But then… the classic AI uncanniness started to peak through. A weird glitch in the movement. Some odd warping on the robots. That unmistakable sheen of polish on the STANDARD HUMAN bags. Of course, when I scrolled down into the credits of the video, it read:

“This music video is a Bacon Lab experiment. The production was a mix of live-action footage, AI animation and classic post production.”

I cannot tell you how immediately my sense of excitement for the video disappeared once I realized that AI was used in the creation of this video.

It reminded me of what Backrooms director, Kane Parsons, recently said about AI.

"When I see in a project online that some sort of generative AI has been used in some way, the part of my brain that desires to really live with the piece of art and look into the details and the nooks and crannies and get excited about what I might see in the background, or look for a deliberate richness in the set direction - that immediately goes away. Because if the artist is willing to make that kind of completely arbitrary choice on whatever the tool they’re using to create that piece of media... I'm then open to conclude that almost any choice in that project is arbitrary on a human level, and so I just kind-of tune out."

Suddenly, the video lost meaning for me. And when I scrolled down in the comments, I found that a lot of people were expressing disappointment that the tech had been used, as well.

What’s depressing is that this music video actually employed tons of artists, but the inclusion of AI ruined the video for a lot of people, honestly, including me.

Obviously, this is just an anecdote and it’s not like everyone had a problem with the video, but nonetheless, it’s one that has confirmed a suspicion I had the moment AI was developed, and I started noticing people claiming that we need to use it to accelerate the spread of our messages:

Using AI to critique modernity, civilization, technology, and AI itself will most likely backfire.1

People do not like it, and I think a lot of really well-intentioned people underestimate how unpopular this technology really is. I really think we need to be paying attention to how much people fucking hate AI and everything it represents.

These commencement speeches have recently gone viral, where the speakers laud AI, only to be shocked when they are booed by the audience of young people who absolutely hate AI. A24 is currently experiencing backlash after their $75 million deal with Google’s DeepMind. Protests against data centers are exploding all over the world. Recently, The Atlantic reported millions of songs by all of our favorite artists have been used to train AI, without compensation, of course.

Right or wrong, misguided or naive, people hate AI.

I am, proudly, one of those haters.

I recently made a video for my stupid little YouTube channel making my case for writers in particular to not use AI in their creative process. One of the points I made in regard to my own reasons for not using AI is that the message I am trying to share does not comport with AI usage on a philosophical level.

I said something to the effect of “my assumption is that my audience in particular would not approve of me using AI in my creative process.” This is because everything I create has a fundamentally skeptical approach to the promises of technology and civilization. Even if there are people in our audience who aren’t critical of AI, which there very much might be, I highly doubt they would respect us for long if we started writing scripts that sounded AI-generated, or using generative AI for animations, or if we had a chatbot write copy for social media posts, or, God forbid, help me write my novels.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think you, the audience, would very much like that!

And the reason I think that is because I don’t like it. As an artist myself, I deeply care about the process of how things are made. And while I certainly don’t represent everyone, I’m also not unique.

So when I, the very much intended audience for José Gonzaléz’s video, saw that AI was used in the video made specifically to critique technology, consumerism, modernity, etc, it left a sour enough taste in my mouth that I immediately started writing this essay.

And it’s not just because I don’t like AI and I think that the video would have been better if they paid a few extra artists to make the video, it’s because I think it is inherently hypocritical to use AI to critique AI, machines, modernity, or technology.

The typical response to an assertion like this is usually something like, “everything about modernity is unethical/destructive/toxic. It’s hypocritical to use the computer or the internet to critique these things, too, and yet you’re doing it right now.”

Funnily enough, this is also the exact response you receive if you dare to critique civilization and industrialism — while being functionally forced into living within it, I might add. Even when the speaker doesn’t intend it, it often functions as a way to shame people into shutting up.

Anyway, it’s easy to make the argument that using AI to spread our messages is the same as needing to use the internet, cars, or living within modern civilization at all in order to spread our messages. Given that the internet is one of the only modes available to anyone, not just me, to spread messages,2 for instance, that argument is usually just used to stop debate or deeper discourse into what we could call: the Machine Question.3

But why am I so certain that AI is different? Is it just that I’ve drawn an arbitrary line in the sand and I presume I am the most enlightened and therefore I know everything?

The difference for me — and this is key — it is a technology with an artificially inflated value that is a completely unnecessary addition to everything that is causing negative externalities within modernity. Industrial civilization and the internet and environmental destruction and extraction and a mechanistic worldview are all expanded with this technology that we don’t even need.4 And while it’s true that we can’t avoid participating in certain destructive aspects of civilization, it seems very strange to me that attempting to avoid or resist the most unnecessarily destructive technological developments has become suspect.

It’s giving psy-op.

And! All of its alleged benefits are essentially promissory. It might eventually solve climate change at some point, so we should probably feed it with all of the freshwater on Earth just in case. It’s so fucking stupid.

Anyway, not only does it accelerate every industrial process on Earth, when certain types of people (like myself) see it being used to create things and spread messages, they experience a feeling of carelessness on the part of the creator. They see someone unnecessarily using resources, stealing from the work of human beings, to create something that feels quick, dirty, and cheap. They feel disrespected. If you didn’t take the time to write this, why should I take the time to read it, watch it, listen to it, consume it?

People of all stripes don’t want to feel like piggies being fed slop.

It may seem innocuous to use an AI generated image for a thumbnail, or to use it to quickly clean up text before you send out a newsletter, but to the audience you’re trying to reach, you might be steadily eroding their trust in you. And when you have something genuinely important to say, I think this is a bad thing.

You’re subtly communicating to them (again, not everyone, but certain types of people) that you care more about optimization and production than you care about substance. And this might not actually be fair — you might be a creator who has only the best intentions in mind, but it’s like Kane Parsons said, something happens when we see generative AI: our brains shut off, and we stop caring about what is actually being communicated.

In the case of work that is trying to critique civilization, technology, or AI itself, I think it’s important that we remember what AI represents for the people we’re trying to reach. If our audience is full of people who feel like AI is eroding creative expression, stealing jobs, polluting the land, filling the coffers of the disgustingly rich, surveilling the masses, etc, etc, etc we cannot be surprised when those people do not want to engage with work that utilized AI, even in the smallest of ways. This rings especially hypocritical when critiquing these very systems. You may be alienating your potential audience making what, to you, seems to be a pretty benign decision.

This was the point I tried to make in my YouTube video. AI stains work it was used to create. It’s caustic. And when it’s actually unnecessary, I just don’t understand the point of turning people off of my work for the minor gains in efficiency (as if that’s what matters in the creation of art or educational content) it might offer me.

As people who have ambitions in both the art and the ecological/civilization-critical world, I think we have a valuable and possibly unique perspective to offer, and there’s some important reasons that AI has become something we can’t shut up about.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is this idea that’s going around in the art world: people are acknowledging that when it comes to speed and efficiency of creation, the creators who use AI will win every single time. The consensus has become, from what I’ve seen, to not even try to compete with AI on that level. Let people who want to factory-produce AI content dominate the realm of quantity while the human creators dominate the realm of quality.

Even though it sucks right now and I don’t think it needed to go this way for people to remember to respect art and creation, I actually, strangely, think this will be good for the culture. It might actually make the cream rise to the top, or make modernity so horrendous that people start looking for a way out. Silver linings.

Anyway.

Culture, Jake and I have long surmised, is one of the most powerful planetary forces. A sick, broken, pathological culture (like the one we currently have) is literally changing the climate and exterminating species off the face of the Earth. If we agree that culture is a powerful force, then we have to interrogate how we contribute to culture, right?

If we contribute to the normalization of AI in art, we are contributing to the further mechanization of culture. This is bad. If we contribute to the normalization of AI in our ecological/civilization-critical/technology-skeptical works, we are also contributing to the further mechanization of culture… specifically in the realms that are trying to move back toward life. This might be worse than bad.

And what does the mechanization of culture do?

It leads to the further mechanization of life. It leads to more commodification.

It’s very easy to undervalue art and storytelling when we’re all looking at the world burning and we’re just trying to find a bucket of water. But the reality is, art and storytelling are at the center of culture. These two faculties of human existence impact every person every single day. It shapes how we understand ourselves and the world around us.5 Humans are constantly telling stories and engaging with art — it’s genuinely the glue that binds us together as a social creature. And as the quality of art erodes, and erodes exponentially with AI, so follows culture down the very path that we’re all trying to prevent it from going down.

So, no, I don’t think using AI in our creations is a benign decision. I think it signals to our audiences far more than we might think. It’s a choice that, whether we mean for it to or not, communicates that we’ll spread our messages at any cost, that we’ll concede to the machine if it means that our message gets out more quickly — that we will acquiesce to the machine to produce at the pace of all available technology.

Here’s the deal. None of us, and I mean none of us, will be able to beat the machine at its own game. It is absolute folly to try. But what we still have power over is our ideas, our ability to pay attention to the world around us, our experience of being embodied, alive, and real. Our suffering, our pain, our awe, and our ecstasy.

How we beat AI is by removing ourselves from its game. Produce things slowly and intentionally. Don’t take the bribe offered by AI: the shortcuts, the optimization, the polish. Produce things that no AI, nor anyone wielding AI, could ever conjure.

Honestly, why would we want to race to the average, to the lowest common denominator? That honestly feels so much more existential to me than the need to get our messages out quickly. In times like these, it’s our humanness, our imperfection, our realness that will carry us forward, differentiate us, and actually impact people on the level that we need.

If we let AI sand down our rough edges, polish our art, write our social media copy, animate our films, what are we really saying?

We’re saying that what makes us human is ineffectual and the machine, technology, industrialism — that’s what makes us better.

Is that not the exact opposite message many of us are trying to convey? Aren’t we trying to get people to see the beauty of nature and complexity of humanity? Aren’t we trying to push back against the enclosure of everything that makes life worth living?

I know it’s a common refrain right now that everything is so urgent that we can’t possibly slow down and take the time to actually create things — we have to use AI to reach people! — but every part of my embodied intuition tells me that if we keep trying to produce at the pace of AI, we’ll accelerate the destruction of the world far faster than we can imagine while completely delegitimizing ourselves and any message we want to share. We’ll inadvertently bury our very important messages.

My point here is this: if our messages matter to us, then the mode through which we create them should matter to us as well. We don’t have the power to control how they are shared in any significant way6 — but the creative process is something we do control.

Beyond the idea of the “medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan said, I think AI is calling us to see the process as the message. If we think of it this way, we genuinely need to ask ourselves: when I use this ‘tool’ to produce something, what is the actual message I’m spreading?

I’ll let you decide for yourself what it really communicates.

And look, maybe I’m wrong and I’m just a naive romantic. George Monbiot’s AI-generated film The Invisible Doctrine was a violent assault against my eyes, but a lot of people were able to get past it and just listen to the message. It has way more views than anything we’ve ever created, that’s for-damn-sure.

There may be plenty of people in your audience or mine that just care about the message. But there are entire cohorts of people that will feel disrespected by the lack of quality and intention. There are so many people who, like Hayao Miyazaki, see this as “insult to life itself.” And I think, as an artist trying to dip my toes into the world of ecology, civilization-analysis, and the rest of it, I ultimately want to treat my audience the way I want to be treated. I want my audience to trust that I don’t outsource my creativity just because I can. I want my audience to trust that I won’t take shortcuts, that I’ll labor for the message I’m trying to share. I want my audience to trust that I’m not just trying to make the cheapest, quickest content available to me — that them giving me their precious attention matters enough to me for me to do it all the way.

Maybe I’ll be left behind as every AI-enthusiast is wont to remind me.

Or maybe we all have an opportunity right now to model the kind of world we actually want to live in.

Written by Maren Morgan

Our new video on the Luddites and AI is out and currently at the mercy of the YouTube algorithm! It’s really hard to get creations in front of the right people in this day and age, especially when you have a small following and therefore have less algorithmic leverage, so it would really mean a lot to us if you would check out the video. We’re really not trying to be spammy — we just put a lot of work into this and think it’s good, so we want people to see it.

Generative AI was not used in any part of the creation of this video, and we plan to keep it that way for our future videos, books, everything. Thank you to our paid subscribers for helping make this video possible.

Our video You’re Probably a Luddite is now available to watch for free on YouTube! Please go watch it! We’re really proud of this video and we hope people enjoy it. If you find value in this video, please consider liking it and sharing it. It helps us tremendously.

