The Kind of People We Need at the End of the World
The Kind of People We Need
at the End of the World
Elizabeth Oldfield
On Character & Climate Anxiety
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
I am weeding a garden. Kneeling, mud-gloved, in an overgrown bed, the smell of damp earth and broken stems in my nostrils. This garden is mine—or partly mine—the first I have ever had a stake in. I have never really weeded before, never had to pay attention to the shape of leaves and length of stalks, to gently push aside foliage to find the bitter root of plants.
Before I yank, I photograph, asking my AI-powered plant app to tell me what to leave and what to destroy. Hedge mustard: weed (usually). Dandelion: weed—even I know that one. Alkanet: weed, deep-rooted and invasive. But it has pretty blue flowers, darker than forget-me-nots, which are not a weed. Maybe I’ll leave them. Red dead nettle is identifiable by the square stem—pink, in fact, not red. Comfrey, tiny white bells full of bees, their fluffy black behinds hanging down like a toddler playing hide-and-seek. It’s a comforting name, comfrey, like something a medieval wise woman would prepare in a poultice. Is it actually medicinal? I ask the internet. Can it heal us? There is another search I am not doing, though I want to, on all these weeds. Can we eat it? Could my children survive on this scrubby patch of green at the bottom of our garden, if they need to? If civilization collapses?
*
I don’t look like a prepper. My husband calls me one, affectionately, because I do feel calmer with full cupboards, but I don’t wear camo or approve of weapons or bury three years’ worth of tins in the ground (yet). Some days I feel like one, though. And all my prepping is focused on this: a sudden need to know about plants.
I’m about to turn 40, and we can only afford the space to grow things now because last year my husband, kids and I moved into community with another family. Instead of a tiny flat with a tinier balcony, we now have space for us plus guests and a table that can, and often does, seat 16. We recently bought an industrial dishwasher and refitted the cupboards to hold the 5-kilogram bags of lentils and rice we use to feed the hordes. We have turned the blue concrete garage at the bottom of the garden into a chapel and pray morning prayer and compline there by candlelight, inviting guests to join us.
We were motivated by practicalities—our call to stay in the city continually undercut by property prices—but also by principles. We had a sense that growing in faith, hope and love might happen more naturally up-close with others, and that witnessing to that love would be easier if our lives didn’t look quite so much like everyone else’s. We also (or the adults at least) were waking up to the fact that the future we’d been promised was disappearing, and that the stable and secure existence of our parents’ generation would not be available to us. I wanted to raise kids who wouldn’t be expecting a nice middle-class life, primed to jump through professional hoops and accumulate possessions. Instead, I wanted them to see how much more resilient and capable we are together than apart.
We were much provoked by the end of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s magnum opus After Virtue, in which he calls “men and woman of good will” to “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages.” He draws heavily on the early monastic movement under Saint Benedict and implies that communities of believers could be of better service to their neighbors through porous communitarian experiments like ours. Making the radical move into intentional community felt more attractive than continuing to acquiesce to what MacIntyre calls “the imperium,” the dominant cultural norms focused on achievement, acquisition, and performance. I wanted adventure, and to see if this Christian story we’d been telling round the edges of our lives could take more weight than I’d yet needed it to—or yet been brave enough to ask it to hold.
*
We now jointly own (with our housemates and a group of wonderful supporters of the project) an extraordinary garden, just three miles from Big Ben. It includes a trinity of full-grown ash trees—our very own muses. I have named them Melia, Frene, and Frassino, the words for ash in Greek, French, and Italian. Melia sheds her seeds over the chapel, turning the leaf-clogged gutters into a tiny sapling forest above our place of prayer.
Lots of people start gardening when they finally have space. It is partly practical. I don’t want to look out from our kitchen into a jungle, and also have a sense of responsibility to steward this ridiculous gift of land. It is partly for beauty. The brown and shriveled wisteria, so drought-ravaged it was barely recognizable when we moved in, now after two prunes and tender watering is covered in flamboyant purple boas of blooms. It feels miraculous. But this new hobby of mine is also a response to something darker.
