What if the end of the world isn't the problem?
What end-of-life care taught me about navigating collapse
This is a written version of the keynote I presented at the DesignHOPES symposium in Glasgow on 22 April 2025.
We are at the end of many eras at the moment. The evidence keeps stacking up, it’s almost hard to keep up.
In March this year, Chief Secretary of the Treasury Darren Jones said that the era of globalisation has ended, which as a statement came nine years after Scottish political economist Mark Blyth in 2016 wrote that the era of neoliberalism is over.
Back in 2000, Johann Galtung, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated sociologist, first set out his prediction that the US empire would collapse within 25 years.
People have paid attention to him because he accurately predicted the 1978 Iranian Revolution, the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 in China, the economic crises of 1987, 2008, and 2011. He also predicted 9/11.
What does this collapse look in an everyday way?
When government officials dismantle Environmental Protection Agency data systems and block industrial facilities and oil refineries from reporting greenhouse gas emissions, we lose the ability to track our climate progress - or lack of it.
That’s just one example. These developments signal the types of political tipping points that indicate the collapse of American global influence. The very indicators that scholars have pointed to when discussing the end of US hegemony.
Speaking of tipping points, those moments in a system where additional pressure makes it impossible to return to previous states? They are being reached across multiple ecosystems.
6 of the 25 global tipping points identified in the 2023 Global Tipping Points Report are close to being met today: warm water coral reefs, the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the North Atlantic subpolar gyre circulation and parts of the permafrost subject to abrupt thawing.
Take a breath
How does it feel to read about these realities? To sit at the edge?
Do you feel a flush of fear? A wave of Anxiety? A burst of denial?
Perhaps even a gingerly touch of curiosity about what happens after this end?
Because the problem isn't that things are ending. The problem is that we're trying to prevent all endings instead of learning how to navigate them wisely.
The anxiety we feel isn't just a personal response but a society-wide condition. We're deeply (often unconsciously) anxious about what's happening in our world.
We're also in denial, which is entirely normal. We live in, what sociologist Tony Walters calls, "everyday denial." We know the seriousness of the situation but choose not to focus on it to continue with daily activities. Even climate activists and scientists adopt this stance because the alternative would be paralysis. You just wouldn’t get out of bed.
We fear climate breakdown and political instability, but we're also anxious because, as Australian sociologist Lesley Head writes:
We grieve the loss of modernity itself - the loss of a sense of progress, optimism, control, and hope.
It's worth noting that this anxiety is specifically an industrialised, Western one. As First Nation Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson poignantly remarked:
We're experiencing what others - namely indigenous communities and nations - have felt for a very long time now. As we live through the sixth mass extinction and the collapse of the old world order, we have the unique position of experiencing the social, cultural and psychological effects of these endings.
How might we meet these ends differently?
Throughout history, we've moved through numerous shifts in how we think about death. French historian Philippe Ariès mapped these changes.
From a "tamed death" in the early medieval period (400-1100) where death was familiar and accepted.
To "one's own death" where individuality emerged after 1200.
To the Victorian (1837-1901) '“thy death" when death became dramatic and exalted.
Finally to "forbidden Death" of modernity (1901-1990s) where death became medicalised, hidden and taboo.
Tony Walters speaks of a new death mentality required for our time. For the first time in human civilisation, we're acutely aware of future collective death.
The climate and ecological emergency expands death awareness: from individual death to collective death; from family/tribe to human race; from humans to animals to all species.
Modernity, for Walters, is less about denying death than inducing death anxiety. But within this anxiety lies hope. Hope, not as Václav Havel - last president of Czechoslovakia - said with:
"...the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out."
Hope as something other than blind faith. Something much harder won. Deeper in its roots.
Taking a palliative approach
Over the last decade working around palliative and end-of-life care I've been slowly strengthening the connection between what happens to us on a personal level and what happens to us on a collective or even planetary level.
And there's a really important, useful phrase that Kathryn Mannix, the retired palliative care doctor and writer, uses when she talks about holding sensitive conversations at the end of life:
And it's important to use this phrase because it speaks to the reality of things. And that reality is that the living systems on our planet are sick enough to die.
It doesn't mean the everything will die, but it sharpens attention to our predicament.
What makes palliative care remarkable is its holistic, human and spiritual approach. It acknowledges limits and helps people come to terms with loss or change.
In traditional palliative care, once healthcare professionals, patients and families can acknowledge the terminal nature of illness and prioritise quality of life over futile, supposedly curative measures, things can start to really shift in their focus.
Palliative care encourages a focus on comfort, closure and working toward acceptance to gain what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson describes as “integrity over despair”.
This approach can transform terrible situations into something quietly compassionate and meaningful without changing the essential facts.
So if you extend that outwards to our global predicaments, a planetary palliative approach challenges the engineering or mechanistic worldview that presumes we can design our way out of collapse.
Such a mechanical worldview that generates geo-engineering makes no place for endings and collapse as natural experiences.
You see it in medicine. It sees death as failure - something to be avoided at all costs - with curative treatments that can be worse to experience than the disease they're meant to treat.
So when one takes a palliative approach, it means recognising the deep importance of building capacity for acceptance and the role of letting go as a necessary part of natural systems.
But how do we actually do that?
An ecological mindset
The Eco-cycle Framework provides a way to understand how letting go fits within a wider natural process.
This model moves in a figure-8 pattern: from birth to maturity, to death and destruction, through to renewal and rebirth, allowing the cycle to continue.
It’s a supremely helpful way to see how all things are connected, that they move from states of opening and closing, from activity to release. And that there are moments in between that are critical, and where we often get stuck.
