*Ganga Devi Braun* opens this new row as a young person with the experience, wisdom, and speaking ability of a true elder. As with the previous interview (Heinberg) Braun has experience living on an ashram. She speaks of a personal conversation she had with Ram Dass just before he died, but she explains "my guru is the Earth." From a young age she apprenticed in grief work and the art of deep listening. Now she is drawn toward "hospicing humanity." • Viewers familiar with the television survival show "Alone" may recognize *Juan Pablo Quiñonez* as the youthful winner from Season 9. • However, the conversation Michael had with *Frank Forencich* comes in first. This puts an elder's life experience of living and teaching the physical and outdoor capabilities of "the human animal" — all within a worldview grounded in his 1970s reading of the book, Limits to Growth.
ROW 05: WOUNDED LANDSCAPES: *Trebbe Johnson* is a prolific writer, whose life experiences range from guiding wilderness quests to her current focus on sojourning in wounded landscapes, as depicted in her book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places". • Living along the industrial south shore of Lake Michigan, *John Halstead* necessarily communes with nature via a wounded landscape. His personal story of deep involvement in climate activism (to the point of arrest) and speaking authentically with his young adult children about the future he foresees matches that told by Karen Perry (Row 01). His book (and blog), Another End of the World Is Possible, is grounded in a postdoom perspective. • "Beginning with Heartbreak" is the title of the conversation with *Deena Metzger*. She is referring both to wounded landscapes and to wounded habitats for animals whom she encountered during her many decades of projects and writings on her life path as storyteller and healer.
ROW 06: POSTDOOM MEANS DEEPLY ADAPTING: Michael Dowd credits the 2018 paper "Deep Adaptation" by *Jem Bendell* as one of the foremost writings that launched his own quest to read the scholarship underpinning how we can know that climate catastrophe and civilizational collapse are already in runaway mode. • In 2023, Jem invited postdoom leader Karen Perry into his own conversation series, which he titled *"There Are Benefits from Accepting Collapse"*. • In 2023 two of the other core leaders in the postdoom community were interviewd by David Baum for his Collapse Club youtube channel. The title of this conversation: *"Collapse Acceptance Alliance" — Val Christensen and Peter Melton"*. (Learn about the Collapse Acceptance Alliance on the Connect page of the Postdoom.com website.)
ROW 07: ACROSS GENERATIONS *Bill Kauth* is an early leader of the men's movement in the USA, co-founding the Mankind Project and the New Warrior Training Adventure in 1984. He tells the story of how he realized that moving beyond doom is crucial, and toward the realization that, "no matter what befalls humanity, the world will be okay". • *Dave Pollard* is a well-known Canadian blogger who has been helping readers since 2002 understand why this civilization cannot be sustained. Michael Dowd's conversation with Dave is placed here because Bill Kauth mentions him as important in his own learnings about collapse. • *Vanessa Blakeslee* is an award-winning writer, mostly of short stories and poetry. An essay about a road-trip she and her partner took through the major oil production region in Texas came to Michael's attention when the "collapse community" made it popular. Its title: "Our Permian Paradox". (Access Michael's audio recording of "Our Permian Paradox.") Michael and Vanessa discuss the importance of not judging others for "denial" and the importance of Catton's book Overshoot in their shedding unrealistic assumptions about the future of civilization. Recognizing the centrality of "cycles" in the universe has helped her accept the inevitability of collapse.
ROW 08: GRIEF AND GRATITUDE: *LaUra Schmidt & Aimee Lewis-Reau* had already launched their Good Grief Network when Michael recorded this video in September 2019. They offer a 10-step (10 weeks) approach for "peer-to-peer" support circles for those "overwhelmed by collective injustices and eco-anxiety, climate grief, and eco-distress." • *Barbara Cecil*, especially in her 2019 essay-writing collaboration with Dahr Jamail, played a big role in Michael Dowd's decision to shift his own life work into what he came to call postdoom. Barbara co-hosted three episodes in this conversation series, including the next one: • *Stephen Jenkinson*, a.k.a. "Griefwalker", uses his social work experience in a hosptial palliative care wing to correlate how a lack of wisdom in dominant culture's handling of individual death carries over into an unwillingness to "face what's coming" for this society.
