1I Am Waking Up
There’s no rug in the world
that’s big enough
to sweep this under.
—Author Britt Wray, PhD1
The seven stages of climate denial: 1. It’s not real, 2. It’s not us, 3. It’s not that bad, 4. We have time, 5. It’s too expensive to fix, 6. Here’s a fake solution, 7. It’s too late: you should have warned us earlier.
—Professor Mark Maslin2
I wish you could have known my beloved Grandpa Smith. He was funny. He told jokes and did tricks, anything to make us laugh. He sometimes took out his false teeth, which truly amazed my cousins and me. Grandma would hear us giggling and see him fooling around with his dentures and she would say, “Oh, Steve,” shaking her head as she turned away to hide her smile.
Grandpa Smith had lots of tools and could fix anything. He could play ragtime songs on the piano, his hands pouncing on those black-and-white keys like two cats on ten mice. We would dance around the room in childish ecstasy, the only time dancing was acceptable in our conservative religious family.
Grandpa told amazing stories that always began with “Back in…” It might have been “Back in 1908…,” or “Back in 1929…,” or maybe “Back during the war…,” which meant World War II. However the story began, it would almost always end with “I’ll never forget it.”
He always carried a handkerchief. And a pocketknife.
He radiated goodwill and the simplest, purest love.
I remember opening my eyes while he said a prayer before a meal during one of our visits. I was seated to his right. I saw his right hand at rest on the table beside me, his fingers gently tapping the tablecloth for emphasis as he prayed. The skin on his forehand looked like cellophane, full of age marks and bruises and wrinkles, with raised purple veins meandering like rivers, so different from my skin back then, so like my skin now.
Almost every winter, he and Grandma joined my parents, brother, and me for a long drive from upstate New York to Florida for a late winter vacation. One year when I was ten or eleven years old, we were passing through a part of Central Florida where the fields were dotted with strange contraptions that looked like giant steel sandpipers bobbing up and down. “What are those?” I asked. Grandpa explained that they were pumpjacks. They pumped oil out from the ground, and from that oil we made gasoline, the same gasoline that fueled my parents’ 1957 Pontiac Star Chief.
“What happens when they pump out all the oil?” I asked. You know how kids ask questions.
My grandfather was born in 1894, and he left school to start working after the eighth grade. He was smart and wise, but not highly educated. Over the course of his life, he had a variety of jobs. First, he was a vegetable huckster in a horse-drawn cart, then a house painter, a piano maker, a maker of plywood aircraft in World War II, and a factory worker for the auto industry. He was a simple, practical man and a devout Christian, and his answer to my question about running out of oil was as immediate and innocent as was everything else he said: “That will never happen, Brian. The Lord put enough of what we need in the Earth to last us until the Second Coming of Christ.”
It was a sweet answer, a sincerely pious answer. But I couldn’t buy it.
My grandfather shaped me in so many ways, and the years since he died have only made me love him more. But I realized even as a boy that Grandpa had grown up in a different time, a different world. To my grandfather, the Earth still felt unimaginably huge, and our loving God designed it especially for us as a giant store of free resources, so there was nothing to worry about.
My ten-year-old psyche was being shaped by different influences, including the first photographs of Earth from space. To me, informed by those photographs, our planet was a small clouded blue-and-white sphere floating in the vast darkness of space. It was obvious to me that in that small sphere, there was only a finite amount of oil—or anything else.
Fast-forward thirty-three years from ten-year-old me sitting beside my Grandpa Smith in our 1957 Star Chief. I had left my first career as a college English teacher to become a pastor, serving an innovative Christian congregation just outside Washington, DC.
One Sunday, I preached a sermon on our moral and spiritual responsibility to care for the Earth. For me, faith in God didn’t absolve us from ecological responsibility or guarantee that we could take all we wanted since the world would end soon. Instead, the beauty and belovedness of creation issued a moral summons to humanity to care for every sparrow, every wildflower, every river and mountain and meadow.
After the service, a student from a nearby university came up to thank me.
“I’m an environmental science major. That was such an important sermon. I’ve never heard any minister say what you said. But I noticed you didn’t mention global climate change. You know about it, right?” she asked.