I am gardening because I feel anxious about the future, about the oncoming climate catastrophes, about what AI will mean. I want my hands in the soil because I need to find a way to be of use. I need to steady myself, pay attention to the local at the level of moss and aphids and what is happening with my first ever kale seedlings. The growing of food is the most elemental of activities, and I want to learn it. I need to know what my ancestors knew, but which my generation, fed on the plastic-wrapped, air-freighted outputs of industrial farming, has forgotten.
*
In his book At Work in The Ruins, writer and former environmental activist Dougald Hine takes the reader on a bracing journey. Having fought to stop the unfolding disaster of manmade climate change for much of his twenties and thirties, he has shifted focus. Given that we don’t seem to be the sort of creatures who can do what we know we need to do, on the scale we need to do it, what next? How do we find a way to live in neither denial of the trouble we’re in nor despair?
Hine’s call, which I am also hearing from my garden and from the Spirit, is to an engaged surrender. He offers a choice which is neither denial nor despair, but instead processing the trouble our world is in through something akin to the stages of grief. Many of us are in denial, which is so tempting, and where I often still reside. It is the bit of you that wants to stop reading this because it is uncomfortable. We may not be actual climate-change deniers, but instead “stealth deniers,” as another philosopher, Jonathan Rowson, called it in his academic article, published by the RSA Social Brain Centre. Living as if it is not happening. Trying not to think about it, because the existential panic is too overwhelming.
More and more people are moving through denial, via anger, to bargaining—if we go vegan, join a march, and persuade everyone we know to stop flying, we can fix this. None of these are bad—they’re probably the responsible things to do—but the harder truth is that the level of change required cannot occur without the complex web of companies and governments acting, rapidly and en masse, against every incentive of self-interest.
It requires almost every person in a position of power in these places to have the kind of character to be willing to lay down their lives, or at least their careers and incomes, for the sake of others. We need a movement of people willing to dismantle the carbon-hungry monster from the inside, taking themselves and the old world down with it, and to do it without the external demand that would make their actions appear legitimate. We need a generation of Bonhoeffers, in other words, and it has been a long time since our societies were even attempting to form in us that kind of moral courage.
After bargaining and depression is acceptance. Acceptance sounds like giving up, but does not have to land you in nihilistic hedonism. It is closer to the serenity prayer: Lord give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
And the monster may be taking itself down. Hine’s argument is that modernity is dying. He uses “modernity” in the same way Paul Kingsnorth uses “The Machine” and some people use “globalized capitalism.” Speaking to him on my podcast, The Sacred, it sounded a lot like how I conceive of sin: the temptation to disconnect from ourselves, from other people, from creation, and from the divine. Modernity, since the Industrial Revolution, has been defined by a proud extractive posture to the world which greedily seeks ever more comfort, convenience, and independence. Its extreme form is the techno-optimistic transhumanism of Silicon Valley, which wants humans to evolve into Homo Deus. To be as gods.
Hine sees the rush for technologized solutions to our ills as a symptom of that posture: a childlike demand to avoid the consequences of our choices. Rather than humble ourselves and change our ways, we creatures of dust grasp at control and cling to our idols. "The imperium" has formed us too deeply and we lack the moral imagination to take the narrower way. But we will not be left to it forever. Modernity, Hine argues, is not dying because we know how to break our addictions, but because we are already way beyond our limits, and the whole fragile web of mechanical, anti-relational and inhumane systems is beginning to tear.
This tearing will bring with it great losses—it is possible that civilization as we currently structure it will break down—but may also restore to us some gifts. What struck me most about Hine’s book is how it showed me my own current helplessness. My husband, a philosopher, often jokes about being “educated into imbecility” and I now feel it for the first time. Modernity, in its restless optimization “ignores and then destroys forms of knowledge that do not serve its systems.”
