Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

1. We’ve all had a glimpse of mortality in this pandemic, and a premonition, while housebound by lockdown, of old age. These warnings remind us to use life well. In the words of the immortal Bard (Eminem), you only get one shot. So let’s not allow our lives to be ruled by lies.

2. I don’t mean only the lies we are told, though there are plenty of them, but also the lies we tell ourselves: the false assurances that might get us through the day, but that prevent us from connecting with what is real and worthwhile.

3. Let’s begin by admitting that we are in a bad place. A very bad place. Climate and ecological breakdown are happening at terrifying speed. Our own mortality is shadowed by a much greater one: the closure of the conditions that support life on Earth.

4. During the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, as contagious collapse spread from Earth system to Earth system, life was almost wiped out altogether. Roughly 90% of species became extinct. Biodiversity did not fully recover for 150 million years.

5. We are messing with a series of interlocking, extremely complex Earth systems, that we scarcely begin to understand. If we push them past certain thresholds (thresholds that may be invisible to us until they are crossed), we could trigger a similar, cascading collapse.

6. The world is wonderful, but it’s not magic. Its biophysical capacity is finite. We cannot endlessly extract from it, and endlessly load it with pollutants, without eventually flipping the system.

7. Flipping the system means a transition – possibly sudden – from the stable and benign conditions that have prevailed since the last glaciation into a completely different state, that's likely to be hostile to most life. A transition of this kind is effectively irreversible.

8. There are plenty of warnings – flickerings from a possible future – that the thresholds could be near. The fires. The freak weather. The extinctions. The spreading dead zones. We must listen to these warnings and hear what they are telling us.

9. We reassure ourselves that “they” won’t let it happen.
But who is “they”?
Governments?
Look, they aren’t even prepared to save the subsystems: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, for example, or to prevent the collapse of marine ecosystems by reining in industrial fishing.

10. Why? Because we've allowed them to respond to commercial lobbyists. I mean we have failed to ensure that they respond to us. In other words, we have failed to mobilise in large enough numbers and make our voices heard about the non-trivial matter of life on Earth.

11. So if you are looking for meaning, it's right here. There is no greater meaning than fighting for the survival of life on Earth. And this starts by unmasking lie after lie.

12. I don’t just mean the familiar lies of the fossil fuel and mining industries. But also the less familiar lies of the banks, the consultants, the farming and fishing lobbies and, above all, the friendly, seductive faces selling us more stuff.

13. It means uncovering the comforting lies we tell ourselves: that it isn’t really happening, or doesn’t really matter, that it’s not our responsibility, that there’s nothing we can do, that it’s already too late.

14. Those of us who are alive right now live at an extraordinary moment. We are among the last people on Earth who are in a position to stop the thresholds from being crossed. Once it has happened, there really will be nothing we can do. But now there is.

15. Join the groups struggling non-violently to defend and restore our life-support systems – the more uncompromising the better. Take up their calls to action, lend your skills, whatever they are, to make them stronger.

16. If you haven’t joined such groups, please don’t ask me “but what can I do?”. There are good groups at every level: local, national, global. If they aren't yet strong enough, help them to get stronger. And if the right ones don’t exist, combine with other people to start them.

17. But it begins with ceasing to lie to ourselves about what we face.
Our own mortality.
And something worse.