What worries Sarah Wilson? Nothing less than the collapse of civilisation

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Wilson. She’s had an incredibly diverse career - from teenage model, to newspaper columnist, to women’s magazine editor, and then best-selling author of the book, I Quit Sugar, in 2012. More books followed, on anxiety, and finding purpose in a disconnected world, especially through the climate change crisis. Now she’s focused on cascading and wicked problems - such as climate change, inequality, artificial intelligence and political polarisation - that will lead to nothing less than the collapse of civilisation. But she also thinks there might just be an upside. Wilson is the subject of our cover story this week - THE CRUSADER - and hosting our conversation today is the journalist behind that profile, Good Weekend senior writer Gay Alcorn.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:09):
Hi, I'm Konrad Marshall and from the Sydney Morning Herald
and The Age. Welcome to Good Weekend Talks, a magazine
for your ears, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people from
sport and politics, science and culture, business and beyond. Every week,
you can download new episodes in which top journalists from
across our newsrooms talk to compelling people about the definitive

(00:31):
stories of the day. In this episode, we talk to
Sarah Wilson. She's had an incredibly diverse career, from teenage
model to newspaper columnist to women's magazine editor and then
best selling author of the book I Quit Sugar in 2012.
More books followed on anxiety and finding purpose in a
disconnected world, especially through the climate change crisis. Now she's

(00:55):
focused on cascading and wicked problems such as climate change inequality,
artificial intelligence and political polarization that will lead to nothing
less than the collapse of civilization. But she also thinks
there might be an upside. Wilson is the subject of
our cover story this week, The Crusader, and hosting our
conversation today is the journalist behind that profile. Good weekend,

(01:18):
senior writer Gay Alcorn.

S2 (01:21):
Thanks, Conrad, and welcome, Sara. I don't think I've ever
interviewed anyone before who's had such a diverse career as
you have had. Um, you've been editor of women's magazine.
You've been a columnist for a long time for mainstream
media organizations. Then you wrote an international best seller, I
Quit Sugar. You've been a climate activist for a very
long time. And now for the past few years, researching

(01:44):
and writing on collapse. Now from your home in Paris.
So I want to get into all of that. But
before we do, can I take you right back to
your childhood outside Canberra and get a sense from you
about what your early influences were and how they influenced
your your values and the way you live now.

S3 (02:03):
Okay. Thank you very much for for that for that introduction. Um, yeah,
it's a really good question. And it probably adds to
the strange picture of my career, because I grew up
in the country sort of on a subsistence or a
semi subsistence sort of property. My parents didn't have a
lot of money, and that was primarily why they moved
us out there. Um, and they I guess there was

(02:26):
also some principles involved. They just felt that living a
capitalist life was not was not cool. So I had
five brothers and sisters. We lived out in the country.
It was a very simple existence. Um, we sort of grew,
you know, we had goats for milk and meat and
we had fruit and vegetables. It was a drought. So
don't get an idyllic picture, listeners of this. It was

(02:47):
pretty it was pretty rough. You know, there was we
ran out of water. Um, there were plagues. There were bushfires. Um, and,
you know, we sort of fended for ourselves, my brothers
and I. My sister came a little, a little later.
But I suppose the reason why it probably influenced where
I wound up is that I spent most of my
childhood sitting up in a tree, dreaming of a better life.

(03:09):
You know, I was literally looking out to the horizon,
you know, to something better than this. I obviously went
into sort of mainstream media, cosmopolitan, MasterChef, all of this.
But I always held on to that. Those principles, they
never left me. So, you know, I was editor of Cosmo,
but I was riding a bike to work and wearing
second hand clothing. I didn't own a handbag. I refused

(03:31):
all of the gifts from the PR agencies. Um, I
still operated by those principles. And, you know, I know
that we talked about this. Um, I sort of treated
it as though I was a chef. You know, a
chef puts on an apron, goes into the kitchen, does
their work. At the end of the shift, they take
their apron off, they go home and eat Vegemite on toast,
you know. And and in some ways, that's how I

(03:53):
treated what I was doing. I had a challenging, enormously
satisfying job. I did it, but it didn't affect who
I was.

S2 (04:01):
Okay, you have worked in the climate area as a
climate activist for many years. But at some point a
few years ago, you had a bit of an epiphany
there and started to to think a bit differently about
climate change. And that, correct me if I'm wrong, sort
of has influenced your thinking about collapse more broadly. Can
you tell me what happened with that?

S3 (04:22):
Yeah, you're right, I, I was working in the climate space,
speaking at functions. I wrote a book about it, you know,
this one, Wild and precious life, which was my journey
to was it was it was my journey to find
a path that could maybe best enroll people into this message.
That's very much behind most climate activism, which is if

(04:43):
we can all do the switch to the green energy
sort of economy all at once, then we have a
chance of saving this one wild and precious life, to
quote the Mary Oliver poem. And that's what we're all
kind of on a mission to do. And it was
quite a singular mission in many ways, and it was
an achievable mission at one point. But what happened is

(05:04):
we didn't do that, did we? Like we've ignored the
IPCC recommendations. There is not a country on the planet
who is on track to stick to their Paris agreements. Um,
and we just kept consuming and we thought that we could,
you know, sort of buy a Tesla and, and and
get a few solar panels and be done with it.
But what I started to realize is that the climate

