The Scottish mining village I grew up in has a rich history, a rich history which has slowly eroded into a quiet poverty. The main street used to house a butcher, baker, village shop, and a post office. The rail track which runs parallel to the shore used to carry coal when I was a child, and, before that, passenger trains into the nearest big town. Underneath those rail tracks were tennis courts built for the miners, and in the woods just a five minute walk away was a public, outdoor swimming pool. I am just old enough to remember it being there, and then ripped away. Deep in the woods in the other direction lies the ruin of a tropical garden of a former manor house long since torn down. This tropical garden housed tropical fruits, made possible by a feat of engineering which used coal and large stones to heat the garden walls so that pineapple could easily grow. The miners rebuilt it in their own time and enjoyed the fruits of their labours for years. It is now overgrown, and those who remember what once grew there are elders who will soon pass.

There are families in my village who have been here for generations. These elders speak of spending summers in the sea and on the beach as children. The beach is no more thanks to the power plant which the rain track runs to; the soot from the coal turned the shore into a different, muddy ecosystem well-loved by birds but not to be swum in by us. I know that when the villagers were still swimming in the sea, it stretched West in a straight line towards an ancient village where the houses are painted pink and yellow and orange. Now, the coastline curves South first, eating into the sea, a vast stretch of artificial land made by the pollution from the coal plant which locals call the ash lagoons.

The miners had a tough job, tough enough to significantly shorten their lives. Yet, somehow, they found the time to maintain the community and negotiate for themselves. They enjoyed a wealth of social infrastructure in comparison to what is now here: a takeaway, a pub. I remember when the post office shut down over a decade ago, and recently discovered that the last remaining post office on this five mile stretch which connects multiple villages to the nearest town was shut down last year. It is almost impossible to imagine, now, that this small village was once a bustling, thriving, independent community. Learning the history as an adult has helped me imagine what it could one day be again. But so much of our social infrastructure has changed, making it that much harder for the residents today to live with one another. Put bluntly: they don't need to. The buses run much less frequently then when I was a child because everyone has a car. Each roof sports antennas for internet and television. One of my mother's neighbours even cut down their three tall, proud fir trees to get a better signal.

Without a cohesive and advocating community, things have started to fall apart. The medical centre went without a doctor for a few years—and when someone eventually took the job, an African man with a young family, he was beaten by a group of racist thugs. The miners who would have taken it upon themselves to punish those teenage boys died some time ago. The doctor left. The community garden which was only christened just over a decade ago, and sprouted a kind group of villagers to chip in and tend the soil, grown food, and care for the trees, has fallen by the wayside as the volunteers age and no young folk are keen to step up and do the work of keeping it going. The village hall is on the brink of being sold by the council, which the community council is fighting desperately to stop. This dedicated contingent have multiple business plans for it. The problem, again, is the shortage of volunteers.

On the bus into town as a teenager, I would watch the elders of the village gather near the front and chat away for the whole journey, easily remembering each other's lineage and history. The bus is quiet, now. There are no regular passengers except the teenagers who are not yet old enough to drive. They sit with their headphones in, as I did. As I often do now.

I've been thinking about the future of the land that raised me recently, and chewing on what its potent history became, every time I come across articles talking about the collapse of our global civilisation, an event timeline which has been accelerated by Trump's illegal war on Iran. Every day, we're fielding warnings about jet fuel and fertiliser running out, about potential food shortages, supply chain breakdowns, an economic crash, and a financial reset which could spike inflation. Alongside that, the artificial intelligence industry is causing numerous white collar job losses, soaking up water and energy, and is threatening to create a permanent underclass. Factor in what has long been on course: resource scarcity, diminishing returns on energy and investment, global heating and biodiversity loss, the future looks frightening and collapse feels inevitable. But when I look at where I come from, and how my resident ancestors lived compared to how the locals live today, I can't help but think so much has already collapsed, is sinking in on itself, weighed down by promises that cannot be kept, by visions devoid of empathy. And any spark of resistance is extinguished by complacency, convenience or fatigue. Things are not just collapsing because of the state of the world. They're collapsing because of the state of us.

