One of the aspects of an entity having an identity is being able to express it by a code. Whether it liberates or binds its actions is left to perspective. When declaring an entity as identical to another, we are satisfied at evaluating whether one is a replication of the other, but this is seldom sufficient to capture such replication. Idempotence can now step in to eradicate the doubts of variations when we often replay past interactions between entities in angst, asking whether their outcome would be the same. A singular entity should be comprehensible via its expression of Indivisibility, Oneness and Unity. These form such a wonderful trinity where taking the first two together form the pillars of individuality, whereas the third is the expression of a grand final state leagues beyond individuality alone, yet maintaining continuity with everything that comes before.
Such strong forces, each of these attributes describe. When applied to a person, they express themselves as questions. Questions that some might try answering for themselves, over an entire lifetime, only never to reach the semblance of an answer. Some might be tempted to avoid them all together, only to encounter other similar forces forming a boundary that feels almost pre-determined. Whether resulting from external engulfment or emerging from internal undertaking, we cannot escape entification.
If a country is to be taken as an idealized result of the entification of a People; and a culture, the result of a shared history, the former would have you be one among and the latter would prod you to be one alike.
However, for a Person, when such questions and forces assert their influence as we endure that endeavor to attain the magnum opus that is Unity, the result is a void that rationality alone cannot diminish.
What comes beyond rationality? Is there, or should there even be such a way of enacting, where it is not rationale alone that drives our actions to fruition? How should one act when the greatest tool that one possesses does not work?
Yet introspecting on such a thought is unmistakably human. The perspective of Humanism so cleanly captures the interactions that drive results when one inevitably finds oneself in the void. We act nevertheless. We act surpassing uncertainty. We act scared, hopeless and trembling in the darkness. We Act.
That is what I have learnt after acting to flood the embedded void within, after leaving my home country and venturing beyond what seems to be —seas, identities, countries and finally Peoples.
Beyond historical, cultural, socio-economic and political…
1. We have practically reached 1.5 degrees of warming already.
2. How can you prepare for a 60 degree heat event? Would you even survive?
3. Your wife or husband may leave you for someone who can keep cooler for longer.
4. Your hypocrisy will feel intolerable, almost to the point of suicide.
5. One day you will scrabble around in the soil as you finally realize what is happening, looking for something cool and reasonable to reassure you.
My dear, dear reader.
Let us discuss the contemporary human predicament, and for now, let us just focus on climate. Moreover, I just want to focus on the 1.5 degree warming limit aimed for by the so-called Paris Agreement. (There was an agreement. It was in Paris. But that is all you need to know. It was useless in curbing the climate catastrophe to any significant degree.)
Some responsible scientists note that we have practically reached 1.5 degrees of warming already, now, in 2026. For example Tad Patzek, Kevin Anderson, Bill McGuire and James Hansen. The conservative consensus of the politically-driven IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) of the United Nations, has proclaimed that 1.5 degrees can only be declared after it has been averaged over 20 years. However, since man-made climate change is probably accelerating (research the scientists above), by the time the 1.5 degree average is declared by the IPCC, global warming will have reached nearer 2 degrees, year on year. And by the time 2 degrees of average global warming is declared, it will actually be nearer 3 degrees, and so on. Do not be lulled into a deathly sleep by the IPCC and the self-serving politicians served by them.
How old will you be in 20 years? It would be prudent to imagine the likely 2 degrees of warming in 2045 and its potential impacts on your life, and it would be prudent to start to prepare now for those impacts, for they will not be slight. Averages of global warming are primarily given for the planet as a whole, but warming over land (where humans live) is always higher than the land-ocean average. A conservative estimate is that 2 degrees of global warming translates to at least 3 degrees of warming over land. Moreover, this warming is not evenly distributed, even over land. Both Europe (where I am from) and Canada (where I live) are warming twice as fast as the global average. So, if you live in these places, (and some select other places) imagine an average of 6 degrees of warming over land, in 2045 (a very reasonable scenario, all things considered). But it gets worse. The bell curve of statistically probable temperatures is shifting towards the hotter end of the spectrum as a whole: this means that rare heat extremes which, for example, due to the current Super El Niño, in Europe are now spiking to around 40 degrees, from an average June high of around 30 degrees, will be several degrees hotter than today. Moreover, as baseline global warming increases, scientists are observing that temperature spikes are increasingly exponentially. So the famous temperature spike of 25 degrees-above-average in Lytton, British Columbia, during the North American heat dome of June 2021, taking the temperature to 49 degrees, if mirrored in 2045 (from a baseline average of 30, instead of 24) could result in an exponentially bigger spike of, for example, 30 degrees, resulting in a 60 degree temperature event. This is not unreasonable conjecture, but is within the likely range of scenarios. Even 55 degrees would be catastrophic enough, I am sure you agree.
