I am pleased to announce the release of The Maplewood Journals. The story chronicles a community’s fight for survival in a world being reshaped by environmental decline.
The story begins as James Holden arrives in the small town of Maplewood with his wife Emily and daughter Sophie. He is the new Town Manager, hired fresh out of college.
James quickly discovers the town has a serious problem, it is running out of water. As the story continues, the water problem is followed by others including catastrophic storms and fires. While James Holden is a central figure, the town of Maplewood itself is the true protagonist. The narrative is a multi-generational saga. It shows residents learning to adapt through community action.
The history of Maplewood and its journey into a new environmental reality is reconstructed from journals, newspaper clippings, and official records. The story’s principal resource is the personal journal of James Holden.
I wanted to understand what happens when the environmental crises we read about in the news become the lived reality of a community.–Garry Rogers
This is not a story of despair. It is a testament to human ingenuity and the power of group action. The narrative explores themes of leadership, loss, and adaptation. It is a tale of the struggle to forge a meaningful future in an uncertain world.
Our planet’s life-support system is in trouble. For centuries, we have treated the biosphere as an infinite resource. We have used its soils, forests, and waters. We have filled its air and oceans with waste. Now, the bill is coming due.
The signs are all around us. We have pushed the Earth beyond its safe operating limits (Richardson et al. 2023). The systems that kept our climate stable for millennia are beginning to break down. This is not a distant problem for future generations. It is a present reality. The window for simple fixes has closed.
My new book, Biosphere Collapse: Causes and Solutions, confronts this reality directly. It argues that we must shift our focus from preserving and restoring the past to preserving a future. The book moves beyond describing the problem. It offers a clear, structured framework for the necessary transformation of our civilization.
The framework organizes the required changes into four levels of increasing difficulty. It starts with straightforward technical solutions, like managing fisheries. It moves to restructuring entire economic sectors, like energy and agriculture. It then addresses systemic drivers like urbanization. Finally, it tackles the deepest challenge: shifting our core beliefs about progress and growth.
The book makes a pragmatic case for preparation. Profound change is difficult in times of comfort. It often takes a crisis to create the political will for action. As climate-related disasters become more common, they will create windows of opportunity. Biosphere Collapse advocates developing detailed blueprints that communities, towns, and nations can have ready to implement when those windows open.
This is a book about facing hard truths. But it is also a book about agency and hope. It outlines a path forward, one that combines technical knowledge, political strategy, and a deeper ethical relationship with the living world.
To learn more about this essential framework, please read the full executive summary on our new website page.
Bibliography
Richardson, K., et al. 2023. Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 9: eadh2458.
Here is a short explanation of the title. It breaks down the metaphor used in the text to clarify that “Initiation” refers to a rite of passage rather than a beginning. The title reframes the collapse of industrial civilization not as a meaningless end, but as a necessary rite of passage for humanity. It argues…
I am pleased to announce the release of my new novel, The Long Fire Season. For years, I have written about the technical realities of biosphere collapse and the necessity of adaptation. Now, I am exploring those themes through the most powerful lens available to us: the human heart. Love in the Time of Nature’s…
We stand at the terminal edge of the Holocene. By now, those of us paying attention to the data know that the era of “green growth” and technological salvation is a delusion. We are beginning to understand what systems theorist Nate Hagens calls “The Great Simplification”—the inevitable thermodynamic correction that occurs as our civilization’s energy…
(This article is the last of a six-post reality-check. Concepts and examples are drawn from “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)
Across this series, we have journeyed from the stark physical reality of a wounded planet to the deep, inner landscape of human grief. We have explored the rise of a new geological force in our Technosphere, the radical rethinking of our legal systems through Rights of Nature, the urgent mission to preserve our knowledge, and the profound sorrow of solastalgia.
This journey from the external world to the internal may seem like a shift in focus, but it reveals the fundamental truth of the Anthropocene: the crisis of the biosphere is inseparable from the crisis of our own consciousness. The crucial question is no longer just what technology we can invent, but what kind of beings we choose to become. Can we, armed with knowledge of our own minds, do a better job?
The evidence presented in Silent Earth suggests the path is difficult. Our species is hobbled by cognitive biases that were once adaptive but are now perilous. We discount the future, we are overly optimistic about risk, and we struggle to grasp the slow, cascading nature of complex system collapse (Frederick et al. 2002). These are the mental roadblocks that have led us to this precipice.
Yet, our cognitive toolkit also contains the seeds of a solution. We are, to our knowledge, the only species on this planet capable of understanding its own cognitive flaws. We are the only species that can study its own history, anticipate distant futures, and consciously choose to evolve its culture.
This is the final and most essential adaptation. It is a cognitive adaptation.
