Introduction—A Common Structure: The World Is Coming to an End

Here is a story: the world is coming to an end. There is very little we can do to change it. Evil people are the cause. But through our personal action and changing the system, we may perhaps be able to save ourselves. As Daniel Wojcik (1996, 320n1) points out, “the pervasiveness of such end-time narratives historically and cross-culturally is revealed by the listings in the various folklore motif and tale-type indices, such as Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Thompson 1955–1958), which includes the major apocalyptic narratives under ‘World calamities and renewals’ (A1000- A1099).”¹ In the past, these narratives were usually framed as “supernatural” events, but recently, many of them have been framed in terms of human technological might (Wojcik 1996, 297). Consider, for example, what Nick Bostrom (2019) refers to as a “black ball,” an unexpected technological invention with the potential to destroy civilization.

In this article, we show that an end-time narrative emerges from within some branches of the environmental movement. This narrative is closely tied to the social activism that emerged from groups such as Extinction Rebellion in the wake of the perceived failure of United Nations intergovernmental negotiations to produce sufficient political results in response to climate change. We call this narrative the “Green Apocalypse.” As we shall show, the Green Apocalypse portrays anthropogenic climate change as a global calamity that will lead to the downfall of humanity. Bringing narrative analysis together with findings in the cognitive, evolutionary, and social sciences, we argue that this narrative can function as a mental simulation that lets social activists experience the end of the world virtually. We broadly characterize this as a biocultural approach (cf. Høgenhaven, Bach, and Geertz 2024; Turner et al. 2018). By not allowing for hope that the world can be salvaged, this form of social activism provides outlets in which activists alleviate anxiety by obtaining a (simulated) sense of agency in the face of an uncontrollable threat. We analyze the role of emotion, especially the tension between pessimism and optimism, in this sort of simulation.² We conclude that the social activism at the most pessimistic end of the spectrum is a form of ritualization with anxiety-reducing potential.

In presenting this argument, we bracket the question of whether the science behind climate change is true in the same way we would bracket questions about whether a particular religion is true. We make this move not because we are science denialists but, quite to the contrary, because this methodological stepping-back provides a valuable perspective to understand the beliefs and practices of a particular religion or important cultural formation. In this case, we are interested in the narrative of a Green Apocalypse. When communicated to the public, even a scientific consensus like the one around climate change must be presented in a narrative form. Whether one takes a strict realist or constructivist position on these matters, we argue both must assume that all narratives fictionalize in the sense that they must tell a story based on objects and events put in a particular order. Objects and events may or may not be real, but ordering them together into a coherent story always requires an element of fiction. For example, to be compelling, stories need beginnings, middles, and ends, while reality presumably does not.

Dealing with Disaster: Navigating between Optimism and Pessimism in Climate Change Movements

In this section, we contextualize the social activism from which the Green Apocalypse emerges. The next section then presents that narrative in a more formal fashion.

The greenhouse effect has been known for at least a hundred years, but it did not become a major political issue until the final part of the twentieth century. Today, many young people around the world find climate change frightening and fear for their future (Hickman et al. 2021). Since its inception in the 1980s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has regularly published reports on climate change. When introducing the IPCC’s 2023 final assessment report, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated:

Dear friends, humanity is on thin ice—and that ice is melting fast. As today’s report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) details, humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years. The rate of temperature rise in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years. Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least 2 million years. The climate time-bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. (United Nations 2023)

Notice that on the one hand, our situation is depicted as extremely serious: we are all under threat. But on the other hand, there is a way to get out of the problem, a guide to how “the bomb” can be defused. In environmentalism today, different groups focus on each of these points.

We use the term “environmentalism” for a highly heterogenous set of movements involved with our relationship with nature (Grasso and Giungi 2022). Some forms of environmentalism are conducted within institutionalized and hierarchical political structures, but other forms take place more spontaneously within loosely connected networks where people are bound together by common concerns and ideological commitments. Another important distinction is whether the group is concerned with the environment broadly or with climate change in particular (Grasso and Giugni 2022). Regarding the latter, we can further distinguish between optimistic and pessimistic groups (Cassegård and Thörn 2022). This distinction helps us navigate a messy landscape, but it does not entail a binary picture where a movement is either completely optimistic or pessimistic. Rather, climate change environmentalism consists of a spectrum of movements where ideas, beliefs, and narratives overlap and transform in ways that are hard to anticipate, where hope and despair combine, and where some groups tend more toward pessimism while others tend toward optimism.

