Resources

Sober Data - The Short List

Data and evidence-based projections regarding collapsing Earth or Human systems.

Articles

Facing Extinction. Essay by Catherine Ingram. (Link to both essay and audio)

The Uninhabitable Earth (annotated version) by David Wallace Wells (New York Magazine 2017) (link to audio version)

The Uninhabitable Earth (audio version)

All the Bunnies in the Meadow Die. Essay by Sid Smith.
A clear description of what got us into this predicament including: the exponential function, overpopulation, and the limits to growth.

The Great Insect Dying: A Global Look at a Deepening Crisis by Jeremy Hance, Mongabay (2019)

Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four

The Insect Apocalypse – Quite possibly the single greatest indicator of a global extinction event, including humans.

Books

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows (2004)

Interview with Dennis Meadows by

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William R. Catton (1982)

“The fact that has shocked me the most is the Overshoot Day: By July 29th, we used up all the regenerative resources of 2019. From July 30 we started to consume more resources than the planet can regenerate in a year. It’s very serious. It’s a global emergency. ” – Pope Francis La Stampa, August 9, 2019

Overshoot Day – A website that tracks Overshoot Day and its ramifications.
On July 29, 2019 humanity exhausted the biological resources that Earth could renew in the entire year.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond (2004)

The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail (2019)

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace Wells (2019)

Audio

Why the only solution to our predicament is shutting down global industrial society.

Interview with Professor Tim Garrett on Collapse Chronicles by Sam Mitchell (September, 2019)
This is definitely the #1 podcast interview for this Short-List section of this work. If there is no other item you listen to or read on this website, listen to this conversation. It is at the heart of why I named my first book, The Impossible Conversation.

Large Scale “Planet Eating” Projects

China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Ocean Mining. The largest mining project in human history.
The Atlantic.

Russian Plans for Arctic Development and Extraction are a Deep Commitment to a Fossil Fuel Driven Future.

Russia’s current initiative to extract oil and gas and other resources in a newly ice-free Arctic. Including floating nuclear power plants to fuel these projects and a well stocked fleet of ice-breakers to maintain a constant military and predatory capitalist presence in the Arctic year-round.

How Russia and China are preparing to exploit a warming planet.

Australian Coal Extraction and sale.

USA Rollback of environmental regulation and decimation of numerous Federal agencies.

USA fracking – Devastating environmentally and not profitable.

Collapse of Earth Systems

Collapse of Human Systems (also called Civilizational Collapse and Collapse of Social Systems)

Books

Selected bibliography on civilizational collapse – suggested by Jeremy Lent, author of, The Patterning Instinct.

Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008).

Marten Scheffer, Critical Transitions in Nature and Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Jorgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012).

Paul Raskin, et al., Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (Boston: Stockholm Environment Institute, 2003).

Articles

Paul R. Ehrlich, and Anne H. Ehrlich, “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, no. 1754 (2013).

Safa Motesharrei, et al., “Modeling Sustainability: Population, Inequality, Consumption, and Bidirectional Coupling of the Earth and Human Systems,” National Science Review 3 (2016): 470–94.

Graeme S. Cumming, and Garry D. Peterson, “Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32, no. 9 (2017): 695–713.

Marten Scheffer, et al., “Early-Warning Signals for Critical Transitions,” Nature 461 (2009): 53–59.

Marten Scheffer, “Anticipating Societal Collapse; Hints from the Stone Age,” PNAS 113, no. 39 (2016): 10733–35.

Richard C Duncan. “The Life-Expectancy of Industrial Civilization.” Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 1991 International System Dynamics Conference, 1991.

Ugo Bardi. “The Punctuated Collapse of the Roman Empire.” In Cassandra’s Legacy. Florence, 2013.

Karl W. Butzer, “Collapse, Environment, and Society,” PNAS 109, no. 10 (2012): 3632–39.

Jeffrey C. Nekola, et al., “The Malthusian–Darwinian Dynamic and the Trajectory of Civilization,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28, no. 3 (2013): 127–30

Joseph Wayne Smith, and Gary Sauer-Thompson, “Civilization’s Wake: Ecology, Economics, and the Roots of Environmental Destruction and Neglect,” Population and Environment 19, no. 6 (1998): 541–75.

Joseph A. Tainter, “Resources and Cultural Complexity: Implications for Sustainability,” Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 30, no. 1–2 (2011): 24–34

Graham M. Turner, “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with 30 Years of Reality,” Global Environmental Change 18 (2008): 397–411.