It means recognizing that our sprawling Technosphere is the physical result of an extractive mindset. It means understanding that the call for Rights of Nature is a legal manifestation of our yearning for a more just relationship. It means acknowledging that our mission to preserve knowledge is our foresight battling our shortsightedness, and our ecological grief is the pain of a bond that has been broken.
To do a better job is to use this self-knowledge to consciously steer our cultural evolution. It is to build governance systems that account for our cognitive biases, to foster economic models that value long-term stability over short-term gain, and to cultivate an ethic of stewardship rooted not in dominance, but in humility.
As the great conservationist Aldo Leopold urged, we must make the journey from “conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold 1949). In a deteriorating biosphere, this is no longer just a poetic ideal. It is the most pragmatic and necessary survival strategy we have left. The ultimate test of human intelligence will be whether we can learn to live wisely on the only home we have ever known.
References
Albrecht, G., et al. 2007. Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry 15(sup1): S95-S98.
Brand, S. 2018. The manual for civilization. Long Now Foundation Press, San Francisco, 324 p.
Cunsolo, A., and Ellis, N. R. 2018. Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change 8(4): 275-281.
Dartnell, L. 2016. The knowledge: How to rebuild civilization in the aftermath of a cataclysm. Penguin Press, New York, 352 p.
Frederick, S., Loewenstein, G., and O’Donoghue, T. 2002. Time discounting and time preference: A critical review. Journal of Economic Literature 40(2): 351-401.
Haff, P. 2014. Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being.
Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395(1): 301-309.
Hutchison, A. 2019. The Whanganui River as a legal person. Alternative Law Journal 44(1): 16-20.
Kauffman, C. M., and Martin, P. L. 2017. Can rights of nature make development more sustainable? Why some Ecuadorian lawsuits succeed and others fail. World Development 92: 130-142.
Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, New York, 226 p.
Zalasiewicz, J., et al. 2017. The technosphere: its composition, structure, and dynamics. The Anthropocene Review 4(1): 9-28.
(This article is part of a six-post reality-check. Concepts and examples are drawn from “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)
Earth’s environmental changes are not just an external, physical phenomenon. They have powerful effects on our inner, psychological landscape. As the world we know changes, many of us are experiencing distress that, until recently, had no name.
Philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe the feeling of homesickness caused by the negative transformation of the environment (Albrecht et al. 2007). It’s the pain of seeing a beloved forest logged, a familiar river run dry, or a vibrant reef turn white. This is accompanied by ecological grief, a deep sadness in response to experienced or anticipated environmental losses (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018).
These are not abstract concepts. They are the lived reality for people around the world. Researchers have documented the grief of Inuit communities as they witness the decline of caribou herds (Cunsolo et al. 2020). Conservation professionals report experiencing significant emotional distress as they conduct their work.
This emotional toll can lead to a dangerous feedback loop. As people lose direct, positive interactions with nature, their emotional connection weakens, reducing their motivation to protect it. This can lead to further loss (Soga and Gaston 2016).
By acknowledging these genuine emotions, we can address the mental health dimensions of biosphere decline. It’s time to explore our inner landscape response to our changing planet,
References
Albrecht, G., et al. 2007. Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry 15(sup1): S95-S98.
Cunsolo, A., and Ellis, N. R. 2018. Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change 8(4): 275-281.
Cunsolo, A., et al. 2020. You can never replace the caribou: Inuit experiences of ecological grief from caribou declines. Cultural Geographies 27(4): 599-616.
Soga, M., and Gaston, K. J. 2016. Extinction of experience: the loss of human–nature interactions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14(2): 94-101.
Cognition is everywhere in all creatures. But what about us? Human cognition is an extraordinary elaboration of the capacities found throughout the biosphere. Our ability for symbolic language and cultural evolution has allowed us to accumulate and transmit knowledge across generations. This has transformed our species from one among many into a planetary force that is reshaping Earth systems (Henrich 2016; Steffen et al. 2011).
This unique cognitive power, however, presents a paradox.
The same intelligence that allows us to understand the intricate workings of the biosphere has also given us the technology to disrupt it (Steffen et al. 2015).
We suffer from a cognitive gap between our technological capacity and our ecological wisdom. We are brilliant at solving immediate, short-term problems but our cognitive biases make it difficult to address slow-moving, long-term crises like climate change. Biases like temporal discounting (valuing the present far more than the future) might have been essential during our early evolution, but they are now proving to be a critical flaw in our ability to act sustainably (Wagner 2010; van der Leeuw 2020).
If we are not the sole possessors of mind, but merely participants in a broader cognitive community, do we have any responsibility to the other thinking beings?
Acknowledging this shared cognitive heritage is a crucial step. It moves us away from a framework of human domination and toward one of stewardship and reciprocity (Leopold 1949). Indigenous knowledge systems have long embodied this perspective. Many of them emphasize interdependence and respect for all living things (Kimmerer 2013). The challenge for humanity is to evolve our culture and our ethics to match the power of our intellect. We need to learn to use our unique cognitive gifts to ensure the long-term viability of our extraordinary, thinking planet (Bai et al. 2016).