(05:26):
system is one of many systems, one of many complex
systems within a broader complex system, which is our entire civilization.
And all of these systems feed in on each other.
And it's like they're dominoes. They're a house of cards.
There are all these tipping points. They interrelate, they're knotted,
and that is how civilization works. And I realized that,

(05:48):
you know, a really simple example of what I'm talking
about is the switch to the green energy economy was
going to entail using up a whole bunch of rare
earth minerals, and that's a system that is now collapsing
as a result of just our surge forward into this
green economy. Um, there's child slavery implications. Um, there's something

(06:10):
like 40,000 child slaves in Congo alone who are working
in mines to get the cobalt required for all these
batteries required for solar panels, the batteries in cars, and
so on. So there's all these so-called externalities that have
been ignored by climate activists. We sort of go, oh, well,
technology might sort this out. I might sort this out.

(06:33):
We'll find a solution because human ingenuity. Well, we're not
doing that either. And so this idea that it's a
sustainable economy is is a furphy when we're not bearing
in mind its impact on all of the other systems. Now,
while this was happening, Gay. I don't know if you noticed,
but the rest of the systems around us were starting

(06:53):
to collapse. Food systems, water systems, democracy. Democracy's been on
decline the last couple of years for the first time
in decades. You know, after we'd made all of this progress, um, fragmentation, um,
equality is on the rise, you know, so all of
these other systems that hold our civilization together were starting
to fall apart. And, you know, we saw during Covid

(07:16):
what happened when, you know, things shut down, a system
was shut down. The implications rippled out around the world
trade routes, you know, um, social stability, you know, there
was a whole range of things that was almost a
portent of what's to come. What we're in now is,
I guess I would say, the beginnings of a civilizational collapse.

(07:38):
And that's what the book is about. And civilizational collapse
happens to every complex civilization in history. So historians have tracked,
I think, several hundred civilizations the Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire,
even Easter Island was a complex civilization, albeit a small one.
And all of them collapsed because all of the complex

(08:00):
systems got too intricate and too complex and and kind
of fed into each other. They just couldn't hold so
much growth. And essentially a way of putting it is
to say a complex civilization reaches the kind of the
edge of its vessel, you know, and in our case,
our vessel is planet Earth. We've reached the end, the

(08:22):
edge of the limits of of growth. We've reached the
edge of six of the nine planetary boundaries, and the
other three are about to tip. And so this is
what happens. We're at that perilous juncture where it's all
going to start to tip. We're living it right now.
And the really big difference okay. And this is something

(08:43):
that I know we talked about is that, unlike Easter
Island or the Roman Empire, our civilization is global. You know,
we've got the trade routes, I everything's interconnected. Our food
systems are interconnected. A can of soup has ingredients from
13 different countries. You know, the system goes down, we
don't have soup, you know.

S2 (09:04):
So. So what will it look like? Collapse. Like what
will it look like? I mean, it's not a it's
not a science, but you're, you know, you're saying there's
all these systems and they're all on a, on a,
on the real brink. But for an ordinary person, what
will it look like?

S3 (09:17):
Um, I thought I'll touch on. I do want to
explain that I'll also touch on the fact that it's,
you know, that comment, that it's not a science. This
is part of the problem, right? It engages all kinds
of disciplines history, geology, philosophy, but also science. Um, it requires, uh, demography,
demographers to be engaged in this. And all these disparate

(09:40):
kind of disciplines are tracking this, but very few people
are able to get together and go, oh my God,
this is actually part of a whole picture. There's very
few people who really understand complex systems, sort of knowledge,
and that is because we've become a very linear society
that is the world that we live in. That's part
of the reason why we're in this problem, because we
haven't been able to to conceptualize this idea of complex, intertwining,

(10:04):
emergent systems. And that in itself is actually a discipline.
It is, in fact a science, um, incorporating physics and
quantum physics and so on. But all the, you know,
there hasn't been a big dinner party where they've all
got together and gone, hey, maybe there's something bigger going
on here. But to answer your question, what does collapse
look like? Collapse looks like what we're in now. Collapse

(10:26):
looks like everything being a bit shitty. And we think
we're going to go back to the old normal. Right?
There'll be a bit of a reset. You know, we
we're having a little bit of a dip in the market.
Oh climate's having a little bit of a wobbly moment.
But look we'll soon enough we'll go back to regular summers.
Everything will be cool again. That ain't going to happen.
Every single scientists working in all these disparate areas is

(10:50):
pointing to the fact that we're not going to go
back to business as usual. And what will happen is
things will start to get a little bit more shitty
and a little bit more shitty after that. And all
of the little systems that are starting to get shittier
will impact on each other and nudge the other system.
So the discomfort of of for instance, warming, increased warming

(11:11):
will increase fragmentation and unrest in cities. It will create
more insecurity in the food system and the water system. Obviously,
it's going to dial up migration. There's a whole bunch
of studies which I cover in the book that show that,
you know, increased heat. And we're just talking about one
system here, um, has a knock on effect for the

(11:31):
way that wars play out, you know. Um, and increases
the severity of wars. Um, so that's what it will
look like. It's going to become more and more uncomfortable. Um,
I think that we're going to see power outages like
there was in Spain back in, I think, the end
of April, where, you know, an entire nation has to

(11:52):
shut down. Now, in that case, it was only for
a day. But, you know, Europe's a great example. It's interconnected.
Its power grids are all interconnected. And, you know, of
course it's it's food systems are interconnected. It's everything is interconnected.
So you see a power grid go down. The implications
for a society that's become so complex and so reliant

(12:12):
on all of the other systems. Is that all right?
There's going to be no ATMs. There's going to be
no money. There's going to be no internet. And, you know,
most people I know don't know how to get from
A to B without the map on their phones. Their
phone runs out of charge. The internet goes down with
the power outage. You know, that's me.

