A civilization isn't what is ending.

It’s been a while. It has been a while because I am not brave.

4am and I am downstairs in my study with my spiced tea by the fire, thinking how to begin. Fire is life’s twin, I think. And another way of looking at it is that fire is one way for a human being to face. It’s been a long time since I faced the other way, a long time since I have sat out alone in the woods. Last time I did it, overnight, I slept in a blackthorn thicket with a muntjac barking in the not-yet-frost. On what passes for a hill round here, a place where the trees are allowed to cling to the scarp because they shelter pheasants. They shelter a few other things too, I suppose; a few wildwood dreams. Or that’s how it looks from the fireside anyway, when I think back on it. At the time, I was a worm and they were out there somewhere, crow-size. I lay on the murk of the muntjac’s trail as the cold worked its way in and I was chanting ‘straw dogs to the Tao, straw dogs to the Tao,’ shaking and shaking. It’s a saying I’ve heard about how easy it is to die¹. I am scared of a lot of things. I think, more than anything, I am scared of the cold. That was not far off a year ago now.

Outside the window, the smoke from my fire pulses across the streetlight. Out there it is November. I go to my laptop. Perhaps this is a third way for a human to face. Perhaps there were never only two ways and it was foolish to suggest it. I have been thinking a lot about dualities recently. In particular, I have been thinking about the dualities between ‘head’ and ‘heart', ‘life’ and ‘machine’, ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ and so on; I’ve heard a lot about these recently, and how they map onto the big old duality, the main one. I’m skeptical. I try to stay curious. The printer, crouched beside me, has one round blue eye that is not an eye. The wooden goblin, the lion, the fisher king, the couples fighting over coffee and uniting to found a nation and the eagle and the buddha on my wall: they also have eyes which are not eyes, don’t they? There is also a green peacock’s tail feather and - all dark but I know this - a painting of the saola, which is the name of the beast I once thought I might help save. I say that because I know some people are new here - thanks to Rob Lewis and Francis Young for recommendations - and it has been a while since I wrote anything here.

It has been a while since I wrote anything because I saw this substack as a way of putting out stuff that I would re-work into a book about my work on the saola and, since May, I have been struggling with structuring that book. This might - again - be a matter of courage. At the same time, I wondered what I was going to do with this substack. Week after week I redrafted a post reviewing what I had written here and announcing either an official hiatus or a series of upcoming posts. Week after week attempts at this post would balloon and then the balloon would seem to deflate and I would kick it a bit and then give up. A lot of coffee was involved. I got nowhere. I’m grateful to Caroline Ross for saying ‘don’t finish it.’ I’m wondering how short a post I can write. Six hundred words was my aim but I’m already there.

The other picture on my wall, above the saola, shows a small figure - a Tyrannosaurus rex - shouting out to a neighbour while silhouetted against a sunset that is too big to be that. I bought it in 2016 after a conversation in a lunch queue with someone who thought there was no way that Donald Trump could actually win. When he actually did, I was in Huế, trying to get through a presentation to WWF managers about an analysis I had done on some snaring data. The election results coming in were distracting and it did feel a bit like the end of our world. This year the great grandchild of that snaring data work finally got published. Patrols constantly removing snares from the forest means that there are fewer snares in the forest, but not really all that many fewer. The last absolutely definite evidence of saola from that forest, or anywhere else, was in 2013. I was last there - sort of - in 2023 and - well, you can read about it.

On Saturday I was at six-year-old birthday party at a local soft play centre and reading the end of Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands. It’s a wonderful book: ‘deep time nature writing;’ I think it really does work. Still, as he goes back through the epochs, something is lost, you can feel it. Colour, for starters, fades as we go deeper, but that isn’t all. In the Pliocene he can start with the swifts, low over Lake Lonyumun. By the Carboniferous, his wandering eye must hover with the Tullimonstrum under a halocline and it is harder to feel he, or we, are present. That is part of the magic, I think. We really are less present there, less of us can bounce back from that place, and there is wonder in the size of the dark. I wish - a little - that I could have written that book, could have been the one to write it, could have done that with my life. Deep time is, in one way, the natural habitat of my mind. In one way and obviously not in another² but - well - all have our hours and days and months and years because we are individual human beings. When we tell stories of the past or future, though, some of us are used to talking decades, some centuries and some millennia. I’m used to talking megayears; I was a deep time baby, a dinosaur child.