It is for this very reason I dislike the word "collapse" to describe what we are living through. As Luke Kemp details in Goliath's Curse, residents of empires which history dictates were in collapse often did not realise themselves. Collapse is not a singular event but a protracted and painful decline, a slow erosion of what is and an erasure of what could be. It is experienced as a new normal for every generation who accept worse living conditions than their parents (the housing market is our greatest example of this, to my eyes: my mother's generation would never have accepted to pay hundreds of thousands for a boxy city apartment, but my own generation readily saddle themselves with lifelong debt just to get on the mysterious "property ladder", unaware it likely now leads to nowhere.)

I am still yet to find the word I prefer to use instead of collapse, but I am coming closer to a definition. Empires always eventually give out, and while their death rattle is often painful it does not signal the end of human society. On the contrary, the death of great vehicles of inequality are often a good thing for the 99%. But before we accept their demise, in the decades or centuries that we still labour under the conviction that things cannot be as bad as they seem; before we help compost these great societies in favour of something else, these Empires thrash madly, desperately trying to reproduce themselves through more violent extraction, extreme tax rates, colonial land grabs and war. And in trying to reproduce themselves, they attack the very conditions that their residents, the very life-blood of Empire, need to reproduce themselves. Dying empires undermine the very conditions that life needs to thrive. That is the pain we are all experiencing today. It is why the miners had tennis courts and swimming pools and a butcher and a baker and a shop and a post office, and why the village I come from seems, today, poor in comparison. We have been robbed. And we let it happen.

Indigenous wisdom warns against thinking in event horizons and instead impels us to consider the great physiological web that cocoons and shields us first: collapse is not the sudden drop on a graph, or midnight on a doomsday clock, or a binary comparison between then and now and then again. Collapse is the gradual and subtle erosion of our social fertility, of our ability to live well together where we are. Like soil erosion, this erosion first sweeps away the top soil, exposing the roots of a place to the elements, undermining their ability to dig in deeper and hold on, rendering them vulnerable to change, to shock, to loss; making dust of our bonds.

In the great neoliberal fantasy of Thatcher and Reagan, we have been eroded to that dust, swirling around each other as independent motes of impotence. It is not the world that will collapse but we who have been undone, and our great, invisible undoing over the many centuries in which capitalist values have dug themselves into our bodies and wrenched us apart from one another have shepherded the great undoing of the world upon which we depend, a great interlinking of the many worlds we once inhabited and cared for, as human beings have always done. Human beings secured themselves throughout history where our hominid cousins failed because we figured out how to produce the conditions for life to thrive. We gardened our way across the world, making living pathways for our kinfolk to follow. That green thumb is our living inheritance, but in so many places around the world it has become nothing more than a fossil. We cannot recover ourselves until we recover it, until we recover this way of being.

I had the great fortune of bumping into one of my former interviewees last week at the Amsterdam Complexity School on Climate Change. We talked late into the evening about mobilisation and what needs to be done in the coming years. She told me that increasingly, for her, the crisis is not climate, scientific, or even political. It is a crisis of values, of the spirit; a rot at the heart of us which cannot sidestep or ignore, but which must be reckoned with with all of our strength and courage. Then she showed me pictures of her garden and the wonderful array of life she has devoted this spring to, and how that devotion is already reaping reward as the shoots of new growth reach towards the sky, towards her. Flicking through them, I thought to myself: This is how we dig out the rot.

My mother called me about a month ago to tell me a village shop has just reopened, offering fresh produce, locally-sourced products, home-baked goods and, of course, coffee. She was so thrilled. It has been decades since the villagers had anywhere to sit and chat, or even to simply bump into one another. Visiting it was the very first thing I did on a trip back, and I smiled joyfully when another customer explained she had just left lunch bubbling on the stove and was nipping in to buy eggs. I returned every day, trying to show my support for this small venture which promises so much to a village that had almost forgotten its history. I sit by the window and watch the villagers dart in and out, like birds surrounding a feeder. They greet each other warmly, they swap tales when they have the time, they offer advice if they can. Something has begun on the land which raised me; a piece of infrastructure has been planted around which we can reseed and regrow, reaching for the sky, for each other.

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