If you’d like to gain access to our upcoming videos early and ad-free and get access to our extended video scripts (like the one below) please consider becoming a paid subscriber!

Thanks for being a subscriber to Death in The Garden, and huge thanks to our paid subscribers for making this project possible! We can’t wait to continue making more things for you all.

If you were a paid subscriber within the last 6 months and would like access to the video and this (that you helped us make!), please send us a message so we can comp your subscription for the next month and give you full access. We will also add your name to the credits on the YouTube version of this video. Thank you for your support.

I’m sure you’ve heard this word before: Luddite. If you ask Google, it will tell you that a Luddite is, “a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.”

In short, for over 200 years it has been a derogatory term to label someone as irrationally afraid of technology or progress. But where did this term come from?

What is a Luddite?

And what if I told you that this is a text-book case of the victors writing the history?

In a time of technological acceleration such as these, you’re likely to be called a Luddite for having the very reasonable stance of, “hey, maybe tech companies should think about the impacts of the technologies they’re making before they unleash them on the world” or “maybe the AI industry should be regulated” or “maybe technology isn’t neutral, maybe there are technologies that are actually harmful.”

And they would be correct in calling you a Luddite - but not for the reason you think.

Because the victors, AKA the factory owners and titans of industrialism, were so successful with their propaganda, you might be compelled to insist that you’re not anti-progress, anti-technology, that you’re not a Luddite, without knowing what the term Luddite really means.

You might not even be aware that the Luddites were real people and were part of a real movement – a movement fighting for dignity, for self-determination, and freedom.

So in this essay, we’re going to use two incredible books to explore the history of the term Luddite, who the Luddites were, and what they stood for – Rebels Against The Future by Kirkpatrick Sale and Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. And hopefully, by the end, we’ll help you see how you are probably a Luddite, too.

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You’ve definitely been hearing this word a lot recently.

A Luddite is “a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.”

That is the definition, at least according to Google.

In short, for over 200 years, it has been a derogatory term to label someone as irrationally afraid of technology or progress.

But where did this term come from? What is a Luddite?

And what if we told you that this was a classic case of the victors writing the history? What if we told you that you, (yes, you) in the age of AI, probably have more in common with those original machine-breakers than you think.

In this video, we explore the history of this group of rebels and their fight for dignity, self-determination, and freedom. Our main sources are Blood in the Machine by and Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale.

We hope, by the end of this video, you’ll see why being called “Luddite” in a time of enclosure, corporate consolidation, expansion of polluting industrialism, automation, and alienation is not an insult, but rather, it’s a badge of honor.

“For what they are remembered for is that they resisted, not that they won.” — Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future

This video was made without the use of generative AI.

This video is made available early and ad-free exclusively for our paid subscribers. The expanded script/essay version of this video will be released tomorrow, exclusively for paid subscribers. If you can read this — thank you. We are so grateful for your support of Death in The Garden. We really hope you enjoy this film. We couldn’t have made it without you.

If you were a paid subscriber within the last 6 months and would like access to this video and follow-up essay that you helped us make, please send us a message so we can comp your subscription for the next month and give you full access. We will also add your name to the credits on the YouTube version of this video. Thank you for your support.

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On this bonus episode of Death in The Garden with Alex Leff of Human Nature Odyssey, Alex takes us along on a deep-dive into The Score by game philosopher C. Thi Nguyen.

In this episode we discuss all things quantification and gamification, and the ways that our civilization has prioritized what can be measured at the expense of almost everything else. W…

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True North Leadership

I want to take a moment to encourage you all to check out the True North Leadership, a 6-week online mentorship program headed by our friend, Thomas Doochin.

What’s beautiful about the work that Thomas does is that he sees the yearning beneath our suffering in modernity — and within that yearning, an opportunity. We live in an age that demands more of us than previous generations, spiritually, psychologically, physically. And there is a gift, a calling, within each of us, one which is terrifying and inspiring and electrifying, and it is our duty to answer that call.

Thomas’ work with Heart of Men is about inspiring men, specifically, to have the courage to answer that call.

The philosophy is simple, yet profound:

1. We each came here with something special to offer the world.

2. If we’re unfulfilled, endless seeking, or dissatisfied, it’s because we’re not giving that thing we have to give.

3. Fully giving this gift requires us to integrate the place we’ve been the most hurt. This is scary so most of us construct our entire lives to justify the wound and avoid the gift.

4. At a time without elders or cultural initiations, we each have to find our own path to the giving of our gift. This is what we call leadership. And if enough of us choose to live this leadership, it will save our world.

In the True North Leadership, not only will you have access to 1-on-1 coaching with Thomas, you’ll also have weekly calls, and access to a community of men from all walks of life1, also doing this deep work. The leadership session begins on May 28th, so if this call resonates with you, please consider joining!

There’s also a free masterclass on May 20th if you want to dip your toes in what Thomas is all about.

If you haven’t listened to our podcast with him and his wife, Tess, I would highly recommend you check it out.

Stratos Data Center — Greed Has Poisoned Men’s Souls

Right now, my home state of Utah is becoming the epicenter of another battle against a proposed data center, and, unfortunately, this one will be the biggest data center in the world. Covering an expanse of land twice the size of Manhattan north of the Great Salt Lake, this data center, once complete, will use 9 gigawatts of energy per year. Currently, the entire state of Utah uses 4 gigawatts of energy per year.

It should shock no one that this is largely a project for the United States military industrial complex, the most polluting and destructive institution on Earth.

This data center has been approved by the cowardly leadership of the State of Utah, and is being backed by Canadian Shark Tank tycoon, Kevin O’Leary, who claimed on social media that the masses of protesters are out-of-town, paid protesters.

Genuinely, this entire thing is sickening for so many reasons. I am a proud AI-hater, most especially when it’s tied to war and the US military. But the location of this project is also a key factor, which is why so many Utahns are protesting.

Its location is just north of the Great Salt Lake, the region’s own ecological ticking-time bomb.

We all know that the main problem with data centers is how they increase energy consumption, and water consumption. As you can see from the image above, the Great Salt Lake has been shrinking over the past 50 years.

Though the project claims it will be using a closed-loop water cooling system, the reality still stands that any more diversion of water away from the lake is a genuinely existential risk. And what of that wastewater? Are they planning on dumping that plastic and chemical infused water back into the lake?

Of course they are.

The reason this is an existential risk to those who live around near the Great Salt Lake is that, for around 200 years, the lake has been a dumping ground to all manner of industrial and biological waste, leading to a toxic buildup of chemicals and heavy metals. If this lake dries up, it will be cataclysmic to the region, as arsenic-laden dust could blow across the state and surrounding states. So adding more toxic water to the lake and siphoning water from the lake will be catastrophic.

This is a 100% preventable environmental issue, as most climate change-induced issues are.

What’s remarkable about this project is that the notion of economic progress is, of course, the key driver above all other concerns. Our cowardly governor, Spencer Cox, has claimed to care about the fate of the Great Salt Lake while simultaneously approving this data center and acting like people who protest it are just anti-technology, anti-progress Romantics.

Sound familiar?

This is a perfect example of why we need to stop believing the myth that humanity itself is the driver of the polycrisis when it’s actually just a handful of dudes making terrible, short-sighted, greedy decisions while the rest of us try to resist against them. Of course mankind has the capacity for greed, but when I look at the people all around the world protesting against enclosure and colonization, resisting against the tides of these foolish men, it’s impossible for me to believe that greed is man’s default state.

It’s not us making these decisions. It’s the economic system, the incentives that perpetuate it, and more than that ,it’s the worldview that justifies this way of organizing human life.

It will lead to our suicide if we don’t change course.

My novel trilogy is set 300 years after the mess of the time we currently live in — specifically, after the collapse of global civilization. After learning about the data center, I added a little detail in the story to allude to it, and what I think of it:

In future drafts, I’ll revise this to be, well, better, but I share it now because it was an example of a moment where art was my ultimate reprieve. I could lay out my protest in my own way, defiantly show that, one day, after laying waste to people and land, all these men will be remembered for is the scar they placed upon the Earth.

How sad and small these men are.

In my story, the people who inspire reverence are the ancestors who healed the land, who stewarded knowledge, who stepped away from the machine toward life, and wrote a new story of humanity. Imagining this world — this “sunrise that I know I’ll never see”2— has filled me with more hope and purpose than I can describe.

If they can do it, why can’t we?

Updates

We’re moving to Colorado! Specifically, we’re moving to Crestone, a strange little town that has been pulling us toward it for years. We’re really excited for the change of scenery, moving to small town, and being part of a creative, inspiring, and passionate community.

For the longest time, we’ve been feeling inexplicably drained and unable to tap into our wells of creativity and curiosity. I’ve personally been feeling that I must have more capacity than my current baseline, because I can remember times when I was just buzzing with interest and discovery. I know there is an insatiably creative person buried underneath this tiredness, so we’re hoping that moving into this next chapter in Crestone will help super-charge that reemergence.

We do have a new video coming out soon, at long-last. This video discusses the history of the Luddites, and why being called a “Luddite” isn’t the insult people think it is. This video was made due to the encouragement and support of Tara Couture, and we want to especially thank her for her generosity and belief in us.

Thank you to everyone who has been so patient with us and this project, our paid subscribers most especially! Once we get settled in Colorado, we plan to finally figure out a consistent rhythm and decide how we want to move forward with this project. Our desire is always to create things of value, and we hope that we can settle into a routine where we can be consistent and create things, whether it be videos, podcasts, essays, or anything else, that are genuinely helpful.

“Until the human is understood as a dimension of the earth, we have no secure basis for understanding any aspect of the human. We can understand the human only through the earth.” - Thomas Berry

Humans are a peculiar creature. In spite of our overall ignorance of the processes of nature and life, a culture has arisen which has nevertheless positioned mankind as masters of the Earth. We know our understanding is far more limited than was initially presumed, and yet, we continue on with the same level of hubris which preceded this awareness. We embark on our enterprises, implicitly viewing ourselves as something higher than the Earth, something separate, something that acts but is not acted upon. We do not see ourselves as a “dimension of the earth” and therefore, our understanding of ourselves and why we behave the way we do is impoverished.

It’s true, however, that humans do have a disproportionate impact on the Earth, to the degree that one could say that humans are one of the most powerful planetary forces, with the ability to toxify entire environments, burn a hole in the ozone, fell rainforests, build deserts, take nitrogen from the air, and change the balance of carbon in the atmosphere. Yet, we also know that not all humans have had this impact on the Earth, and that most humans in our long history as a species have lived lightly, playing important roles in various ecological niches, building gardens and stewarding the cycles of life. So it’s more fair to say that human culture is one of the most powerful planetary forces, as it’s a type of culture that created the conditions of breakdown and ecological collapse that we see today.

What is culture, then? Culture is not believed to be unique to humans, but nevertheless, it’s something humans undoubtedly do and do very well. As a social creature, culture is our primary mode of survival. We must teach the process of how to be to our young and maintain that process throughout our lives through socialization. Culture is essentially a way of being in the world that is borne out from beliefs. And what are cultural beliefs about? They are stories about what kind of people we are, where we came from, and where we are going. And all these stories originate from one seed: a powerful idea of some kind, whether religious, political, or philosophical.

We, as modern humans in a global civilization, are just as impacted by stories as any human has been in our history. Stories are how we make meaning of the world, and humans, I believe, inherently strive to make meaning. Today, for example, we see the story of a meaningless universe where we are nothing but random collections of carbon, waking up only briefly in an ever-present trajectory towards entropy. We also see the story of a supposed “naturalness” being expressed in our exploitative, rapacious capitalism – a belief borne from one seed: Darwin’s idea of “survival of the fittest” being perverted in such a way as to valorize our most aggressive and dominating behaviors.

Typically, we’re not conscious of these stories that we carry, these idea-seeds that we nurture. They are in the air we breathe, as it were. Author Daniel Quinn called this ubiquitousness of cultural stories “Mother Culture.” Whether these cultural stories are healthy or destructive is another matter.

Humanity is a unique creature in that our primary function is the germination and dissemination of stories. We’re the only creature, as far as we know, who does this very odd thing. The stories we spread ripple throughout the culture, and everywhere we see the shoots bursting through the soil. Quinn’s entire purpose, insofar as I can tell, is to expose the destructiveness of our cultural stories, to bring them into consciousness so that we may tell different stories and therefore behave in different ways.