S2 (12:29):
Sara. Yes.

S3 (12:31):
Yeah. That's right. And it's most people under 30 because,
you know, we've all grown up with a map on
their phone. Um, so these that's what collapse will look
like more and more inconvenient. We're going to be shocked.
We're not going to have access to the internet. How
are people going to access how to unlock their house?
The the YouTube guide to how to unlock their house

(12:51):
once the security system is is jammed because the power's
gone down.

S2 (12:56):
Is this likely to happen within our lifetimes?

S3 (12:58):
Oh, absolutely. We're in it. Gay.

S2 (13:00):
We're we're in it now. Yes, at the beginning of it, perhaps.

S3 (13:03):
Yeah. I mean, you know, 10 million. They say that
10 million people are already dying of air pollution as
a result of the climate system going down, you know, declining. Um,
we're already in, uh, a situation where extreme poverty and, uh,
mass civil unrest and famine is going up again after

(13:23):
we made all these inroads, you know, for generations, it's
going up again, and there's no signs that it can
go down. And the obvious one that I think is
getting a bit of traction at the moment, because the
tech bros are all over it and people are worried
about it around the world. You know, leaders in the UK,
the US are talking about this. I think they are
in the. In Australia as well is, uh, population collapse.

(13:45):
So that's something that is actually set in to the
modelling of how and why people are having children. And
there's a whole bunch of reasons relating to collapsing systems,
including pollution, that's causing, you know, hormonal issues. And women
and men are becoming more and more infertile. That's not
just a sort of a vague kind of slight influence.

(14:05):
It's a, you know, I mean, men's sperm has, uh, dropped,
I think somewhere between 40 and 50% since the 1970s.
That's having a huge impact on the number of children
people are able to have such that, uh, our peak
population is being brought forward dramatically from sort of when
you and I were growing up and told that it'll

(14:25):
just keep growing forever, and it's not going to be
enough room on the planet. We're now looking at somewhere
between 2050 and 2080 and that sort of deadline or
peak is being brought forward all the time, where we'll
hit a peak population of around 10 billion, a bit
under 10 billion people, um, at which point it'll start

(14:46):
to decline. So it'll take a while. Fertility will sort
of come well under 2.1, which is the replacement rate
required for, you know, a steady population, let alone growth. Um,
it'll come under that and then it'll be a bit
of a 30 year lag. And, uh, and then population
numbers around the world will start to drop off. And

(15:06):
we're looking at quite a large and fast rate. We're
looking at sort of 1 billion people within a hundred years, um,
which is significant, which is significant not just because of
the less humans. And isn't it sad that that's sort
of happening and humanity seems to be shrinking? It's because
there's going to be a, you know, generations of people
growing up without younger generations to pay tax, to create

(15:29):
the widgets, to also look after old people.

S2 (15:32):
All right. Can I play you? You're a great talker.
I hardly need to ask anything, but, um. I'm just
going to play devil's advocate for a minute, because I can,
I can I can think that some of our audience
would say, oh, haven't we heard, you know, over many
decades at the end of the World is Nigh. And
we certainly had during the Cold War, you know, real
fears about nuclear, um, collapse of of of the whole world.

(15:54):
How do you what's different about this from than other
periods where humanity has been under enormous strain and stress
and World War one and World War Two? But we've
managed to bumble our way and work it out because
we're a, you know, a resourceful, uh, species.

S3 (16:09):
We absolutely are. I mean, it's almost ridiculous, the sort
of the 11th hour, sort of uncanniness right, of humans
to be able to rise to an occasion, you know, um,
you know, I think of those stories of women, uh, mothers,
you know, who can lift a car off a toddler,
you know, um, when required. I mean, that is what
humans do. And I'd always worked to that idea, and

(16:30):
I'd written about it. I'd used that exact, exact example
in my last book, this One Wild and Precious Life. Um,
because I've always been amazed by it. The difference today
there's a couple of differences. First of all, it's we're
now in a position where all the systems are globally interacting.
So in the past, like I mentioned before, the Roman
Empire could collapse, right? I mean, it was quite a

(16:52):
big empire, but indigenous people in Australia or in South America,
they wouldn't have known that it was going on. And,
you know, business continued as usual. Today, the systems are
so intricately connected. Um, we don't stand a chance if
one of the dominoes starts to fall. The other thing
is that, yes, I think a lot of our ideas

(17:14):
around being able to sort of be to save the situation, um,
comes from the idea that technology. We have technology now.
There'll be some technology that we can put in place. And,
you know, I obviously can't feed off all the arguments
that listeners are probably developing in their heads. But what
about what? What about. And I do cover a bunch
of them. A lot of them in the book because

(17:34):
I've heard a lot of them. What about arguments for
a number of years now? I've asked them myself, but say,
for instance, if we take technology as the great savior, technology,
as it currently stands, requires huge, huge amounts of energy
and water and infrastructure and so on. And large language
models alone are going to be burning through quantities of

(17:57):
power by 2030 that are just not available. And the
tech bros say as such, they've announced this, which is
why they're investing in nuclear and all this kind of thing.
They're actually building their own nuclear plants to power their products.
The problem is, is that, sure, nuclear might come about it.
I think the fastest they can turn around nuclear power
plant now is about seven years. It could be brought forward.