How can you prepare for a 60 degree heat event? Would you even survive? Maybe you would if it happened now, but how about when you are twenty years older? And what about your children?
No amount of reasoning can help us now. All I can appeal to, is your greed, and your fear (my greed, my fear) and Heaven help us, our sense of poetry. Centre of the Web is a global platform, but since its readers are so far mostly from so-called developed countries, I aim this post mainly at you.
You will crave after those fond memories of swims in lakes with your family, followed by ice-creams and board games. You will feel compelled to swim in lakes in all seasons, to somehow make yourself tough enough (though you will not really understand why you are doing this), and the board games you play will tend towards the kind that attempt to teach survival skills.
You will, pathetically, be more and more proud of the less and less valuable things you own, and become impressively more strategic in how you plan to sell them. Many of your cutting edge gadgets will cease to function in 50 degrees of heat, as will your shares in the companies that produce such gadgets.
Your wife or husband may leave you for someone who can keep cooler for longer. You must understand, times will become desperate; it is for the sake of your children.
Your liberal-left attitudes towards immigration will harden into hard right attitudes, as the Global South capitalizes on the acclerated warming in the North, engaging in long, drawn-out economic hit-and-runs. Unconsciously, you will sympathize with the raiders. Your hypocrisy will feel intolerable, almost to the point of suicide (and for some, to the point of suicide).
Even when things become hellish, you will attempt to continue with your daily routine, as if nothing extraordinary is happening. You will keep going to the gym despite the extravagent expense and its drain on electricity, and the smashing of gym equipment by local activists. Only the neonazis taking over will finally convince you to renounce your membership. You will only be mildly surprised when your clubcard membership to various other outlets suddenly becomes null and void, on account of the mass bankruptcy of those outlets, due to heat-induced supply chain failures.
Finally, you will be upset, very upset, when your favourite butterfly suddenly goes extinct, in the space of a single season. At this, and only this, you will cry your eyes out….One day you will scrabble around in the soil as you finally realize what is happening, looking for something cool and reasonable to reassure you, to grab onto. You will unearth only an odd piece of plastic, and you will stare at it for an eternity, expressing perfectly how powerless and divorced from nature you feel…
Of course, if you somehow manage to change direction in your life, in an extraordinary way, before all of this unfolds, and if enough other people do the same, a small percentage of these kinds of outcomes may be partly avoidable or subvertable into a less dark kind of poetics, as represented in your thoughts, the stories you tell to yourself and your friends, the posts you post on decrepit social media platforms, and so on. I wish this for you, more than anything in the world. I really, really do.
My name is Matthew Azuley, and I am the founding editor of Centre of the Web. I am also the editor ofthe globally diverse anthology Climate Collapse? Calls to Action from Around the World, published by Arkbound in the UK.
Part of me hopes that this summer is catastrophically hot because fuck you, and fuck them. It is just that I want you, I want them, to wake up to the unfolding reality of climate collapse. I am not an accelerationist, but sometimes I get profoundly frustrated.
Of course, in my better moments, actually the majority of the time, I do not think the above. But it does not matter what I think. According to James Hansen et al, who is usually proved right, 2026 is likely to be the hottest year on record, with 2027 being even hotter. Sure, this is confused and compounded by a Super El Nino, but that is no reason for complacency: the Super El Nino itself is suspiciously strong, shaping up to be the strongest we have had in 140 years, apparently. How will this affect so-called climate tipping points? Nobody knows for sure, but it does not look good.