Generally, cultures that have made a conscious effort to maintain and make explicit their stories are the ones who have found more peace and harmony with the natural world and amongst each other. The consciousness of human power and the need to wield that power with care and humility, for instance, can be seen in the famous Seventh Generation Principle outlined within The Great Law of Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The concept that humans today ought to make decisions that consider their descendents seven generations down the line is a very powerful story, and it indicates a conscious awareness of the power of stories themselves. Our modern consumerist culture has no such story, and we see nothing but destruction and atomization in its wake.

Being made conscious of something involves a process whereby something that has always been there slowly emerges into our field of awareness, and we suddenly see the truth. In a sense, the seeds of consciousness are dormant, waiting for us to shine light on them so they may grow. We know this process well – we have some sort of unconscious behavior or pattern that we keep enacting, until one day we have shined enough light on that process to see the truth of the behavior, and we understand why we keep doing this thing. We bring it out of unconsciousness and into conscious awareness. We see that we struggle to communicate, for instance, because we couldn’t express our feelings to our father as a child – or whatever it may be. This experience of consciousness is often revelatory and profound, and once we see it, we can see it was always there, just waiting for us to shine a light upon it.

For a long time, man, as an actor of the dominant culture, has been unconscious of the negative ramifications of his power, though the seeds of humility, reciprocity, our connectedness to the whole, and so on have always been dormant within us. Collective transformation is much harder than individual transformation. We have to, somehow, collectively, shine life-giving rays upon those dormant seeds which are buried much deeper in the soil.

My friend Jörgen Andersson, a regenerative sheep farmer and philosopher in his own right, said to me once, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Through sleet and flame, through sunless days and frigid winters, people like Jörgen have been stewarding and protecting the seeds of the idea for the new story for mankind and our role on Earth for decades. Indigenous wisdom keepers have also been protecting these seeds for generations. They have been shining a light on the dormant seeds of mankind’s consciousness. These fragile sprouts – the ideas that humans can have a positive impact if only we make different decisions and see the world differently – have been barraged by all pernicious forces of this culture. And yet seedkeepers like Jörgen exist all over the world.

Our dominant culture would have us believe that humans are too greedy and selfish to ever exist in any sort of harmony with the natural world, and the best we can do is dominate it, but in a more “sustainable” way. What a powerful story that is – what a noxious, artificial seed that has been planted by our species. This seed is not biological: no, it is algorithmic, machine, nonliving. It is a mere abstract ideal, unmoored from a living context. It presumes that man is unlike any creature on Earth, that we can’t help but to destroy the fabric of life which sustains us, and in so believing that story, we enact it.

I believe that the new story can only be germinated in the compost of the old. The death and decay of our previous way of being will be the fertile soil through which a new understanding of ourselves may emerge. Our impact upon the planet is undoubtable, and our need to course-correct for our own survival is omnipresent. It’s only through the breakdown of stories which sustained us for the past several hundred years that we may truly emerge on the other side with a new, whole understanding of ourselves.

If human culture is one of the most powerful planetary forces that exists, which I believe it is, the power we wield must be taken seriously and with a tremendous sense of humility and responsibility. We have proven to ourselves our capacity to drastically change aspects of the biosphere with our behavior, and we’ve proven that these changes often have very unintended negative externalities that we could never have predicted. Human culture must be understood as a dimension of the earth if we are to engage with it properly. It cannot be made to be separate – it acts upon us, and we act upon the Earth through it.

Did humanity need to learn these lessons the hard way? Possibly not, but like all seeds of consciousness, they may germinate only through repeated sowing, repeated attempts by nature to keep life growing. It’s clear that other cultures did not need to learn this lesson the hard way, but the global culture, as an over-powered planetary force, does. We’ll learn these lessons either in crisis and collapse, or through consciousness – there is no escaping the inevitability of our need for change. If not for us, then for our descendants who will come after us.

It is our job, today, to bring into consciousness the new story, to protect it like a small, fragile sapling until it can grow and fruit. We must create the fecund conditions for the decay and composting of the old story to occur, and already that is happening without any hierarchical intervention. Every day, everywhere, people are shining lights on those dormant seeds of a new consciousness. They are finding people like Jörgen and Daniel Quinn who show that there is another way to see – our honored seedkeepers, our gardeners, our philosopher-friends. And the way we may help steward these seeds is through telling ourselves a different story.

If we believe that our species is an evolutionary dead-end, then we will be that. If we believe that humans have tremendous power, the consequences of which we cannot predict, we will act in another way, a more conscious, considered way. Further, if we believe that we have tremendous power for good, for a life-giving relationship with the Earth, then we will be that.

Stories are powerful – perhaps the most powerful thing we wield. What we do with them may mean the difference between extinction and the regeneration of the biosphere, and perhaps, most importantly, ourselves.

Written by Maren Morgan

This was an essay that I submitted for a contest, and was ultimately rejected — and I can understand why. It seems a little stilted upon re-reading, but nevertheless, I thought I’d share it here. I think my ability to write interesting nonfiction is atrophying as I work on fiction-writing. Anyway, I’m working on finding a better balance with everything — as is Jake — and we hope to have a new video and some new essays out soon.

Thank you as always to our paid subscribers for supporting us!

Sources cited:

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. New York: Bantam Books, 2017.

“Values.” Haudenosaunee Confederacy, June 9, 2021. https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/values/.

March Reading Reflections

Right Story, Wrong Story

This is the type of book that you read, go out and pay attention to the world, talk to a lot of different people and think and dream, and then read again. I have no doubt I’ll pick this one up again.

Written in a sequence of interconnecting yarns and trains of thought, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Right Story, Wrong Story is unlike any nonfiction book I’ve ever read. Somehow, he’s managed to take a rather linear medium and create a book that feels like a conversation, a canoe trip descent into hell, and a dream all at the same time.

When we spoke to him on our podcast, it did not go the way we had planned — two young settlers hoping to eke out some Indigenous Wisdom™ from him after reading his first book, Sand Talk. What we got instead was so much more interesting: a yarn that went every-which-way and demonstrated his indigenous way of thinking — a way of thinking that is about surprise, relatedness, uncertainty, emergence, and levity in the face of breakdown.

That’s what this book is: a demonstration of a different way of thinking, seeing, communicating. And he does it in a way that is inviting and accessible, while also asserting very clear boundaries around what he sees as a commoditization of Indigenous Wisdom™ without scolding the reader for desiring to understand it. He writes:

“Remember, we’re partners in this heretical act of looking out at the world together through a glitchy Indigenous lens and riffing on what we see there. We’re inquiring through Indigenous knowledge, not about it, and this is a deeply unsettling and unpopular process in a world that gobbles up minority narratives and wisdom like chocolate-covered strawberries and macadamias.”

He shares his own indigenous worldview without commodifying it, without idealizing his culture and rendering it inert and inflexible. He demonstrates the need to adapt, to be fluid, to see the “right story” in the present as well as the past. This is something we all have to grapple with in modernity.

What I love about Tyson’s work is his humor — this is a guy who is aware of the wisdom he carries without it making him dogmatic or uncurious. He sees the fucked-up-ness of the world and feels it deeply, but also carries it lightly and knows how to make fun of the insanity we’re all experiencing. You get the sense while reading that you’re conversing with a very shrewd, yet somehow non-judgmental friend when you’re reading this book.

There’s so much more I could say, but this is a book you need to experience for yourself. It’s a genuinely funny, wholly original, and very helpful book for our times. It helped me embrace more uncertainty and find humor in the breakdown we all face. I highly recommend it.

April Selections

Though I have a bad track record with keeping up with my reading goals already, I’m hoping that continuing to subject myself to the embarrassment of being late will eventually lead me to not procrastinating so much. Therefore, we’re back to two books for this month.

Finding Lights in a Dark Age

is a brilliant thinker and author of many books — his latest being Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. We were lucky enough to do a podcast with him a couple years ago discussing his book that he wrote in response to George Monbiot’s Regenesis (which I, too, had a lot of opinions about), called Saying No to a Farm-Free Future.

I found his perspective about humanity’s role on Earth very affirming and refreshing, and I’m excited to delve into a deeper, potentially darker analysis of the current state of the world from him.

The blurb is as follows:

Today, society and government are still asking what our country can yield, and in what quantity. They do so because in a sense we are still living in conquest-based societies. Agrarian thinker Chris Smaje opens this book by drawing an arresting modern parallel to Viking raiding, trading and enslaving societies and the Ragnarok they faced then of dramatic climate change and societal collapse.

So, to meet these modern crises, Chris asks us to look beyond the current discourse of capitalism versus chaos, and indeed the dualism of ‘state versus market’ and the ‘state with the market’, both of which has failed us.

Instead, Chris explores a world where we live slower lives more immersed in local ecologies. Where our present Viking age has inflicted a thorough alienation from place and local livelihood, Chris proposes other models of collective organization, where land and capital are seen as a common good that involves a widespread and secure redistribution. These ideas are the basic principles associated with distributism – broadly, that issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level feasible and governance, wherever possible, should be bottom-up. There should also be a moral economy founded in ideals of justice.

Work and production should rest on commitments struck in a community rather than deals in a market. There should be a concept of shared common good, of what life is for. Ultimately, we should build a sense of future possibility around local ecological societies dedicated to human and ecological wellbeing.

Much of the global damage to the environment has arisen not because people were there in the landscape, but because they weren’t. It’s time to hospice modernity and build a green Earth rising. In this book, Chris discusses what this society and landscape might look like in the near future and longer term.

Thank you to Chelsea Green for sending me this review copy. Although my review is belated, I can’t wait to read it.

The Dispossessed

If you know anything about the publishing industry, you know about comp titles — an evil, objectifying process by which you need to prove that your novel is worthy by showing how similar it is to other successful books. In order to query literary agents (a humiliation ritual that I am willingly subjecting myself to in the next months), I need comp titles, ideally ones written in the past 5-10 years. I’m struggling to find those titles, so instead, I’m going to read anything that could even be tangentially similar to my book, starting with The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which was written in the 70’s.

The blurb:

A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist’s gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

Looking Ahead…

The next books will be selected from the list below. I’ve added a couple new books to the list — some more possible comps for Fall of Men — but I think they’ll still be quite relevant for this audience. I’m definitely trying to make sure I read a healthy balance of fiction and nonfiction this year!

• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power by Joanna Macy

• The Complete Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

• The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

• Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

• The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

• Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse by Jem Bendell

If you’d like to join, simply read the books (or just one of the books, or just part of a book) and engage in the comments section of any of the book club posts! Comments will be made available for all subscribers. There’s no pressure to participate whatsoever.

February Reading Reflections

The Emergency

George Packer’s The Emergency begins with the collapse of empire — a vague, amorphous one, but an empire that provided a unifying narrative for its people nonetheless. The novel closely follows one family and their individual ways of making sense of the collapse, known to them as the Emergency. You have the father who saw nothing whatsoever wrong with Empire and essentially believed that everything was the way it always had been, then you have the daughter who is awakened by the collapse and all of the artifice of the Empire exposed therein, and the mother, who more subtly finds her voice and usefulness amid the breakdown. All characters are unique introspective, offering nuanced point of views that we get to explore (when we get into their heads).

What I found quite interesting about this book was the way it dealt with relationships — with the way we perceive each other. In the throes of the old way dying and the new way being born, we get to see the assumptions the characters make about each other and the world, and ultimately, how open they are to sharing a reality even with divergent perspectives.

Additionally, there are some very fascinating themes around humans right place in the world — should we be as gods, or are we animals? This was a surprising and interesting exploration which I very much enjoyed.

There’s an earnestness to this book that I really resonated with. It grappled with the fallibility of humanity without being cynical or nihilistic. I genuinely felt like the story wasn’t trying to take sides, but rather complexify each character and plot point to the degree that you can see the inhumanity and humanity in everyone.

It’s a deceptively simple book, one which uses a rather straightforward parable to explore deeply complex ideas. There’s an ambiguity to this book that really encourages the reader to think, so long as one can read from an open-minded frame of mind.

The Invisibility of Success and Other Investigations

God, I love Daniel Quinn.

As I wrote previously, The Invisibility of Success was the very first book I ever read by Quinn, and at this point, I’m pretty sure I’ve read everything he’s ever written. Re-reading this was a good reminder that it’s high time for me to re-read all of his books, because genuinely, he’s one of the very best modern thinkers and I’m eternally grateful that he existed.