(18:20):
The problem is a the technology required. There's not enough
energy currently to actually pull off what we're all talking about. um,
you know, um, agi. So generalized, um, artificial intelligence, that
can't happen with our current power systems. Not while we're
also wanting to cook dinner and turn on lights. Right.
The rest of us. The second thing is that it's

(18:41):
not going to happen in time. Now, AI AGI is
going on at a rapid pace, faster than we all anticipated,
but for them to build the power structures that can
keep it going, for instance, nuclear, it's going to take
5 to 10 years, some say 20 years. Um, and
by then the climate system is going to be in
all kinds of trouble. Okay. So we might be able

(19:03):
to solve, you know, some of the problems that, you know,
AI or whatever can solve, but we're going to have
a climate that's unlivable and is going to be having
tipping effects to everything else. The problem has got too
complex for the human mind to now fathom. And this
is exactly what happens each time just before a complex

(19:25):
system fails. The difference being, as I've mentioned a couple
of times already, is that we're global. It's global. And
I think the argument that I make in the book,
and it's an argument, it's not my argument, it's coming
from various people in this space. Um, is that okay
if we've got limited energy available on the planet? And
by the way, we're not going to run out of
fossil fuels, right? This is not how it's going to happen.

(19:49):
The extraction of fossil fuels is going to be so prohibitive. The,
you know, the ROI, the cost of extraction is going
to be too expensive to fuel the economy, the economy,
the the bonds markets, the loan systems as it currently exists.
And so these commentators that I'm surrounded by and I've
been speaking to are saying, do we want to use

(20:11):
these remaining fuels, fossil fuels that we're going to have
access to in an affordable, manageable way on building technologies
that are not going to save us, right. Do or
do we want to? And this is a phrase that
comes from the indigenous, um, thinker from Canada, um, Vanessa Andreotti.
She says, or do we want to be hospicing modernity?

(20:32):
Do we want to be? And, you know, a lot
of people in the climate space are familiar with the
idea of, um, adaptation and mitigation as the focus now
rather than fixing things. Um, do we want to be
putting our resources into adaptation and mitigation, assisting the humans
that are around today to adapting to these changed conditions,

(20:53):
rather than fixing a system that's clearly broken and can
no longer service?

S2 (20:58):
Okay. Can we talk a little bit more about climate change?
Because you've spoken to me about how, you know, you've
lost some friends over this, particularly because you've worked, uh,
amongst climate change activists for a long time. And they say, Sarah,
don't talk about how it's too late for climate change.
You know, that's not the message we should be putting out,
that somehow that's that might lead people to give up

(21:18):
on climate change. Can you discuss that a little bit
more about what your thinking is on on climate change
and whether it's it's too late for us to do
anything about it.

S3 (21:27):
Yeah. I want to pick up on that argument what
I say to that argument. And I've been, you know,
hit with it a number of times. I've also been
told I'm a shill for the fossil fuel industry, um,
because I, because I put out this argument. But what
I would say to that is that we are cocooning
people in very limited binary thinking by assuming they're not
capable of adjusting to the nuances of of where we're at. So, yes, um,

(21:52):
the fossil fuel industry is conveniently making this argument. You know,
it works for them. I absolutely agree that is what
they're doing. That doesn't mean that there's also another truth.
It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be actually be discussing
this and letting the fossil fuel industry run away with
this argument. So you can have a this and kind
of situation. What I argue is we are at a

(22:14):
juncture in history where we're going to all have to
adult up and face difficult, complex discussions like this and
infantilizing the world by saying, oh, people can't deal with
this level of complexity. They're just going to think that
we give up. I'm like, no, this is the moment
when we need to be educating people on this. And yes,

(22:36):
it's hard. Yes. Everything we thought that we could do
to save the planet, uh, is, is really not going
to work for us anymore. And there is another path.
We don't give up. We fight like hell. And we
we we we do the practical, pragmatic, useful thing that
actually might serve humanity. My point is that whenever we
stay stuck in that hopeful and, you know, there's a

(22:59):
term that was coined by, um, a thinker in this space,
a reverend who passed away recently, Reverend Michael O'Dowd, he's
called called it Hopium. You know, it's an addiction to hope.
And we've got a societal addiction to hope because we
find discomfort so unpalatable. We are a Civilization that has
put so much effort into avoiding discomfort. That avoidance and

(23:23):
that inability to deal with the discomfort is going to
come and bite us hard. So my point is, we
need to be discussing these things super realistically, and there
needs to be more voices who are gamers to go this.
And yes, the fossil fuel industry is saying this as well.
And we need to take control of this debate because

(23:44):
it is indeed true. It is indeed true. We can't, uh,
green economize our way out of this.