My grandparents were a home economics teacher, an engineer, a nurse, and a market gardener. They knew how to make things, mend things, heal things, grow things. They found satisfaction in it. Perhaps almost everyone did, even those with other professions. Their generation, like almost every generation up until my own, had received knowledge from their parents that was of practical use. I picture them sometimes, turned loose on a desert island, and think they would survive, the four of them. They were really grownups. I, on the other hand, can make a podcast, turn a sentence, create a reel on social media, and learning those things does not appear to have grown me up in the important ways at all. Currently, turned loose on a desert island, or in a city in which food production and health and energy systems are failing, what use would I be? How capable would I be of loving my neighbor?
*
And so, I plant and weed and call my mum to ask why my beans aren’t thriving. I am now paying attention in a way that makes things visible which were there all along, outside the black frame of my phone and the frictionless, homogenous trade of assets and information. Mary Oliver was right. Attention is the beginning of devotion. I am receiving the gifts I have already been given. The smell of lemon balm, the violet chiffon shimmer in the petals of an Iris. The way the sweet pea plants which are fractionally in the shade grow six centimeters smaller than the rest. This is something I can change.
When I surrender what I cannot change and pay attention to what is front of me, paths of fruitful action begin to emerge. I am starting, late, to receive my ancestral inheritance. And it steadies me. This garden, this earth, this gift, has taken a kicking, but it’s still growing. The end of the world as we know it is not, after all, the end of the world. Although the theological story I am always trying to locate myself in did not promise that the world would live forever, or that me and mine would live a comfortable middle-class life. Billions never have. Someone will live in a time of endings, even if it is not us. It won’t be comfortable, or safe, but it might call us to become more like the people we were meant to be all along.
In his book Pathogenesis, Jonathan Kennedy relates how third-century Christians, living through the Plague of Cyprian, distinguished themselves by caring for their neighbors. They must have thought then that it was the end of the world. They didn’t panic, letting fight-or-flight kick them into self-defense and hoarding. Instead, they steadied themselves and nursed other people’s sick relatives as well as their own, refusing to flee the cities like everyone else. In so doing, they both survived in higher numbers themselves and grew the community, with many drawn to their ethic of mutuality and service: “The pandemic turned a tiny and obscure Jewish sect on the periphery of the empire into a major world religion,” Kennedy writes.
*
I give some leggy kale plants to an elderly neighbor, and she gifts me a tiny cherry tree she has grown from a stone. I plant the cherry tree, adding it mentally to our future food garden, along with the dandelions, wondering how many cherries we’d need to feed a street. As I plant the tree which is as high as my hand and which, God willing, will be here after I am dead, I think about Wendell Berry. Lines from his poem “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” bubble up though I did not know I knew them:
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Teach me, Wendell, I sort-of pray, a non-Catholic to a non-saint. As I come back up the garden path, I can see one of my housemates doing DIY—teaching herself practical skills too. She is singing. On the deck my six-year-old son unzips the budget eBay greenhouse. Unprompted, he carefully waters the tomatoes, standing on his tiptoes to reach the ones at the back with his red plastic watering can. It is a beginning.
When I was pruning the wisteria in the dead of winter, hacking away what seemed like fresh green life as my granddad used to do, it didn’t seem possible that I was helping this plant. Pruning is brutal, painful, and counterintuitive. For those branches, it is the end of the world. But the plant remains and becomes more its full self. Maybe we are being pruned, and maybe we need to be. I do not have to know. In the story I try and inhabit, the world does end, but not everyone gets what they deserve. I cannot control what is coming. I can only surrender, receive the grace that is this patch of ground, and pick up my spade.
Elizabeth Oldfield
Writer & Podcaster
Elizabeth is the host of The Sacred Podcast. She writes at morefullyalive.substack.com and will publish a book of personally essays (also called Fully Alive) in Spring 2024
Photography by Daniel Casson
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