Last night, a town of 27,000 people in northern California burned to the ground from an uncontained wildfire. This happened in early November.

Let me connect a few dots to show how this is part of a much larger pattern that can be linked to the complex processes of planetary collapse…

Two days ago, there was also a tornado in Tennessee. At the beginning of last week there was a tornado in the town of Scio in Oregon. Again — all happening in late October and early November.

(For those of you who grew up in “tornado alley” like I did, you’ll recall that these kinds of storms used to take place in April, May, June, July, or August.)

Something else that just happened is a mass shooting in southern California when a man walked into the bar with smoke grenades and firearms and opened fire. Eleven people were killed in the event.

This is just one more explosion of uncontained violence in the United States after decades of Neoliberal policies designed to hoard wealth, create massive poverty and inequality, gut public institutions of funding, and convert everything of value into a number to be bought or sold.

What we see in these seemingly isolated events is a pattern of destabilization:

(1) Weather patterns have become erratic with events that used to be extremely rare now occurring out of normal times of the year and with great frequency — because things like deforestation and conversion of land for human uses has made entire regions fragile and easily disturbed.

(2) Social patterns of behavior exhibit severe lack of discernment, outbursts of violence, polarization expressed as “us versus them” thinking, and can be seen as part of larger epidemics of harm over the last several years.

There are still a lot of people who don’t know that planetary collapse began more than a century ago. The apocalyptic thinking that it is coming in a few years or a few decades is a failure to weave patterns together running far into the past and projecting far into the future.

Most of the deforestation happened in the last 50 years. It occurred after the “green revolution” in agriculture that enabled the human population to grow from 1 billion to 7 billion strong in the 20th Century. This growth took place by displacing ecosystems all over the planet, causing a 1000 to 10,000-fold increase in species extinction.

All of this occurred as inequality grew out of Neoliberal policies first envisioned at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland in 1947, first articulated as a coherent strategy in the Powell Memo in 1971, and first enacted into policies in the US and UK in the 1980’s after the dual elections of Reagan and Thatcher.

So what we see is seemingly isolated events of a rare and terrible nature actually occurring as parts of larger accelerations of intensity and hardship that have grown out of very complex social and ecological collapse patterns across the last several decades.

Sit with this for a moment. Take it seriously. Then ask how you can contribute to the regeneration of communities, institutions, ecosystems, and planetary-scale drivers of global change.

Many things have degenerated to the point that they are unraveling around us now. Other things have degenerated, but not yet to this point of vivid actualization of harm. We must now regenerate lost ecological and social-systemic functions that have degraded (or in some cases, didn’t exist).

This is the work of the next 50 years for those of us who care to see humanity survive the planetary collapse we are all living through now. For those who are interested, I’ll be giving a workshop on how to Manage Planetary Collapse in January of 2019 that goes into these topics with much more depth and rigor. Learn more here.

Onward, fellow humans.