TL;DR
The dominant environmental script swings between apocalyptic despair and techno-salvation, with not much room in the middle. This essay examines how historical societies actually navigated serious environmental stress and what resilience looked like at different scales. The point isn’t to downplay what’s coming. It’s to reframe it as an adaptive challenge rather than end times or business as usual. That shift buys us some clearer thinking, better choices, and a more productive way to meet the profound transitions ahead.
I presume that most people have heard of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, world-famous for his lush, energetic Baroque masterpieces. But he was also a spy. Kings and queens across Europe wanted him to paint their portraits, and he used access to royal courts to trade information and was instrumental in brokering a peace treaty between England and Spain in 1630.
Here is one of his paintings, which centres on the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, standing atop a crescent moon and crushing a serpent beneath her feet.
The truth is that humans have always been drawn to apocalyptic and salvationist narratives, especially when spiced with intrigue. Well, we love a story for starters, and really love one where the hero saves the world from disaster, just like Superman, Batman, the Avengers, James Bond… you get the idea.
We like the bit in the hero’s journey where the angel can cast out Satan, but she has to do this; otherwise, our story ends. But what we really like about heroes, beyond the defeat of the baddie, is the risk they take of losing their soul or their family, a loved one, in the course of the casting out. Then the outcome is much more uncertain and emotionally engaging.
What will be the heroic arc to save humanity from the apocalypse of overabundance? Will it come from peddlers of the dominant environmental discourse? Either the folk with dystopian visions of collapse or those with faith in technological salvation in the time it takes not to look up. Such polarised narratives can be emotionally compelling but are rarely empowering.
We have had these heroes among us for a while. They tend to overuse apocalyptic rhetoric, which disempowers rather than galvanises. They are countered by unbridled techno-optimism that will have us setting up colonies on Mars.
This essay explores a few of these stories before reframing environmental change as an adaptive challenge. It suggests we might need a different kind of hero, perhaps with more to lose, who can tackle a much richer engagement with complexity.
Let’s begin with the first premise that Satan may be among us…
Apocalyptic environmental narratives dominate public discourse despite limited utility
Talk of imminent collapse, irreversible tipping points, and civilisational doom has become a common feature in media, activist messaging, and even scientific communication. These emotionally compelling narratives attract attention, making them powerful tools for raising awareness. And there are endless examples, but here are two.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change documentary Before the Flood (2016) opens with the kind of imagery that doesn’t leave much room for doubt. Melting ice caps. Burning forests. Flooded cities. It’s mainstream media doing what it does best when it wants to move you fast.
Produced with National Geographic, the film frames environmental collapse as urgent and irreversible, and it keeps that pressure on with dire warnings about civilisation’s trajectory. Scientists and activists lean on tipping points, like methane release from permafrost or coral bleaching, where the system can lurch and then fail to recover. Cross a threshold, and the warming accelerates.
So the narrative is built to hit the viewer in the gut, then convert that shock into motivation for climate action by making collapse feel imminent. The hero did most of his heroism in other roles.
Perhaps understandably, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tends to write like a committee, with careful language and qualified claims. But once those reports hit the media, the centre of gravity shifts toward the sharpest edge.
Coverage often pulls out the most dramatic conclusions and builds the surrounding story. Headlines like Code Red for Humanity (from the 2021 IPCC report) elevate phrases such as irreversible impacts, runaway warming, or tipping points. The summaries aren’t untethered from the science, but the framing gets compressed into stark warnings that can read like a countdown to societal collapse or uninhabitability unless decisive action is taken.
Some scientists find portrayals like this controversial. Still, it’s one way the broader public gets the weight of inaction. However, the drama is dry and remote, lacking the personal touch.
There are many examples like these where the emotional rhetoric of collapse is expected to provoke concern, drive engagement, and potentially inspire change. At least that is what we suppose the proponents thought should happen… to frighten people into action. The problem is that this is more villain than hero.
