As you explore yourself, the root cause of our predicament is our biologically determined behaviours. It’s a hardware issue.

Layered on top of that, we have the software of our deep-seated and ultimately unsustainable cultural norms and myths that require a lot of generational churn to shift meaningfully. Traditionally, it requires a society's collapse to properly shake the bag and draw a new fistful of dice.

These Sixth Fronts for Intervention will not suffice, admirable as they may be. The changes needed are nothing short of a paradigm shift in human consciousness.

Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen the “easy” way, and so our modern industrial civilisation will be sieved away as reality selects against unsustainable systems. 

Also, all our progress and magnanimity is directly related to our unprecedented access to cheap energy. As Roy Scranton writes in his new book Impasse, “Turn the tap off and see what happens.” Cue the ol’ quote “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” - Alfred Henry Lewis, or my personal fave, because German is so good for rustic expressions, Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. 

Our coming times will see society after society experience collapse. Their assimilation of neighbouring goliaths may arrest their collapse before they reach the fifth stage: cultural collapse (Dmitry Orlov), so they might survive, but none of that will go smoothly for anyone involved.

At 49, I’m fortunate to be of an age that will be spared the worst of it. We have some decades to go before things really start falling apart. But I grue for the coming generations.

Because one can negotiate with neither the individuals so biologically driven towards domination that they’ll justify any method to achieve it, no matter how vile, nor the institutions that ultimately take on the perverse ideologies that their positions attract, from the führer all the way down to the lowly bureaucrat, and because we are so wholly in the grasp of what Nate Hagens calls The Superorganism and time has already run out to prevent collapse, it’s tempting to conclude that the only response that could diverge us from our BAU course driving us straight into extinction is violent activism.

Unfortunately, the way this ultimately plays out (due to the root causes outlined above), even that is just Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Unless, of course, it’s taken to the extreme, the burn-the-system-down stage of true rebirth: a protracted global civil war, which of course leads to total chaos, breakdown, misery and likely nuclear annihilation. So that’s no solution.

But don’t worry about Ragnarok. Apathy, selfishness and greed are cornerstones of both our genetic and cultural behaviours. The revolution won’t come. We will just fizzle out in a great and relatively undramatic, protracted die-off. The best we can hope for is that the coming global population drop is largely driven by old age die-offs. That would be nice.

In the meantime, we will put up with and adapt to the deteriorating conditions and fight each other in dog-eat-dog work environments, played out against each other by societies that have successfully atomised both families and communities and gotten us all addicted to consumerism. Migrants will be kept the hell out of first-world boats. A long, slow decline from here on out. Mental anguish will be our main challenge, and many will succumb to that.

You and I and Nate and countless others will talk and talk and talk about it. Like how Derrick Jensen laments a lot in his books that he’s achieving nothing by writing and writing about the burning of the world, and that what he should be doing is blowing up dams and assassinating corrupt, destructive elites – impulses triggered by most people’s biology (even if few of us can afford to admit it), as exemplified by the massive outpouring of support for Luigi and the popularity of vigilante justice stories.

I tug and tug at the Overton window, but the self-reinforcing parasite grows from the inside as it is joined every single day by a fresh batch of manipulable, uneducated, unwise, horny and hapless 18-year-old humans reaching “adulthood”, as defined by when it’s patriotic to hand them a machine gun to point at The Others but not trust them with access to beer or a choice of whether to keep a baby that they totally don’t want and can’t take care of.

To sum up, human biological and cultural traits, along with ecological realities regarding scarcity and accelerating pollution levels, make collapse unavoidable and meaningful reform impossible.

The only candle of light in the enveloping darkness is that our positive traits are also hardwired into us, biologically and culturally: things like cooperation, altruism and reciprocity. Just as there are irrevocably bad people in the world, there are also good ones who fight because they are compelled to. Something meaningful may arise from the ashes.