Activism

Books

This is Not a Drill by Extinction Rebellion (2019)

Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown (2019)

Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown (2017)

This is Not a Drill by Extinction Rebellion (2019)

Audio

Emerge: Making Sense of What’s Next – Gail Bradbrook

Websites

Eradicating Ecocide – An organization founded by the late, Polly Higgins in an attempt to advocate for full rights and protection for our global ecosystem.

The Americans of Conscience Checklist

Pachamama Alliance

The Gamechanger Intensive

Drawdown – Pachamama Alliance / Paul Hawken

Extinction Rebellion

Videos

Roger Hallam (Extinction Rebellion co-founder) interviewed by Right-Wing pundit, Mallen Baker.

A very respectful and balanced exploration and conversation.

Roger Hallam – a recorded presentation re Extinction Rebellion.

A fine first exposure to Roger and some of the fundamentals of XR.

The Myth of Sustainable Development and Green Growth

Articles:

Getting Real About Green Energy / Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity

All the Bunnies in the Meadow Die / Sid Smith
Including a clear layout of the Exponential Function within ‘Growth.’

Books

Audio

Websites

Videos

Species Extinction

Books

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (@014)

Articles

Extinction Countdown by John R. Platt

Rise of the Extinction Deniers by John R. Platt (2019)

The Great Insect Dying: A Global Look at a Deepening Crisis by Jeremy Hance, Mongabay (2019)

Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four

The Insect Apocalypse – Quite possibly the single greatest indicator of a global extinction event, including humans.

Human Extinction: Is it Possible? by Julian Cribb (2014)

Abrupt Anthropogenic Climate Chaos

Books

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells (2019)

Articles

The Uninhabitable Earth (annotated version) by David Wallace Wells (New York Magazine 2017) (link to audio version)

An Open Letter to Those Who Haven’t Faced Climate Change.by Skip Spitzer (2019)

Arctic

A Farewell to Ice by Peter Waddams (2016)

Sam Carana’s blog

Glossaries for the Age of Collapse

The Library of Collapse

Skip Spitzer’s website

A Climate Vocabulary of the Future by Herb Simmens (2017)

The Apocalypedia

The Apocalypse Alphabet

An enchanting picture book for all ages…about the most important event in human history.

Manifestos

Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009)

ScientistsWarning.org

Scientists’ Warning #1

Scientists’ Warning #2

Laudato Si. Pope Francis’ encyclical.
( This is a link to an in-depth study guide for the encyclical from Earth Beat)

All the Bunnies in the Meadow Die. Essay by Sid Smith.
A clear description of what got us into this predicament including: the exponential function, overpopulation, and the limits to growth.

The Embodiment Manifesto by Phillip Shepherd (2012)

Facing Extinction. Essay by Catherine Ingram.

Deep Adaptation. Essay by Jem Bendell

The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared by Dr Lise Van Susteren and Kevin Coyle JD (2012) Van Susteren and Coyle estimated that 200 million Americans would suffer with acute or chronic mental health issues as Climate Change effects intensified. In subsequent interviews Dr Van Susteren has repeatedly stated that they had underestimated.

Earth Charter

The Ecomodernist Manifesto – I am no proponent of this line of thinking. I provide it here as an example of one enthusiastic subgroup of our Business as Usual world, and their confidence and faith that human ingenuity will save us from the human ingenuity that got us into our current predicaments.

How we got into this Predicament

The Great Disconnection (2018)

Propaganda

The Century of the Self (2016) (Documentary series)

Including focus on Edward Bernays, the Grandfather of Propaganda, Sales, PR, mass media influence of cultures.

Patriarchy

Why Does Patriarchy Persist? by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider (2018)

Excellent review of this book.

What the Corporations Knew and When They Knew it

CIEL: The Center for International Environmental Law

How we learned “What They Knew.” by Carrol Muffett, President and CEO of CIEL

The Charney Report (1979) – Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment

Their special report on what fossil fuel corporations and governments knew about the devastating impacts of fossil fuel use – and when they knew it. One of many documents gathered by CIEL in their case against decades of cynical duplicity by major fossil fuel corporations.

Exxon: The Road Not Taken (2015)
What Exxon and other FF majors knew and when they knew it.

Overshoot

Growthbusters Podcast

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows (2004)

On the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet…

Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, “Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem,” from Valuing The Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, MIT Press, 1993, p. 267 ff.

