From Despair to Collective Action: John D Liu on Community, Survival, and the Path Forward
With all that I’ve seen and reported on, it strikes me just how sharply the future turns on the choices we make—right now. John D Liu’s words reinforce it: we can’t afford to just keep talking about climate action. The more we talk, the more CO2 we generate, and while factories and machines are part of our world, it’s clear they can’t fix the damage they helped create.
John points out—almost with a wry smile—that the Earth isn’t broken. What’s broken is our sense of value, our stubborn habit of measuring wealth by what we extract and sell, rather than what sustains life. The simple reality is this: we know how to restore soils, renew water systems, regrow biodiversity. The challenge is to choose that path, to make restoration the centrepiece of what we do and how we see our own wellbeing.
There’s an underlying urgency here. John isn’t shy about the stakes: If we carry on as we are, fixated on materials and money and production, we’re risking extinction. We’re already seeing collapse—of species, of systems, of predictability. The top of the food chain never has a good time in an extinction event. That’s us.
But John’s optimism persists. “It’s our choice,” he says. He reminds us, we have agency, we can change direction. There’s huge power in collective action—communities learning together, sharing knowledge, restoring ecosystems as much for joy and connection as for survival. It doesn’t have to be abstract: it can be as tangible as a local pub, a co-op, music, and pancakes—for real! It’s the ordinary acts, repeated and shared, that stitch hope back into the environmental story.
The time to act is now—not just as individuals, but as communities, as a species, as citizens of the only planet we have. If we’re going to thrive, not just survive, we need to realise that the greatest wealth is in living systems, not in what we can churn out of a factory or sell for a quick profit.
That’s the real work of our time. And it starts with a choice.