At the start of dinner with his guests, Ben Green offers this pick-me-up of a toast: "We're here because it's already too late," he tells them. "The collapse of society is inevitable, and it's imminent. There's absolutely nothing we can do about it." One of those guests is Michaela Cavanagh, who's taking part in a retreat at Green's unusual abode for a profile of him for Hazlitt. After the Brit lost his job as a software developer in Switzerland in 2019, Green bought an abandoned military barracks in Germany and converted it into a self-sufficient vegan farm—the Collapse Laboratory, as he calls it. He's now living out what he believes are the final days of life as we know it—thanks to climate change—and spreading his carbon-neutral word online.
Cavanagh writes that she privately thought of the place as "Climate Doomer Camp," though Green himself embodies a "chipper, upbeat" mentality. Her story explores how critics say the "doomer" mindset is dangerous because it breeds inaction on the climate. Green, though, rejects the doomer label—though he does predict some kind of climate-triggered "catastrophic event" that will make life miserable for most Earthlings. In his view, the Collapse Laboratory is a logical way to prepare for whatever follows, though he also rejects the "prepper" label. At one point, he uses the analogy of a caterpillar becoming a "soupy mess" before turning into a butterfly. "A caterpillar can't imagine a butterfly, and vice versa," he says. "And right now, we're in the soupy mess of the middle." Read the full story. (Or read other Longform recaps.)
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