The first thing I noticed was the tiny black-and-white sign hanging lopsided from the metal gate. “PRIVATGRUNDSTÜCK,” it shouted at me. “BETRETEN VERBOTEN!” (“Private property, entry forbidden!”) The gate was unlocked. I watched from the car’s back seat as the wall of faded camouflage netting yielded. Nervous, I reached for my phone. No service. Two long, tall barracks came into view, mirror images of each other. The severe silhouettes, matching blocks of Soviet Lego, were softened by shades of lush green all around. I stepped out of the car and inhaled the sharp scent of fresh pine. Golden hour was approaching, and I could hear the cicadas tuning their instruments. Two women wearing wide-brimmed hats and gardening gloves looked up and waved. As the sun grazed the treetops against a cotton candy sky, I thought that if this was a doomsday survivalist’s paradise, it seemed more paradise than doomsday.
Still, the anxiety I had been ignoring all day rose in my chest. I reasoned with my fight-or-flight instinct: I had spent hours travelling from Berlin to get here. There was no backing out now. I took a deep breath and turned toward the main building. Just then, my host appeared, standing on the front steps. I recognized Ben immediately from his Instagram posts. He looked about fifty, skin leathery from the sun, with a mess of frizzled grey–strawberry blond curls tied into a bun. His bright blue eyes tracked me—affable with a hint of suspicion, mirroring my own—and we shook hands.
“Welcome to the Collapse Laboratory,” Ben said with a smirk.
His blue dress shirt was streaked with dirt, and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing a tattoo—“Vegan”—printed like a nutritional label on his forearm. His British accent felt out of place at the end of the train line, deep in Saxony, in the former German Democratic Republic. We exchanged pleasantries—how was the trip, what a beautiful day, we’ve been so lucky with the weather, you’re the last to arrive, the others are making dinner—as I followed him up the stairs. Inside was dark and dingy, and our path was lit only by the waning daylight. Most of the building, except for the bedrooms and kitchen, still didn’t have electricity, Ben told me. The industrial terrazzo flooring and long, low-ceilinged hallways reminded me of an old primary school frozen in time.
In the cramped dining room, a round table was set for eight. Atop an old lace tablecloth sat heaping bowls of salad and pumpkin soup. Against the wall was a glass cabinet holding stacks of mismatched porcelain salvaged from rummage sales. Taken altogether, the effect was very German punk grandma. As the other guests emerged and began to take their seats, we started to get acquainted.
Before we got very far, Ben interrupted. “I’d just like to say a few things about why we’re here this week,” he said. The chatter fell to silence. “We’re here because it’s already too late.” I raised an eyebrow. I knew he didn’t mean late in the day. “The collapse of society is inevitable, and it’s imminent. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it,” he continued, with the confidence of a world-weary Cassandra. “In all ways, human life is going to get worse. Instead of continual upward progress, we’re starting to see the world go in the opposite direction.” Everyone was suddenly laser-focused on their dinner plates. I had half expected an opening monologue like this, but I thought Ben might have opted for a softer approach. He continued. “I don’t know what it’ll look like, exactly, but there’s almost certainly going to be a catastrophic event. Most of us are going to have a terrible time.” Ben was animated by his speech: his curls sprang forth, taking on a life of their own as he gesticulated wildly. I caught a sparkle in his eyes. I watched my new friends squirm in their seats.
As Ben spoke, I picked at my potato salad, mentally retracing the steps that had led me here. It had seemed like a good idea at first, I reminded myself. But truthfully, I hadn’t felt like coming. Earlier that week, as I sat in front of the abyss of my empty duffel bag, I started having second thoughts. The tantalizing promise of a perfect summer weekend had materialized, and instead of going camping with friends or engaging in the preferred activity of Berlin’s underemployed—loafing at the periphery of lakes—I was getting on a train to the middle of nowhere to spend the week in a decommissioned military barracks for a “retreat” called the Collapse Laboratory. Privately—to friends, to myself—I referred to it as Climate Doomer Camp.
