutely zero understanding , zero wisdom and zero action. Abandon all hope, for there is none.
I now consider my self a humane ecologist, I still read, listen to podcast, watch YouTube and I’m taking a night course on ”resilient and sustainable cities”.
I haven’t lost hope in humanity, but I’ve lost hope in that we are gonna change the system in a way that will soften our civilisations fall/collapse. Our species are mentally still between childhood and adolescence, and we lack the wisdom to even comprehend the nature of the problem. Yet we wield the power of gods, and everything we touch, we destroy.
I don’t know if this paradox has a name, or if it’s just the core problem with capitalism. But take almost any invention. Some university discovers something, someone finds a way to monetise on it, the public goes ”yay!” And everyone buys it. A few years down the line in turns out that there was a caveat. And now we need a new invention to counter
