What to Do as the World Falls Apart

Over the last 2,000 years, he says, there were very long stretches of flat or declining growth. All of our stories were designed inside the last fifty years or so: progress, retirement, careers, what a normal life looks like. Those years were an extraordinary one-time set of circumstances. The circumstances rest on burning about 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent a year in coal, oil and gas. Each barrel is worth around five years of human work. That cheap, abundant energy underpins all of the technological progress, the convenience and the comfort we have. It is a stock. Our culture treats it as a flow.

Society talks about politics and technology and money. Hagens calls these the proximate drivers of progress. Society conflates them with the ultimate drivers. All of that rests on a base of non-renewable energy, resources and materials. All of that rests on a healthy biosphere. He was with Johan Rockström the day before, talking through the Planetary Health Check. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries are exceeded. We are leaving the stability of the Holocene.

Under the current economic system, better technology is likely to grow our environmental impact rather than shrink it. We build more and more. So the real energy transition, in his view, is mostly not about what kind of energy. It is about our relationship to energy, to each other and to the natural world. Just about every climate meeting he has attended this week has turned into a data center meeting. AI makes things more efficient and needs an enormous amount of energy. So it is a larger draw on the environment. His phrase is that it turbocharges the nervous system of the superorganism. Under this system, he says, it will also accelerate inequality toward some kind of neo-feudalism.

Barring a new boost in productivity, he thinks total global growth is soon over. The first challenge is a financial recalibration. The number of monetary claims against underlying energy and materials will stretch until it snaps back. Two billion people face unaffordable energy because of the Iran war. India and Pakistan have emergency measures. Diesel stations are out of fuel. It is spilling into Europe. Rather than choose austerity, governments and central banks will print and monetize debt. That ends in currency debasement. Renewables and nuclear are the right answers to the wrong question. The right question is how to live using the benefits of this technology in a way that supports human and biosphere wellbeing.

A biophysical phase shift is under way in global politics, alliances and agreements. Even if peace breaks out in the Middle East, who trades with whom has changed. Where the flows go has changed. He expects them to go east rather than west and north. He expects state capitalism and regional trade blocs, the superorganism calving in half. He expects an oil supply that never returns to last year's level. The reasons are shut-in production, damaged fields and security risk.

Climate change, he says, is not the problem. It is a symptom of a larger dysfunction, ecological overshoot. The complex predicament he describes on the podcast cannot be voiced in politics or the press. The day before, he spoke with two European women who work on climate. They did not know each other. Homeland Security held each of them for hours. Each was made to promise not to speak at any publicly announced event in the United States. Stop a random person outside the restaurant with this story, he says, and they would think he had sprouted antlers. People feel something is wrong even so. Democracies and open societies followed the carbon pulse on the way up. What follows it on the way down, he says, is an open question.

Our current 19 terawatt global metabolism, he says, can power a great culture, just not the one we have. We do not face a resource shortage so much as a longage of our expectations. Longage is his word. It applies especially in countries like the United States. He does not know what to do. But there is a task he is more and more comfortable taking on. It is to change the initial conditions of the future, then change the initial conditions of the next one. Gatherings like this one do that. They are seeds of whatever replaces what he calls the metabolic, psychopathic, instrumental economic superorganism. The human story, he says, is advanced but not written. What is at stake is the contest between power and life.

He used to ask only whether the economy would grow or contract. He called the contraction a great simplification. This year he added three more variables. The economy variable asks whether it grows or contracts, toward ecological limits or further into overshoot. Power asks whether it is broad or concentrated, with gains shared or hoarded. Geopolitics asks whether it is interdependent or autarkic, adversarial or friendly. Earth systems ask whether climate stress is moderate or severe, and whether the biosphere is functional or unravelling. Together they give 256 combinations. From those he draws four discussion scenarios. The Long Repair is economic descent with shared power and non-adversarial geopolitics. Its biosphere is degraded relative to our childhoods but stable. Mordor Persists is the default. Growth continues, and more and more energy goes to the energy and materials sector. That is brown growth, which throws off throughput and destroys the biosphere. Fortress World is descent under billionaire control with isolation and failing Earth systems. The Unraveling is the negative quadrant of all four.