I had trouble justifying my choice of How I Spent My Summer Vacation to these friends I was forsaking. What I told them was this: in 2019, a Brit named Ben Green, who was let go from his plush software developer job in Switzerland, bought the biggest, cheapest, most isolated piece of land he could find in Germany and began to get serious about what he saw as the end of the world as we know it. For most of his adult life, he had worried about climate change. But as time wore on, he had begun to think that collapse was inevitable. He had built the Barracks—part back-to-the-land farm, part doomsday bunker—to live out the climate change–driven breakdown of society. He was the sole occupant and master of his thirteen acres, with only a few pigs he had rescued to keep him company.
Months ago, I came across Ben online while searching for climate doomers. I had always known there were people who felt nihilistic about the climate crisis. Doomers believe we’re bound for a catastrophic fate, destined for a dark climate apocalypse. Depending on who you ask, they’re either the only ones who understand the reality of the climate crisis, or they’re a gloomy threat to climate action, encouraging people to lapse into apathy and surrender to the rapidly warming universe. Doom—once a simple noun, often attached to its twin, gloom—has taken on a life of its own in the past few years. More than a fleeting feeling or an emotional response, it’s become a philosophical stance and, for some, a way of life. Not all doomers retreat from society and build their own post-apocalyptic communities, but Ben and the Barracks were perhaps the logical conclusion of doom, the end point of where these feelings could take you—if you had enough money to buy a sprawling plot of land and leave the messy world behind.
***
It should be said that Ben insists he is neither a climate doomer (“I think collapse is coming, but I don’t feel particularly doomy about it”) or a prepper (“I don’t do baked beans and shotguns.”) From where I stand, though, the absolute conviction that the apocalypse is looming, and the irrefutable belief that we can’t stop it, are the constituent parts of doom. Though there are ways that Ben doesn’t fit the profile of a typical prepper-slash-climate doomer. He shares chipper, upbeat content about the process of constructing his new life—what he calls “one man’s ten-year plan to build a post-climate catastrophe community”—on YouTube, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack. He is militant about veganism and self-sufficiency, fanatical about gardening, and committed to achieving a negative carbon footprint—which often means doing things the hard way. These are all strategies to fend off what he called “whataboutism”—if nobody could poke holes in his carbon-neutral lifestyle, he’d carry more clout in conversations about climate change and collapse. At the Collapse Lab, Ben gathered like-minded people who believed that climate collapse wasn’t just imminent, it was happening now—and that we needed to think deeply about how to show up for it. I was curious. Collapse-curious, I joked to my friends.
At its most basic level, climate doom is a feeling of despair for the increasing inhospitability of our warming planet. Doom implies a hopelessness akin to fatalism. Climate doom isn’t a cohesive movement with mutually agreed-upon norms or rituals, but a diffuse group of people who share an approach. It’s the stance from which people view the world and metabolize the science, the news, the grim reality. It guides how people live their lives. It can have far-reaching consequences, as in the case of Ben, who uprooted his whole life; it can wreak havoc on people’s mental health, causing spirals of depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts; and it can shape people’s decisions about the future: whether to have kids or not, whether to go to university, whether and how much to save for retirement.
The doom debate has produced a schism within the climate movement between the optimists and the people the optimists think are the pessimists, who might consider themselves realists instead. But many climate activists and scientists are dismissive of doomers’ approach, saying it breeds inaction, paralyzes us, and drags us down into the depths of despair. There is also research that has shown climate doomism has been used as a tool of the fossil fuel industry to block action by sowing the belief that it’s too late to do anything to stop the climate crisis. Some climate scientists prefer to call it climate defeatism instead, and others have called doom the new climate denial because of how disempowering its black-and-white logic is: There is nothing to be done to stop climate collapse, so why bother trying?
If doomers and I occupied a Venn diagram, we would find comfortable overlap in the understanding that things are worse than most people think and are getting even worse faster than can be seen. The doomers were out there on their own, though, with their belief that the apocalypse was coming. I had always believed that the question of how apocalyptic things got was up to us—that we had the power to, if not pull ourselves back from the brink, stop short of the worst-case scenario. But on bad days—when study after study warns of tipping points passed and betrayals big and small by the people in charge, my pendulum would swing toward Don’t Bother. On other days, I found my darker impulse to declare the earth’s time of death ridiculous. Mostly, maybe, I was numb, keeping my head down, blinders on. When I trace my own understanding of how the world has responded to the climate crisis, I see something different than the doomers do. We’ve jumped from the complete climate denial of the ’90s—the refusal to admit that climate change was even happening, let alone that it was caused by human activity—straight to It’s Too Late. Did I blink and miss the part where climate change was a challenge we could tackle, something we were equal to? Ambiguity can be a hard space to occupy, so it makes sense that some, when faced with ambiguity, have skipped right to “destined to fail.”
