Environmental collapse and inherited guilt
Environmental collapse and inherited guilt sit in a bizzare space, because they’re not just scientific or political ideas, they’re moral and psychological ones. Now this is one of those themes that features heavily in my book, particularly book two.
Environmental collapse isn’t one single event. It’s a slow unravelling: biodiversity loss, soil degradation, ocean acidification, climate instability. What makes it particularly unsettling is that it’s both gradual and irreversible in parts. You don’t get a cinematic “end”, instead its a shifting baseline. Each generation grows up thinking the diminished version of the world they inherit is normal until there is nothing left.
Now this is where inherited guilt creeps in.
We didn’t burn the coal in the Industrial Revolution. We didn’t design systems that reward extraction over regeneration. And yet, we benefit from them. That creates a kind of moral complexity: how can I be responsible for something I didn’t choose, but still feel implicated in?
There are a few layers to that guilt:
1. Beneficiary guilt
Even if you didn’t cause the damage, you’re living inside the advantages it created, cheap energy, global supply chains, convenience. That’s both, hard to get away from and hard to not feel guilty for doing nothing.
2. Powerlessness vs responsibility
Whilst we’re told to all do our bit, we’re often faced with the self opinion of “this is our fault” and “you individually can’t fix it.” That contradiction can lead to paralysis, or obsessive attempts to control our own footprint.
3. Temporal injustice
Future generations will inherit the consequences of actions taken long before they were born. But we’re also inheriting consequences now from decisions made decades ago. Which blurs the line between victim and participant.
4. Moral harm
At a deeper level, there’s a sense that humanity has violated something fundamental, our relationship with the natural world. That can feel less like guilt over specific actions and more like a loss of integrity as a species.
So how do we deal with it?
There are questions we can ask ourselves to both, calm our nervous system and reduce damage we are further causing.
Given that I’m here, now, in this system, what do I do with that?
What do I refuse to normalise?
What do I build differently?
Crucially, it doesn’t pretend you can purify yourself out of the system. You can’t. No one can live entirely outside it.
So what about a narrative where its too late? Well, that’s less easy to ignore. When you’re living in a world where the actions of generations before us has made survival nearly impossible, writing in a community which obsessively attempts to reverse the damage, makes sense. And those obsessions would of course, turn extreme.