Anyway, this is a great book. What I enjoy most about this book is the feeling that you are at the lecture or talk he is giving — he’s laying ideas out in the way a teacher would. This is clearly something he’s quite good at, otherwise Ishmael, Story of B, and My Ishmael would be bad books. His ability to break down big ideas in tangible ways is something I admire deeply. His work is expressly an invitation into further inquiry: he’s providing descriptions, not prescriptions. This invitational communication style is important, as it encourages the audience to have a deeper relationship with what he is saying. Rather than telling people what to do, he’s telling people that they can know what they are meant to do. A common refrain throughout the book is his insistence that he doesn’t know what a designer, engineer, homeschooling advocate, etc. ought to do with his ideas: instead, he insists that, armed with a new way of seeing and thinking, people in those professions will be able to decide the right course of action.

As ever, I’m so grateful I was introduced to Daniel Quinn when I was, because I realize that my perspective about the importance of cultural diversity (“there is no one right way to live”), my conviction that we cannot continue living this way, and my questioning of the narrative of farmers needing to feed the world (as opposed to their local community) originated in this book. These ideas have helped me question the premise of so many other unquestioned assumptions in modernity.

This is an excellent book — and an excellent intro to Daniel Quinn’s thinking. It made me feel a lot of remorse that I didn’t have the chance to meet him before he died. Nevertheless, I hope I can play my small part in continuing his legacy in my own way.

We can all be B if we choose to be.

March Selection

In an effort to not overcommit, I’m going to keep it simple and read just one book — and for this month I’ve selected Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. Since we’re in Australia (till March 24th as we extended our trip), it seemed like a good way to connect to this country and read from an author and thinker I already enjoy and respect. You can listen to our podcasts with Tyson here and here.

The blurb:

Right Story, Wrong Story extends Yunkaporta’s explorations of how we can learn from Indigenous thinking. Along the way, he talks to a range of people including liberal economists, memorisation experts, Frisian ecologists, and Elders who are wood carvers, mathematicians and storytellers.

Right Story, Wrong Story describes how our relationship with land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

And, as he argues, story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or wrong story? This exhilarating book is an attempt to answer that question. Right Story, Wrong Story is a formidably original essay about how we teach and learn, and how we can talk to each other to shape forms of collective thinking that are aligned with land and creation.

Looking Ahead…

Now, I said I would pick from this list last month and clearly I didn’t. I own the majority of these books already, but they’re back home in America, so I had to be a lil flexible and change it up a bit. Nevertheless, these are still the books I plan to read soon!

• Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft by Chris Smaje

• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power by Joanna Macy

• The Complete Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

• Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale

• Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures by René Daumal

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

• Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse by Jem Bendell

If you’d like to join, simply read the book or books and engage in the comments section of any of the book club posts if you feel so inclined! Comments will be made available for all subscribers. There’s no pressure to participate whatsoever.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.com. If you want to help support Death in The Garden, consider buying through the links provided. Where applicable, I’ll share links to the author’s website so you can buy direct through them.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is the author of Ancient Futures, Local is Our Future, and many other books. She is the founder of Local Futures, the organization pioneering the world localization movement. To learn more about the movement for localization, please go to the Local Futures website or follow them on Instagram and YouTube. For a comprehensive overview of their work, be sure to watch The Economics of Happiness as well as their film Ancient Futures, which explores how Helena’s experience in Ladakh fundamentally shifted her worldview.

Introduction

Almost no one would deny that our species and our planet are heading toward breakdown — a polycrisis of interconnected issues that are rapidly eroding our biosphere, our societies, and our connection with our own humanity.

What do all of these crises have in common? That common root is the influence of an interlinked group of global corporations and banks which make up what is essentially a global empire.

This global empire has a structure, a form — and it’s imperative that we understand how it took shape, how it functions and how it persists today.

Thankfully, there are people all over the world that are working to resist these powerful forces.

The localization movement (amongst many other natural, land-based, human-scale movements) is spreading throughout the world, and there is a deep intuitive cultural turning back home — back to community, to land, and to our belonging on Earth. Humanity is naturally demonstrating a deep desire to reject the system that has us running faster and faster to stay in the same place, which is denuding our sense of meaning. Globally, we’re seeing a profound shift where people are turning back to connection with nature and community.

These initiatives, movements, and ideas do not suit the mainstream narrative, so we rarely hear about them. Additionally, they represent a powerful example of human resistance to the global system in the expression of alternative ways of being, alternative economies, and alternative value systems, so there is an incentive to suppress and marginalize the movements as radical or utopian.

Still, in spite of the great strides being made in this positive, humane direction, people are vulnerable to the system so long as it exists, and it is imperative that we understand what it is and how it works so we may resist it more effectively.

Why is the global economy like this?

Though the genesis of globalization began during the age of colonial imperialism and was expanded and entrenched during the industrial age, the global economy as we know it today took shape during the throes of WW2 — where a group of world leaders, business leaders, and bankers gathered to envision the world beyond the war, where all people were united in peace and prosperity. Their vision was that trade and economic growth would benefit everyone, and that there would be no limits to the abundance they could attain.

The Bretton Woods conference would lead to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as laying the foundations for the GATT - the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

The intended purpose of these programs were to work in tandem to promote economic growth and globalization.

The World Bank and IMF specialized in the creation of loans meant to target the Global South, known as Structural Adjustment Program Loans. The goal was to develop the Global South in the image of the North to create an interlinked global economy.

These loans were granted only to countries that agreed to dismantle their economic and social structures and redesign them according to an imposed free market/free trade ideology, resulting in a widespread movement of enclosure.

Nations were pressured by those loans to open their borders and change their economies from self-sufficiency to export production, continuing the logic of comparative advantage which had first risen to prominence during the Age of Conquest.

The GATT reinforced this by opening markets in the North and South to trade, encouraging trade to expand across the planet.

And expand, it did.

Over the next forty years, global trade exploded. A new industrial revolution had begun, and with the use of fossil fuels and widespread electrification, a new colonialism was taking hold through the development processes of the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT.

Far from bringing the world together, communities all over the world were fractured and people were forced from the land — their sacred forests and rivers cut down, mined, and dammed in the name of progress. This process of enclosure, which echoed the enclosure movements of the 18th & 19th centuries, resulted in the breakdown of the intergenerational community fabric and the relationship with the “real economy”1 for people all over the world.

Governments who didn’t want to join the new global order were infiltrated and toppled by agents of the global superpowers, namely the United States and the United Kingdom, who violently demanded fealty to the new system.

Globalization would be entrenched at any cost.

New technologies such as GMOs, pesticides, and fertilizers were now commercially available, which in effect forced farmers worldwide to “go big or go home,” and overtime, farmland became more and more centralized in the hands of the few.

The rapid increase of technological industrialism resulted in a rise of a new class of chemical pollution — DDT, lead, plastics, radioactive substances, and other toxins that are detrimental to life on Earth.

By the 1960s, there was a revivified backlash against the industrialism, pollution, and military violence that was taking place to benefit the global system of trade. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring marked a seminal turning point, encouraging citizens and policymakers to see that there were, in fact, limits on Earth. The environmental movement was born from the revelations that we live on a limited planet and that our behavior can have a detrimental effect on the biosphere. Additionally, it was born with an awareness of our need to decentralize the economy and expand our knowledge systems to be more holistic.

By the nineties, globalization was in full swing. Governments, whether left or right, were dominated by the inexorable logic of economic globalization — also known as neoliberalism. The narrative that globalization was inevitable, bringing the world together in peace, and creating a global village had become deeply entrenched in the zeitgeist of the Global North by the 1990s. But this narrative of abundance and progress was far from the truth for the vast majority of people.

NAFTA was signed, and the World Trade Organization was formed as the supranational institution to regulate global trade. What this led to was thousands of regional trade and investment agreements being ratified, and, importantly, deregulated.

This ultimately had the effect of giving corporations and foreign investors the freedom to move in and out of national economies in search of subsidies, cheap labor and resources, low taxes, and lax environmental and social protection measures. Many of these trade treaties included ISDS clauses which would allow corporations and banks to challenge regulatory policies that might threaten their profits.

ISDS stands for Investor-State Dispute Settlement — which is a legal mechanism which allows investors to sue sovereign nations for creating policies which might threaten their profits. As of 2024, over $113 billion USD has been paid by states to investors. The biggest beneficiaries are fossil fuel companies, who have raked in over $80 billion USD since 1998.

These ISDS clauses give corporations and banks the legal right to sue governments for creating environmental policies or social policies (policies which would impact polluters or unethical businesses’ profits), in effect giving corporations and banks more power over a nation’s land and citizenry than governments themselves.

This has caused governments and the corporations they are supposed to regulate to become dangerous bedfellows. It has created a situation where governments are punished for acting in the interests of their people and the planet. Additionally, many corporations now have more money than most governments, giving them disproportionate power on the global stage.

And meanwhile, while corporations and banks were given carte blanche to behave however they wanted, regulations for small business, small farms – local, human scale operations – started to be over-regulated by governments, making it harder and harder for small, local, and artisanal producers to compete with the global economy, which not only had swallowed up the land and resources, but were also increasingly subsidized by governments themselves.

Today, we live in a world where corporations and financial institutions are truly ruling the world.

Far from globalization being the panacea for our ills, it has entrenched the world in a system of trade that is predatory, exploitative, and mechanical — which places the profits of big business as the primary metric of societal health. Globalized development, which promised to eradicate hunger and poverty, has further impoverished people and devastated the planet worldwide.

We were told that the benefits of globalization would trickle down, that a new rising tide would lift all boats. But in reality, the only boats that have risen are that of the owners and managers of globalization, leaving the rest of us stranded on the beach, facing the rising tide.2

Globalization has, in effect, meant the continuation of robbing, rather than enriching, the majority. It has increased the gap between rich and poor to an extent unimaginable to our ancient ancestors, and we live in a world where every one of us has to work harder and harder just to make ends meet. This corporate colonialism is now entrenched in all aspects of our society.

The primacy of economic growth as the primary metric of the health of human civilization has led to a global monoculture: the earth has been terraformed into straight, uniform lands which reflects the Western corporate vision and serves their interests, as well as a global population groomed into being participants in a consumer monoculture, where diverse, self-sustaining cultures and ways of living have been marginalized as “inefficient” and “primitive.”

The goal everywhere is now the same: free all economic resources to serve the needs of corporations, not people or the environment.

“All combined, the hypermobility of transnational corporations, the creation of money by deregulated banks, and the cozy relationship between government and big business have resulted in a profoundly undemocratic global order with deepening impacts on people and the planet.” — Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local is Our Future

All of life and nature has been handed over to create this machine – this Global Empire that threatens everything.

What is it doing to us?

Consider the decline in our quality of life, our relationships with each other, and the stability of our societies in general — all these problems can be linked to the process of economic globalization.

Social Breakdown

The negative impacts of globalization have a common thread: the removal of people from land. In order for globalization to work, land must be enclosed upon. In order to compete in the global system, countries must participate in comparative advantage, a process by which the land is turned into productive monocultures for trade. This has been going on since the time of colonization, and it has only gotten more entrenched as time has gone on.

Comparative advantage is a process of specialization, with each region specializing in one (or a few) monocrops or products for export and trade, rather than producing a diversity of foods for local consumption. Other examples include industrial specialization, where countries are heavily specialized in one industry, making their economies precarious and highly dependent on imports and exports.

Additionally, there needs to be a steady supply of labor for the globalized system. When people are severed from the landbase that gives them life, and are forced into a money economy, social breakdown follows. All over the world, we have cultures which have been flattened and subsumed into a machine-like monoculture, ripping people from ways of life that give people meaning and structure. This dismantlement of local traditions and economies is devastating to the social fabric.

Today, we have widespread poverty, landlessness, homelessness, alienation, and extreme anxiety about the future. When people are unmoored from their cultures and landbases, forced into cities to compete for scarce jobs, this leads to ethnic and intercultural violence amongst groups who otherwise may have existed peacefully together for hundreds of years.

This process of enclosure is leading to the rise of immigration worldwide, which has the unfortunate side-effect of governments and citizens embracing fascistic or nationalistic rhetoric about foreigners who they perceive to be the threat to their livelihoods, rather than directing their ire at the system itself. This is leading to a disintegration of social stability worldwide.

And because corporations and banks have more power than governments, and they thrive on the uprooting and displacement of the world’s people, it’s easy for demagoguery to take hold in democratic societies all around the world.

All of this social disruption and violence works in the favor of globalization which incentivizes all of this. This monoculturing of people, land, and cultures increases profits for the very wealthy, and siphons wealth from the less-fortunate. The gap between the rich and poor has never been wider in all of human history, and it continues to grow, day by day.

