Surviving the Future with Shaun Chamberlin
Interview by Niels Devisscher
Why do so many people feel disempowered in the face of climate change and collapse? ”I believe it’s in part because of the narrative we’ve been sold”, responds Shaun. “We are really used to telling the story of this huge leviathan — this industrial civilization — and asking ourselves ‘how are we going to turn The Titanic?’ And that’s pretty disempowering. Yet we all know that this system is unsustainable and, well, that means it’s going to end. The Leviathan is falling. So maybe it’s time to start a different conversation, about the sequels. Not about precautionary tales, but about what happens after all the precautionary tales are ignored. The important questions then change: what does it mean to live in a world where our institutions actually aren’t going to head off climate change? How do we live through collapse? And how do we begin to live into the sequels now?” These questions have guided Shaun’s own journey of reckoning with modernity. And they continue to animate and ripple through the conversations of alumni and participants in Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive.
Ignoring Precautionary Tales
Why do so many people feel disempowered in the face of climate change and collapse? ”I believe it’s in part because of the narrative we’ve been sold”, responds Shaun. “We are really used to telling the story of this huge leviathan — this industrial civilization — and asking ourselves, ‘how are we going to turn The Titanic?’ And that’s pretty disempowering. Yet we all know that this system is unsustainable and, well, that means it’s going to end. The Leviathan is falling. So maybe it’s time to start a different conversation, about the sequels. Not about precautionary tales, but about what happens after all the precautionary tales are ignored. The important questions then change: what does it mean to live in a world where our institutions actually aren’t going to head off climate change? How do we live through collapse? And how do we begin to live into the sequels now?” These questions have guided Shaun’s own journey of reckoning with modernity. And they continue to animate and ripple through the conversations of alumni and participants in Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive.
” I came to realise two groups were calling themselves ‘realists’: the political realists and the realists about physics. They were talking past each other because they were loyal to different realities that simply weren’t compatible. And of course, ultimately, physical reality is going to pull rank.”
Telling Beautiful Stories with Our Lives
“ I was in my second year of university when I got an email from my dad that basically said: ‘Hey, just wanted to let you know that oil reserves are depleting, and this is the energy source that fuels society. And I’m sure you had an idea in your head of what the future might look like, but yeah, over the next 15-20 years, it’s going to be all pestilence, collapse, and famine, and everything’s going to crumble. Hope you’re having a nice day, Dad.’ And I just thought that can’t be right. If that were true, it would be all over the news. So I started looking into it, partly to put my dad’s mind at rest. This was in 1999. I was initially looking into energy depletion and climate change, and gradually realized, hang on, this really is civilization-threatening. Maybe not quite as immediately as my dad implied, at least not hitting England first, but still, society wasn’t addressing it in any adequate way.
At the time, Shaun was running a learning center for marginalized groups: people with addiction issues, mental health struggles, and young asylum seekers. He loved that work, helping people reintegrate with society. But by around 2005, Shaun had a growing sense that “society itself was heading off a cliff”. That’s where he felt called to engage. “I quit my job, learned to live very cheaply, and gave my time to reading, going to talks, following up with interesting-seeming writers and thinkers. I didn’t have any peers around this, so it was a difficult period, knowing what I was walking away from, but not really sure if I was walking towards anything. I talk about it now as being in between stories. I didn’t believe the story of the future my culture raised me in, but I didn’t have a new one yet.”
After about a year of this searching, Shaun found a two-week course at Schumacher College in Devon, ‘Life After Oil’. There, he studied with twenty-five others with similar concerns, and teachers including David Fleming, who became his mentor, and Rob Hopkins, about to launch the Transition movement. “That was the first time I felt I had a peer group around this. A release from feeling alone with the apocalypse. Like finding an oasis in the desert, when you actually find others seeing the same facts, and how those facts challenge the fundamentals of what a meaningful life looks like in these times.”
Over the next few years, Shaun co-founded Transition Town Kingston, wrote the movement’s second book, The Transition Timeline, was active in ecological direct action and supported Fleming as they advised the UK government feasibility study into his concept of carbon rationing. “But by around 2010, I’d lost faith in government’s ability to respond. I watched policies representing ecological sanity get assessed as practically feasible and then be stomped on by the Treasury because they threatened economic growth. I came to realise two groups were calling themselves ‘realists’: the political realists and the realists about physics. They were talking past each other because they were loyal to different realities that simply weren’t compatible. And of course, ultimately, physical reality is going to pull rank.”
