When it was announced that Ashley Colby of Doomer Optimism had organized a two-day retreat with Dougald in Chicago, which is only five hours away from my home, I signed up immediately.<\/p>\n
The retreat began on Saturday morning on the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. It was a small group of six attendees including Aven, Josephine, Cavan, Laura, Haley, and myself, but that made it especially valuable.<\/p>\n
As part of the retreat, each participant was able to bring a question or topic for the group to discuss. I came to the retreat with questions I was seeking to grow from such as, how do we find others who share our worldview? How do we make it easier to bring up topics such as collapse and degrowth?<\/p>\n
What do we call our tribe?<\/h4>\n
When my turn came, I posed the question: \u201cWhat do we call our tribe?\u201d<\/p>\n
We never came up with a direct answer, but instead we arrived at the concept of creating a lapel pin which can be worn to convey a shared sense of the predicament in which we find ourselves.<\/p>\n
For those who know the meaning of the pin, it is a way to recognize each other and make ourselves approachable. For those not aware of its meaning, it can be a conversation starter that is accompanied with readily available resources to learn more.<\/p>\n
So, then the question was what symbol should be on the pin to communicate our message?<\/p>\n
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Dougald\u2019s Story: The Black Elephant<\/h3>\n
As the group leaned into Ivan\u2019s question, I found myself remembering another crew of around the same size that I had been part of. The Institute for Collapsonomics was a group of friends who met in London in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.<\/p>\n
Its founders were Kalam Ali, Mike Bennett, Mamading Ceesay, Vinay Gupta and myself. We came from very different backgrounds, but had a shared sense of the depth of the trouble that lay around and ahead for our societies.<\/p>\n
We would get ourselves invited to seminars at the London think tanks and ask questions that weren\u2019t normally voiced in those rooms. It was on the way out of one of those meetings that our friend Lloyd Davies came up with the idea of the Black Elephant, which became the emblem of Collapsonomics.<\/p>\n
The Black Elephant is a hybrid of two widely used metaphors:<\/p>\n
- \n
- The Black Swan is a hard-to-foresee event which changes everything.<\/li>\n
- The Elephant in the Room is an enormous issue that everyone knows is there, but no one wants to talk about.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So the Black Elephant is an event that, when it happens, everyone will try to pretend was a Black Swan, when all along it was the Elephant in the Room.<\/p>\n
Listening to the conversations going on among policymakers and political insiders, we thought we could make out a lot of these elephants.<\/p>\n
Tattoos and Lapel Badges<\/h4>\n
I told the story of the Institute for Collapsonomics to the participants in Chicago and it seemed to catch everyone\u2019s imagination. One participant even went away and got a Black Elephant tattoo!<\/p>\n
For those not ready to go quite that far, the idea of a lapel pin seemed a good way to put the emblem of the elephant to use, creating a marker by which to recognise each other and spark the kind of curiosity that can lead to conversations worth having. So in the weeks after the retreat, Ivan got busy developing a pin design.<\/p>\n
Besides the image of the elephant, it felt as though some words were needed, and we landed on the phrase \u201cLOOK DOWN\u201d. Some readers may remember this from the Dark Mountain Manifesto, where Paul Kingsnorth and I wrote:<\/p>\n
And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down.<\/p>\n
Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?<\/p>\n
We believe it is time to look down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Finding Each Other<\/h4>\n
When Ivan framed that question about what to call our \u201ctribe\u201d, I knew what he was getting at \u2013 but I also remembered the early Dark Mountain festivals, and how the most exciting part was the unlikely combination of people who were drawn by the invitation we made in the manifesto.<\/p>\n
You would see disillusioned bankers sitting alongside counterculture veterans, engineers talking to poets, Wikileaks hackers, small farm futurists and a guy who had worked on prison reform in post-Soviet Russia who got a frightening number of us corralled within a small square of rope to reenact the cell into which he had been thrown on his first visit to a Russian prison.<\/p>\n
Those of us who are facing up to the realities of collapse don\u2019t all look like we come from the same tribe or subculture. This is good news, because we\u2019re going to need a lot of different skills and kinds of life experience to navigate these times of unravelling. But it\u2019s also why it makes sense to have a way of recognising each other.<\/p>\n
Finding Your Bearings: Collapsonomics.info<\/h4>\n
So you\u2019re wearing the pin and you get into conversation with someone who has just reached the point where they are willing to look down. What else are they going to need?<\/p>\n
This is what led us to set up Collapsonomics.info, a simple landing page which points to a variety of resources and communities that can be helpful in finding your bearings.<\/p>\n
Each Black Elephant pin comes with a small laminated card with the Collapsonomics.info web address and a QR code that links to the site. The card is small enough to carry in your wallet or purse, sturdy enough to last, and it should mean that, if a conversation has gone off the deep end, you can leave someone with some starting points for where to go next.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/New-cards-3-10-25-1-1024x407.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe 2008 crisis threw together a lot of us who were ready to talk about the fragility of the systems that our societies take for granted. We\u2019re living through another moment in which that sense of fragility is being brought home to many people around us \u2013 so my hope is that the resources we\u2019re bringing together are of some help to those who are trying to find their bearings.<\/p>\n
Five Principles of Wearing the Pin<\/h4>\n
What does it mean to wear the Black Elephant pin? Here\u2019s the set of principles we came up with:<\/p>\n
1. It is time to face the realities of collapse: the unravelling of systems and structures that many of us grew up taking for granted.
\n2. Framing this as a set of \u201cproblems\u201d to be solved doesn\u2019t help us face these realities \u2013 because it suggests that, with the right solutions, our societies could get back on the path they appeared to be on.
\n3. Refusing the \u201cproblem\u2013solution\u201d mindset doesn\u2019t mean giving up and doing nothing \u2013 there is still plenty of work worth doing that has a chance of affecting how things play out.
\n4. To catch sight of the work worth doing and to become capable of contributing to it, we need multiple lenses, new maps and tools for orientation, practical and cultural skills.
\n5. We also need to find each other, in the in-between spaces of the internet and in the on-the-ground places where we start from.<\/p>\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Black-Elephant-hi-res.png\")
<\/p>\n