After Ben’s unsettling welcome—like a gloomy grace before the meal—we tried to rescue the conversation with uneasy small talk. Across from me was Jack, a vegan chef in his fifties from California who lived in Zurich. Ruddy and affable in Bermuda shorts and a baseball cap, he told me he had come to visit Ben after they connected on Substack over their shared veganism. Rebecca and Roland were a quiet young German couple—students, Roland said, but their real passion was farming. They were inspired by what Ben was doing here. Between bites, Indra, a petite Dutch girl in her midtwenties with long dark hair, told me she was just travelling around. In a few months, she would head to Canada to work the ski season out west. Eva, a monosyllabic Finn about my age who dressed in head-to-toe black, seemed uninterested in most of what was happening around her, including me. I learned from the others that she was a filmmaker who had driven here from Helsinki. She was spending the summer helping Ben produce YouTube videos about the Barracks, a bit of promotion to stir up more Substack subscriptions. Sitting next to me was Nynke. She had a round, cherubic face framed by a pixie cut, and she spoke softly, eyes cast perpetually downward. She told us she was a theology student at a university in Amsterdam. I said I had studied philosophy as an undergrad, and we began comparing notes. Ben chimed in. His philosophical influences stopped at Descartes and Sisyphus, he told us.
“Why Sisyphus?” asked Nynke.
“The myth of Sisyphus is about finding pleasure in whatever you’re doing,” he said. I tried to remember what I knew about Sisyphus. He had been condemned to a life of fruitless labour: pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down and have to start again—rinse and repeat forever. Finding pleasure in that seemed like a hard sell, but Ben went looking for it.
As the bottle of wine was passed around, a strange camaraderie opened up between us. Doom slipped further and further away from the conversation’s centre, until it dissipated into something unspoken. Instead, we sought out what was shared between us. The end of the world was the reason we were here, but we were still dancing around it, not quite ready to face what came next.
***
In the morning, I found Ben in the garden. It was a perfect summer day. Sunlight filtered through the trees, dappling the grass, and the air was silent except for a chorus of chirping birds. I asked if I could help.
“You can harvest all those small snap peas,” Ben said, pointing to a cluster of trellises.
I started snacking on them immediately, delighted by their sweetness and crunch. At first, we worked in silence. I eyed Ben from where I stood between the rows of trellises. He worked adeptly, as if it were second nature. I felt vaguely uneasy around him, sensing a hazy antagonism from him I didn’t know what to do with. What I really wanted to know were the answers to the big questions: How could he be so certain that societal collapse was imminent? Why did he live here all alone? What did he think was going to happen?
“Where did you learn to garden?” I asked.
In the little time we had spent together, I had noticed Ben defaulted to sarcasm and a spirited cynicism about most things. Now, though, as he shared his history of gardening—a de facto personal biography—he became earnest. Ben told me he had spent his entire life tending plants, starting from when he was a kid growing up in Birmingham, where his parents had an ornamental garden. Since then, he’d found a garden to care for almost everywhere he’d lived: in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he studied chemistry as an undergraduate; in Austria, where he raised his two daughters with his ex-partner and helped cultivate the family garden plot; in London in his twenties, where he launched a company that planted vegetable patches for rich people; alongside a successful career as a software developer that took him around Europe.
Ben had loved living in cities, he said, doing the same things I like to do: going to bars and cafés and clubs, to yoga classes and the movies. But in the back of his mind, he had always known we were running out of time. Over his forty-seven years, Ben watched as the planet raced past grim climate milestones: as rising temperatures broke record after record, as sea levels rose, as countless species went extinct, as governments and institutions failed to act, as the scale of the problem grew too massive for individual action alone to slow or stop it—and as what is considered “normal” shifted radically.