Then the psychology researchers got to work. They found that fear-based messaging without accompanying pathways for action often triggers eco-anxiety, learned helplessness, or denial, rather than motivating pro-environmental behaviour. A classic consequence of the dissonance and dissociation we found in a previous essay. While short-term urgency can spark action, as when all my neighbours helped each other during a bushfire in our street, sustained engagement typically requires a sense of agency and hope. The story is only uplifting if we can believe that Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman can actually defeat the baddies.
Psychologists also found that a focus on worst-case scenarios can obscure the complexity and variability of environmental change. It can eclipse stories of adaptation, resilience, and innovation, the very narratives more likely to inspire systemic and individual responses. For this reason, many scholars and communicators argue for a shift toward framing that integrates urgency with possibility.
But partly because it excels at capturing attention, apocalyptic framing dominates, even though its limited utility is well-documented. The evidence strongly supports the apocalyptic narrative premise.
Just to be certain, let’s reinforce the premise with another one that doubles down.
Collapse rhetoric often reinforces inaction rather than motivating change
Collapse rhetoric is the story that environmental breakdown inevitably cashes out as social or civilisational collapse. It’s a compelling frame ready to shock and grab attention. But there’s a catch because when a threat feels insurmountable or inevitable, people don’t mobilise. They shut down; emotionally, cognitively, or both. My wife does this after about 30 seconds of me enthusiastically recounting my latest anecdote of doom. Researchers sometimes refer to the pattern as defensive avoidance with a consistent outcome of inaction because people feel powerless.
You see it in younger people, too. High exposure to doomsday messaging shows up as eco-anxiety, the dread, burnout, and numbness from the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm and the persistent distress caused by observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change on the planet’s future.
And then collapse rhetoric bleeds into politics to corrode trust in democratic processes and make extremist or authoritarian responses feel like the only serious option. Once a population believes it’s on the brink of extinction, strongman tactics become more acceptable. Actions that would otherwise read as plainly undemocratic. Politicians start claiming that, to save the nation, they must bypass slow democratic processes, ignore court rulings, or silence the opposition.
We’ve seen this movie before. It played out in the Weimar Republic’s final years in Germany, and it delivered a catastrophically flawed leader.
Collapse narratives do highlight urgency, but they often reinforce inaction by overwhelming individuals rather than mobilising them toward constructive, collective change. In communities already experiencing structural inequality, such rhetoric can exacerbate feelings of marginalisation and further reduce engagement. People are still concerned about environmental risks, but how we frame these challenges fundamentally shapes responses.
Somehow, we need the narrative of urgency while preserving human agency, exactly what mindful scepticism advocates. But before we get all high and mighty about new options, it is worth looking back to see if humans have been in similar positions of resource stress before and what they did about it.
Historical analysis offers overlooked insights into navigating environmental transitions
Environmental history, archaeology, and historical ecology tell a messier story than the collapse-only version. Past societies did get hit by climate shifts, resource depletion, and ecological disruption, but their outcomes weren’t uniform. Some collapsed. Some moved. Some improvised. Some redesigned institutions to fit a tighter world. And across those cases, the record is crowded with adaptive strategies, early warning signals, and resilience mechanisms that show how different groups absorbed stress or failed to.
Jared Diamond’s comparative analysis in his book Collapse is probably the most familiar and comprehensive examination of how societies have historically navigated environmental challenges, but his work represents just the tip of an extensive research iceberg. Archaeological evidence from institutions like the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program shows that human societies have successfully adapted to ice ages, volcanic winters, and regional climate shifts for over 300,000 years. Collapse wasn’t inevitable when adaptations were possible through sophisticated technological, social, and cultural innovations.
Japan’s Edo period is often read as a top-down sustainability story. The Shogunate responded to a timber crisis with strict forest management, recycling systems, and a tightly regulated internal economy that stabilised resource use. The Zuni people offer a bottom-up model of resilience. Through traditional ecological knowledge that enabled runoff farming and waffle gardens, they maintained food security in a fragile arid landscape for centuries.
With sea levels rising, the Dutch have leaned on centuries of water management and built on 1,000 years of engineering dikes, canals, and flood control systems. Their adaptation strategy today includes projects like Room for the River, which reshapes urban and rural landscapes to accommodate periodic flooding rather than fight it. Because this is proactive and culturally embedded, it lets the Netherlands manage climate risk with confidence and precision, unlike societies that meet environmental change as something wholly new and destabilising.