Simultaneously, environmental degradation is at its worst point in all of human history as well, with the rise in GDP correlating directly with the decline of social cohesion, as well as the decline of the biosphere’s functioning. And yet — GDP is still considered to be the only relevant measure when considering the health of society.

Environmental Breakdown

Since Bretton Woods, in particular, CO2 emissions have sky-rocketed, but worse, ecocide has exploded across the globe at a nauseating pace.

And though biodiversity loss has been rapidly declining since the industrial revolution, it has only gotten worse and more widespread with the rise of globalization.

The widespread terraforming of the planet for industrial agriculture has led to depleted soils. Farmland globally is now dependent on globalized machinery, technology, pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation to produce less nutritious food than was produced before WW2. The baffling supply chains involved in producing any food in the globalized food system include uncountable amounts of energy and fossil fuels, all to produce food that is lower in nutrient density than in localized and diversified food systems. From the production of fertilizers, to transport, to the cold chain, and the insane trade that has countries importing the same quantities of specific foods as they export, the global food system is dumping pollution and emissions into the biosphere at every step of the process.

Food, rather than being eaten by local people in the region in which it was grown or produced, is now typically shipped thousands of miles (at great environmental cost) to be eaten by the already well-fed.

Meanwhile, the promotion of the consumer monoculture is rapidly consuming the Earth’s resources, often for nonsense that is destined to end up in landfills anyway. The global economy is using approximately 100 billion tons of resources per year which is equivalent to the weight of more than 16,000 Great Pyramids of Giza, to produce electronics, vehicles, clothing, plastic, fossil fuels, random knick-knacks, food, wood — everything that is purchasable by people and usable by industry.

This is leading to a derangement of the biosphere. Without intact ecosystems, life struggles to persist. The general trend of regular droughts, floods, freezes, severe storms, tropical cyclones, wild fires and winter storms are all increasing. The climate is becoming deranged, unpredictable and erratic.

Yet all these metrics are not factored into the global economy. All of these metrics are unaccounted in the profit-loss statements of the global empire. There are no price signals to inform the consumers, bankers and CEOs of too much land, air and water pollution. Only profit is accounted for, as GDP and the efficiency of production are the only relevant measures.

A 2010 study conducted for the UN estimated that the combined environmental externalities of the world’s 3,000 largest companies to equal over $2.2 trillion USD, which is a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year. The gargantuan figure does not include social impacts, waste, or other long-term costs – all costs that these corporations and banks will never have to pay back, so long as the system continues functioning in the way it is.

And another pivotal measure that is certainly left out of the accounting is our rapidly declining human health.

Damage to Health

As humans were forced off of land into urban expanses, diseases of civilization have exploded within populations that were unprecedented before the rise of globalization. When people eat globalized industrialized foods, have sedentary yet high-stress jobs, diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes rise. Additionally, ultra-processed global foods grown in soil-depleting monocultures and processed in factories, are associated with tooth decay, skeletal issues, dementia, and malnutrition.

With globalization we are exposed to industrial by-products, waste, and chemicals, pesticides, microplastics. The food we consume is contaminated through every step of its production. The environments we live in are polluted by invisible toxins embedded in our furniture, cooking utensils, carpets and more.

Our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are shortening our lives and reducing our quality of life as we age. All of these issues, combined with the breakdown of community bonds and the rise of loneliness, are having detrimental effects on human health.

Additionally, as development increases, we are seeing the rise in mental health problems. Anxiety and depression are on the rise globally. Cultures and regions where suicide was once unspeakably rare are now seeing epidemic rates of suicide. And these trends all correlate with the introduction of development and globalization.

The psychological impact of having to compete for scarce jobs and resources, of comparison through social media, and the increasing feeling amongst young people that there is no future are impacts which are hard to quantify, but they are having detrimental effects on the mental health of people all over the world. In addition, we’re being increasingly alienated from the living world through a sycophantic, advertisement driven, consumerism oriented digital world, which leads to a feeling of tremendous meaninglessness and pointlessness.

And again, none of this is accounted for in the measure of GDP. In fact, disease and its treatment increase GDP. If you need chemotherapy for your cancer treatment, that will represent a net positive in the measure of GDP. If you need insulin, there is a rise in GDP. One could say that the problems caused by global industrialism are actually benefits as far as GDP is concerned.

This reductionism and abstraction is leading to deleterious effects all over the world.

And the reason for this is due to a pernicious worldview that developed during the scientific revolution — the idea that life is a machine, that humans are machines, and that living systems and processes can be reduced to numbers, leading to...

The Mechanistic Worldview

A mechanical worldview has pervaded since the industrial revolution, and accelerated under the reign of globalization — one which deifies technological progress no matter the invisible and overt negative consequences.

The machine of the Global Empire is fed through algorithms, surveillance, and the acquisition of our data, mined by data brokers and tech companies. It is kept alive through information technologies, propaganda, and even the education system.

Today, we face the existential threat of AI — the ultimate endpoint of the global empire’s mechanistic worldview. The goal of AI companies is to automate all human labor so that they, a handful of corporations, can truly own the entire economy. This marks one of the final enclosures — the enclosure of all aspects of human exchange.

Our attention was first stolen by algorithms, and now our attachment is being stolen by chatbots. And if AGI or ASI is reached, the enclosure of the entire enterprise of human labor will be in the hands of machines and those who wield them, with the Big Tech oligarchs shaping the world for their own designs.

But beyond the enclosure of livelihoods — AI has the capacity to accelerate every destructive process on Earth to a degree that is almost unimaginable. Unlike technological advancements of yesteryear, the singular advancement of machine learning accelerates all industrial processes. This acceleration will rapidly increase the pace of ecocide which threatens the entire living world.

Already, data centers are poisoning rivers and creating toxic noise pollution and churning through rare earth elements and critical minerals, whose industries are incredibly destructive. The data companies use so much energy that local communities are being forced, through a sickening lack of regulation, to subsidize the costs of the data centers. It’s estimated that global electricity production will need to increase 20% just for data centers. Where will that energy most likely come from? Coal, fossil fuels, natural gas, and other dirty industries. And that’s just to power the data centers — the rare earth minerals required for the infrastructure and that level of compute power spike the demand for mining.

Life itself has been enclosed upon with the rise of GMOs, our attention is colonized by algorithms, and our most human feature — our social relationality — is being exploited by AI. Our minds and bodies are the final hinterland, and the technology of the global empire threatens to encroach and enclose us completely.

There is a certain madness in the idea of replacing humanity with rare earth minerals — gouging the earth to replace the abundant renewable resource of humanity on the land. This is especially dispiriting when we consider how much the earth yearns to be tended to by human hands, and how much we yearn for that connection as well.

The Invisible Effects

Of all of the external problems of globalization, the invisible, internal consequences are some of the most destructive and pernicious. The progress narrative marches forth with little consideration for the myriad invisible costs that we have accrued: a widespread, multivalent impoverishment that impacts us all.

As the world has become more entrenched in a money economy, generation after generation, people are having to work harder and harder for less and less, to the degree that basic necessities are becoming inaccessible to people all around the world — in rich and poor countries. People are having to run faster and faster to stay in the same place, and all the while, we’re told how lucky we are to be alive at this time. We’re made to feel guilty for imagining that the world could be different than this.

Our spiritual lives have become impoverished: our sense of meaning subsumed by consumerism, our sense of awe replaced with dread for the future, and our sense of purpose dwarfed by the scale of the problems we face as a creature.

We’re becoming increasingly socially impoverished as well — another invisible effect of the global system. We’ve been cordoned off in our digital siloes, made to feel inferior to one another, forced into competition and polarization. Our society is the loneliest culture which has ever existed, and young people’s belief in a positive future is at an all-time low.

Our skill capacities are becoming impoverished as well — our cognitive capacity is declining, as is our physical and creative capacity. Since industrialization, there has been a steady erosion of skills as technology has taken primacy. Skills such as growing, foraging, or hunting food, carpentry, and other practical skills have been marginalized and are rapidly being subsumed by mechanization. Cultural skills such as singing, dancing, weaving, pottery, wood carving, hunting, clothing making, husbandry, herbalism, cooking, and so much more have been eroded under a hyper-centralized money economy where all human skills can be replaced with a “buy now” button.

These things may seem unrelated to this process of globalization, but they all serve to weaken us and make us vulnerable. They increase our dependency on this machine.

If we are skill-less, we rely on the system. If we have lost our cognitive capacities, we must rely on technology. If we have lost our communities, we must rely on transactional relationships with our fellow humans. If we have lost our physical abilities due to diseases caused by the industrial, modern way of life, we will rely on the system to keep us alive. If we lose our imagination and creativity, the system will offer a facsimile of these things back to us in the form of products, reinforcing our need to participate in the global economy — reinforcing our role as consumers, rather than creators.

These invisible consequences of the mechanized, global system leave us feeling hopeless, listless, atomized, and alienated – like there’s nothing we can do to resist the rising tide.

How can we resist?

How long are we going to continue this handover?

The truth is that the Earth, and the human soul, cannot sustain the assaults from this system for much longer. We must change course.

We need to reorient ourselves to the local and the human scale. We need to realign our intentions toward human and ecological health, not abstract measures like GDP, profits, growth, and efficiency. We need to remember that we depend on the real economy, which is the living world. Returning to a deep relationship with the web of life is paramount.

When we do that, we also see that the biosphere is limited, and that we can honor those limits while regaining severed aspects of our humanity – the parts which have been stolen by modernity. When we accept limits, we also see that we are limited, our understanding is limited, and when we make decisions at a planetary scale, we lack the capacity to understand the consequences of our actions.

Beyond just the environmental benefits of returning to a local, human-scale economy are the psychological benefits of being in community, in deep relationship to land and place, not needing to work at the speed of all available technology, and being useful. We can resist the global empire through policy, but also through the creation of community initiatives, building local resilience.

Localization, as Helena explains, is a “solution multiplier” in that it is not specialized just to the environmental benefits, it also strengthens us on a cultural level, promoting self-determinism, and sovereignty.

When we see that trade is a fundamental lever of the crisis, and that it’s something man-made and not inevitable, we can start really addressing the problems that the global economy has caused.

There is a cultural turning underway right now, one which is turning away from the atomized, dead existence, away from competition, toward meaning, valuing the natural and handmade. We are turning toward community, land, and connection — an intuitive return home.

Written by Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez, with guidance from Helena Norberg-Hodge

Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you thought of this essay. As we’re making a film about this subject, we invite you to share your feedback on how we’re conveying this information. This essay is free to read, so please share widely if you found value in the information contained within.

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For more information, please go check out the Local Futures website.

To learn more from Helena herself, check out our interview with her from Ladakh:

2

Paraphrased from a quote by Jerry Mander in The Case Against the Global Economy: and For a Turn Toward the Local.

December & January Reading Reflections

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Technopoly is a genuinely important book, if only for its quality of dispelling the idea that technology is neutral.

As Postman writes:

“A new technology doesn’t add or subtract. It changes everything.”

Though the book is primarily critiquing cultures which pay undue deference to technology, particularly with the rise of computer technology and the spread of Americanized techno-consumer culture, the book, in general, makes the claim that we ought to feel a sense of righteousness when asking fundamental questions about technological society.

Rather than constantly having to qualify our critiques, Postman makes the case that for every new technology, we should ask, “To whom will the technology give greater power and freedom? And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it?”

The book also makes the case that in our society, all technologies should be looked upon with suspicion, in large part because Technopolies lack a “moral center,” and that Technopolies replace human values with machine values.

“It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce the functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.”

This is an indispensable book for those critical technology and industrial civilization. I’m sure I’ll return to it often.

Anima: A Wild Pastoral

This was a stunning book, and one I feel I probably never would have read if it weren’t for it being selected for our book club. Anima is the conclusion of a 4-part book series of author Kapka Kassabova’s immersive experience of the Balkans.

This book explores the relationship between humans and animals in a way that I’ve never seen written — though I’ve felt aspects of it in person. The relationship between human, livestock, dog and mountain is the swirling centerpiece of this book. Through her prosaic journalistic writing, we the reader get to step into a world where all of these things are one continuous thing, where there is no separation. This is at once a lament and love-letter to ancient pastoralism, as well as a subtle plea for humanity to find a “forgotten middle path” between the old ways and the new world.

Throughout the book, Kassabova injects moments of context, describing the violence of sedentarization, enclosure, Soviet collectivization, and industrialism. She weaves these didactic moments in expertly to an otherwise novel-esque narrative.