Ben knew he wasn’t deluded, but he felt like the rest of the world was. He saw a widening gap between what he was reading and what he was hearing from climate scientists, who couched their warnings in neutral academic language. Eventually, the cognitive dissonance between how he was living and what he knew to be the reality of climate change became too much. When Ben was fired from his job at a big media company in Zurich in 2019, he sold the apartment he had in Berlin and bought the Barracks with his savings. Now Ben’s LinkedIn profile lists his job as “Self Sufficient Avant Garde Gardener.”
I glanced down at the pile of peas I had amassed as we talked. I was impressed by Ben’s commitment to gardening—and to the Barracks—but I wasn’t convinced. Why was his answer to our current crisis to turn his back on the wider world, the messy cause of the problem? “I knew that to accelerate the conversation about climate change, about the human impacts of climate change, something like this needed to exist,” Ben told me. “I feel most useful when I’m being radical, and I knew this was radical.” What Ben saw as climate action—a “show what’s possible” model that allowed him to live in total alignment with his values while doing online outreach—I saw more as a retreat from the world, an escape hatch to a place where he could be in control. I told him it seemed like a huge gamble on an uncertain future. “What makes you so certain that society is going to collapse?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Well, the concept of things getting better is fairly modern. For most of history, people expected to live lives identical to their parents. But we live in a world where fossil fuels finance every measure of human progress. We forget that the very nature of progress is energy-intensive,” he told me.
“But,” I countered, “the U-turn of human progress doesn’t necessarily mean everything is going to fall apart. And it’s hard for most people to opt out of progress. What would collapse even look like?”
“It’s almost impossible to say—all I know is that it’s inevitable.” Then he raised his trowel from the soil and stopped. “Oh, this is a good one; I haven’t used this before: A caterpillar doesn’t just turn into a butterfly; it turns into a soupy mess first, out of which emerges a butterfly. A caterpillar can’t imagine a butterfly, and vice versa. And right now, we’re in the soupy mess of the middle,” he said.
I was skeptical of Ben in the way I was skeptical of most people trying to sell me something. But I had to wonder: Didn’t I, at least on some level, agree with him? That was part of why I was here, after all. I could tell he was a contrarian and a curmudgeon, but his disposition wasn’t gloomy. He seemed almost gleeful about the prospect of collapse, or maybe excited to be right.
Ben’s comment about Sisyphus the night before rattled around in my head. It seemed like there was no better place to live out Sisyphean fantasies of a never-ending to-do list than an abandoned military barracks in serious disrepair. The Barracks’s upkeep occupied Ben’s entire life. He had spent the past five years fixing up the dilapidated buildings and paving the way for sustenance through the seasons: clearing sections of land, building garden beds, planting, harvesting, making old machines work, chopping firewood—little by little creating the conditions to ensure his continued survival in an environment that was indifferent—and perhaps would soon be hostile—to it. Later that night, I realized I had forgotten the reason for Sisyphus’s life sentence. I looked it up before bed, illuminated by the blue light of my phone. It turns out he had been doomed to an eternity of rock-pushing because he had made the gods angry by cheating Death. Sisyphus had tried to outsmart the Greeks’ rules of the game, and he was punished for his hubris.
Ben was always thinking about the future. He marked time by the seasons—what he would preserve for the winter, what he would plant in the spring. He had only installed working toilets and running water in the main building six weeks earlier, for the occasion of our arrival. Everything at the Barracks was a painstaking work in progress. I wondered if Ben could see what I saw. Like Sisyphus, he had tried to opt out of the death of society. In exchange, he’d condemned himself to a life of endless toil. Unlike Sisyphus, though, Ben’s work wasn’t fruitless. All his labour amounted to something—though bearing witness to it, I wasn’t sure it was all done in a spirit of good-natured enjoyment. Ben had a long-term plan to maximize year-over-year harvests of organic vegetables. He had planted an orchard’s worth of trees, despite knowing they would only bear fruit a few decades later. Ben was preparing for the end of the world, sure—but that work was generative.
I envied his conviction. Ben was certain, and certainty is hard to come by in conversations about our climate-changed future. The questions I was preoccupied with—How should we live in the face of an existential threat? What do we do with all this uncertainty?—were the same ones that haunted Ben. It’s just that Ben’s search for answers had led him to take a sharp turn off society’s beaten track. For him, there was only one path forward. But, I asked myself: How should we deal with doom? It seemed to me like there were three options: retreat from society to better strive for a negative individual carbon footprint, like Ben; stay and fight for system change, like the climate activists and scientists; or remain in society but retreat from responsibility—like those of us in between.