And there are plenty of similar examples from Balinese water temple systems, Icelandic fisheries management, to Aboriginal fire management in Australia that demonstrate complex adaptive strategies that maintained both ecological and social stability across centuries of environmental variability. The heroes here have humility. Rather than control or conquer, they understand that their role is to facilitate natural cycles that were established long before they were born and must continue long after they are gone.
Pragmatic insights and solutions like these remain largely absent from mainstream environmental policy discussions, which tend to focus either on future projections or present-day technological fixes.
In short, this premise holds and gives us the key insight that human societies have always been adaptive systems. So instead of an apocalypse that requires the ecclesiastical imagery of Baroque painters, what happens if we assume that adaptation is an option?
Past societies demonstrate successful adaptation through incremental innovation and social flexibility
Many past societies did adapt to ecological change. Not with a single grand redesign, but with small, cumulative moves. Better farming. Tighter water management. More trade options. Shifts in land tenure. The sweeping, cinematic reset was the exception. Most of the time, it was accretion, not breakthrough.
For example, indigenous Andean societies developed terracing and irrigation methods to cope with variable mountain climates, and medieval European communities adjusted land-use patterns and communal resource management during the Little Ice Age. Even the British, during the sea blockades early in World War II, set out to turn as much spare land as possible into gardens to grow food.
These responses were neither static nor utopian; they evolved and often depended on the ability to renegotiate norms, redistribute resources, or alter governance structures in response to changing conditions. In short, people and their systems were flexible.
Incremental change reinforces the key point often overlooked in modern environmental policy, that adaptation does not always require radical disruption or high-tech intervention. Instead, it often hinges on resilience-building practices embedded within communities, sustained by cultural knowledge, responsive institutions, and feedback loops between people and their environments.
In Iceland, adaptation was a string of pragmatic pivots. Grain gave way to pastoralism. Diets leaned harder on the sea, especially fish and seabirds. Turf became a managed building resource. These were flexible responses to variability during the Medieval Warm Period, built from social organisation and accumulated ecological knowledge.
Between 600–1300 CE, the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest built adaptation into the landscape. Check dams, terraces, and canals to capture scarce water. Crop diversification, including drought-tolerant maize. Communal granaries and other storage to buffer short-term shocks. Late 13th century droughts, plus population pressure and possibly internal conflict, contributed to the abandonment of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. People migrated, and Puebloan life reorganised in new places.
I could go on.
Societies that made it through environmental stress often paired technological innovation with social flexibility, and even then, success was uneven and never guaranteed. The core pattern is iterative through experimentation, adjustment, learning, then more adjustment. This suggests there is a lesson to treat today’s environmental challenges as a moving target and build for continuous adaptation, not one-time fixes.
In other words, we already have countermeasures to the apocalyptic narrative, so we could adopt them as principles to guide our responses.
These historical successes reveal adaptive principles that acknowledge both continuity and transformation
Successful adaptation is rarely all-or-nothing. Societies that endure environmental stress tend to maintain core governance structures, cultural narratives, and mechanisms of community cohesion, while changing how they operate. That blend is the point. Resilience thinking treats continuity and change as a paired move because neither rigid stability nor wholesale transformation, on its own, reliably produces sustainability.
I think this is often forgotten in the fear of change. The assumption is that everything we know and love will be lost, and what replaces it will be uncomfortable or even horrible. Hence, the need for a saviour, religious or secular. Only this is not how it works.
In Tokugawa Japan, the state kept social order and political continuity intact while still reshaping land use, forest management, and economic practice to live within ecological constraints. In traditional Pacific Island societies, cultural cohesion and oral knowledge systems persisted even as people adjusted settlement patterns or fishing techniques in response to shifting marine or climatic conditions. Across cases like these, the idea is how people operate under constraint. Humans are often good at working in loops that embrace feedback, learning, redundancy, and modularity, which maps cleanly onto concepts now foundational in modern resilience frameworks.