Then, in late 2010, David Fleming died unexpectedly, and a few weeks later, Shaun’s fiancée also died suddenly. “My personal story of the future collapsed. But as I wrote about that, I was surprised that people empathised with my personal grief through their own grief for our collective future. Grief for the places they loved, for the lost belief that their children’s lives would be better than theirs.” In the process of metabolizing his own grief, and seeking meaningful ways to shift the society that births our politics, Shaun brought Fleming’s influential Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It to posthumous publication in 2016. Central to Fleming’s work was the idea of moving beyond the market economy and its endless growth imperative towards a grounding in culture, seeking security not in money, but in our relationships with each other and the living world.
“So yes, my dad brought my awareness to the darkness of our times, and it sure frustrates me when people pretend that’s not there. But perhaps my twist is what I call dark optimism. I don’t see anything about these times that prevents us from telling beautiful stories with our lives. And so bringing people together to move beyond both denial and despair and find that meaning, is where I’m finding mine.”
“Once we accept the reality of the moment we’re in, we can focus on how to respond—on making things better than they would otherwise be.”
Responses, Not Solutions
For the average tech guru, ecological and social collapse is a trillion-dollar market opportunity, and aging the next problem to crush. However, Shaun argues that neither are problems, because neither is solvable. Rather, they are predicaments to respond to.
“ Quite often, as we become aware of some of the immense challenges of our time — the ongoing unraveling of ecological, economic, and social systems — we naturally want to talk about those difficult realities with others around us.” Yet trying to do so can leave us labeled as depressing doomers. “But what you’re really trying to get to”, says Shaun, “is how do we respond? The Deeper Dive is meant as a place where we all know about the dark in our times. In some sense, this means we can stop needing to focus on it, and instead take that as the context within which we discuss the optimism.”
“Once we accept the reality of the moment we’re in,” Shaun says, “we can focus on how to respond—on making things better than they would otherwise be.”
Embodying Alternative Lifeways
“In the Deeper Dive, we meet with guests who are all walking very different, meaningful paths through these tumultuous times. We’ve found that over the six years we’ve been running this program, those guests become avatars for different impulses inside our participants. Maybe there’s a part of us that wants to become an educator, like Nate Hagens or Rachel Donald. Another part may want to retreat from the world, become a writer, and decrease their dependency on destructive systems, like Mark Boyle. Tadzio Müller, the founder of Collapse Camp, on the other hand, embodies a different impulse, one that longs to create a political movement and a mobilizing narrative around collapse awareness…”
Leah Manaema Avene is one of the guests who speaks from Indigenous perspectives. For their communities, collapse — the apocalypse — is not an abstraction but a lived reality. “ They’ve already had their way of life destroyed”, continues Shaun. “They’ve already had their ecological context devastated. Such cultures often bring millennia of experience of true sustainability, but they are also among the veterans of collapse, and of responses.”
The Deeper Dive is for those seeking insights and allies to help themselves and their localities through profound change, and is now enrolling. Join 50 fellow journeyers in this stimulating and important inquiry.
“Once we accept the reality of the moment we’re in, we can focus on how to respond—on making things better than they would otherwise be.”
Responses, Not Solutions
For the average tech guru, ecological and social collapse is a trillion-dollar market opportunity, and aging the next problem to crush. However, Shaun argues that neither are problems, because neither is solvable. Rather, they are predicaments to respond to.
“ Quite often, as we become aware of some of the immense challenges of our time — the ongoing unraveling of ecological, economic, and social systems — we naturally want to talk about those difficult realities with others around us.” Yet trying to do so can leave us labeled as depressing doomers. “But what you’re really trying to get to”, says Shaun, “is how do we respond? The Deeper Dive is meant as a place where we all know about the dark in our times. In some sense, this means we can stop needing to focus on it, and instead take that as the context within which we discuss the optimism.”
“Once we accept the reality of the moment we’re in,” Shaun says, “we can focus on how to respond—on making things better than they would otherwise be.”
Embodying Alternative Lifeways
“In the Deeper Dive, we meet with guests who are all walking very different, meaningful paths through these tumultuous times. We’ve found that over the six years we’ve been running this program, those guests become avatars for different impulses inside our participants. Maybe there’s a part of us that wants to become an educator, like Nate Hagens or Rachel Donald. Another part may want to retreat from the world, become a writer, and decrease their dependency on destructive systems, like Mark Boyle. Tadzio Müller, the founder of Collapse Camp, on the other hand, embodies a different impulse, one that longs to create a political movement and a mobilizing narrative around collapse awareness…”
Leah Manaema Avene is one of the guests who speaks from Indigenous perspectives. For their communities, collapse — the apocalypse — is not an abstraction but a lived reality. “ They’ve already had their way of life destroyed”, continues Shaun. “They’ve already had their ecological context devastated. Such cultures often bring millennia of experience of true sustainability, but they are also among the veterans of collapse, and of responses.”
The Deeper Dive is for those seeking insights and allies to help themselves and their localities through profound change, and is now enrolling. Join 50 fellow journeyers in this stimulating and important inquiry.