I learned so much from reading this book — in particular about the importance of guardian dogs. The question of whether we can have livestock or healthy predator populations is answered in the form of guardian dogs. Guardian dogs allow for the coexistence of livestock, shepherds, wolves, and bears, and the rich story Kassabova shares exposes that truth.

“Guardian dogs didn’t just protect the flock from large predators. They also protected large predators from being shot by people with livestock,” Kassabova writes.

What she describes throughout the story is a rich, and dying web of life — one that we need to reclaim in order to reclaim biodiversity and ancient ecosystem-function. Shepherding the world’s oldest sheep, the Karakachans, she learns and shares so much about the disconnect between our world and the ancient world, and need to find ways to reconnect the two if we have any hopes of persisting into the future at all.

Earth Abides

I must admit failure again! I did not finish this book in the allotted timeframe. I thought about getting the audiobook, listening on 1.5 speed to try to get it through to give you all a review, but I ultimately decided against it. I think that this book is an important one — one that I don’t want to rush through. I’ll definitely be including this book in a later book club. I apologize for not finishing it!

February Selections

We are currently reading The Emergency for for Anya Kaats’ book club and The Invisibility of Success is a book I read (and loved) back in early 2021. Because we’re in Australia for the month to film, I wanted to make sure I didn’t have too ambitious of a reading goal for the time we’re here (and I didn’t want to bring too many books with me). This reading goal might end up being a bit lean in the end, but achieving it is the most important thing!1

Onto the blurbs:

The Emergency

A gripping fable of imperial collapse that illuminates the crises of our times.

George Packer’s bestselling nonfiction work exploring American life has won many prizes, including the National Book Award. With The Emergency, he returns to fiction, bringing us a visionary novel that goes to the nerve center of what it means to live in a time of fracture and upheaval.

An empire has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself. In the Emergency that follows, youth rebellions of urban Burghers and rural Yeomen embrace radical new ideas of humanity. Doctor Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, is increasingly estranged from his city and his family―from his wife, Annabelle, who finds fulfillment in their changed community; and especially from his teenage daughter, Selva, who has turned against her father’s values. When an incident at the hospital leads to Rustin’s disgrace, he seeks redemption in a quixotic and dangerous journey into the countryside, with Selva as his companion, just as the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen is reaching a crisis.

The Invisibility of Success and Other Investigations

The Invisibility of Success is the very first book by Daniel Quinn I ever read — and it was an incredibly revelatory and affirming experience.

The book is made up of 13 lectures and talks given by Daniel Quinn, outlining his philosophy, his keen ability to question the premise of conventional wisdom and challenge the assumptions of our culture.

I’ve grown a lot in my own thinking since I read this book 5 years ago. I really look forward to seeing all of the things I did not pick up on back then, and to see how my own view of things has evolved over time.

The blurb is very dull, so I won’t bother sharing it. Suffice it to say that this is a very easy, accessible read, which explores complex ideas through a classically Quinnian frame. I’m excited to read it again!

Looking Ahead…

The next books will be selected from the list below, but to allow for a little whimsy, I’m definitely going to include books that aren’t on this list from time to time, as I’ve done this month. I’m trying not to be too rigid, otherwise I fear my goals will not be accomplished.

• Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft by Chris Smaje

• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power by Joanna Macy

• The Complete Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

• Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale

• Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures by René Daumal

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse by Jem Bendell

If you’d like to join, simply read the books (or just one of the books, or just part of a book) and engage in the comments section of any of the book club posts! Comments will be made available for all subscribers. There’s no pressure to participate whatsoever.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.com. If you want to help support Death in The Garden, consider buying through the links provided. Where applicable, I’ll share links to the author’s website so you can buy direct through them.

The long night is falling away, and the land is slowly, softly, filling with the first colorful wisps of sunrise.

We are living at the dawn of a new Renaissance.

I am convinced that all of the crises we face as a species share a common root — a cultural root which perpetuates our decline.

More specifically, it is a storytelling problem.

Over the past several hundred years, some of the dominant cultural stories have been that the world is a machine and can be controlled by man; that humans are inherently greedy, selfish, and destructive; and that “progress,” through technology and science, is not only natural, but inevitable.

Today, in 2026, it’s plain to see that these stories are failing us at every level. They have allowed powerful, Machiavellian rulers to shape the environment, the economy, and governments, bending the entire world to its will. They have allowed for the rape and despoliation of the Earth. They have allowed for the alienation and competition of individualism to reign supreme at the cost of the total destruction of healthy, sustainable communities and individuality. They have allowed catastrophic global experiments to be unleashed on the biosphere in the name of human advancement.

We have made the claim before that human culture is one of the most powerful planetary forces, and one we must wield with consciousness and profound awareness. This sentiment is echoed by one of the most soulful writers and teachers of writing, K.M. Weiland, in her video “Why Writers Need a Sense of Wonder in Fiction (Especially Now)” where she explains her conviction that there is no such thing as “just a story.”

She explains that humans are a storytelling animal, and that this inherent quality is what allows us as a creature to ultimately make meaning from our experience of consciousness. The psychological exchange between each other through stories is foundational to the creation of culture.

“Writers are cultural architects, and this is because stories do more than just reflect reality: they create it... We dream our stories and, together, our stories dream our culture, our society, and our world. Even now, we are dreaming into existence the next generations and their paradigms.”

This sentiment has also been echoed by , who has amplified Manda Scott’s assertion that “storytellers will be held responsible for our times.” Stories are powerful, and like technology, they are not neutral.

I have also expressed this in the past when I wrote:

“What actually moves us? What provokes us to empathy, inspiration, and understanding? Art does. Stories do. And some stories which are created, adapted, or ‘sub-created’ tap into the universal heartbeat of humanity and our place in the world. Whether they are mythic epics, or historical adaptations, or simple tales of humanness, there are certain stories that stay with us and compel us to interact with the world differently. If there is one thing that is undoubtedly true, it is that humans are capable of great good, as well as great evil. The stories that we tell ourselves play an outsized role in defining how we wield such power.”1

It should be apparent to anyone with a pulse that we have not been wielding this cultural power responsibly for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and our world is in crisis because of it.

Over the past years of doing this project, I’ve spent most of my time trying to recognize patterns and the strange interconnections between seemingly disparate things. One of the points of interconnection that captivates me is the intersection between pop-culture and ecology, which is why I have somewhat tenuously attempted to link them in the past.

At first glance, it might be hard to connect the “death cycle of creative bankruptcy”2 in a Hollywood which only seems interested in creating reboots and remakes, and the ecocidal, consumer monoculturing of the living Earth, for instance, but these things are deeply intertwined. The degradation of our stories mirrors the degradation of our souls which mirrors the degradation of the land.

A culture incapable of telling new stories is a culture incapable of envisioning a different world. A culture that uses its creative capital to chase trends, quick money, and tropes to create cheap and meaningless content is a culture that is dying in the wreckage of the world it is killing. It’s a culture that doesn’t believe in the future at all, and thus, behaves as such. Creators create cheap, regurgitated slop (spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing so), and everyone else consumes it with an unconscious, suicidal abandon.

“That this packaging strategy works is thanks in part to the dire state of the world beyond the cinema; audiences are really eager for escape,” writes Catherine Shoard, for the Guardian.

In On Fairy Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien addresses escapism and fantasy. In the essay, he explains that there is a difference between “the escape of the prisoner” and the “flight of the deserter”, which I interpret to mean that some stories allow us to escape into a better world, which causes us to reimagine our own world and allows us to see the bars on the cage that surrounds us. This form of “escape” is quite different than the “escape” of shutting off your brain by putting on a random, terrible TV show in the background while you scroll TikTok on your phone. This form of escape inspires a renewed sense of responsibility — of finding a way to free oneself from their cage.

“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” Tolkien writes.3

The flight of the deserter, on the other hand, is using stories as mere entertainment, as a way to numb and pretend and obfuscate our responsibility to the world. This is the culture we live in now which runs on content, algorithms, distraction, and honestly just a fuck-ton of wasted time and energy. I believe everything in our culture right now is trying to distract and commodify us. As it’s pushing us into being rapacious consumers of the Earth, it’s simultaneously pushing us towards being deserters rather than escaped prisoners.

The deserter slop and the dark, hopeless stories that evoke nihilism and apathy have the same effect — they dull us to our responsibility, distract us from our own inherent creativity, and lull us into degeneration and cynicism.

As K.M. Weiland explains in her aforementioned video, it’s not “that stories that explore darkness, whether realistically or hyperbolically, should be eschewed. Quite the opposite. But, as so many storytellers already intuitively understand, darkness must be reckoned with as part of a larger cycle.”

She explains the necessity of writers today to write from a place of “wonder.” This is not, she explains, the abandonment of exploring dark themes, as these are essential mirrors that the culture needs, but rather the synthesis that comes from exploring those themes from a place of wonder. She explains that, in order for stories to serve a helpful purpose in our times, we need to “complete the arc” — the arc of descent into the shadows, returning again through hope, light, and meaning.

“Humans cannot live indefinitely without hope. If our stories can’t imagine goodness, then goodness becomes unimaginable. Stories teach us what kind of future is possible and whether its worth striving for.”

This is the difference between escape and desertion. Stories that get stuck in the darkness, or say nothing of substance at all, inspire nihilism and cynicism, and we do not have the luxury to indulge these attitudes if we want to steward a better world into being. We have to start creating and consuming art that propels us into radical responsibility once again.

As the world is getting scarier around us, more and more of us are waking up to the cage we live in, and are plotting our escape. I think the stories we tell and the stories we imagine must help us envision how to escape the prison cell.

I have become absolutely convinced that alongside the need to expend our abundance of human energy on healing and regenerating the land, we need artists now more than ever before. We need true artists — those who pierce the culture with their gaze, who see the truths and harken to them. We need artists who bare witness to the dark, and yet create from an inviolable well of hope and wonder. We need artists that have something to say and the courage to say it with earnestness and heart.

The creation of stories and music and other works of art that help us understand the reality of our world and envision a way through it are of paramount importance in this time. I don’t think I can emphasize enough how essential artists are to the unfolding of the better world we all long for. The Renaissance will not emerge on its own. It will come through us and through our art. And this Renaissance, I believe, to have any value at all, must be able to hold the dark with the light.

And if you don’t believe me when I say this Renaissance is nigh, just look at Jesse Welles, who has catapulted to fame through his earnest, honest, sharply discerning folk music.

Every one of Jesse Welles’ songs critiques the lunacy of the world we live in. But one can sense his sincerity and his hope — for why would he create such music if he didn’t believe that there would be a good, human soul on the other end who could hear him?

These times are ripe for creators to emerge who really have something to say. We need art like this: art which doesn’t shy away from reality, which doesn’t collapse into triviality. We need art that critiques and witnesses, art which allows truths to be laid bare.

I think it’s worth reiterating that we do not live in times of peace — and as George Orwell lamented, he would have written different things had he not been writing in times of war, that that reality colored his work and made it more overtly “serious” than other works.

We might want to write silly stories and fun songs, and there is need for that, to some degree. But I think there are many of us who will see the importance of our creative energy being spent to help this cultural turning along. There are many of us who will see the power we as creators wield, and do what we can to create works that consciously bring into form a new worldview.

As Weiland explained:

“Too often, we fail to appreciate the psychological power with which we are interacting when we read, or watch stories. Because of their profound capacity to bypass the conscious brain and engage directly with the most primal parts of our psyche, stories do not merely reflect worldview: they also actively participate in shaping it… This is why it is important to question what the stories we are writing or consuming are pointing us toward.”

The worldview will be shaped anyway, as it has been through unconsciousness, nihilism, and the unquenchable desire to make money. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the storytellers and artists of today to create consciously and with intent.

We have the ability, and the responsibility, to envision and help bring into form a new world. These are exciting times, full of both terror and promise. This journey will be arduous, but I can feel it beneath my feet, the shift is coming. I can feel the light, faintly, warming my skin.

The sunrise is cresting over the mountains now.

What a time to be alive.

Written by Maren Morgan

Note to readers:

The reason Death in The Garden exists at all is because we are convinced that, in spite of everything, creating the art we wish to see in the world, and taking seriously the calling to be an artist, is deeply important in these perilous times. While documentary and nonfiction is not often considered to be art, our efforts come from a place of inherent artistry, sensitivity to the world, and a desire to connect and create. Our work is an effort to witness and to translate what we see into art. Educational art, but art nonetheless. All acts of true creation ought to be considered art. Death in The Garden, in many ways, is the real-life foundation upon which we plan to create many other works of art — narrative films, novels, and other creations that are easier to call “art.”