Importantly, acknowledging both continuity and transformation avoids two common pitfalls in environmental narratives. The first assumption is that preserving the status quo is always desirable or feasible. The keep everything the same fallacy. The second is the idea that transformation must be total, rapid, or disruptive. When change begins, it will be catastrophic. Instead, adaptation often involves layered, iterative adjustments, where some aspects of a system are stabilised while others evolve. A nuanced understanding like this, drawn from historical successes, is especially relevant today as societies navigate complex transitions without eroding their social foundations or cultural identities.
One further example is necessary here.
The adaptive cycle framework, developed by ecologist and systems theorist C.S. “Buzz” Holling, offers a dynamic model for understanding resilience in ecological and social systems. Rather than assuming stability is the norm, Holling proposed that resilient systems move through four recurring phases: rapid growth (r), conservation (K), release or collapse (Ω), and reorganisation (α). This cycle reflects how systems accumulate resources, become more rigid or vulnerable, experience disruption, and then reorganise into new configurations. Adaptation, in this context, is not about preventing change but about navigating these transitions without losing the system’s core identity or functionality.
The Venetian merchant network is a clean example of adaptation with a backbone. It stayed durable across centuries of political and economic churn by keeping a stable institutional core in place, guilds, maritime law, and banking infrastructure, while still adjusting to new trade routes, shifting alliances, and changing technologies. Japan’s traditional forest management shows a similar pattern in a different domain. Systems evolved through cycles of depletion and renewal, and after periods of overuse, policies like temple-controlled reforestation and community-based resource limits helped sustain the resource over the long run. In both cases, the point is not perfect foresight, but a systemic capacity to reorganise when ecological strain made the old pattern untenable.
An adaptive cycle raises an uncomfortable question of where modern societies are on that arc.
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, countries in the Global North have seen rapid growth across the board, and the appetite for more hasn’t gone away. But many of these societies now carry the classic fingerprints of a late-stage system with accumulated wealth, institutional rigidity, and a growing vulnerability to disruption. That looks a lot like the conservation phase, with clear signs of systemic stress.
If adaptation isn’t pursued proactively, the next steps tend not to be gentle. The path narrows toward collapse or drastic reorganisation.
However, it can’t be everything all the time. There is the problem of scale…
Effective adaptation requires coordinated strategies across scales, from local innovation to institutional change
Environmental challenges like droughts, floods, and biodiversity loss show up locally, but they’re rarely purely local in origin. They’re shaped and amplified by larger forces that include global climate change, economic policies, and geopolitical dynamics. So adaptation has to match the shape of the problem. It has to run across scales from the local, context-specific responses on the ground to institutional and policy-level shifts that enable, fund, and reinforce those efforts.
Bottom-up and top-down at the same time.
Historical and contemporary case studies support this principle. For instance, smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa have adapted to climate variability through crop diversification and water conservation techniques, but these innovations are most durable when supported by access to markets, land rights, and government extension services. Likewise, urban climate resilience projects that emerge from community engagement often depend on integration with municipal planning and national policy for long-term viability.
Resilience literature also points to scale-crossing brokers and polycentric governance as core mechanisms for adaptation. In plain terms, these are the actors, institutions, or networks that move information and resources—and keep policies aligned—across different levels of decision-making. Without that connective tissue, local efforts can get boxed in by higher-level constraints, and top-down strategies can fail because they don’t fit on-the-ground realities.
Here is the thing. Local action within a broader structure is how humans transitioned from living in small bands on the savanna to create large, organised social systems. And it’s what we do now.
The Transition Towns movement, started by Rob Hopkins in the mid-2000s, is a clear example of local, grassroots adaptation. The idea is simple. Build resilience close to home through local food systems, renewable energy projects, and community-based economic support.
Totnes in Devon, England was the first Transition Town, and it became a reference point for how small places can test more sustainable ways of living under climate change, peak oil, and economic instability. The toolkit is a practical mix of community currencies, food co-ops, energy descent plans, and citizen-led infrastructure projects. The aim is to shrink ecological footprints and strengthen local self-reliance.
