It is important to re-state the truth: Our very survival as a species may now be under threat. A mass of other species have already been committed to extinction. That’s why we are in rebellion.
The sixth mass extinction and climate breakdown are happening right now. The truth is that everything is not going to be OK. Even if destruction of ecosystems stopped tomorrow and greenhouse gas emissions peaked, we will still experience the consequences for a long time.
People sometimes say we are hurtling toward a cliff edge, but the truth is that we’ve already breached planetary limits. We are already in the unsafe zone of the Earth-system. There are ‘limits to growth’. The job of XR is better conceived as stopping us crashing to the bottom of the cliff and lying bloodied on the rocks, than as stopping us going off the edge: we’re already over the edge. We need to halt our deadly descent. It is going to be incredibly hard; though, as we do it, the rewards are immense: we can make our lives better in all sorts of ways: for instance, less insecure, less lonely, and more local.