Over the past year and a half, I have been attempting to walk the talk in one of those other realms of creation: writing a novel.

I am excited (and terrified) to announce that I am at the stage of the process where I need to start soliciting feedback from beta-readers for my debut novel, Fall of Men.4 Asking for feedback from beta-readers is a massive favor to ask, so I’ve created a sign-up form that people can check out if they are interested in helping me through this pivotal part of the creation of my novel trilogy.

Thank you as always to our paid subscribers for helping us keep the lights on and believing in our act of creation enough to support us financially. It is truly such an honor and privilege. If you’ve read this far, I sincerely thank you for your attention today.

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Set 28 years after the rapid spread of the “rage virus” across Britain, we follow a group of survivors who have managed to create a small, ins…

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2025 is nearing its final hours, and I don’t know about you all, but 2026 is looking like it’s going to shape out to be one of the most impactful (and possibly terrifying) years of my life thus far. I’ll be ringing in the third decade of my life with some pretty amazing opportunities and projects, maybe even publishing my first novel, and I’m feeling incredibly grateful to be moving into 2026 with a lot of excitement for the future.

Before I get into some of the things I’d like to bring your attention to, some updates:

• I’m currently working on an essay about AI and why I think we, as an ecologically-minded community, should outright reject it, so that should be out soon.

• We’re also working on a video about the Luddites and why, if you’re resistant to AI and Big Tech encroachment on your life, livelihood, and the living world, you’re probably a Luddite and you ought to reclaim that word.

• The biggest news of all: we’ve been hired by Local Futures to create 3 films in the next year — one feature length, and two short films. We’re extremely excited about the opportunity to work with such a like-minded organization, and we’re so grateful to be able to be employed in the creative field during such challenging and uncertain times.

• I will also be soliciting beta-readers for the first book of my novel trilogy in the next couple of weeks, so do stay tuned for that if you’re interested. If you want to see into my journey to become an author thus far and get some insights into the book, consider checking out my little YouTube channel where I’ve been documenting some of the ups and downs of earnestly trying to write a novel for the first time.

With those updates out of the way, before the year closes out, I wanted to call your attention to some developments in the world, as well as some cool things that our friends and community are creating that you might want to get involved with in the new year. 2026 is already feeling charged and fecund, and I can’t wait to see what it brings us. I hope everyone else is looking forward to next year as much as we are.

Sending you all the best.

- Maren

A Mechanism of the Machine

One of the films we are creating for Local Futures is essentially a breakdown of how the global empire works — what is the engine that powers this machine, what is the fuel, what does it do to us, and what can we do to resist it? Globalization has been a complicated process that has taken hundreds of years develop, but there are some key mechanisms that have allowed the power of corporations to be as entrenched in the world as they are, and one of those mechanisms is the existence of investor-state dispute settlement clauses in trade treaties, known as ISDS clauses.

In Helena Norberg-Hodge’s book Local is Our Future, she defines ISDS clauses as rules which “allow corporations to challenge any national policies — including domestic labor laws that mandate humane working conditions of rules that limit pollution of air and water — if they might reduce the corporation’s expected profits.”1 The way that corporations challenge these policies is through law suits against nation-states, which are upheld in international arbitration courts, run by corporate lawyers.

Let me repeat: corporations are allowed to sue nations if their policies may threaten investor profits.

Or, as Steven Donziger explained: “It allows corporations (the investor) to sue a host country government in a private process when they feel their investment has been negatively affected by some public court or legislative decision.”

These clauses are embedded in trade treaties, which effectively gives corporations power over governments and carte blanche to do as they like. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-human aspect of trade treaties, and it’s a key mechanism which allows corporations to have so much power in the world. Last year, it was found that over $114 billion USD of public money has been awarded to corporations since these clauses were added to trade treaties in the nineties, and over $84 billion USD of that money has been shelled out to the fossil fuel industry.

Today, we can add another possible $220 million to that $84 billion figure: right now, Chevron is suing Ecuador to pay back their legal fees for the over 30 years of fighting against the farmer and indigenous communities that they poisoned in the Amazon. Years ago, we interviewed Steven Donziger about this case and the catastrophic harm Chevron (then Texaco) did when they dumped billions of gallons of toxic crude into the Amazon, devastating communities and the land, leading to an explosion of cancer in the region. Steven and his team won a judgement against Chevron of $9.5 billion in damages, but instead of paying up, Chevron went straight into arbitration.

Chevron’s lawyers used corrupt and dirty tactics to discredit the case, and now are essentially claiming that the case itself was fraudulent, meaning that Ecuador is responsible now to pay the legal fees incurred during litigation. Using the mechanism of ISDS, Chevron has won favor with these shadowy arbitration courts.

One of the most baffling parts of this case is that the damage that Chevron (then Texaco) incurred happened before ISDS clauses were added to their trade treaties. Still, the arbitrators have ruled in Chevron’s favor. “Should Ecuador refuse to pay the award,” writes Katie Surma for Inside Climate News, “Chevron could move to seize the country’s overseas assets to extract payment. That’s one reason among many why the ISDS system is so powerful.”

To be honest, I don’t fully understand how this works or how this is enforced. These are deeply entrenched machinations that are a result of economic globalization — where foreign governments have global assets which are available for corporations to seize, apparently. My understanding is that any nation who tries to challenge the global economy by refusing to pay will be punished economically for their resistance.

explains in a recent Substack that this plan might actually backfire. He writes:

“Lawyers for the Amazon communities — that is, my colleagues in Ecuador who unlike me still have their law licenses — just asked an Ecuador court to embargo the $220 million and divert it to pay for the clean-up of the contamination that Chevron caused. If the $220 million in Ecuador becomes a Chevron asset, then that asset under law must be used to satisfy the company’s legal debt to the Amazon communities. Chevron had stripped its assets from the country in anticipation of our judgment. Well, they now might have an asset that the communities can seize.”

If this is confusing to you, I’m right there with you. ISDS is something I only recently learned about, but we’re grateful for the opportunity to learn and create films which will educate the public on these treaties, and hopefully, with more public awareness, trade treaties can be amended to prevent these law suits from happening, restoring sovereignty back to nations. With the world as deeply entrenched in this globalist system of trade as it is, it’s hard to imagine how this would be done. But in our many talks with Helena over the past weeks, it’s clear that if one nation, or collection of nations, decided to decouple from the global system and work towards building local, bioregional economic systems outside of the bullying tactics of multi-nationals, there may be an example that the world can look to to show that this system is artificial, that it’s not inevitable, and that it can be changed.

And while I’m not a fan of George Monbiot, credit where credit is due, he recently wrote a Guardian article explaining this process and the current ISDS suits being levied at the United Kingdom. He explains how governments, particularly rich and powerful governments, long understood how these clauses and treaties would be predatory and harmful to less-powerful nations, but never believed, in their idiocy, that these treaties would come back to roost in their own countries. Monbiot rightly called out this foolishness a decade ago. It’s amazing to think that governments, such as the UK, would be naive enough to believe that multi-nationals would never supersede their power. In reality, the biggest firms in the world already have much more power and money than governments.

Monbiot was absolutely correct when he wrote, “as corporations begin to understand the power they’ve been granted, they will turn their attention from the weak nations to the strong ones.”

Some Cool Things From Cool Friends

Introducing: The Living Commons

The minds behind Earth Regeneration Alliance, Mandy Magill, Ben Clark, and Jarrod Ferstl, are launching a program called The Living Commons, which aims to help people activate in their local communities (and bodies) to start bringing about change in their worldviews to align more toward the continuation of life.

Their goal is to help empower a global movement of land stewardship by aggregating funds in a commonly held trust which can then be dispersed towards people and projects who need it — tapping into the wealth of land and capital that are currently being used in ways that are out of alignment with a vision of the future that we all long for.

I will be in attendance at their webinar this Saturday, and I’m wishing them all the best in the creation of this project! I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds.

Sign up and join us, Saturday, January 3rd.

Sane Town: A Realistic Vision of Life 100 Years from Now

I’m really excited to share this episode of Crazy Town with you all. In this conversation, Rob, Asher, Jason, and Alex (from Human Nature Odyssey) discuss their vision of what the world could look like 100 years from now. They describe the rural, low-energy, decentralized, community-based future that is possible, after a period of difficulty and hardship as our modern system unravels.

It’s like this podcast was made for me.

To give some context why this episode is so exciting for me personally: my novel trilogy, Fall of Men, is about exactly what they are talking about. Global civilization has fallen, and people have been living in a peaceful Dark Age for hundreds of years, living well in local communities and clans, living rural, place-based ways of life. These people are the descendants of those people who chose to consciously decouple from the global system and create parallel societies. The antagonist of the story is a group of people who want to restart civilization, creating a new global empire, for the express reason that they believe their ancestors, the arbiters of our current technological civilization, were mere decades away from solving the problem of death. They had almost taken full control over the world. The heroes of the story are from communities resisting against the encroachment of another machine-civilization: one which aims to enslave and subjugate the people in the enemy’s quest toward becoming scientific, immortal gods.

Another thing I appreciate is their willingness to talk about the potential ugliness of an unraveling, collapsing civilization. This is something I have considered deeply. In fact, the first “iteration” of this series was actually a stand-alone that I had started writing back in 2021, set during the time of the Fall. Something about depicting the violence and chaos of the Fall felt kind of gross, like I was glorifying something that I find deeply troubling, and also, potentially inevitable, maybe within my own lifetime. When I thought of setting the book 300 years after the Fall, it opened up a much more hopeful vision of the future for me — one where groups of people all over the world made the right decisions, enabling humanity to persist into the future and create ecological societies.

This shift in narrative also helped me world-build in a way that felt helpful and instructive, rather than bleak and depressing. To be sure, there are bleak and depressing aspects of Fall of Men, but they do not come from the fact that civilization has ended — they come from the world created by those who would restart it. This, in my view, is a subversion of the post-apocalyptic/dystopian genre in that I’m really hoping to depict how good life could be if we decoupled from the rapacious, world-devouring machine system that we’re currently entrapped within.

This podcast is fun and informative to listen to, and I really encourage you to subscribe to the Crazy Town podcast and sign up for Resilience.org’s newsletter if you haven’t already.

One more thing: I failed in my goal to finish all of the books for the book club, so I’m going to postpone that post 1 week so I can catch up! The holidays got the better of me, but I’m determined to get my shit together. Sorry about that!

That’s it from us for today. We hope to be more consistent and bring more value to our subscribers in the new year. Thank you to everyone who has continued to support us in 2025 — it means the world to us! Cheers to 2026! Happy New Year!

Our video interview with Allan Savory is up on our YouTube channel for anyone interested in watching. The video includes b-roll footage we collected while we were in Zimbabwe, so it’s a really special one.

To recap:

In this interview, we discuss the basic ideas around a holistic context, ecological concepts such as desertification, and the ways that we misunderstand ecology by imposing human concepts, such as competition, on the natural world. We also discuss some fascinating critiques of conservation, and the importance of human beings in environments. We discuss the role of death and killing in the continuation of life, and the importance of moral courage. We also tackle issues such as honesty in science, the fallibility of scientists and the problems of academia, bureaucracy, and institutional science. Most importantly, we talk about our desperate need to change our management strategies from reductionistic to holistic.

Additionally, we wanted to re-share the film we made a few years ago for the Savory Institute which highlights our friend Jörgen Andersson’s spectacular implementation of holistic management. We’ve been so grateful to be able to collaborate with the Savory Institute over the years, and we hope to do more work with them in the future.

Last April, we had the opportunity to travel to Zimbabwe to film promotional material for Allan’s memoir. You can sign up for the pre-sale list to be notified when the book comes out. We had the opportunity to read a proof copy before our trip, and it was absolutely fascinating to have a window into the life and context that birthed holistic management.

In this interview, we discuss the basic ideas around a holistic context, ecological concepts such as desertification, and the ways that we misunderstand ecology by imposing human concepts, such as competition, on the natural world. We also discuss some fascinating critiques of conservation, and the importance of human beings in environments. We discuss the role of death and killing in the continuation of life, and the importance of moral courage. We also tackle issues such as honesty in science, the fallibility of scientists and the problems of academia, bureaucracy, and institutional science. Most importantly, we talk about our desperate need to change our management strategies from reductionistic to holistic.