These efforts scale better when city or national policy makes room for them through funding, legal flexibility, or infrastructure support. By contrast, top-down sustainability mandates often stumble when they lack community buy-in or fail to fit local conditions.
Adaptive framing is more effective than the apocalyptic narrative we began with, but it requires coordination to be a practical tool. And it can’t just be local or structural, it has to be both. Hence, ideas like transition towns, regenerative agriculture networks, and urban resilience programs become functional nodes in a larger system as well as feel good stories.
Adaptive framing is a practical tool that can interrupt business-as-usual drift by restoring agency, time-horizon, and action.
When environmental issues are framed as existential threats with only a narrow set of solutions, the response often collapses into paralysis, denial, or reactionary politics. When the same challenges are framed as opportunities for adaptation, the response set widens. You get more proactive behaviour, more hope, and more participation. It also trains the right stance. It makes room for complexity, uncertainty, and learning. This is everything a mindful sceptic should be.
Cities facing sea-level rise are experimenting with living shorelines and climate-resilient infrastructure, not just to defend against change but to reimagine urban design. Some agricultural systems are adopting regenerative principles that restore soils while enhancing productivity and local food security. Indigenous and place-based knowledge systems, which have always been adaptive, are now being recognised as central to climate resilience strategies.
Adaptation framing also broadens who gets to participate. It invites contributions from education, health, technology, arts, and governance, and it treats meaningful action as distributed and diverse rather than owned by one sector. It also makes room for incremental and systemic work, not a brittle pass fail story of success or failure. That flexibility matters if you want momentum that survives different contexts and longer timeframes.
But the reframing only helps when the opportunities are real. They have to be genuine, achievable, and aligned with what people already care about and can actually do.
Here is the heretical thought.
Our most passionate environmental advocates may be inadvertently sabotaging the very cause they champion. Every time we share another apocalyptic climate headline, and every time we describe environmental challenges as a civilisational collapse, we may be systematically training human brains to disengage.
Cognitive science is unforgiving on this point. When we frame environmental challenges as overwhelming disasters, we activate psychological defence mechanisms that make people less likely to act, even while increasing their anxiety. We’re creating a generation of environmentally anxious but behaviourally disengaged humans.
This demands uncomfortable self-reflection from anyone who cares about environmental issues. Are your climate conversations helping or hindering your efforts? When you share that latest alarming study or catastrophic projection, are you building adaptive capacity or feeding the paralysis machine?
Ask yourself this.
Does this apocalyptic narrative enhance or diminish my sense of agency? Then experiment with reframing one environmental concern as adaptation opportunities rather than a looming threat. The goal isn’t to minimise real challenges, but to activate your exploration mindset rather than your defensive one.
The evidence suggests our environmental future depends less on perfect data and more on our collective capacity to engage constructively with uncertainty. That capacity is shaped, minute by minute, by the stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible.
Neither technology nor collapse is coming to save us from the hard work of adaptation. Despite decades of hoping for either revolutionary breakthroughs or clarifying catastrophes, the evidence suggests a gradual, iterative, and unglamorous change across multiple generations. We have to adapt, and it will take time, trial and error and action.
This is a demanding task, and our culture finds it deeply uncomfortable. We will need to adopt long-term, incremental change rather than find a transformative silver bullet today.
So we don’t need conquering warriors who defeat nature, the traditional hero who uses force to restore the status quo.
The heroes and heroines we need have the humility to accept that the world has changed and then redesign accordingly. Partnership over dominance. Human systems that flow with a volatile environment rather than fighting it.
This kind of heroism is defined by intergenerational integrity and the ability to build social architecture. Much like the biblical Daniel, these figures operate with temporal depth, ignoring short-term political or economic pressure in favour of long-term survival. They’re the bridge-builders who create cooperatives and community trust, so society doesn’t collapse into conflict when resources become scarce.
Ultimately, this is a hero of Tragic Optimism like Malala Yousafzai or Nelson Mandela. The modern heroes for the environment would neither deny environmental loss nor succumb to the paralysis of despair. They would offer the steady, ethical leadership needed to transition into a new reality, and their legacy would be a functioning, resilient ecosystem passed down to the next seven generations.
Could you be one?