Many indicators suggest we're past our best or in a state of collapse, yet held we’re collectively in what Antonio Gramsci called the interregnum. The space between what was and what will be.
Or as Fritjof Capra posits:
These problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is at large a crisis of perception... it derives from the fact that most people in our modern society, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview.
Lament and grief
This is our problem: our worldview is stuck. We're afraid to let go of it. We're afraid to lose our way of life.
Writer
observes:It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.
What's required now is recognition of two powerful feelings: lament and grief.
Lament is the breaking of numbness by the admission of pain and loss.
As I’ve often referred to – because its an ancient wisdom that bears repeating often – according to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, lament holds a key function: it confronts people with reality, enables a pouring out of grief and helps us find hope amid the ashes.
And grief isn't just something that happens when someone dies. It defines our entire existence.
In times of collapse, we need to understand the experience the way that philosopher Alfred Bordado Sköld's calls "being-towards-grief":
Being-towards grief points to life's intrinsic back-and-forth between hope and hopelessness and the never-ending struggle of avoiding despair. A human life, then, is not only 'grievable'; we are bereaved from the moment we are born.
To move beyond our stuckness at the edge of collapse, we need grief more than hope. As Stephen Jenkinson, poet and hospice chaplain, says:
You don't need hope to proceed, you need grief.
This grief, this breaking down, enables the necessary letting go. The creative destruction in the eco-cycle that precedes renewal. The eco-cycle is our map.
Our map to the underworld, the crucible of regeneration.
Think like a natural being
Consider a tree through the seasons: the brightness of spring and summer with growing leaves and blooming flowers; autumn with falling fruits and browning leaves; winter with shedding leaves.
In the depth of winter, the tree appears essentially dead. But underground, the energy shifts as roots stretch and deepen. In this darkness, the prerequisites for new growth form. This is where we get the word "radical”, from the roots.
Even when a tree eventually dies completely, the dead tree becomes a powerful site for regeneration and new life. Whether a seasonal winter that gives birth to spring or a final winter that kills the tree. The dead tree, in its decomposition, nurtures renewal.
As Hospicing Modernity author, Vanessa Andreotti puts it:
Many people want to think about hope and the future as a better place, but this better place depends on what we do today—on us building our capacity to compost this shit, which is not necessarily a pleasurable process.
The importance of personal death work
Building our capacity to "compost this shit" requires developing our individual understanding of our relationship with death.
This work is not only essential for deep ecological engagement but has the immediate effect of building personal capacity for transformation.
That’s what
is all about.It helps people explore their relationship with mortality through a framework that examines how our attitudes toward death shape everything in our lives. From decision-making to how deeply we connect with others.
Through structured exploration of our mortality attitudes, we can move from patterns of denial, disengagement or fear toward greater acceptance and a more vibrant relationship with both death and life.
This journey transforms not just how we relate to death, but how we experience being alive.
From individual to collective
But doing it alone isn’t enough. This individual practice of developing awareness and mechanisms to move from fear to acceptance about death is something we need to do collectively.
The psychological work is essential, but acceptance of mortality isn't the goal itself.
As Jem Bendell wrote in "Breaking Together":
The big challenge of our time is to make sure that when our hearts break amidst climate catastrophe, that we stay open and connected and curious.
Being curious and connected is significant when we find acceptance. We do this work for our own existential anxieties, but it also builds capacity to see beyond death and destruction.
Curiosity and creativity
Curiosity is a critical component of creativity. Death and rebirth are part of an ongoing creative process and awareness of mortality is a critical component of regenerative practice.
In destruction, death, collapse and endings, it's important to hold onto hope. Not as a belief that everything will turn out well, but what Roshi Joan Halifax calls "wise hope".
Wise hope requires that we open ourselves to what we do not know, what we cannot know, that we open ourselves to being surprised, perpetually surprised.
This perspective isn't morose but inherently generative, though held in tension with the knowledge that things might not work out. Wise hope means planting seeds knowing you may never reap them. But someone else might.
The renewal and rebirth that follows destruction is why it's important to think beyond oneself.
We're in a powerful moment where we're being asked to consider not just our individual deaths but our collective mortality.
Climate breakdown expands our awareness, allowing us to shed some core beliefs of modernity and reconnect with a larger cosmic sense of time beyond our finite lives.
The forest's wisdom
Phew. It’s a lot.
So let me close with a small gesture of regeneration.
🌳
Imagine a dense primordial forest with ferns and trees and saplings and plants, flowers and animals.
And a tree that has succumbed to old age or disease or dwindling light.
After a storm, cracks and collapses to the forest floor. Its huge bulk resting like a sleeping giant on the forest floor.
The bright core of that tree, all ripped and shredded from the break, is fresh like a wound.
But over day, night, day, night, week, week, week, month, month, year, it dulls.
And as the rains fall and the winds blow, this fallen tree, inert... This inert tree becomes loosened.
The bark loosens. The cells loosen.
The thick enlivening sap is long gone.
Woodlouse enters cracks.
Mycelium breaches in.
And over time, inhabitants of every species and size – from microscopic to bird – engage and pull at this log, this decaying log of a tree.
As it relaxes and continues to relax on the forest floor, the nutrients and the life force of tens of years, hundreds of years of life and growth, slowly oozes out through life forms that inhabit it.
As the cells break down, the cellulose breaks down, spores and seeds and mosses take up residence. Inside the roots, inside the branches, on the branches, inside the barks, on the bark, inside the core.
Over time, the log becomes a landscape of life – completely new – generating and humming with its own rhythm.
And it is that noble acceptance it would take to lie down into death, knowing despite it being your end what could be created from you. Created from the things that we have held dear, in ways we could never do ourselves.
🍄🟫