Departure In Place: An outline for a wildly ambitious book

I’ve been circling this book for a long time without quite realising it. It’s about collapse—yes—but not as apocalypse, not as spectacle, not even as a single event. Collapse here is understood as a long, uneven unravelling of systems that were never built to last, and perhaps never built to serve life in the first place. More importantly, this book is about how we meet collapse. How we orient ourselves in the face of it. How we choose to act—not to preserve the old world, but to seed what might come after.

This is a draft outline for a book I’m calling Departure in Place. It asks what happens when we stop trying to escape collapse through more energy, more money, more control—and instead begin reconfiguring how we live, where we are. It’s a book about walking away from the dying machine, not into isolation, but into mutuality, locality, and the quiet work of building what’s next.

I’m not an expert in any of this—not a climate scientist, historian, or systems theorist. But I’ve spent years thinking about technology, infrastructure and collapse from inside technological and consumer-optimised organisations. I’ve read a fair bit, listened carefully and sat with the sometimes apparently intractable contradictions. And I believe it’s okay to write from that place—not to proclaim, but to inquire, to connect dots, to invite others in. I’m writing this book to learn, and maybe to help others find their footing too.

My initial idea is that I will serialise the various pieces of the book here — 70 topics at last count! — and will then, somehow, figure out the time, headspace and finances to pull it all together into something publishable. I'm not worrying too much about that now — this project does feel book-shaped to me today, but I'm under no illusions about the unexpected things that will certainly happen after step one.

So, I don’t know exactly where this will lead, but I know it feels necessary. And I’d love to hear what it stirs in you.

Chapter 1: Trapped between progress and collapse

The two dominant myths of modernity—Progress and Collapse—paralyse agency; Each myth totalises the future and excludes adaptive alternatives; The Progress/Collapse duopoly is a memetic trap that suppresses complexity and possibility.

Chapter 2: The gospel of progress

Modernity rooted in a teleological belief in perpetual improvement; Industrialisation and techno-solutionism gave the myth material proof; Progress narratives universalise one path and erase cultural alternatives; GDP and growth are moralised as markers of civilisational worth; Progress is able to persist as a myth in part because of the horror of Collapse.

Chapter 3: Progress, the engine of collapse

Progress, when perverted to be equated with growth, is not the opposite of collapse—it is its generator function; Growth has always been subsidised by ecological, temporal and social externalities; Overshoot is not an accident but the inevitable consequence of extractive progress; Overshoot is not just climate—it includes soil loss, ocean acidification, endocrine disruptors, microplastics and more; Debt and financialisation both radically amplify and temporally externalise long-term harm; The rebound effect means efficiency gains drive greater consumption; Collapse is already under way for many ecosystems and communities, including in the rich West/North.

Chapter 4: Survivals unseen

What we measure shapes what we see—and what we overlook; Written history favours the monumental and imperial, and erases subsistence and adaptation; Metrics based on “economic” (meaning financial) activity obscure resilience and mutual aid; Popular histories of collapse erase continuity and oversimplify causes and outcomes; The myth duopoly (progress = good, collapse = oblivion) is reinforced by data bias, media narratives, and institutional incentives.

Chapter 5: Patchwork futures – lessons from real post-collapses

Collapse is rarely total—it fragments large systems and opens adaptive space; Post-Roman Europe, post-Han China, post-Gupta India and Dark Age Greece each reorganised around local resilience; Fragmentation fosters diversity, subsidiarity and new cultural forms; Post-collapse societies are ingenious and innovative — they often retain knowledge, retool infrastructure and develop novel governance; Collapse is best understood as transformation across space and time, not a singular event.

Chapter 6: Complex, high-energy, brittle

Large systems fail nonlinearly due to energy constraints, coupling and over-optimisation; High EROI fuels enabled modern complexity, but returns are declining and costs are stacking up; Efficiency produces fragility—just-in-time logistics, financial leverage and global supply chains amplify shocks; Debt-based capitalism requires perpetual growth, but planetary boundaries make further growth impossible; Green growth is still growth—will still accelerate pollution, sickness, soil depletion, biodiversity loss; Material demand, not carbon alone, is the basis of overshoot; Collapse is already underway in patchy form—and the system we inhabit cannot turn back.

Chapter 7: No escape via clean energy

Clean energy does not liberate us from overshoot—it just enables continued extraction with one less moral barrier; Renewables require destructive mining, fossil-fuelled supply chains and massive up-front investment; The clean energy transition narrative assumes continued economic growth to fund itself—doubling down on the very logic driving collapse; Electrifying everything without reducing demand only scales industrial harm—soil loss, ocean acidification, pollution, displacement; “Green growth” is a myth: there is no historical evidence of absolute decoupling at planetary scale; Meeting human needs within ecological limits means relocalising, simplifying and reorienting—not just swapping energy sources.

Chapter 8: No escape via money or power

Elites seek to insulate themselves from collapse—but isolation is brittle; Do not aspire to join the elites — it will destroy your humanity; Bunker fantasies and hoarding are fear responses that deepen collapse conditions; Relational wealth—trust, care, mutual obligation—is the only form of security that scales; Redistribution is not charity—it is infrastructure for shared survival; The richest may delay collapse for themselves, but cannot survive it alone.

Chapter 9: Departure-In-Place

Departure-in-place means shifting how we meet life’s necessities—away from brittle global systems, toward resilient local ones; This is not a call for degrowth as a target, but for mutuality and local adaptivity in the satisfaction of needs; It is not about withdrawal or purity, but about reducing harm, deepening belonging and becoming less capturable by the collapsing whole; Framework to reflect on current dependencies and explore practical, collective reconfiguration; Relocalisation strengthens both material resilience and relational capacity—two sides of the same survival strategy; As demand shrinks through sufficiency and solidarity—not an imposed economic agenda — planetary systems have a chance to recover.

Chapter 10: Design principles for break-away resilience

Resilient systems must be built on subsidiarity, polycentric governance, diversity; Polyculture in food and energy prioritises ecological fit and resilience; Skill webs and mutual apprenticeship ensure knowledge is embodied, practiced, passed on and developed; Conviviality as a goal grows quality rather than quantity—supporting and enabling what matters here rather than what scales; Break-away systems must be protected from co-optation, suppression, or extraction by the old system as it turns authoritarian—via legal avenues, decentralisation, building cultural legitimacy, networked federation and good old-fashioned stealth and guile.

Chapter 11: Case sketches, 2020s edition

The pluriverse is already emerging in fragmentary and more-than-provisional forms; COVID mutual-aid networks showed how care can self-organise fast; Puerto Rican microgrids reveal energy autonomy in practice; Catalan co-ops, Detroit repair cafés, Indigenous fire stewardship, Kenyan PAYG solar each illustrate points of departure and reconfiguration; No single model exists—only patterns, principles and relational commitments that work in place.

Chapter 12: Choosing our story, day after day

Collapse is not the end of meaning—it is where meaning becomes visible again; We must let go of our stories of progress and salvation to grow new cultural forms; Relational, place-based/pluriversal stories can guide collective orientation; Collapse is not to be feared but met—like death, it asks for presence, purpose and courage; Our work is to become ancestors of viable futures, even if we do not live to see them.

Epilogue: A Larger Us

We are not alone on this journey — others are already planting, tending and building; The pluriverse grows in the cracks; The path forward is not scale, but federation—not purity, but participation; The task is not to be safe, but to be in right relation; If we're organised, every successive failure of the dying machine can be another step on our walking into the new — together, here, now.