References
Bai, X., et al. 2016. Plausible and desirable futures in the Anthropocene: A new research agenda. Global Environmental Change 39: 351-362.
Henrich, J. 2016. The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 447 p.
Kimmerer, R. W. 2013. Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 408 p.
Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, New York, 226 p.
Steffen, W., et al. 2011. The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369(1938): 842-867.
Steffen, W., et al. 2015. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2(1): 81-98.
van der Leeuw, S. 2020. The archaeology of innovation: The embodiment of mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 368 p.
Wagner, G. 2010. But will the planet notice? How smart economics can save the world. Hill and Wang, New York, 256 p.
(This article is part of a six-post reality-check. Concepts and examples are drawn from “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)
In times of crisis, we focus on saving lives and priceless artifacts. But what about the most vital asset for the long-term survival of our civilization: our accumulated knowledge? As the biosphere degrades and the risk of social disruption grows, the mission to preserve the blueprint of our knowledge becomes a critical imperative.
Our current knowledge systems are fragile. Digital archives are vulnerable to energy loss, hardware degradation, and format obsolescence. At the same time, physical libraries are threatened by environmental disasters (Morrow 2020). This has spurred innovative projects like The Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilization, which seeks to create a durable, multi-format library of essential information (Brand 2018).
But it’s not enough to save data. We must preserve what author Lewis Dartnell calls “bootstrapping knowledge.” This is the foundational instructions needed to rebuild basic technologies and access more complex information (Dartnell 2016). Without the ability to make a simple motor or generate electricity, a digital library of all human knowledge would be a useless artifact.
Also important is the preservation of cultural and historical memory, which provides the social cohesion necessary to navigate collapse and recovery. This requires a focus on living knowledge communities and practical skills transmitted through apprenticeship (Marchand 2016). This will be difficult, but safeguarding this blueprint is an essential investment in the potential for a future rebirth.
References
Brand, S. 2018. The manual for civilization. Long Now Foundation Press, San Francisco, 324 p.
Dartnell, L. 2016. The knowledge: How to rebuild civilization in the aftermath of a cataclysm. Penguin Press, New York, 352 p.
Marchand, T. H. J. 2016. Craftwork as problem solving: Ethnographic studies of design and making. Routledge, London, 286 p.
Morrow, J. 2020. Knowledge persistence in unstable times. Library Quarterly 90(2): 154-173.
(This article is part of a series, The Thinking Planet, exploring the universal nature of cognition in the living world. Concepts and examples are drawn from “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)
So far in the series, we’ve established that cognition is a universal feature of life. But does it matter for the planet as a whole? According to Silent Earth, the answer is a resounding yes. The cognitive abilities of organisms are not just interesting quirks; they are a vital force that contributes to the stability and resilience of the entire biosphere (Elmqvist et al. 2003).
This is the value of cognition, beyond the direct, utilitarian services we often measure (Costanza et al. 1997):
Adaptation and Resilience: Cognition is a primary tool for adaptation. When species can learn and modify their behavior based on experience, they are better able to cope with environmental change. This cognitive flexibility enhances the resilience of entire ecosystems, as their inhabitants can adjust to new challenges (Folke et al. 2004).
Structuring Ecosystems Through Emotion: The emotional responses of animals have a powerful effect on the landscape. The “ecology of fear” created by predators is a cognitive phenomenon (Estes et al. 2011). Prey animals that are afraid will alter their foraging patterns, which in turn allows vegetation to recover. The resulting trophic cascade, famously seen with the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, stabilizes the entire ecosystem (Ripple and Beschta 2004).
Powering Ecosystem Services: Many ecosystem services we depend on are underpinned by cognition. Crop pollination relies on the ability of bees to learn and remember which flowers provide the best food rewards, which enhances their foraging efficiency (Chittka et al. 1999) and supports global agricultural productivity (Klein et al. 2007).
Cooperative Strategies: Collective cognition allows for cooperative strategies that enhance ecosystem health. The mycorrhizal networks connecting trees allow them to share resources and communicate about stress, improving the resilience of the entire forest, especially during environmental challenges like drought (Simard et al. 2012; Madouh and Quoreshi 2023).
A biosphere full of cognitive agents is fundamentally more robust and stable (Cardinale et al. 2012). Cognition allows for the adaptation, feedback, and cooperation that help maintain the delicate balance of our living planet.
But there’s one cognitive agent whose intelligence has had an outsized—and often destructive—impact. In my final post, I’ll explore the paradox of human cognition and its role in shaping the planet’s future.