***
In the months leading up to Doomer Camp, I started my research. Doomers were easy to find; they spent a lot of time online. They fit into a few camps. One camp is comprised of young people. Born into the climate emergency, they’ve watched from positions of relative powerlessness as the people in charge have betrayed them by failing to change course, over and over again. One 2021 survey of ten thousand teenagers in ten countries found that more than half believed that humanity was doomed, and three quarters said the future was frightening. Doomers are also scientists or public figures who claim “mainstream” climate science is sanitizing and obscuring the truth about climate change, and in a few cases, they intersect with preppers who adopt a radically individualistic, libertarian stance toward the end of the world. As I learned more about climate doom, I noticed that outside of young people, doomers were often middle-aged men notable for their vocal and absolute confidence in the looming end of the world.
People’s preoccupation with collapse—or extinction—is by no means new. Émile Torres, a historian who’s written the book on the history of extinction, told me that although the idea of extinction has roots in Ancient Greece, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that it came into its own. Before that, widespread Christianity was underlaid with the assumption that human beings are indestructible, which made extinction unthinkable. It was really only in the 1850s, when scientists uncovered the second law of thermodynamics—essentially a scientific indication that our universe will become completely uninhabitable when the sun burns out billions of years from now—that extinction became not only a possibility but an inevitability. But it wasn’t until the Cold War that the threat of nuclear destruction made human extinction seem like a realistic possibility.
Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, has long been a vocal critic of climate doom. “I study extinction for a living, and I see just as many examples of resilience in the fossil record as I see of disaster,” she told me. She cites the research of a colleague of hers, Erle Ellis: “When you look at the past, we have seen people grapple with existential crises, and the outcomes of those crises have more to do with the choices people make in those moments than the nature of the stressors.” But, Gill says, “resilience by changing our life ways is just not as titillating as the Last Civilization.”
Things are changing, researchers like Gill say. It just doesn’t feel like it. These competing narratives both have their grounding in reality: things are both getting better and worse. An edition of the New York Times’s climate newsletter that landed in my inbox earlier this summer got to the heart of the problem. Two studies had been released the day before: One highlighted the record growth of wind and solar power, showing that 30% of global electricity was generated by renewables in 2023. The other data, though, from the NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, showed record levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and marked the most significant year-on-year gain of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ever recorded.
In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes about the rare matsutake mushroom that grows in ruined industrial forests, and the often displaced and disenfranchised pickers who gather the mushrooms. She highlights that there’s something profoundly American—and capitalist—about seeing survival as a predominantly individual pursuit, fighting off others to save yourself. Instead, Lowenhaupt Tsing says her research has shown her that, more than going it alone, collaboration is what’s required for our continued survival—we need to help and be helped. Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that the ability to change with our circumstances is necessary if we want to sustain ourselves: “We change through our collaborations… the important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations.”
The summer before, a friend had told me about a particular kind of climate doom: the Deep Adaptation movement, a strand of doomism whose adherents believe that any energy spent on stopping climate change is wasted and we should be preparing for societal collapse. Deep Adaptation got its name from a self-published scientific paper by British sustainability professor Jem Bendell. The paper was downloaded over a million times, spurred an entire movement, and earned him the label of the High Priest of Doom. The paper was also criticized by many scientists for misinterpreting data and drawing flawed conclusions. Bendell later came under fire for promoting coronavirus misinformation, and he eventually moved to Indonesia to start a seaweed farming enterprise.
I saw Bendell speak at a Deep Adaptation gathering in Glastonbury in the summer of 2023, where he was wearing a T-shirt (also for sale) printed with “Doomsters Have More Fun.” He had just self-published a new book, and rather than doom, he expressed anger and moral outrage at “elites,” the “mainstream climate establishment,” and the “fake green globalists.” This climate populism was expressed to a room of people who were, if I had to guess, 98% white, and well-resourced enough to make it to Glastonbury. I rolled my eyes. If anything, the people in that room, including me, were not outsiders, but climate “winners”—the ones with the biggest carbon footprints who were still insulated from the worst climate impacts. I knew from the online groups that many people in the UK, the US, and Canada found solace in the Deep Adaptation movement when confronting their climate feelings—but this was something different. I was alarmed by the way grief had turned to anger, finger-pointing, and infighting.
