Neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency

Last night I went to a screening of The People's Emergency Briefing in Morpeth, my home town.

The 50-minute film draws on the National Emergency Briefing held in Westminster in November 2025, where scientists and other experts presented the evidence on the climate and nature crisis to politicians and other leaders. Groups are now showing it in community venues across the country. The aim is to build pressure on the UK Government to give a similar briefing on prime-time television.

I watched the film, joined in some of the discussion afterwards, and at one point grabbed the mic to say something about us all being complicit. Which went down like a lead balloon.

The evening reminded me of Jared Diamond's book Collapse, which I read years ago, and which I've gone back to this morning.

Most of it was news to people in the audience

When the discussion started, some people said that around 75% of the information in the film was new to them. Whereas I can't think of anything it said that I wasn't already aware of.

Is this because I'm some kind of genius or morally superior? No, not at all. I just pay attention to what is happening around me, and curate my information environment carefully. Unlike most of my fellow citizens (it would seem) I don't get my news from right-wing newspapers and Instagram/Facebook.

The bigger gap last night was in mental models for thinking about the problem. Because it's 2026 and we have to not only see the content but watch people reacting to the content, the film presented people talking about simple things: the government should do this, we should swap this for that, etc.

My training is in philosophy, history, education, and systems thinking, so I tend to ask what structures produce the patterns we're seeing – and what would need to change for a different pattern to emerge. Anyone can learn to think like this.

All the gear but no idea

There's scaffolding up around casa Belshaw this weekend, as on Monday we're having solar panels and a battery fitted. We've also got a heat pump, an EV, and I'm vegetarian. The film seemed to suggest that households like ours are the answer: switch to the right equipment and we'll be fine!

We won't be.

Replacing one technology with another leaves the rest of the system untouched. Building an EV produces a lot of carbon in terms of embodied emissions before it travels even a single mile, and owning one still assumes a life organised around the private car.

Diamond has a passage I've never forgotten, about the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree:

I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We don't have proof that there aren't palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering"? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.

– Jared Diamond, Collapse

The second of his imagined answers feels close to what the film offered last night: carry on as before, but with better technology.

I'm not sure that's going to cut it.

It's our values that need changing, not just our energy sources

In his conclusion, Diamond says two kinds of choice made the difference between societies that survived and those that collapsed:

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

– Jared Diamond, Collapse

The film said a lot about planning and very little about values. Reconsidering our values would mean asking whether an economy has to keep growing, and whether every household needs its own car and its own copy of everything.

Why do we tolerate a society where cars sit unused 95% of the time, big businesses and "high net worth" individuals get out of paying their fair share of tax, and our news media blames immigrants, trans people, and other minorities rather than grappling with systemic issues?

Yes, it's good that we're getting solar panels but it's an investment that, like our heat pump, requires access to capital that either people don't have or don't prioritise.

And even with solar and heat pumps, how does it actually change the way we live our lives?

As Diamond points out, adaptation is hard:

It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die rather than to compromise and live.

– Jared Diamond, Collapse

Campaigns built on raising awareness assume that people act once they know, whereas Diamond's case studies suggest otherwise. Several of his societies saw the problem coming and failed anyway, as acting would have meant giving up something they valued more.

Prime-time television? In 2026?

The campaign apparently wants the Prime Minister to introduce the filmed briefing on prime-time television.

I can see why this would appeal to a certain demographic: it recalls wartime broadcasts and the Covid briefings of 2020. Those broadcasts worked as the threat was immediate and the request was simple: stay at home.

Climate and nature breakdown needs slower, structural change.

And the bigger problem is that most of the country no longer watches the same thing at the same time. People get their news from feeds designed to keep them scrolling. A broadcast from the Prime Minister would be turned into short clips within the hour, with context stripped out.

To my mind, calling for this kind of thing is at best anachronistic. It assumes a way of paying attention that people gave up on years ago.

What I'd like to see instead

Diamond makes a point about timing:

"In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources. On reflection, it's no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks."

– Jared Diamond, Collapse

If decline can follow quickly after a peak, we don't have time for awareness to build slowly. I'd rather screenings like last night's ended with people organising. That could mean pushing Northumberland County Council on planning and transport, because they can do better, and faster.

Donella Meadows wrote a well-known list of places to intervene in a system, ranked by how much difference each makes. I wrote about it here. Simply changing numbers and parameters sits near the bottom: cleaner fuel, more efficient boilers, different sources of electricity.

Changing the rules of a system, its goals and the mindset it grows out of sits near the top. My concern is that most of what the film asked of us last night belongs at the bottom of her list. Diamond's point about reconsidering core values, meanwhile, belongs at the top.

In Morpeth, working nearer the top of Meadows' list of places to intervene in a system could mean pressing Northumberland County Council on planning and transport. Why, for example, after declaring a climate emergency, did they knock down a school and replace it with a car park?

Living without a car should be a realistic choice for more people, even here in Northumberland.

It could also mean neighbours setting up a community energy scheme, so that panels on one roof become something a street owns together. There's already a model for this a couple of miles up the road. Northumberland Community Energy, based in Pegswood, is a co-operative that puts solar panels and batteries on village halls, churches and other community buildings. Each building that takes part gets a stake in the co-op and a vote, so the people using the energy have a say in how it's run. The wider Climate Action in Rural North East project is planning whole-community carbon assessments to work out where action would make the biggest difference.

Things like this don't need a prime-time broadcast, they need people who know each other and keep meeting.

If I were running the next screening, I'd be asking people to think bigger, and to consider why it is that they're only seeing the information for the first time. Then I'd book the same room for a fortnight later, so the evening ends with a date in the diary and a reason to come back.

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Note: the title is also a quotation taken from Jared Diamond.