(This article is part of a six-post reality-check. Concepts and examples are drawn from “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)
When a forest is cleared or a river is polluted, who speaks for them? For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as property—a resource to be owned, used, and exploited. But what if nature had rights of its own?
This is not a mere metaphor. In a groundbreaking move, Ecuador’s 2008 constitution enshrined the Rights of Nature, recognizing that nature has the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles” (Kauffman and Martin 2017). Following this, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017, and appointed guardians to act on its behalf and protect its interests as a living, integrated whole (Hutchison 2019).
This shift from nature as “property” to nature as a “rights-bearing entity” raises complex questions. Who has the standing to represent an ecosystem in court? How do we balance the rights of a river against the rights of a community that depends on it? Implementing these legal conditions is still evolving, but they represent a fundamental rethinking of environmental protection.
By recognizing the intrinsic value and legal standing of the natural world, we open up entirely new avenues for its defense. This approach invites us to move beyond our role as masters of the Earth and toward a more just relationship as members of a wider ecological community. Related Resources
References
Hutchison, A. 2019. The Whanganui River as a legal person. Alternative Law Journal 44(1): 16-20.
Kauffman, C. M., and Martin, P. L. 2017. Can rights of nature make development more sustainable? Why some Ecuadorian lawsuits succeed and others fail. World Development 92: 130-142.
(This article is part of a series, The Thinking Planet, exploring the universal nature of cognition in the living world. All concepts and examples are drawn from an analysis of my comprehensive work, “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)
While plants and microbes show us that a brain isn’t required for cognition, the animal kingdom reveals an explosive diversity of minds shaped by evolution. Silent Earth details how different ecological challenges have produced a stunning array of cognitive solutions.
Insects, with their tiny brains, accomplish remarkable feats. Honeybees communicate the location of resources through a symbolic dance language and even display a conceptual understanding of zero (Chittka and Niven 2009; Howard et al. 2018).
Birds like the New Caledonian crow manufacture complex tools with features designed for specific tasks, a skill demonstrating causal understanding (Emery and Clayton 2004). Western scrub-jays exhibit episodic-like memory, remembering what food they hid, where, and when (Clayton and Dickinson 1999).
Octopuses represent a fascinating case of convergent evolution. Separated from vertebrates by over 500 million years, they have independently evolved puzzle-solving abilities, tool use, and the capacity to recognize individual humans (Godfrey-Smith 2016; Hochner et al. 2006).
But cognition isn’t just an individual affair. Silent Earth highlights the power of collective cognition, where complex problem-solving emerges from the interaction of many individuals.
Ant colonies act as a “superorganism,” creating efficient transport networks between the nest and food sources without any centralized control or leader (Deneubourg et al. 1990; Gordon 2010).
Fish schools display distributed vigilance. An evasive maneuver by a few fish on the edge of the group can propagate rapidly through the entire school, allowing fish far from the initial detection to respond to a threat they haven’t personally seen (Couzin and Krause 2003; Rosenthal et al. 2015).
From the specialized mind of a tool-making crow to the emergent intelligence of an ant colony, the biosphere is a showcase of cognitive diversity. There is no single ladder of intelligence with humans at the top, but rather a rich tapestry of minds, each a unique solution to the challenge of living (Shettleworth 2010).
In the next post, I will explore why this “thinking planet” is so important and how the cognitive abilities of all these organisms contribute to a more stable and resilient world.
References
Chittka, L., and Niven, J. E. 2009. Are bigger brains better? Current Biology 19(21): R995-R1008.
Clayton, N. S., and Dickinson, A. 1999. Episodic-like memory in scrub jays. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 354(1387): 1481-1495.
Couzin, I. D., and Krause, J. 2003. Self-organization and collective behavior in vertebrates. Advances in the Study of Behavior 32: 1-75.
Deneubourg, J. L., et al. 1990. The blind leading the blind: Modeling chemically mediated army ant raid patterns. Journal of Insect Behavior 3(5): 719-725.
Emery, N. J., and Clayton, N. S. 2004. The mentality of crows: Convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes. Science 306(5703): 1903-1907.
Godfrey-Smith, P. 2016. Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 272 p.
Gordon, D. M. 2010. Ant encounters: Interaction networks and colony behavior. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 185 p.
Hochner, B., et al. 2006. The octopus: a model for a comparative analysis of the evolution of learning and memory mechanisms. The Biological Bulletin 210(3): 308-317.
Howard, S. R., et al. 2018. Numerical ordering of zero in honeybees. Science 360(6393): 1124-1126.
Rosenthal, S. B., et al. 2015. Revealing the unseen majority: ULV-based assessment of plankton reveals profound impacts of kleptoparasites on crustacean zooplankton. Limnology and Oceanography 60(5): 1591-1604.
Shettleworth, S. J. 2010. Cognition, evolution, and behavior. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 720 p.
GarryRogers Nature Conservation 