When I talked to Jacquelyn Gill about this, she had little patience for it. “The people who are the most protected from the impacts of climate change are suddenly now feeling an existential threat, perhaps for the first time in their lives as a broader group—these mostly affluent, mostly white, mostly male, mostly Global North voices are the ones we tend to hear from the most,” she tells me. “In contrast, front-line communities in the Global South have been feeling the effects of climate change first and the most, and I don’t see them giving up.” For these communities, there is no backup plan, no emergency bunker or Mars colony, or anywhere else to go at all. “And if we’re really committed to climate justice, then no one is expendable—so giving up is not an option,” Gill tells me, “because you’re committing people to suffering to death, which to me is unacceptable.”
***
Depending on who you talk to, climate collapse is arriving imminently or has already arrived. Most serious doomers understand there to be a very short time horizon on ecological collapse—so short that they don’t want to invest much in the future. Better, like the Deep Adaptation adherents, to dedicate themselves to accepting their fate. Ben set himself apart here: he was preparing for ecological collapse by building what he calls a “post-collapse community.” The post in post-collapse indicated to me a type of optimism uncharacteristic of a doomer.
This experiment in community was new territory for Ben. He was continually torn between the forces of individualism—serving himself first, keeping things under control, being the boss—and remembering to account for other people, trying to be a good host. At dinners, a familiar refrain was, “If you don’t ask, you’re not going to get.”
At the heart of the Collapse Laboratory, he had told us at the start of the week, was the idea that we were meant to produce a document of some sort, from one side of collapse to the post-collapse world. This to me seemed like a flaw in the plan. If it was really collapse, wouldn’t that mean that there would be no recognizable world on the other side? Cynically, I wondered if this document was something he wanted to have only for the sake of selling the Collapse Laboratory in the future.
But all the other participants seemed to be here by accident—either to visit Ben, work in the garden, or hang out for a while. None of them seemed interested in thinking about climate collapse in the way that I was. There was no set agenda for the week, and most of the time, collapse talk was conspicuously absent—people were more concerned with what was for dinner, how the garden was looking, or a funny YouTube video. I wasn’t sure if Ben had recruited all his friends to fill seats at the first Collapse Laboratory, or if this was a testament to how hard it is to look a doomy future in the face, to engage with it on a daily basis, to let your life be affected by it in big and small ways.
I was spending a lot of my downtime at Doomer Camp doing interviews for an article about a small town in Canada that was rebuilding after a wildfire. The people I was speaking to had lost everything in the fire; nearly the entire village was burned to the ground. Their stories weren’t just tragic—they were completely unfinished. The community had had no closure, and their lives as they knew them were gone. And there were front-line communities like this one all over the world.
I found it jarring to listen to their stories while I was tucked away in the common room at a “post-collapse community,” as Ben called it. To be here preparing for the End of the World—in a way that amounted, for me, to recreational gardening and building things and canning vegetables—while many people around the world have already experienced an end to their world, made me nauseous.
***
All week the sun shone. One morning at breakfast, Ben suggested we have a picnic lunch in the garden. Nynke and Jack prepared sandwiches and salads, and I set the scene, laying out an old sheet for us to sit on in the shade of a big tree, and ferrying out plates and glassware, presenting the sleeve of vegan cookies I had brought to share.
The birds chirped and a light breeze came through, cooling us off. Everyone sat and grabbed a sandwich from the stacked plate, and I asked what people imagined a world in collapse might look like.
“Collapse is the continuing degradation of the human experience,” Ben told us. “It’s worth spending time thinking about what collapse might look like, but I also think we’re not capable of imagining it.”
“As far as I can see, collapse depends on three things: food, water and air,” said Jack.
Ben said that the air is the only one that actually scared him. “People are talking about geoengineering solutions—basically coating the sky in dust to reflect as much sunlight as possible to give us a couple more years. But obviously, they’ll spray stuff into the air that will rain down sulphuric acid. That is not being hyperbolic,” he assured us. “Geoengineering is how the Matrix started.”