ROW 09: CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES: All conversations here articulate their understanding of civilizational and ecological contraction from their religious grounding. • *Richard Rohr*, a Franciscan, founded The Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987, based in New Mexico USA. He speaks of his journey in that shedding the myth of progress was "slow because I held onto my Franciscan optimism and romantic sentimentality about the beauty of the Earth." • *Damaris Zehner* teaches writing at a community college in Indiana; she also devotes time to her home gardening and goat. She learned the joy of simple living while in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. Echoing Stephen Jenkinson (from the previous row), she reflects on Eastern Orthodox doctrine: "The root of all sin is a fear of death." Michah 6:8 is a good practical foundation, summarized as "Love justice, do mercy, and walk humbly with your God." • *Gail Worcelo* is a Passionist nun who is carrying forward the teachings of Father Thomas Berry. She co-founded Green Mountain Monastery in Vermont and is a leader of "Sisters of Earth".
ROW 10: RADICAL EARTH ACTION: *Max Wilbert* and *Derrick Jensen* are well known in the USA for what they call "Deep Green Resistance". Activism to maintain as much of the living world as possible while civilization continues its collapse is their shared prime directive. (Derrick is also a prolific author.) • In 2018 *Roger Hallam* stepped beyond his career as an organic farmer in the U.K. to co-found Extinction Rebellion.
ROW 11: ECOLOGICAL SCIENTISTS: *William Rees* is a Canadian population ecologist best known for the "ecological footprint" concept and tool. This hour-long episode is a superb review of the basic ecological, sociological, and systems science principles underlying the civilizational and biospheric unravelling. (Connie Barlow, a science writer, co-hosted this episode with Michael Dowd.) • Michael was also eager to converse with *Tom Wessels* because of Tom's book, The Myth of Progress. (Michael volunteered his voice for the audiobook.) Key to Tom's science trajectory was reading Black Elk Speaks, Sand County Almanac, and Silent Spring during his first year of college (1969). • Stanford professor *Paul Ehrlich* has written popular books laying out the severe ecological consequences of human overpopulation and overconsumption since the 1960s.
ROW 12: VISIONARY YOUNGERS: *Mike Garfield*, podcast host of "Future Fossils", spent 13 years as a professional musician and visual artist before becoming a parent. His day job now is in communications at the Santa Fe Institute, NM: "I live at the intersection of art and science, and philosophy and spiritual practice." • *Krista Hiser* identifies religiously as a gaian. Trained for university administration, she leads the "Sustainability Education and Key Competencies Framework" at the Global Council for Science and the Environment. She speaks poignantly of how the grief journey following suicide of a loved one gave experience for her coming to terms with a foreboding future for all. • *Gauthier Chapelle* trained as an agricultural engineer in Belgium. He is among the French-speaking leaders of the new field they call "Collapsology". (See also Wikipedia "Collapsology".) A young parent himself, he speaks of how his generation in France is deeply questioning the ethics of becoming parents.
ROW 13: CLIMATE COMMUNICATORS: *Dahr Jamail* is the author of The End of Ice (2019). Acclaimed as one of the best books of climate science for a popular audience, each chapter also delves into the emotional impacts of the science upon the scientists themselves. A core topic of this conversation is the contrasting values between Indigenous cultures and those of dominant culture. • *Robert Hunziker* is a well-known climate journalist in alternative media. This conversation is titled "Abrupt Climate Change: The World Tour." Although recorded in 2020, the grounding science operative in 6 distinct regions is always foundational: Antarctica, Australia, Amazon rain forest, Oceans, Greenland, and Arctic. • *John Englander* (former CEO of the Jacques Cousteau Society), is widely recognized as one the world's foremost experts on the rapidity and unstoppability of climate-induced rising sea levels. Here both of his books provide the focus: High Tide on Main Street and Moving to Higher Ground.