S2 (24:00):
There is a huge effort amongst scientists, climate activist groups
and so on, so still on climate change to really
speed up our emissions reduction. And I know you're not
against emissions reduction, but are you saying that look, we
should put some of that energy now shift focus to
adaptation that we can't probably do both equally. And, and

(24:21):
that's I think the, the, the argument that some people
anyway say, oh, we just can't afford to take our
foot off the pedal on emissions for one second. But
are you saying, look, actually, we're at a point now
that we would be better spending some of our limited
resources that we have on making people more resilient and
adapting to the climate change that is already baked in.
Is that fair? Is that what you're arguing?

S3 (24:41):
I think it's a discussion we need to have, because
I am not a leader of a particular country who
can make that call, but I think it needs to
be discussed whether that is the better way. Okay. What
I'm saying is we need to take these blinkers off,
this sort of blind belief that we're somebody out there.
Elon Musk, a tech bro. I don't know who is

(25:01):
going to come in and save us, which is how
we're operating at the moment. So I feel that also,
I mean, I think this is probably one of the
arguments I can probably really stand by and will really
put forward. Is that the green economy? Green growth. That
argument is highly problematic because it's not actually going to
change human behavior. I know people who go off and

(25:24):
buy their, you know, electric car and do a few
electrical swaps. They're generally, uh, wealthy people. Um, they're in
the upper echelons of things. They are essentially doing all
of these things, and it's kind of a form of
single action bias. You know, I've done it. Now. I
don't have to worry about anything else. I can continue
business as usual. The problem as well, with the green

(25:45):
sort of economy and that whole switcheroo mindset, and I've
had so many people on my various podcasts over the
years and in interviews and on panels say, oh, what
it means is we can continue our lives, you know,
we can leave the lights on, we can drive as
often as we want, we can consume as much as
we want, as long as it's got some kind of green,
green washing label on it. The problem is our addiction

(26:08):
to growth. The problem is our addiction to consumption. And
that is another part of the I guess, green economy argument,
is that it's not fixing the original problem. It's infantilizing
people to be able to continue with what is. You know,
I call it a human behavioral crisis.

S2 (26:27):
That is what our government in Australia argues, too, that
you know, that they don't want to talk about reducing consumption.
They think we can continue to growth and continue to
grow and new green jobs and so on. Um, do
you it's an argument that you make, I think, against
capitalism about endless growth and endless consumption. Some people would
argue that, look, there's been a lot of good that's

(26:49):
come out of that. There's been a lot of poverty
reduction over the last century or so that fossil fuels,
even though we know that we've got a big price
to pay now, have done a lot of good in
the world. So do you sort of acknowledge that or
how do you see that? They're right. Okay.

S3 (27:03):
They're right. Capitalism was a system that served us, you know,
and and look, capitalism the early you know, there's debates
as to when capitalism started. Um, and there's debates as
to when our civilization started. For the purposes of my book, um,
I sort of take the line that a lot of
people take that it sort of started during the Industrial Revolution. So, um,

(27:26):
it's a post industrial civilization is how I refer to
our civilization. And I would say capitalism, sort of the
concept of it started back then and it did. It
lifted a lot of people out of poverty. Um, it
created a lot more equality. It enabled things like democracy
and so on to flourish. That is, without a doubt,

(27:48):
but that, I mean, we are quite sophisticated thinkers, right?
We should be able to see when a good thing
is no longer serving us. Right. That's that's the argument
that people are making. Growth has was steady, steady, steady.
It's the accelerated the spike that almost went vertical in growth.
That is Insane, and the concept that unlimited growth on

(28:13):
a finite planet can work forever is insane. Continued growth
for a long time, until things start to get wobbly
is probably the right way to go about things. But
we didn't do that, did we? Because people who then
started to really profit from capitalism had to keep that
growth myth going. And we see it still. We see

(28:34):
it with the way our leaders talk, the way the
tech bros talk. It's this insanity. I mean, pull it apart,
I think. I think a five year old child would
understand that this does not work, that cannot hold, and
indeed it's not holding. So yeah.

S2 (28:48):
But we want, don't we? More things. We want more
things we want to have. We don't want to decrease
our standard of living. The last federal election we had
here was all about the cost of living. And and
obviously people in developing countries to China or India, they
want to raise their standard of living. So is it
just sort of incompatible? Is it inconsistent that what we
want is not is not possible, given the interconnecting sort

(29:12):
of issues that we have? But that's going to fall apart.

S3 (29:15):
Yes it is. It's completely incompatible. And this is not
just my speculation. I'm basing this on economic modelling that
is showing that this is crumbling already. It cannot hold.
The debt market in the US is is just it's
it's untenable. Um, and this is exactly how previous civilizations

(29:36):
have gone. I mean, you you can make parallels and
find them interesting, but it's more about the idea that
this is what humans do. We believe in growth. We
believe that if we just complexify. And a big part
of the reason that civilizations fail, and I think we
can probably see the parallels with our own society, is
that we and this is what, um, Joseph Tainter, who's

(29:56):
one of the, the, the, the main voices in this space,
an historian that's been writing about this for many years. Um,
you know, he sort of has argued this. Jared Diamond
also picks up on this. A complex civilization collapses because
it can no longer afford to fix the problems created
by the Complexifying. So in our case, we can't afford

(30:20):
to do the green energy transition, which was required to
fix the collapsing climate system. And that's where we're at.
You know, we've basically we've basically embedded so much stuff
into the system, it's so precarious. We literally and it's
kind of ironic, right, that this is actually going to
be an economic issue. We literally do not have the