Indra made a face, sighed, and asked, “Why would anyone still have kids in that situation?” Indra said she wasn’t sure the base level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—food, shelter, clean air, and water—could be met in the future. Any child of hers would have a worse life than her own, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to guarantee their safety.
Ben responded in a comforting tone: “Because we’re not all going to die.”
But, I challenged, what about the people who were less privileged than he and I were, the people who were already facing the end of the world?
“There’s an awful lot of browbeating about how climate change is going to affect the Global South worse. No, it isn’t; it’s going to affect them first. But no one is getting away from it.” What I heard between the lines was that those of us living in rich countries were less likely to die, but those who were living closer to climate threats wouldn’t be spared. But I knew it wasn’t just about where we lived—it was about the wealth that insulated us. And that wealth had come from a century of burning fossil fuels and heating up the planet. Didn’t the people who were farther from harm’s way—whether fire or flood—owe a hand to those who were in danger?
“Listen, look at it this way: every society collapses eventually,” said Ben. “Does anyone know about the Maya people?”
Nynke chimed in: “The collapse of the Maya civilization came after the breakdown of societal structure first. Usually it’s first economic, political, and societal degradation, and then an external force will come and—”
“Finish it off,” Ben said, completing her sentence.
“And let’s not forget a plague,” Nynke added.
The conversation wound its way from the pandemic to to the risks of AI-engineered rabies. Eventually, Jack chimed in, “Let’s drift into a few more positives, shall we?” and everybody laughed.
Yes, I thought, things are Bad, but are we following in the Maya’s footsteps? As we reshape our definition of dystopia, our definition of utopia is changing, too. Is a doomed world really the one we’re living in now? I wondered. Or could it be that actually, fighting alongside one another for a better world—even in a messy, uncertain, often disappointing society—is a form of utopia?
***
Later that afternoon, Ben and I sat side by side on a shaded bench near the orchard, hidden by a ring of tall grass, watching Roland wheel rolls of roofing from the workshed to the barracks building.
Our conversation meandered: We discussed our different approaches to climate action—Ben was not opposed to acts that could be labelled by some legal systems as eco-terrorism, where I thought we should play by the rules. I asked him what it was like to live at the Barracks alone: lonely and crazy-making, especially in the winter.
“Still, though, I don’t regret it,” he told me.
After our conversation, Ben gave me a tour of the orchard. As he walked, he stopped at every tree, naming it and telling me the story of where he got it. He talked about how he planted the trees, paying attention to how they would grow and offer a shaded path when they grew tall in many years to come. The trees were still scrawny, but they were bearing fruit. “I’m not a prepper, because preppers don’t plant apple trees,” he told me. “The skill set we’re going to need to rebuild, and to survive, is going to be a very much more empathic thing,” he said. “I really think that by virtue of what I’ve invested into the ground here, and the energy that I’ve done it with—which is all positive, transformative stuff—I think you can feel the difference between that and walking into someone’s bunker.”
It was a bounty: plum trees of all sorts, wild pear, cherry trees, apricots, apple trees. At the far end of the orchard he had planted nut trees—chestnut, walnut, hazelnut, hickory, and pine nuts. “The hickory and pine might not produce fruit for twenty years,” he said. I saw the irony of a climate doomer who was planting trees that would only flower in the time it takes for someone like me to have a child and raise it—watch it come of age. “You’re playing the long game,” I said, and he grumbled. Then we stopped at the peach tree. “Try one,” he said. I plucked a hot peach from a twiggy, drooping branch and took a bite.
How can I describe it? It was the best peach I had ever tasted. All summer I’d been popping into the organic market on my street corner, hopeful I would find the perfect peach. It had been here the whole time. It was the platonic ideal of a peach: bright and bursting with sweetness, warm. The juice dripped down my hand and I wondered why we hadn’t been eating these all week, until I realized it was because they had just ripened.
I resisted the impulse to pluck the tree bare and gather them all into my shirt, to steal away with them. When we finished the tour, Ben sent me to grab some more peaches for the rest of the group. I returned to the tree, eating another as I harvested enough for everyone, and handed them out as if I had grown them myself. Here we were, at the end, and there were fruit trees blossoming, and people to eat peaches with. Was it the work that had made the peaches possible that was beautiful, or was it the sharing?
On my way home, I took one more peach for the road.
