Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

Hi all! I have volunteered to mod for this community. I am new at modding a lemmy community, but this is a topic that genuinely interests me in the details as I am a geologist and many of the ways in which the earth faces collapse intersect directly with and are quantified by geology/climatology.

It is difficult to have an honest conversation about our future in most contexts and it makes sense, the outlook for a stable climate looks bleak, but I find it suffocating how the inability to talk about it keeps large swathes of our future as invisible territory we are unwilling to see.

I see collapse this way, imagine if you were grieving the future loss of a loved one that you could do nothing to stop (they had a terminal disease say for example) would it make sense if everyone around you just encouraged you not to think about it? If they reiterated repeatedly to you to not talk about the details, nor what it will entail practically for the rest of your family, nor the emotions around it...

I see a discussion around collapse as an echo of this but writ large, there are healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with future collapse. There are rational and irrational ways of talking about future collapse.

I think it is important to have a place to talk clearly and realistically about these things in the same way that while you might not want to talk about the intense brutal details of a loved one's terminal cancer in certain contexts that it is necessary to have contexts that you do discuss them in.

I used to read /r/collapse quite frequently on reddit but like everyone else here I wanted to get away from reddit...

I also think it is important to intertwine this space with a sense of the vital human response of art, discussion and healing to the experience of collapse.

From a moderation perspective then, I see the scope and context of this community as both a space for clinical, scientific evaluations of collapse that are difficult to stomach but also discussions of art, personal experiences, and healing in the context of collapse. Novels like The Southern Reach series by Jeff VanderMeer are essential touchstones here to guide us into the future just as much as novels like Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein are.

The community rules are the same as the host instance, sopuli.xyz, though I may consider moderating clearly pseudo-scientific content if it gets really egregious but I don't see that as likely. Downvotes and well written responses are more productive and fair in most cases!