The books and essays listed below may be downloaded in PDF format free of charge. The first set covers human-caused environmental changes and the adaptations humans must make. The second set, the novels, includes stories of characters living through the environmental changes. The third set includes textbooks on writing techniques by the Infinite Writers. The fourth group includes plant and animal field guides, our contribution to local planning resources.
Nonfiction Books and Essays
Scientists’ Reticence Leads to
Underestimation of Climate Risk
If Hansen is right, and reticence has indeed gone too far, understanding the machinery of this silence is no longer just an academic exercise, it is a survival imperative. The essay attempts to dismantle that machinery to show exactly how and why we underestimate the risk of ruin.
Download the PDF.
Community Adaptations is a rigorous tactical manual for the small-scale reorganization required to weather coming systemic shifts.It moves beyond abstract theory to provide a granular battle plan for local resilience. From establishing “analog anchors” in communications to engineering parallel “shadow structures” when official governance falters, this work outlines essential protocols for a post-monetary, high-friction reality. Download the PDF.
The central inquiry regarding humanity’s role after the Initiation, specifically whether we will emerge as sapient stewards or devolve into subsistence organisms, requires a rigorous dismantling of our current anthropocentric assumptions. Download the PDF.
How can humans simultaneously love and destroy plants, animals, and ecosystems. This essay, “The Innocence of Ignorance: Human Compassion and the Unknowing Destruction of the Biosphere,” explores the paradox of humanity’s innate compassion for nature coexisting with unprecedented environmental destruction.Most humans are “innocent of intentional harm to the biosphere” but they are culpable due to ignorance. Download the PDF
This philosophical manifesto frames the collapse of industrial civilization as a necessary evolutionary “initiation” that compels humanity to transition from a pathological industrial adolescence into a state of mature, ecocentric sapience. Download the PDF.
A pragmatic roadmap for civilizational survival, this work proposes a hierarchy of interventions—from limiting direct resource extraction to shifting foundational economic paradigms—to navigate the irreversible decline of the planet’s life-support systems. Download the PDF.
This comprehensive treatise provides a cross-disciplinary framework for maintaining limited human civilization through strategic societal transformations, assuming that the complete restoration of Earth’s ecosystem functions is no longer a viable objective. Download the PDF.
This brief but urgent volume outlines essential community-level strategies for surviving the most extreme climate projections, emphasizing the need for prudent, proactive planning over reactive crisis management. Download the PDF.
Novels
Corr’s journey takes him from the political intrigues of his home district to the vast expanses of space, challenging his skills, beliefs, and understanding of the universe.
The history of Maplewood and its journey into a new environmental reality is reconstructed from journals, newspaper clippings, and official records, particularly the personal journal of Town Manager James Holden.
Through professional triumphs, crushing losses, and the desperate, quiet work of raising a family in a collapsing world, Sam and Mia discover that the strongest shelter isn’t made of concrete—it is made of promises kept.
Dr. Sarah Chen exposes a failure in the metrics used to monitor planetary health. She discovers the biosphere is collapsing. Her investigation leads to Antarctica, where paleontologist Tom Bradley identifies the agent of collapse. Ancient, dormant organisms have awakened to terraform the Earth.
Writing Textbooks
Life on the Land merges scientific precision and literary artistry, offering an essential guide for anyone seeking to document the natural world with both accuracy and heart. Rogers provides a framework that transforms casual observation into meaningful narrative, demonstrating how attentive nature writing creates vital connections to the landscapes we inhabit.
Field Guides
Coming soon.
Background
I wanted to know more about the environmental changes being caused by people. Curious how they would respond, I constructed detailed outlines for specific issues and had the AIs search for peer-reviewed literature and reliable institutional reports. I began with the adaptations required to survive climate change. You can read the result in “Adapting to Worst-Case Climate Change” below.
The AI responses revealed a profound and systemic disintegration in global climate. However, a singular focus on climate overlooked the broader erosion of biological complexity including deforestation, desertification, the “insect apocalypse”, and the unraveling of the “assembly language” of our planetary operating system: the microbiome. I asked the AIs about the inner workings of the biosphere, the changes that were occurring and the adaptations people needed to make. Silent Earth Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere is the comprehensive result.
In Silent Earth, I asked for information about the “Cognitive Biosphere”, the view of Earth not as a passive stage, but as an active, information-processing entity connected and regulated by quadrillions of microbial and fungal agents. The presence of cognition across every level of the biosphere illuminates the complex interconnected nature of Earth’s living system. As I went on to catalog the adaptations required for our civilization to persist within this vast system, a grim conclusion emerged: the socio-political inertia that prevents ecosystem preservation, maintenance, and restoration also renders large-scale adaptation effectively impossible.
Seeking a mechanism for survival within this impasse, I asked for solutions and assembled Biosphere Collapse: Causes and Solutions. But there were no “solutions” in the traditional sense. The transgression of six of the nine planetary boundaries has already triggered cascading tipping points that are irreversible on human timescales.
As the impossibility of recovering Goldilocks Holocene conditions settled in, I searched for an endgame solution. After sorting through and discarding some big wild ideas, I settled on The Manifesto of the Initiation. It proposes that the collapse of industrial civilization is not a failure to avoid, but a necessary evolutionary “Initiation”. It is the mandatory transition from a state of pathological industrial adolescence defined by juvenile fantasies of omnipotence and a rebellion against limits, into a mature, sapient integration with the biosphere.
The initiation requires a shift from futile concern for failing systems toward an “Ark Strategy” of strategic abandonment and the preservation of genetic and cultural seeds. Two essays pursue related issues (Post Initiation . . . and Innocence of Ignorance).
The novels serve as a laboratory for these ideas. While Corr Syl is the imaginary ideal of long-term ecological harmony, The Maplewood Journals, The Long Fire Season, and Love in Eternal Gardens serve as more contemporary explorations of the coming ordeal, envisioning sanctuaries of memory and survival in the ashes of the Holocene.
Following the results presented in the essays and books below, I searched for practical adaptations people could make now to prepare for the coming catastrophes. I used my years of experience living in and taking part in community affairs here in Humboldt, Arizona to assess and integrate the AI responses. The “Guide to Community Adaptations” offers a set of actions that would help communities survive and prepare for the Initiation described in the Manifesto.
I tried many AIs, but mostly used Claude, Deep Agent, Elicit, Gatsbi, Gemini, Notebook LM, Originality, ProWritingAid, SciSpace, and Word. As required of any AI user, I decided which results to present, I checked each piece of text for accuracy and plagiarism, and I thoroughly edited the final drafts to ensure they made sense.
This adventure with AI yielded comprehensive results. I believe the works below should be required reading for all government and NGO planners.
GarryRogers Nature Conservation 