(30:41):
money to, to to find these fixes to actually enable
these fixes. All right. That's a slight digression. But obviously
this is a complex issue. And and to talk about it,
it can't be linear. And of course gay. You know
when we did our interview that was a slight challenge because,
you know, usually as a journalist and as a writer,
I make linear arguments, you know, that's what gives you kudos,

(31:04):
you know, and and credibility. But with this, it really
does take a different mindset, which is a complex systems mindset,
which is an ability to be comfortable to talk, I guess,
in looping connected sort of sequences rather than A if A,
then B, then C, and so it's really hard, you know,
for somebody like myself or anyone in this space to

(31:27):
make the kinds of arguments that the linear, you know,
sort of left brain world finds us palatable, you know.

S2 (31:35):
And I think, I mean, I did find that a challenge.
I don't I can't deny that I did. It does
sound extremely grim, Sarah. So but I know you write
about look, uh, it isn't all bad necessarily. You know,
that there are some some upsides to this or things
we can learn, uh, about this, about how to live
in a new way. So let's talk about the upsides

(31:58):
after all that.

S3 (31:59):
Happy to. So, as you know, I first wrote this
book as a serialization on my Substack, so it evolved
chapter by chapter. So each week I posted a chapter
and my community who signed up to be part of
this journey, joined me as we went. So I was
able to witness in real time through the hundreds of
comments that followed each chapter, how the information was landing

(32:22):
and I first I go in hard, I say I
no longer have hope, and we pull apart that hopium
concept that we talked about earlier. Um, but what I found,
the common reaction is that a lot of people felt
a relief, partly because suddenly, cognitively, what somebody was saying,
I myself, you know, as a conduit to all these experts,

(32:43):
was that this doesn't stack up. I think most people
listening to this are going, yeah, it doesn't stack up.
And yet we've been kind of plugging this force, feeding
this square peg in a round hole, a braising ourselves,
trying to make this work, trying to rush our kids
around and get them ahead in the world and and
working a second job to send them to private schools.

(33:04):
And the system is getting more and more ridiculous and inhumane,
you know, and I'm talking about a middle class, upper
middle class situation in that example. But around the world
this is playing out. So a lot of people feel
and I did as well, a sense of cognitive, emotional,
even spiritual relief to go, God, it's not meant to

(33:25):
work out. This is not meant to stack up. So
that's something to bear in mind, and that is something
to be. I encourage anyone listening to this to be
comfortable with that sensation as a first starting point. The
second thing, um, I would say is that as you
go through this process of looking at what is happening,
I mean, this is the thesis that I kind of,

(33:46):
you know, run with in my book. And I come
across it about a third of the way in, and
I start to develop it and it develops a crescendo
by the time I get to the end of the
book at, you know, 90,000 pages or whatever, uh, 90,000
words I should say is that this process is actually
bringing us back to all the aspects of our humanity
that we had to let go of to fit in

(34:07):
to the post-industrial system. So, you know, it's actually forcing
us to contemplate the idea that we're going to have
to simplify. So I, I sort of refer to what
collapse is likely to look like as is as a simplification.
It's going to be an undoing of all the complexifying,
the insane, frantic complexifying we've been doing for decades and centuries.

(34:28):
It's going to be an undoing of that. And so
this notion of simplifying, I think, appeals to humans. We
are going too fast. We are consuming too much. It's
too much. So, um, one of the messages, you know,
I put out there is. Well, simplify. Now, start practicing
it now. It's a mindset shift, but it's also a
pragmatic shift. You can actually start to get yourself ready.

(34:49):
That's not prepping. I am not a prepper. I am
also not a dumbest. I'm really trying to piece apart
the the various arguments that really do stack up and
and gay that we would want to do anyway. So
even if I'm wrong, the idea of driving less, being
less reliant on technology, uh, going more analog, um, spending

(35:15):
more time in community, um, you know, not working as
hard and making sacrifices so that you can actually do
the stuff that makes us human, i.e. spending time with
other humans, loving, uh, exercising, being healthy, all that. If
we do it anyway, no one's going to get hurt,
you know? Um, it's a it's a plus plus either way.

(35:36):
So that's the positive. We have been waiting almost. And
I know because I know that a lot of people
are feeling this way. We have been almost waiting for
the shove that's going to force us to do the
thing that we've been wanting to do for ages. We
are cringing at the way that we consume and live
our lives. We feel alienated. We feel kids are getting

(35:57):
all kinds of deranged derangements from too much stimulation. Um,
we're all unwell, and we're not particularly happy. In fact,
you know, that's been borne out in all kinds of statistics.
And so we've been looking for the thing that's going
to shove us into what we really want to be doing.
And my argument is collapse is going to do that.
Collapse is collapse is not some nefarious force out there

(36:20):
out to get the humans. It's a reconnection. It's a
rebalancing of the natural order of things, really, if you
want to, you know, pan right back and get spiritual
about it or get, you know, get quantum physical about it.
So it does create a cognitive and emotional congruency. It
also feels right. It enables us to step into all

(36:44):
the things that we feel we've been missing. And I
is really starting to expose to us just what we're
missing out on. You know, deep fakes are the way
it's taking jobs, the way it's eating into the creative world.
All of those things, we do not want them to go.
So when I say to people, it's highly likely that
AI is not going to get to that singularity point,
that AGI point, because irony of ironies, there's not enough