Some climate scientists, I have observed, have started to dispense with academic formalities in their science communications, in an attempt to get through to the indolent masses, and make it clear that they don`t share the consensus of the tepid climate science mainstream, which often underestimates or underemphasizes the extent of the climate threats now facing us as a planet. James Hansen is a good example. His scientific papers are these days peppered with irreverant swipes towards the climate science establishment as well as some daily English expressions of the sheer mind-boggling severity of the unfolding climate catastrophe. Bill McGuire is another good example. Bill, a socialist activist as well as climate scientist, recently released The Fate of the World.
Every kind of communication on the severity of the climate crisis has been tried by scientists, activists and social movements, from the scientific, to the optimistic, to the brutally honest and deliberately shocking (hence the title of this post). None of it seems to work, The global population in general isn`t ready to hear it, or is generally either too economically comfortable or too mired in socio-economic problems to which climate collapse is closely related. Consequently, we drift towards various unpalatable futures: war, civilizational Collapse, or bloody coups and revolutions. None of these outcomes are welcome, but we may have to deal with all of them, to varying degrees at different stages of our lives, depending on where we live in the world and how old we are.
Yet, there will always be pockets of humanity committed to thriving and helping others to thrive. This has become my strongest vision and my most important work.
I dread the size of the bugs as the world gets hotter and more humid, but the bugs mean me no conscious harm, and perhaps some of them will be edible.
As I live in a foreign country now, I dread being forever cut off from my family back in my homeland, due to global war and the collapse of (affordable) aviation, but when I do see them, it will be all the more sweet.
I dread my moderate health problem getting worse, and not being able to find a doctor (or affordable one) who can treat me. And I dread painkillers becoming inaccessible or prohibitively expensive, but I am looking forward to experimenting with natural painkillers that I can harvest myself.
I dread the continual worsening of the wildfire season in Canada, but I am curious about the farmland that may open up in the north.
I dread marauding gangs in a Mad Max future, but look forward to being part of a good gang.
I dread the collapse of governments, but look forward to the creation of more localized and appropriate ones.
In times of Collapse, I dread what I may become, but I look forward to the better version that I will strive to be…
Featured image: ‘Aerial View’ 1996, acrylic on board
In 2000 I found a studio, housed within and named after an old Chocolate Factory, where the plan was to house 100 artists. It was a walk across the park from my flat and near to the allotment! I was creating my little natural world in London! I was the first artist in and my work became freer. I painted, sculpted, crafted, and made clothes, mostly from recycled materials.
‘Red Still Life’ 2000, oil on canvas
I came across a leaflet for a residency at Dorland Mountain Arts colony in California, applied for it and was accepted. Somehow, I made the money to go and so I made drawings of an ambitious painting I wanted to do there. I tentatively bought a huge roll of canvas thinking that I could cut it down when I arrived if it was too big.
In March 2001 I arrived at Dorland and I was shown to where I would be staying for the next month. Wow! The Retreat was sensational. It sat nestled on a remote hillside with fabulous views all around. It was a massive building with a canvas roof and windows which showed the moon coming up at night. The wood burner was the only source of heating and I had never lit a fire in my life. I soon learned and became an expert.
The Retreat
Robert, a permanent resident showed me inside the house and when he got back to the front door, he said “oh, and there is this…” He lifted a pole at the side of the front door and the whole front wooden wall opened out onto a concrete balcony. The amazing thing was, there was a massive drawing board attached to this wall and it was exactly the size of my canvas! Needless to say I didn’t cut it down and I spent the whole month painting outside.
Front wall, living space, and communal dining room
‘Past Life Present’ 2001, oil on canvas
My work had got bigger and bigger over the years, from tiny black and white graphics to this, a massive, colourful oil painting on canvas. It is about a vision I had of me and my relationships to people in a past life as Native Americans. The other people in the painting are from my present life.
I met a beautiful man called Ben at Dorland, who made amazing sculptures in wood. We hung out together throughout the month. I realised later in the month that I had fallen in love with him, but he had a girlfriend so I never told him. Keeping my feelings to myself was hard. When I left Dorland, I got onto the Greyhound bus and began to feel ill. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I was getting up to ask the driver to take me to a hospital when I instinctively pulled out a piece of paper and pencil and started writing. I wrote a 46-verse love poem about Ben on the bus and when I had finished, the pain in my heart had gone.
Dorland was an amazing break from my madness and gave me the motivation and energy for the beginning of a new life.
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