ROW 14: CLIMATE COMMUNICATORS:
Of this second set of climate communicators, *Paul Beckwith* and *Nick Humphrey* have graduate backgrounds in the field. The host, Michael Dowd, runs their conversations as opportunities for viewer education in the science. • *Jennifer Hynes* offers a fascinating story of how she also became a trusted climate communicator. She is the only one of the three who, at the time, were ready and eager to talk about fully accepting "doom" enroute to a postdoom perspective. Jennifer is co-host of the climate episodes of the "Environmental Coffeehouse" on youtube, and Nick also makes occasional appearances there.
ROW 15: ECOLOGY, NUKES, & ECONOMICS: Climate change is far from the only looming doom scenario for humanity, as made clear in this set of conversations. *Sid Smith* is a mathematician in the academy who chose to learn and write and advocate about humanity overshooting the ecological limits to growth. Notoriety came his way when, upon the invitation of the Greens at Virginia Tech in 2018, he delivered a talk titled, "Humanity: The Final Chapter". • *Alan Weisman* recalls touring the world as a top-level environmental journalist. His brief visit to post-meltdown Chernobyl surprised him with the fecundity of plants and animals who reoccupied the buildings and grounds in the absence of humans. Thus was born his best-selling book, The World Without Us. • *Gail Tverberg* used her mathematical gift to earn a living as an actuary — helping finance, insurance, and other business calculate risks when considering shifts in their endeavors. Along the way, she volunteered her time as one of the early contributers in the "peak oil" community, via her blog "Our Finite World".
ROW 16: LIVING IN A TIME OF ENDINGS:
*Jessica Canham* is a leader in the global Deep Adaptation community. Locally, she focuses on helping her community on the Caribbean island of Dominica recover from hurricanes and to become more sufficient in growing their own food. This conversation is unique in also featuring the ethical importance of privileged nations sharing wealth in service to ecological justice and as climate change reparations. • As with the previous conversation, *Dougald Hine* speaks both about his personal shift into localism whilst writing for audiences scattered around the globe. Well-known as coauthor of the "Dark Mountain Manifesto" (2009) and, in 2023, of the book At Work in the Ruins, this conversation was recorded in 2019 and titled "Living in a Time of Endings." • With graduate training in science communication, *Britt Wray* pulls no punches about how the older generations have left a bleak future for the youngers. She began in 2020 with a newsletter titled, "Gen Dread", which translated into the title of her 2022 book, Generation Dread. The tagline is expressly postdoom: "Finding Purpose in an Age of Eco-Anxiety."
ROW 17: POSTDOOM PERMACULTURE & REGENERATIVE DESIGN: In the 1970s, *David Holmgren* cofounded the approach to food-growing known as permaculture. Applying that now to an already collapsing global civilization, his new teachings and writings begin with localism and entail "retrofitting what we already have in the built, the biological, and the behavioral." • Having just experienced one of California's biggest wildfires, the calm and community mindedness of *Denise Rushing* exemplifies the value of a postdoom worldview — both for personal emotional wellbeing in a time of crisis and for cultivating practical love-in-action. Her 2012 book exemplifies this blending: Tending the Soul's Garden: Permaculture as a Way Forward in Difficult Times. • *Daniel Christian Wahl* works in regenerative design. The interview is co-hosted by Ganga Devi Braun. It is a long, ideas-rich episode. Access his essays as reposted on the Resilience website.