(37:07):
energy or money on the planet to do it. People go,
oh my God, thank God. And so that's the argument
that I make. And, you know, I tell this anecdote in,
in the book. I was back home in Canberra visiting
my parents, and my dad gets all of this, you know,
he read the Limits to Growth report from 1972 that
really set out this modelling, um, which, you know, I

(37:30):
point out in the book, um, we're right on track.
We're right on track for the worst case scenario that,
you know, the Club of Rome set out back in 1972.
So he's been comprehending of all of this. He was
resistant to the idea that the climate crisis, the climate fight,
was not going to play out as we thought. But
as he read the book as a subscriber, a paid
up subscriber, bless him, um, he sort of came around

(37:52):
to it, but my mother struggled. My mother really struggled.
And she said to me, I don't understand, Sarah. You're
writing about this stuff all day. All night. You're interviewing people,
and yet you seem sort of cheerier and happier than
I've ever seen you. And it's true. I am, you know, gay.
We talk about this, I think, in, in the interview, um,

(38:12):
and I'm, you know, written books about it. I struggle
with anxiety and I struggle with a bunch of different,
you know, health issues, um, that make living on the
planet fairly difficult for me, you know, and I've gone
through my ups and downs throughout the years, but I
feel more sturdy and calm than I ever have. And
I think it's because, yes, I'm in a congruency. I

(38:34):
can see where we all fit in now. I can
see where we've gone wrong. I can see that the
climate crisis, the AI threat, nuclear threat, what's happening in America,
what's happening in Gaza. I can see it's all pretty
much the one thing. And that makes it so much
easier for us to deal with and to then start
to shift and make the choice to shift away. We

(38:55):
don't have agency to make a change at this stage.
That's the thing about civilizational collapse. There really is nothing
that anyone can do to stop this. No good intentioned
leader that we vote in, uh, can get rid of the,
you know, the fossil fuel industry can do all of
this stuff in time to make a tangible difference. But
what we can do, we do have personal agency. We

(39:17):
can choose to start to adjust to this new way,
and we can start to build communities. Um, I, you know,
I call them taking from a sort of a spiritual thinker,
Meg Wheatley. She calls them islands of sanity. We create
islands of sanity, because the thing that's probably going to
actually impact whether and how fast we go into collapse

(39:38):
in our lifetimes is going to be determined by the
stability we're able to hold. You know, I call it,
you know, calming the farm. So the role that anyone
who's listening and who feels kind of like this makes
sense to me. The role that we have is to
actually be an island of sanity, to actually get okay
with this, to role model calmness and, and a certain

(40:01):
type of leadership and start to kind of do the
simplification stuff, start to sort of show how we can
live with less, how we can actually build community. We
go first. Um, so that's the upside to all of this.
It's actually going to see I think it has the opportunity,
the capacity to see a lot of us lift into
our full adulthood and our full humanness. And I think

(40:25):
many of us have been aching for that for a long,
long time.

S2 (40:29):
I think some of our listeners at least will find
a lot of these ideas fairly new. Um, but you
live in Paris and you've talked about how in Europe
these things are discussed a lot more. Can you can
you talk a little bit about that, the differences between
what you see when you visit here and what the
discussions are in, in Europe and Paris in particular.

S3 (40:48):
Yeah, France is actually well, Europe is is very okay
around collapse language, particularly in France. Some of the big
voices are based in France. Um, it's called Collapsology here.
And in fact, I think it was three summers ago now, um,
the number one best selling book in France was a
book on collapse, um, that had been turned into a

(41:08):
graphic novel, not a graphic novel, a graphic book. Um, yes.
You know, and sort of the voices, you know, I
sort of, you know, see morning television. I don't understand
it all, but I can see that they're the experts
that I'm, you know, I'm reading their work. So collapse
experts are doing morning TV, talking about this stuff. I mean,
can you imagine this happening in Australia? No. Um, so,

(41:29):
you know, there's a discussion around this, and then I
wrote about this on my Substack that, uh, in sort
of April, March, April this year, um, the EU came
out and sort of instructed the, you know, what is it,
400 odd million Europeans to get together a survival kit. Um,
in the case the, uh. In the case, the likely case.

(41:50):
I can't remember the wording, but they were basically saying,
you know, in the very probable case or, you know,
they weren't sort of dismissing it as a far off possibility.
They were saying, look, it's possible there's going to be, uh, pandemic, flood, fire,
you know, some kind of climate catastrophe or a war.
And that's what a lot of the leaders in the
EU focused on is war. And they said, you need

(42:11):
to get together a kit that can keep you and
your family going. And, you know, there's they were deploying
in France, the army over summer to go round and
door to door and speak to people about this. So
this is something people do talk about. And by the way,
the kit contains a physical map because they're aware that
the power will go down in some kind of emergency.

