⌛️ It’s Ultimatum Time.

Originally published in The Ecologist.

On the recommendation of fellow Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook, I ploughed through Iain McGilchrist’s 1,500-page The Matter with Things.

As people say in the quotes, this book is “an event.” For the green movements, it could well be what Das Kapital was for communism. But the thing about The Matter with Things, as you might say, is that, like Marx’s weighty tome, it is radically incomplete.

McGilchrist’s work is a wonderful sourcebook for our crying-out need to start thinking in terms of processes rather than “things,” to look at the whole rather than the “parts.” But, like just about all such books, it is about theory rather than practice—how things need to be, without anything on how to get there. Marx was famously hopeless on what actually needs to happen, and McGilchrist follows in the same great male thinker tradition.

You know how it is: you read the book, you have that warm, glowing feeling about now being so smart about the world. And then what? Nothing changes because, well, what do you do next? Write a book maybe? Meanwhile, the bad guys are still doing their thing—burn, baby, burn.

There is something about the very act of reading that is implicitly unecological in McGilchrist’s critical sense of our separation from the whole. What reading has come to mean in our culture is separate from acting. There is reading, and then there is acting—separate, atomised, in their own nice, neat silos. The author is not someone real, speaking to you, making demands of you. They are some sort of abstraction. In “serious” writing, the author is supposed to entirely disappear. It’s all in the third person. It’s all part of that “don’t show feelings,” “keep it rational” bollocks culture that enables our societies to rape Nature to the point of extinction and think it’s basically no big deal. Separation enables extraction, which leads to suicide. A process, not a bunch of things.

So, it’s the New Year. Time for a new process. No more of this reading another nice article and then business as usual. I am going to give you an ultimatum—this is direct action time. We need to connect!

If I am going to carry on writing for The Ecologist, then I need at least 100 of you, dear readers, to commit several hours of your time to running a mini-assembly. It’s genuinely no big deal. You get together, on or offline, with a few friends and chat about the state of the world, and then you feed into what will be a global assembly process.

As I hope to show, if I do continue to write articles, this will lead to a world revolution. We have to aim high. It’s the End of the World. 

Of course, I could ask nicely, but, as some of you know, that is not really my style—not least because it doesn’t work. All real change requires real risk. Disruption, we have to understand, is the means to creating connection. Being nice means continuing with separation. We all know this from our personal relationships if we’re honest.

So, I want you to trust me and just do it. And, as I say, it’s not a massive thing. I’m not asking you to go to prison (not yet, anyway). But seriously, if we are to get through the next few decades together, we need to start trusting each other and acting with each other, not just reading.

So, please sign up and share it. Otherwise, my illustrious journalism career with The Ecologist will have come to a premature halt. Life will go on, I suppose. At least for a while.

Happy New Year!