So, when I first read the Dark Mountain Manifesto, and especially the poem that fluttered before it and gave it its name, I heard a Deep Time story. The poet, untethering his eye from the organismal scale could see humanity and call us “beautiful… as a slowly gathering / glacier on a high mountain rock-face, / bound to plow down a forest.” I think immediately of Darwin’s “there is grandeur in this view of life.” I think of the ellipsis we all surely hear before ‘grandeur’, the gulp we must all take there. Well, not all of us, I suppose, you can always deny it. The Dark Mountain Manifesto points out that there are different kinds of denial. I have a somewhat better idea now, why I suddenly took it into my head to talk about Creationism.

The last chapter of Otherlands leaves me deeply shaken in the soft play centre because it reminds me what I shouldn’t need reminding of, placing our current epoch in what, to me, is its proper context. The proper context is quite horribly simple. I have been listening, increasingly, to people who believe we are facing the collapse of our civilization. I have been caught in a trap of wondering whether or not this is true. If I do that, I forget what I actually know. It’s not my area. What we are living through, and have always been living through, is a mass extinction.

A mass extinction. The words aren’t warm to the touch. They haven’t been running beside us like greyhounds. They aren’t poetry. The thing itself is there, though. It always been. In the big darkness something like Sumeria is a blazing light, relatively speaking, like the morning star, but there are real stars a lot further away. They look the same but they aren’t. And yet we’re the star, we’re the Death Star. A mass extinction is not an event that has ever happened in human history because human history itself is the event.

My fire is out, my family are up. I got anxious a couple of paragraphs back and quickly ate a banana. I’m still in my dressing gown. I am a human being. The last chapter of Otherlands makes a familiar argument about human beings³: we can be the Death Star that cares. Unlike the Chicxulub bolide or the Siberian megavolcano, we can see what we are doing and we can then change it. That’s the book’s message of hope and I’ve heard it before and I don’t believe it. I feel ashamed about that but I don’t. It doesn’t seem to me that there is that kind of a ‘we’ that can reflect and take action. I might be wrong. I love people but humanity isn’t a person. It might be beautiful, perhaps, but from a very long way away.

That will do for now. It is a beautiful morning and I might go and pick horsetails to plant by my pond. It’s ludicrous. I have no right to talk about this but then I don’t think anybody does. I think that next week I might find another morning to write something as long as this - 1.5 thousand words or so. I think that I might need to write about this dualism that seems to have grown into a holy war and to be either eclipsing the old right-left war or recruiting for it. A few years back I found myself among people who were sure that the story of the Anthropocene was the story of racism and colonialism. It was obvious, apparently. Now it seems that it is obviously a story about the Molochian Machine or the Luciferic Left Brain. I find myself reaching for the old conservationist’s logic, looking for allies among groups of humans telling stories about civilizational concerns. In short, I don’t feel at home. Apologies to those who have no idea what I’m talking about. I hope to explain a bit next time. Apologies to those who do, I don’t mean to sound flippant, I’m just trying to end this for today.

It’s broad daylight. There is a picture on my wall of a green pool - too green - and a dark beast drinking, and there is a picture of a ball of fire - too orange - and a black beast before it simply standing. I’ve run out of words.

1. From Caro Ross. Also from that book by John Gray back in 2004 or whatever it was.

2. Did we just have tea with Cthulhu?

3. For example, Aldo Leopold’s statement on the monument to the Passenger Pigeon.