(42:32):
It's things like, um, you know, water tablets, it's, uh,
compass and that kind of thing. So amongst the people
I know, they're like working out how to use a
compass and how to use a paper map. You know
what I mean? Like, because we've lost these skills. This
is stuff that, yeah, people are talking about. And in
sort of Finland, which is where I think this model
comes from, um, because they're so close to, um, to,

(42:54):
to Russia. Um, this has been around for a while. Um,
it's very familiar. So, yeah, I've gone back to Australia
recently and started talking about this. And yes, you're right,
people are shocked. However, when I start to talk about
it just a little, there's that sort of sense of recognition. This. Okay,

(43:15):
it sounds insane. People have been saying the end of
the world is nigh for ages. However, some of the
stuff you're saying stacks up now. Um, and as I say,
I am not going to create a prediction that we're
all going to go to shit in X amount of years.
You know, it could be a gradual collapse. And the

(43:35):
argument I make is we have an opportunity. If we
put on our big girl and big boy pants and
get out there and own this. Instead of infantilizing each
other in these hopium message that messages that somehow one
of those tech bros are going to get a conscience
and steer their technology to saving human life. I mean,

(43:55):
every single sign says that that is not their priority.
I mean, they're building bunkers and trying to get to Mars.
Looking after the rest of us is not their priority.
So once we actually start to operate in a way
that goes right, this is the reality. And what are
we going to do then? I think we could actually

(44:17):
limit collapse to just collapse of that growth mindset, that system, the,
you know, the capitalist system, call it the post-industrial system,
which requires that growth set and an addiction to fossil
fuels to keep everything going. You know, that is what
we've actually got to put our energy into is to

(44:38):
actually not trying to save that. And part of my
argument about what the climate movement often does is it's
trying to save that model. Right. And and we shouldn't
be we should be trying to save our humanity.

S2 (44:51):
Okay. Finally, Sarah, I'm just interested in how you see
your role in all this. There are sort of thinkers
and academics and so on. And I read a few
of them. Mum, in France you've got a really strong
mainstream following. You've got a lot of Instagram followers and
you wrote this book chapter by chapter and your Substack,
and now you're you're finishing off a more conventional book. Um,

(45:13):
how do you see what's what's your role in the
discussion here that you see in particular?

S3 (45:18):
Well, I'm not a scientist. Um, you know, I trained
as a philosopher. Um, and then obviously in journalism, um,
you know, as a journalist for. Well, it's a bit
like being a Catholic, isn't it? Gay? Born a journalist,
you die a journalist.

S2 (45:33):
Um, yes.

S3 (45:35):
So I yeah, I've been a journalist since I was
sort of, you know, 2021. But I would say that
my role has always been with all the books that
I've written. I'm a conduit, I'm a conduit who's able
to go down the rabbit hole and digest complex information
across a range of disciplines and kind of surface with
it after, you know, often, many, many years of, you know,

(45:56):
swirling around in confusion and doubt and asking all the
questions that, you know, my readers eventually ask when I
surface again, I then bring that together and try to
write in a way that the everyday, caring human is
able to then digest it. Because the problem is, is
that academics and scientists and philosophers and so on, they

(46:17):
do an incredible job. But most people don't get access
to their work, nor can they understand it when they do,
because it's just, you know, in a particular sort of
written in a particular way. And, and we've got to
a point now with, you know, the news cycle and
with the way that information is disseminated, nobody knows what
to trust anymore. You know, there's so many competing messages.
And in this space there's a lot of really problematic messages,

(46:38):
which is part of the reason I decided to write
this book, because there's a bunch of dudes, predominantly who
are really loving the doom message, and they're taking a
lot of people down in that dark direction of, of
pessimism and giving up. And so I decided to write
this book because I felt that it needed a far
more balanced, um, holistic approach that could actually show a path,

(47:01):
because most, most humans that I know, they do want
to know what they can do. They we do. We
are programmed to fight for our own survival, but to
survive to, to to, to continue the human species because
it's indeed a beautiful entity and we should not be
giving up on it. So yeah, I'm a conduit is
the short answer, you know, and and look, I, I'm

(47:23):
an intense person. I don't have children. I'm going to
be super honest here with everybody. I don't have a partner.
I have no possessions. I live out of one bag. And,
you know, you mentioned I live in Paris at the moment.
I don't I don't have an apartment there. I'm currently
living out of a backpack with my tent, um, sort
of hopping between different places while I finishing finishing the
editing process of this book. But, um, I'm able to

(47:46):
live like that and I can agilely go and interview
some of the top voices. I interviewed over 200 people, uh,
in this space, uh, who aren't talking to each other,
by the way, you know, the philosophers aren't talking to
the geologists, and they're not talking to the energy futurists,
and they're not talking to the investment bankers. I have
an ability to do that by virtue of my circumstances,

(48:07):
my training. And so that's what I that's what I do.
That's my role.

S2 (48:12):
Okay. Thank you so much, Sarah Wilson. That was fascinating and, uh,
and interesting and and everything else. So I greatly appreciate
your time with us.

S3 (48:22):
Okay. Thank you so much for wading into this realm. Um,
it's it's hard. It is, it's hard. It's big.

S2 (48:29):
It's very challenging, but completely fascinating. I've learned a hell
of a lot.

S3 (48:31):
Thank you, Gaye.

S2 (48:32):
Thank you, thank you.

S1 (48:35):
That was author, host and presenter and climate crusader Sarah
Wilson in conversation with senior writer Gaye Alcorn on the
latest Good Weekend talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please
remember to subscribe, rate and comment wherever you get your
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(48:57):
with the operator of Sydney Swinging venue, our secret spot.
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(49:18):
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