Don’t exaggerate

In 2010 I joined Crisis Forum, an email discussion loop initiated by genocide scholar Mark Levene and friends. Coming into being shortly before the onset of corporate social media, Crisis Forum offered a simple communal space for genocide, climate, and human ecology researchers to reflect together on what can be done to avert industrial modernity’s self-reinforcing ‘death spiral’, as it’s now being called, into runaway climate chaos and genocidal violence.

Some fifteen years later, as daily images of a UK-facilitated genocide return me to this first sustained exposure to an unfolding metacrisis, there’s one encounter at Crisis Forum in particular that’s stayed with me.

My presence on the forum was something of an anomaly – an artist and arts lecturer without relevant credentials, I’d wound up there through common concern rather than relevant expertise. On the whole I tended to listen rather than speak, then, but on this occasion I must have remarked on something I’d just heard – or thought I’d just heard – concerning a growing inevitability that the dominant culture’s current trajectory will lead not just to the near-term collapse of complex societies, nor merely to the end of the human species, but to a more terminal mass-extinction event: to the extinguishing of Earth’s entire web of life.

I forget now what this news, if news it still was by that point, prompted me to say. What I do recall is my response receiving  a rather brusque correction, which amounted to: Don’t exaggerate – it’s not helpful. It’s almost certain that some form of microbial life will survive what this culture’s inflicting on the biosphere.

Like an unintended gallows joke that climate scientist’s scrupulous precision has stayed with me for fifteen years. 

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Of course there’s no single beginning to this. A haphazard series of encounters, each a starting point of a kind, each with its own version of a still emerging story. Seen from here, though, it’s keeping company with Crisis Forum that first precipitates a slow process of change, one it will take him a decade and more to even notice, let alone name.

As he listens to them talk, he begins to turn into stone. That other life, the person he’s been, all that begins to coagulate, to harden, until one day he wakes to find he’s become a new thing altogether: a thing that can no longer move.

All of this is open to question. Does their conversation really stir such a change into being, or is it truer to say that as one kind of truth becomes clear to him it fits seamlessly onto another, lying in wait at the root of his life? And yes, all of this is just a way of speaking – he begins to turn into stone – but a way of speaking with its own peculiar, unexaggerated precision.