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The stories of Business as Usual and the Great Unraveling offer starkly contrasting accounts of the state of our world. They are two different realities coexisting in the same time and space. You probably know people who live in a different story than you. You may also be moving between stories yourself. It’s possible to spend part of a day in our own business-as-usual mode, making plans for a future we assume will be much like today. Then something triggers an awareness of the mess we’re in, and we recognize in our hearts and minds the crash that lies ahead.

For increasing numbers of people, the crash has come already: homes flooded after extreme rainfall, farms abandoned because of long-term drought, water supplies contaminated and undrinkable, jobs or savings lost. The mainstream reality of Business as Usual is increasingly becoming interrupted by the bad news of the Great Unraveling.

When we first become aware of the grimness of our situation, it can come as quite a shock. Most of these issues are squeezed out of mainstream media, their coverage confined to occasional documentaries or fringe publications. The gaze of the modern press, particularly in the Western world, is more focused on gossip about celebrities. We live, as Al Gore puts it, in a culture of distraction.³⁶

When these issues do come up in conversation, they are often met by awkward silences. Two different views commonly block the flow of words. The first dismisses the problem as overblown. This is the voice of the first story that says it’s not really that bad. The second perspective fully inhabits the Great Unraveling. This view sees continued decline as so inevitable as to render it not worth talking about. There is a resigned acceptance that things have gone too far, that we can’t do anything about them, that we’ve crossed a point of no return.

The expression things have gone too far is another way of saying we are in overshoot. We are too late to prevent the harm already done or to prevent aspects of collapse already well under way. Overfishing has already led to the devastating collapse of many of the world’s fisheries. Climate change has already led to an increase in extreme weather events worldwide. Many oil-producing countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia) are already past their production peak, their oil output now in decline.³⁷ These things have already happened. But we can learn from them and make choices about where we go from here. In their detailed study of the global overshoot in our material economy, environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows write:

Overshoot can lead to two different outcomes. One is a crash of some kind. Another is a deliberate turnaround, a correction, a careful easing down…. We believe that a correction is possible and that it could lead to a desirable, sustainable, sufficient future for all the world’s peoples. We also believe that if a profound correction is not made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are alive today.³⁸

The story of Business as Usual is putting us on a collision course with disaster. And by itself, the Great Unraveling can seem like a horror story that overwhelms and defeats, paralyzing us. Fortunately there is a third story, one that is becoming increasingly visible. You are probably already part of it.