If you haven’t seen Allan’s TedTalk, we really can’t recommend it enough. This video was probably the single biggest impetus for beginning our journey into the creation of Death in The Garden. Holistic management, and the idea of holism in general, inspired us to see the world as one whole ecosystem that we are inextricably connected to, entangled in a web of relationships. This radically shifted our view of life after being enculturated in the Western, reductionist, mechanical worldview that the dominant culture presents as fact.

You can learn more about Allan’s work at the Savory Institute’s website, and you can contribute to their end-of-year campaign if you have the means.

Thank you as always to our paid subscribers who continue to make this project possible, and for Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield for giving us the opportunity to come out to Zimbabwe and work on this project.

November Reading Reflections

Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind

’s memoir is beyond soulful — it’s almost like stepping into an entirely different epistemological framework, one that is gentle, attentive, and embedded. This book is beautiful, and I found myself crying constantly as I read it: tears of grief, tears of longing for a different world, but also tears of homecoming. There’s something about this book that made me feel seen and understood, connected to the ongoing storying of humanity. So powerful, the multitudes a memoir can contain in the hands of a skilled writer. But more than that, it’s Tara’s soul itself that shines through this book, and the soulfulness of it is makes it penetrate so deep. The grief within these pages is oceanic and full of wisdom — a wisdom we all must learn to embody, sooner than later. Our souls and stories are all entwined: fractals within fractals, entangled webs within the complicated, painful, devastating, beautiful experience of being human in this wounded, gorgeous world.

That’s how this book makes me feel. Tara knows how to be human. And I feel more human for reading her words.

That much I know.

Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness

This excellent little book gives a great overview of the problem of globalization, and the need for humans to return to a local, place-based system of exchange — not only for the planet, but for our souls.

Jake and I have recently begun collaborating with Local Futures, so this book is an indispensable resource for us as we wrap our heads around how the globalized system works and the impacts it has on people, on democracy, and the environment. There are some extremely chilling facts within this book, as well as practical pathways to change. Globalization imperils us all, and we need to collectively wake up to that reality. We need to abandon the myth of progress and truly understand the ways that globalization has impoverished us and put us on a suicidal trajectory.

If you’re looking for an accessible resource to help you understand globalization, localization, and the way corporations are continuing to get richer at the expense of the rest of the planet, this book is for you.

In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty

I love Francis Weller’s graceful, sage style of writing. This collection of essays was a wonderful accompaniment to his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, focusing more concretely on the threshold we face, which he calls “The Long Dark.” He spends much of the book discussing the alchemical process of nigredo: which is the death, decay, and composting that is the first process in the creation of the “philosopher’s stone” — which, in psychological terms, can be interpreted as a form of enlightenment. For the collective, we may think of this period as the necessary breakdown and stripping away to reach the true center of our collective functioning: humans remembering our place within the web of life, abandoning the stories and myths that keep us trapped within cycles of greed, violence, corruption, and exploitation, and achieving alchemical transformation, becoming the people we know we can be and creating the world we know is possible.

This book did not go quite as deep and dark as I was expecting, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful resource which I will return to in my times of despair.

December Selections

We are currently reading Anima for Anya Kaats’ book club, and this book is really speaking to my soul already, confirming my bias that a new pastoralism is the way of the future. Technopoly wasn’t originally on my list, but over the past few days, I have been exposed to some very baffling and unnerving developments within the world of AI, and I feel this book will help me contextualize my feelings about it. Earth Abides was recommended to me by Alex Leff and Tom Murphy, who I believe are working on a podcast about it, so follow Human Nature Odyssey to get notified of that episode when it comes out. I look forward to listening to it!

I’ll go ahead and share the blurbs:

Anima: A Wild Pastoral

In Anima, Kapka Kassabova introduces us to the “pastiri” people—the shepherds struggling to hold on to an ancient way of life in which humans and animals exist in profound interdependence. Following her three previous books set in the Balkans, and with an increasing interest in the degraded state of our planet and culture, Kassabova reaches further into the spirit of place than she ever has before. In this extraordinary portrayal of pastoral life, she investigates the heroic efforts to sustain the oldest surviving breeds of our domesticated animals, and she shows us the epic, orchestrated activity of transhumance—the seasonal movement, on foot, of a vast herd of sheep, working in tandem with dogs. She also becomes more and more attuned to the isolation and sacrifices inherent in the lives shaped by this work.

Weaving together lyrical writing about place with a sweeping sense of the traumatic histories that have shaped this mountainous region of Bulgaria, Kassabova shows how environmental change and industrial capitalism are endangering older, sustainable ways of living, and by extension she reveals the limited nature of so much of modern life. But shining through Kassabova’s passionate, intimate response to the monoculture that is “Anthropos” is her indelible portrait of a circulating interdependence of people and animals that might point to a healthier way to live.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

The story of our society’s transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it—with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Earth Abides

For Isherwood Williams, his cabin has always been a haven from the demands of society. But one day while hiking, Ish is bitten by a rattlesnake, and the solitude he had so desired takes on dire new significance. Because not long after, the coughing begins. Then the chills and fever and a measles-like rash. He thinks it’s a reaction to the bite. What he doesn’t know that the venom might be the only thing that kept him alive.

For when Ish heads home the world is not as he left it. No cars pass, the gas station not far from his cabin looks abandoned, there’s nothing on the radio, and he is shocked to see the body of a man on the roadside near a small town. He has missed humanity’s abrupt demise, only to find himself at the center of society’s rebirth. This is a chance to start over, and as Ish gathers survivors to him, he discovers just how wondrous and terrible that proposition is.

And when, decades later, he looks back on his legacy, he is only starting to understand the challenge between enlightenment and practicality. He had left one world, rejoined another, and now leaves—hopefully—an even different world behind. Because, reluctantly or no, his words and actions carry weight for the next generation, and Ish’s vision of the future may be one of prophecy…or doom.

Looking Ahead…

The next books will be selected from the list below. This list is likely to change, hopefully only slightly, but these are the books I’ve got my eyes on.

• Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft by Chris Smaje

• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power by Joanna Macy

• The Complete Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

• Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale

• Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures by René Daumal

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse by Jem Bendell

If you’d like to join, simply read the books (or just one of the books, or just part of a book) and engage in the comments section of any of the book club posts! Comments will be made available for all subscribers. There’s no pressure to participate whatsoever.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.com. If you want to help support Death in The Garden, consider buying through the links provided. Where applicable, I’ll share links to the author’s website so you can buy direct through them.

Read more

Happy Halloween! We wanted to share with you a new podcast from our friend and co-conspirator, Alex Leff of Human Nature Odyssey. This podcast features us as actors. We’re acting like ourselves, but it was a performance nonetheless — and a very fun one at that.

“A horrific zombie apocalypse has ravaged the world — but hardly anyone seems to notice. One lone podcast sets out to interview those navigating this strange new reality: from people attending mindful zombie retreats and binging zombie media, to those stockpiling shotguns and fortifying bunkers, to other disappearing into the woods to build something entirely new.”

We had a really fun time co-creating this very original, clever, and creative fictional podcast with Alex, and we’re confident you all will enjoy it.

Please go check it out, and give it some love!

Also, I’m Starting a “Book Club” for One

As you may have seen in your inbox from about 5 minutes ago, I (Maren) have announced a sort of book-club-type-thing. You can read more about it below:

I (as in Maren)1 am embarrassed to admit how much I’ve let my reading habit fall off the edge of a cliff the past year. I have fallen extremely short of my reading goal this year, and largely, it’s because of a lack of discipline and my tendency to start books and not finish them. This bad habit is not only using up all of my bookmarks, but it’s also leaving me with a foreboding, overarching feeling of incompletion, which then bleeds into other things.

A few creators I follow have been posting about their 2026 bookclubs, and I thought, “I should do that.” But then, as I was compiling all of the books I’d like to prioritize reading, I realized it would suck for me to wait until January to develop the discipline to read more — plus, there are books I urgently need to finish.

So, I have decided to start my own unofficial bookclub, party of one. My plan with this is to announce the books I’m committing to completing in a given month, and then at the end of the month, I’ll make a post discussing my thoughts on the book or books. I’ll leave comments open for people who may want to join me in reading the books, but I have no expectation of that. More than anything, it’s a means for me to hold myself accountable, keep my mind sharp, and engage with more ideas than my own. If people want to join me in reading and have some discussions in the comments, that’s great. If not, that’s cool, too.2

So this November, I plan to read these three books (at least): Radiance of the Ordinary by Tara Couture, Local is Our Future by Helena Norberg-Hodge, and In the Absence of the Ordinary by Francis Weller.

I’ll share the blurb for each book below:

Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind

From the author of the popular Slowdown Farmstead Substack: a raw, poignant collection of essays about cultivating authenticity in this age of great pretend.

When she was young, Tara Couture had a deep fear of death. In her twenties, determined to manifest her long-time dream of owning a farm, she worked alongside a cattleman whose perspectives on life and death would come to transform her own. When she found herself in the passenger seat of the cattleman’s truck out on the Alberta prairie, in search of the bison herd from which they would harvest an animal, she could hardly believe this was the life she was living. But even more surprising was the realization the experience awakened in her: that life and death are inextricably connected. When we shield ourselves from death—or from any of the hard things in life—we close ourselves off to the beauty and richness of a life fully lived.

Full of evocative prose that elicits the smells, tastes, cold winds, and sticky summer sweat of Tara’s place in the world, Radiance of the Ordinary elegantly explores the moments both complex and mundane, laden with grief and light with wonderment—from butchering and birthing cows to motherhood and the tragic loss of her youngest daughter. Throughout, the reader is reminded that the work we choose to engage with, the way we make our homes, the food we put into our bodies, the relationships we nurture, and the attention we pay to the ordinary moments—this is what matters. Taken together, these essays provide an unforgettable meditation on what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century.

Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness

Helena Norberg-Hodge’s most recent book, ‘Local is Our Future’, connects the dots between our social, economic, ecological and spiritual crises, revealing how a systemic shift from global to local can address these seemingly disparate problems simultaneously.

Distilling the wisdom gleaned from four decades of activism and direct experience in both the global North and South, Helena lucidly deconstructs the old narrative of ‘progress’ through technological advance and corporate growth, while presenting a concise and compelling case for economic localization. Her arguments are supported by real-world examples proving that – beneath the radar of the mainstream media and far from the fetishized techno-utopia of Silicon Valley – healthy and vibrant futures, built upon connection to nature and community, are already in the making.

In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty

In his singular and inimitable voice, psychotherapist and author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow Francis Weller offers 17 soulful essays to help us move together through the anxieties, difficulties, and sacred transitions of 21st-century life.

In the Absence of the Ordinary frames our current era as a rough initiation—an upending experience of profound trauma and transformation that demands we reorient our ways of thinking, being, and relating. Through essays like “Some People Wake Up…,” “The Gift of Restraint,” and “Gratitude for All That Is,” Weller offers clarity and wisdom on how to face the sobering stakes of our time—while offering the nourishment and support we need to embody the new roles this initiation requires.

Section 1, “When the Bough Breaks,” names our collective traumas and peels back the false armor of modernity. We’re called to the depths, to understand the power of descent, and to cultivate the necessary skills of initiation.

Section 2, “Care of the Soul,” differentiates between the connected soul and the individualistic self, inviting us back into alignment with the wider world of belonging. We learn to approach our experiences with reverence, work with our grief, and develop restraint, repetition, and self-compassion.

Section 3, “Meanwhile, the World Goes On,” gives shape to the emptiness we carry and the ways modernity has severed us from our birthright of interconnectedness with the natural world. It offers rituals of gratitude and practices of kinship to restore our bond with the living Earth.

In each essay, Weller fortifies us to become immense—to meet these unpredictable times with presence and faith, to restore our souls’ place in the soul of the world, and to hold steady, amid and for it all.

I’m really looking forward to reading these books and sharing my thoughts on them. If you’d like to join me, I’d love the company.

Looking Ahead…

So we’ll start with the first three, and then the next books will be selected from the list below. This is subject to change, but these are the books I’m most interested in reading over the next six months or so.

• Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova3

• Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft by Chris Smaje

• Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power by Joanna Macy

• The Complete Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

• Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale

• Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures by René Daumal

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse by Jem Bendell

If you’d like to join, simply read the books (or just one of the books, or just part of a book) and engage in the comments section of any of the book club posts! Comments will be made available for all subscribers. There’s no pressure to participate whatsoever.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.com. If you want to help support Death in The Garden, consider buying through the links provided. Where applicable, I’ll share links to the author’s website so you can buy direct through them.