I Eat the Stars

On July 29, Elle Hunt wrote an article for The Guardian titled Your worst fears about cultural collapse might be true – here’s what you can do about it. In it she interviewed Sarah Wilson whose new book I Eat the Stars argues that we’re hurtling toward the same end as ancient Rome and the Mayan civilisation – but but still suggests that we have plenty to fight for.

Wilson argues that

We’ve been dealing with the climate as an isolated, almost linear concept, where it’s a problem with a fix. But not a single nation stuck to the Paris agreement. People are getting solar panels, but we’re all using more carbon-emitting fossil fuels as well – our habits aren’t changing. We’re still trapped in the mindset that caused the problem in the first place: believing in infinite growth, and that we don’t have to change our ways of being. We are living in a time of polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone

A civilisation is a complex system of complex systems. Eventually all complex systems, without exception throughout history, have collapsed under the weight of their complexity. A small crisis like a heatwave can be enough to tip the whole thing over, so the climate crisis is a really powerful node in this whole thing, because it is dictating the buildup of tension of all these other complex systems – while those, of course, are also adding to the climate crisis.

She also says that “I have no hope that it’s all going to be OK if we just recycle, or that we can return to the way things were, when everything was comfortable and we didn’t have to take responsibility. But I still have hope that the natural systems of life are going to force us into being the best versions of ourselves”.

Finally Wilson concludes that that she sees “what’s happening as a correction: we’ve gone in the wrong direction, we took individualism too far, capitalism no longer serves us and the centre cannot hold. Nature will recalibrate and find balance again. That’s what’s happening now. In the process, we are being forced to return to everything that makes us human.”

You can find the complete interview in the archives of The Guardian.