The line is from the French biologist Olivier Hamant. His episode became the podcast's most watched clip on YouTube. Hagens takes it to mean the future is not uniform. Many futures will coexist. All four scenarios could exist inside one country at once. On his map the northeast lands in the Long Repair. Your region may diverge sharply from other regions in governance and resources. Your zip code may determine your future more than the country you live in. He thinks meetings like this one matter for that reason. Seeds planted in these conversations spiral into things no one could plan.

There are broad fronts of intervention: infrastructure, poverty and displacement, ecological defense, governance, culture, economic transition and the commons. For each scenario there are no-regret strategies. But he does not think someone in Minnesota should tell New York how to run New York. The person on stage in future, he says, should be someone like Alexis Zeigler of Living Energy Farm. Zeigler was on the podcast on running local electricity at a fraction of current throughput. He is in the room. The degrees of freedom we have as individual citizens may never be greater than they are right now. In the last six months something has dawned on him. He does not want ten million humans who know everything about the metacrisis. He wants ten million who are grounded, in their parasympathetic nervous system, with community, spaciousness and enough to support others. Both, in the end, he says, and that is his hope.

An evolutionary stack, he says, runs from the microbiome up through the enteric system, the gut and its relationship to the brain. Then comes the reptilian hindbrain, then the limbic system, and only then cognition and the neocortex. The enteric system is responsible for homeostasis. Hungry or tired, you are unstable. Each layer has something like a binary switch. In the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, we are not at ease. We cannot have these conversations or help a neighbor. With the limbic system hijacked we need to scroll or eat. We think of learning as linear, as if cognition were in charge. In reality the whole stack has to be in a good place before cognition can be applied to anything. That means stable, at ease and satisfied. His slide gives cognition its own switch too, understanding of goals and the future. It reads serene on one side and confused on the other.

For a long time he did not understand why people thanked him after he told them frightening things about the future. Now he thinks it is because they can then see how the pieces fit together. The oceans, the polarization, the data centers, read separately, are just confusing. A map of how they connect calms the system.

The slide calls them Nate's inner tech. The first is do not leave home hungry: exercise, sleep, nutrition and some form of meditation. Without them he spins. The second is spaciousness. That means gaps of an hour or two in the day, and gaps in the week, month and year. He does nothing and almost thinks nothing in them. The flood of oceans, climate, species, war and nuclear risk in his job is a lot. The third is nature every day, a hike or a sit spot by a tree. He lived in Battery Park City and then SoHo 34 years ago. He does not think he could do it now. The fourth is being with his people. The fifth is working on something meaningful to him. He asks the room to name the three to five things that let their body and system be at their best in these times.

It has become harder and harder for him to talk with people who have no idea what is going on with the metacrisis. He calls it almost a speciation. He builds bridges where he lives without talking about it. What he needs is people who share the understanding. Then they can talk about anything else. A few weeks ago he spent five days with fifteen people who know the story. Nobody mentioned it. They went for dim sum and cracked jokes. He remembered that he can be funny. Our culture, he says, is over-tilted toward dopamine and endorphins. It is under-supplied with oxytocin and serotonin. Dopamine drives the doing, the compulsion and the list. Being with his people is the other axis. It is cathartic to his nervous system.

Don White is one of the original Greenpeace people and co-author of Hagens' books. He was a 22-year-old geologist in Indianapolis. He loved whales and dolphins and lived nowhere near any. He bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii and volunteered to clean out aquarium tanks. Within eight years, by Hagens' telling, he was one of the most effective environmental activists alive. The list includes the driftnet campaign and the dolphin-safe tuna agreement with the largest tuna company. It includes a hand in the Star Trek film with the whales. It includes the end of a dolphin drive kill in Taiwan. Nobody knows about that one, because the deal with the government was to never release the footage. He took a direction that was meaningful to him. It gave meaning to his days. No one, Hagens says, can decide that for you except you.

Suppose many more humans had some checklist like his, and then met in rooms like this one. Those would be the islands of coherence in the world. He ends there and opens the floor. On the question of what we do as individuals and groups, he says, he is a peer of everyone present. He has thought about it longer. But we are headed into uncharted time.