ROW 18: BACK TO THE FUTURE: Michael Dowd begins with a recitation not only of the nonfiction and fiction books by *James Howard Kunstler*, but also affirming the ones he himself has read (even read twice) during in his own autodidactic journey to grasp the causes and consequences of civilizational collapse. Foremost was Kunstler's nonfiction: The Long Emergency (2005) and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (2012). Kunstler points to his World Made By Hand fiction series as his own realistically possible best-case scenario: that here in America, conditions would go back to what prevailed in the early 1800s. • *Peter Russell* (still well known for his 1983 book The Global Brain: Speculations on the evolutionary leap to planetary consciousness) doesn't quibble with the certainty of civilizational contraction and a scaling back to previous technological constraints. Where he uniquely differs in this series is his emphasis on meditation, while pointing to "the evolution of consciousness" continuing in a progressive way — despite the "unravelling" of the material world. • *Sandy Schoelles* makes no pretense about having ideas or predictions of her own to share. Rather, she is well known in the "collapse" and postdoom communities for founding a youtube channel that invites others to share what they are learning. The channel is Environmental Coffeehouse. Fans of that channel may wish to go to timecode 24:27 to learn its history and how climate change became the focus.
ROW 19: VOICES FROM NEW ZEALAND, GERMANY, & APPALACHIA: *Kevin Hester* hails from New Zealand where his career for hire as a master sailor and diver offered him direct experience of marine biological decline over decades. Heroes in his youth included Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau. Assisting Guy McPherson in the Nature Bats Last podcast series offered Kevin a foundational understanding of climate change as presented in academic papers.
• *Fabian Scheidler* is an independent journalist and writer in Germany, best known for his book The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization. This is an ideas episode, as the book has been endorsed by the likes of Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, and Vandana Shiva. • Finally, even though *Rory Varrato* lives in the USA, the way he describes his growing up in a collapsed coal-mining town in Pennsylvania makes it clear that he was not a privileged American. Nonetheless, he found a way to pursue interdisciplinary graduate scholarship in existentialism, human nature, the foibles of this form of civilization, and how education might be transformed to serve students in a declining world. He was noticed as a young visionary in 2018 for his essay, "We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction". (Hear Michael Dowd narrate the essay.) During the early days of "Extinction Rebellion" Rory served as media liaison for activists in the USA.
ROW 20: POTPOURRI
*Dean Spillane-Walker* has been hosting "impossible conversations" for those struggling with collapse awareness. Trained in counseling, Dean's website, Living Resilience, features "Transformative tools, support, and practices for people bravely facing human-caused collapse of Earth and human systems." • *Rupert Read* was a philosophy professor at the University of East Anglia, U.K. when he stepped into activism. First in the Green Party and then Extinction Rebellion. After this episode was recorded, he reported on his website that after 26 years in the academy, "I've taken voluntary severance ... to dedicate myself to the Climate Majority Project." • *Joe Brewer* explores and practices regenerative design scaled to bioregions. This work entails attending to the social needs and opportunities as much as those that the regional ecology calls forth. His 2021 book is The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth.
ROW 21: ANOTHER ROUND OF LEADING VOICES: These three videos all entail guests featured in earlier episodes of Postdoom Conversations. Michael Dowd valued them so much that he reprised opportunities for more people to hear them. *Karen and Jordan Perry* appeared in 2022 on David Baum's "Collapse Club" podcast, and it is crossposted here. "Getting Real About Collapse" is the title. • In 2021 Barbara Cecil cohosted with Michael a conversation with *Joanna Macy* titled "Children of the Passage". (The sequel hosted by Dowd appears in Row 3 above and was recorded exactly a year later — during which time, collapse became even more evident. Hence the title, "To Collapse Well".) • The *Meg Wheatley* video here dates to October 2022. Titled "Beyond Hope and Fear", this is actually the first time that Michael recorded a conversation with her for a wider public. The previous conversation with Meg appears in Row 3 above, and it was hosted by Terry Patten in May 2020.
ROW 22: POSTDOOM LEADERS NOW & THEN
Here's yet another superb video interview (by David Baum) of *Karen Perry*, titled "Smoke and Fire" (September 2022). The founding host of Postdoom Conversations, *Michael Dowd*, was interviewed by Terry Patten (September 2020; Terry died one year later). Then in December 2022, *Michael Dowd* was the subject of a "Collapse Club" interview by David Baum. Much of their conversation turned to the linked topics of death and gratitude. Ten months later, Michael Dowd would become a revered ancestor of the Postdoom Community.
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