The Burden of Knowledge

"A Eulogy for Richard Heinberg" 

 

Even people who don’t talk about climate change know that their lives are getting worse, in many cases, not better. They know that their friends’ and family’s lives are getting worse, not better, in various ways. It might be loneliness; it might be health; it might be just generalized anxiety. So they look for stories to explain it. And then you’ve got all these opportunists coming along to say, blame the immigrants or blame Trump or blame whoever. It’s a blame game, you know; it’s just whoever wants to come along and say, blame them, blame that. And people are really attaching themselves to stories of blame if it helps them feel self-righteous. Because there’s this wish to somehow be better than the mess and think that the mess can be defeated, and that’s natural, and it’s completely wrong and counterproductive.

– Jem Bendell, MEER interview, September 1, 2026

Richard Heinberg passed on July 19. His Wikipedia entry calls him an American journalist and educator, but he was far more than those meager appellations permit. He wrote 14 books and countless essays, all meticulously researched and each one brilliant. Like me, he spent formative years in a spiritual community, in his case, Colorado’s Sunrise Ranch. I came to know him when I read his book, The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies in 2003. I bought a case of the books to give out to friends and switched from my publisher to his. I was treated to his fiddle-picking for more than twenty years as we shared book and lecture tours.

Lately I've noticed that, as more people realize our collective goose may truly be cooked, there is, besides hand-wringing, denial, and grasping for untenable “solutions,” a growing urge towards peace and reconciliation. In my view, humans have always meddled with nature. You could say that is in our nature. We are the great disturbers in the grand ecosystem design. Homeostasis, as it has evolved, now relies on homo-stasis.

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We are Gaia’s epigenome. Our role now is to midwife a post-Anthropocene recovery by regenerating carbon-capturing, harmony-restoring ecosystems, even if much of that may only come to fruition after Homo collosus has left the stage.

In his last book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (2021), Richard’s advice to young people was broader than “prepping.” 

Practical self-reliance, he wrote, was necessary but not enough: you need to learn social competence, and not the kind that issues from clickbait. Health, ecological literacy, and emotional resilience, including collective trauma repair, will aid you in all aspects of life in our uncertain, but very dire future.

The skills Richard listed:

• Grow food; study permaculture.

• Read people, especially to judge trustworthiness.

• Be trustworthy yourself.

• Express yourself clearly and persuasively.

• Consider not reproducing.

• Make decisions by consensus.

• Repair and use simple, durable technologies.

• Fix farming and construction tools and small engines; make spare parts from salvaged materials.

• Defend yourself.

• Heal the body through nutrition, herbs, and basic emergency care.

• Learn local nature: plants, birds, and insects; become comfortable in the wild.

• Produce beauty through art, music, or movement.

• Learn to process trauma emotionally.

We are Gaia’s epigenome.

I have been toying with the new A.I. tools for creating content, aware that every use carries nasty energy, water, and climate side effects. I am hopeful my personal lifestyle, which produces extra energy and water while actively reversing climate change in many and sundry ways, mitigates at least some of that damage. Regular readers here may recall my experiments with the Trump Crime Family Coloring Book. Richard’s list offers a more positive use of this coloring book format, geared towards younger children.

Shortly after Richard passed, I started to draw a 32-page, all-ages coloring book that turns his advice into a practical, non-alarmist journey. A teenage protagonist named Maya learns to care for food, tools, bodies, ecosystems, relationships, creativity, and community. She is supported and guided by her neighbors: Richard, an inventive friend who loves repair and mechanical systems; Aunt Jo, a gardener, herbalist, and patient teacher; Sam, a skilled listener and facilitator of community meetings; and Maya’s ecovillage of people of varied ages, bodies, and cultures, emphasizing that resilience is cooperative rather than individualistic. The panels emphasize food growing, permaculture, trust, communication, consensus, repair, first aid, nature knowledge, art, and trauma processing.

Here are a few early draft pages of my coloring book, turning Heinberg’s recommended skills for youth into pages that might inspire them with a sketch—and let them paint the picture.

Let’s end these wars. We support peace in Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to end the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. With your assistance, it will continue. We have a pipeline to aid in the West Bank that may only last a short time, so we appreciate immediate donations—right now.

We support Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road, and we work to heal collective trauma worldwide through the Pocket Project. I will be attending Thomas Hübl’s Healers on Healing event September 17 and so can you! It’s free. There is more about our work on the Global Village Institute website (GVI.cool). I appreciate your support.

Could you help me get my blog posted every week? All Patreon donations and subscriptions to Blogger, Substack, and Medium are welcome. You make this happen. Your contributions can be made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! Donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. So the lesson is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

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We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.