Population / Overpopulation

State of the Species by Charles Mann (2012)

Crowded Planet: A Conversation with Alan Weisman (2013)

The Centroid by Jeremy Miller (2011)

Overpopulation Atlas

Collapse-Aware Resources

Websites

Perhaps the greatest repository of Collapse-Aware resources available today:
The work of Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow…

http://www.thegreatstory.org
https://postdoom.com

Resilience.org

Center for Biological Diversity

The Revelator – An initiative of the Center for Biological Diversity

Mongabay

Let’s Talk Collapse

Blogs

Authors

Dimitri Orlov – ClubOrlov

Carolyn Baker (See book list below under: Spirit and Soul)

Dave Pollard – How to Save the World

Julian Cribb – Surviving the 21st Century

Skip Spitzer

Podcasts

The Poetry of Predicament by Dean Walker

Emerge: Making Sense of What’s Next with Daniel Thorson

Last Born in the Wilderness with Patrick Farnsworth

Humptydumptytribe with Hambone Littletail

Collapse Chronicles with Sam Mitchell

Environmental Coffeehouse with Sandy Schoelles

Black Bear News with Kevin Sandbloom

KunstlerCast with Jim Kunstler

Peak Prosperity / Featured Voices / Chris Martenson

Films

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire (2007)

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

The Story of Stuff (2009)

Resources
(With great thanks to un-denial for these suggestions)

Spirit and Soul

Books

The Journey of Forgiveness: Fulfilling the Healing Process by Carolyn Baker (2000)

Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse by Carolyn Baker (2009)

The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism by Andrew Harvey (2009)

Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition by Carolyn Baker (2011)

Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times by Carolyn Baker (2013)

Dark Gold: The Human Shadow and the Global Crisis by Carolyn Baker (2015)

Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: Cultivating the Relationships We Need to Thrive by Carolyn Baker (2015)

Savage Grace: Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe by Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker (2017)

Saving Animals from Ourselves: A Manifesto for Healing the Divine Animal Within by Carolyn Baker (2019)

Podcasts

On Being with Krista Tippet

In The Deep with Catherine Ingram

Mindrolling Podcast with Raghu Markus

Emerge: Making Sense of What’s Next with Daniel Thorson

Grief

Books

The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller (2015)

Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul by Stephen Jenkinson (2015)

Websites

What’s Your Grief

Good Grief Network – Ten-Step Grief Program

New Possibilities

Websites

The Great Story – Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow

Dowd and Barlow have created their own formidable bodies of work and give us access to hundreds of articles, audio recordings of books and articles, and videos… Bridging between the sacred and the non-sectarian, Michael and Connie have a prolific and powerful gift for translation and inspiration across often very polarized ground.

The Regenerative Communities Network – Affiliated with the work of Joe Brewer.

Daniel Christian Wahl

Evolution Institute

The Rules

Smart Ecologies

Post Growth Institute

Books

Climate: a New Story by Charles Eisenstein (2018)

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein (2011)

Podcasts

The Poetry of Predicament – Joe Brewer (2019)

The Next System Project with Gar Alperovitz

Bioneers Radio Series

Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

Emerge: Making Sense of What’s Next with Daniel Thorson

Last Born in the Wilderness with Patrick Farnsworth

The Optimist Daily

Articles

Culture Design Labs – Evolving the Future by Joe Brewer (2016)

World Beyond War

Programs

Mindfulness / Emergent & Energetics / Healing / Transformation-Based

Living Resilience Alliance

Dean Walker

Grief Rituals / Group and Community Self-Regulation and Bonding

Individual and Group, Collapse-Aware / Deep Adaptation Coaching

Deep Academy – Online Learning and Training

Safe Circle Support

Thomas Hübl – Healing collective trauma

Mindfulness / Emergent / Educational

The Work That Reconnects

Joanna Macy, Molly Young Brown, Constance

Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown (2014)

Monastic Academy
Vermont.
info@monasticacademy.org

Center for Mindful Learning is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization devoted to developing trustworthy people to create trustworthy culture. MAPLE (Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth) is a full-time leadership and meditation residential training program to cultivate leaders who embody wisdom, power, and love for all living things.

Transformation365 online contemplative practices and community
https://community.contemplativelife.org/transformation365

Educational / Activism

Pachamama Alliance
Game Changer Intensive (online course)

Awakening the Dreamer

Drawdown
Paul Hawken

Evocative Entergetics / Transformation-based Training

Possibility Management

Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings by Clinton Callahan (2010)

Louise Lebrun

Theory U

Earth-Based / Transformation-Based Programs
School of Lost Borders – 11 day Vision Fast

Non Violent Communication / Trainings