“You mean nuclear winter, the global cooling that would follow a nuclear war?” I replied.
“Wow. You don’t know about global warming,” she replied, obviously shocked. She told me to go home and search “global warming” on my computer, which I did that very afternoon. Soon I came upon a graphic that showed the reduction of the Arctic ice sheet over the previous forty years. I saw the patch of polar white shrink before my eyes, and my life has never been the same.
Seven years later, my concern about global warming and related environmental problems led me to write a book on the subject. I wanted to explore the question, “What are the biggest problems, challenges, and threats we face as a human species?”
That research project might sound depressing to you. But the question had seized my curiosity for three reasons.
First, to put it bluntly, as a pastor, I had gotten sick of religious problems. I was sick of people complaining about the style of music in our services, or the way I interpreted a Bible passage in my last sermon, or that I wasn’t as dynamic as that handsome young preacher on cable TV. I felt that I was constantly being drawn into big arguments about tiny religious matters. Religious triviality was not only boring to me; it felt dangerous. While we were arguing about gnat-sized religious problems, I suspected that a giant camel of trouble was sneaking into the tent in the form of global overheating, to be sure, but also resurgent racism and white supremacy, accumulated power among the super-rich, the dissemination of more and more weapons with greater and greater kill power, a growing susceptibility to authoritarianism among frightened and easily misled religious people, and more.
Second, for well over a decade, I had been going through a deep theological re-thinking, what many people now call “faith deconstruction.” I had been taught that the purpose and focus of Christianity was to help people end up in a good place after they die. But as a preacher who had to engage with the Bible week after week, I had become convinced that this assumption was faulty. Every week when we prayed, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven,” I realized that we weren’t praying for our souls to go up to heaven after death. We were praying for a better way of life to come to fruition down here on Earth, while we were still alive. That theological revolution made me ask questions I had never asked before: If God cares about what is going on here in this life, shouldn’t we care too? If so, what are the biggest problems here on Earth, anyway? I had been so focused on heavenly problems for so long, I felt like I needed to take a crash course in earthly problems.
Third, something was happening to me that often happens to people at midlife. I was becoming less obsessed with my own success and well-being, and more concerned about the success and well-being of my four children and future generations beyond them. What kind of world would my kids face as they grew up and perhaps had children of their own?
So in 2006, at the age of fifty, I embarked on a research project that turned into a book.
The title, Everything Must Change, tells you something about what I learned. (That title was tame compared to the title I originally proposed to my editors: Jesus and the Suicide Machine.)
In that year of research and writing, I became convinced that human civilization as we knew it was destroying itself. It was on a suicidal, eco-cidal trajectory arcing toward the collapse of the global ecosystems upon which we depend. We were already on course to plunge billions of people into great danger and suffering, and tragically, the most vulnerable would suffer most. I wish the intervening years proved that I had overestimated those dangers. I wish.
As I finished the book, one huge new question had arisen and remained unanswered. Some of the experts I encountered were confident that a great turning or turnaround could happen before a civilizational collapse. Others were convinced it was already too late for that, and we should put all our efforts into preparing survivors of the collapse to create resilient local communities in the aftermath. Still others believed that the collapse would be so total that there would be no economies at all, global or local, because there would be no humans, and perhaps little in the way of complex life left on the planet. Which experts were right?
I felt that question was too dire to include in the book, so I held it in my pocket like a stone, like a bullet that had been removed from my body. I have held it as my deep secret ever since, seldom mentioning it to anyone.
As a writer and speaker over the years since I left the pastorate, I’ve come to realize that precious few of the clergy, church folk, and other spiritually oriented people who come to hear me want me to talk about civilizational collapse. (Why did that surprise me?) They’re too busy trying to help individuals, local communities, and humanity in general survive in this pre-collapse civilization. Survival is a tough enough assignment in these fractious and anxious times. So religious organizations pay for my travel, lodging, and honorarium because they want me to give them hope and some practical guidance for the current “normal” world and its challenges. I’ve done my best to do so.
But in the last several years, it’s been harder and harder to keep doing that. Part of me wants to grab every pope, bishop, denominational executive, pastor, and seminary professor by the lapels and start yelling, “What the frack are you doing? Arguing about theological trivialities while the world burns? Worrying about preserving organ music and quaint architecture as the sixth mass extinction is unfolding? Why aren’t you reorganizing everything, rewriting every liturgy, restructuring every hierarchy, and revolutionizing all your priorities so that you can re-mobilize all your resources to help save our precious, fragile planet? Aren’t you supposed to be in the saving business? Don’t you see? Without a healthy planet, there will be no healthy people, and certainly no healthy congregations, denominations, religions … or organ music!”
But I haven’t assaulted anyone, physically or verbally, at least not yet, and I don’t plan to. I realize that, whether in the world of religion or in the worlds of politics, business, education, and science, until things get bad enough, most people don’t change. They don’t even notice. They just go on, doing the best they can, and feeling that the future of humanity and the health of the Earth are way above their pay grade. They hope somebody else is worrying about it.
Maybe a few of them feel like my Grandpa Smith, that God has the past, present, and future fully scripted already, so we humans don’t need to worry about such things. Whatever happens will be God’s will.
But I suspect that most folks have their secret worries just as I’ve had.
So I began planning this book for all those people who have been hiding how worried they are, who know we’re in trouble and aren’t sure what to do or how to be, who realize that pretending to have hope is more exhausting than waking up to reality.
I remember what it felt like when I clicked on that website with the shrinking ice cap graphic. I remember what it felt like when I wrote Everything Must Change, or read William Catton’s Overshoot, or Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and Falter, or, more recently, Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice, or listened to lectures by Michael Dowd or Sid Smith. I remember the alarm, even panic, that arose within me.
At points in my ongoing awakening, when I felt that I couldn’t bear any more grim statistics or dire predictions, I learned to say to myself, “It’s OK. I’m waking up. It’s a process. It takes time.” My learning process has zigzagged back and forth, taking a bipolar path between optimism and despondency. I expect yours will too. So I’ll do my best to guide you through this gently, knowing that we humans need to be awakened gradually, or we get really grumpy.
So here we are. We share this emotional and intellectual experience of doom, of waking up to our precarious predicament.
We’ll explore questions like these:
What are the best-case and the worst-case scenarios that we face—environmentally and socially?
If some degree of civilizational collapse is coming, how shall we live on the bumpy ride toward the bottom? And how bad will the bottom be?
How do we manage a recurring temptation to retreat into a bubble of denial?
How can we manage encroaching feelings of doom without becoming despondent, overwhelmed, buried in gloom?
How can we avoid turning our worst-case scenarios into self-fulfilling prophecies?
Because facing current available data forces us to think about our own deaths and the possible demise of our civilization or even the whole human species, how can we predispose ourselves to live well while we’re still alive?
Where can we find spiritual support when our religions seem to be living in another world?
How can we organize for meaningful action when our political systems are failing so pathetically?
How do we, who have lived in a time of extraordinary progress and plenty, prepare for a future of decline and collapse?
How can we help our children and grandchildren grow up in a world that often feels like it’s falling apart, where their lives will almost certainly be less prosperous, less secure, and less comfortable than our lives have been?
When we were driving past the pumpjacks in Central Florida, Grandpa Smith was about the age I am now. He had lived through two world wars, a global pandemic, and the Great Depression, in the middle of which he fell from a ladder and broke his spine, forcing him to spend many months in a Stryker frame in a hospital. When we were sitting there in the back seat of the Sky Chief, he was about to begin the long journey of walking with his beloved wife through her long decline from cancer.
He didn’t know anything about climate change, ecological overshoot, or the dynamics of civilizational collapse. But he did know how to survive in a scary century, how to endure great hardship, and how to sustain a kind and resilient spirit through it all. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about him now, as I begin this book. And that’s why I wish you knew him.
Dear Reader,
I introduce myself in this chapter by sharing my story about waking up to our current situation. Here are some questions you can use as journal prompts alone, and as conversation starters with a reading group.
Copyright © 2024 by Brian D. McLaren