Movements that put an optimistic spin on the situation tend to focus on how the problem of climate change can be solved with improved technology and better cooperation within the framework of the existing global political and economic order. Hence, the central narrative that guides their form of environmentalism is about progress (Cassegård and Thörn 2022). The United Nations intergovernmental negotiations on climate change are central events in this form of environmentalism. Core non-governmental organization such as Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature appeal to the notion of progress to mobilize support for environmental action (Cassegård and Thörn 2022, 44). The website of the World Wide Fund for Nature, for example, depicts a smiling girl in a field next to an article about the transition to renewables (WWF, n.d.). The central emotion in this narrative is hope for a better future (Cassegård and Thörn 2022, 29–30). This sort of optimism relates to mainstream or institutionalized forms of environmentalism (Cassegård and Thörn 2022; Grasso and Giugni 2022). Even when using serious-sounding rhetoric and the metaphor of a “bomb,” the United Nations secretary-general could still be seen as operating largely within an optimistic framework. As Carl Cassegård and Håkan Thörn (2022, 84) argue, this “apocalyptic” narrative, where the possibility of the end of the world is used strategically to mobilize support for climate action, has become incorporated into mainstream, establishment discourse. This narrative is optimistic in the sense that the global disaster, or at least the worst-case scenario, is portrayed as something we can still avoid.

But there are also much more pessimistic narratives in environmentalism today. For some environmentalists, the IPCC reports are not just warnings of a possible dangerous future if we fail to act now. Rather, humanity already faces a life-threatening global climate breakdown that existing political and economic institutions are inherently incapable of stopping. In other words, what is merely seen as possible in optimistic narratives is depicted as inevitable in the more pessimistic ones (Cassegård and Thörn 2022, 96–98; de Moor and Marquardt 2023; Stuart 2020). These narratives exploded into the public in the wake of the perceived failure of mainstream institutions to address climate change.

In 2015, the United Nations climate summit in Paris (COP21) was seen as a crucial and perhaps final opportunity for the world to steer in a direction that would divert it from global disaster. The previous COP15 summit in Copenhagen was widely deemed to have failed; therefore, activists strongly engaged in how to deal with the Paris summit in better ways (de Moor and Wahlström 2020; Cassegård and Thörn 2022). According to Joost de Moor and Mattias Wahlström (2020, 270–71, see also de Moor and Wahlström 2019), divisions arose. On the one hand, many who mobilized believed that by learning from mistakes made during the earlier “Copenhagen failure” a better outcome was possible. Some of them argued that even though the COP structure was too weak to produce real change, the summit was still an opportunity to draw attention to the cause and, foremost, target the fossil fuel industry. On the other hand, critics within many of the same groups worried that this strategy would not work and that mobilizing around “an overly optimistic narrative would inevitably lead to disappointment” (de Moor and Wahlström 2020, 270). These tensions and debates provide social and political context for the emergence of the Green Apocalypse, which we outline in the next section. An important year in that regard is 2018.

With their declaration of a global emergency in 2018, Extinction Rebellion (n.d.) set the stage for the current wave of climate pessimism:

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time, and our governments have failed to act.

Roger Hallam (n.d.), a British activist who cofounded Extinction Rebellion, describes the global situation as leading directly to human extinction. The following statement conveys the urgency in Hallam’s (2024) message:

As I write, an article on the Atlantic Ocean Circulation nearing its tipping point is the top viewed on the Guardian website. This is what they miss out. The collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC) will be the most devastating event in the last 10,000 years of human history. It will happen overnight with sudden effects. It will be irreversible and continue for 1000s of years. It will destroy human civilization because it will be impossible to grow food in northern Europe—temperatures would drop by between 3–8°C. Enough to half the amount of land where you can grow wheat. 100s of millions of Europeans will have to move or starve to death. Those that move will be subject to holocaust events created by warlords and/or fascistic regimes. Coastal cities will have to be evacuated. Monsoons in the tropics will collapse, resulting in 100s of millions more refugees. This is just the beginning—the collapse also will feed into other disastrous climate tipping points like the collapse of the Amazon rainforest. We are looking at billions of deaths and possible effective extinction this century—that now has to be the main concern (Hallam 2024).

The main theme in these and many similar statements is that the world as we know it is about to end.

Social activists engage in a lot of moral condemnation of those seen as responsible. That brings us to the rabble-rouser³ Greta Thunberg, whose school strikes led to the formation of Fridays for Future (n.d.), self-described as a global climate change movement led by young people. Here is Thunberg in an address to the United Nations in 2019:

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words . . .

You are failing us. But young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not. (United Nations 2019)

Notice the sense of betrayal directed at fossil fuel-driven industries but especially at their assumed political allies, whom Thunberg sees as responsible for business as usual (United Nations 2019). Surveys show that activists in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion see governmental organizations as weak, untrustworthy, and unreliable in their capacity to react to the crisis (de Moor and Wahlström 2022, 271–73). Betrayal is even more pronounced in the blog run by Roger Hallam. In one of his posts, under the heading “billions will die,” Hallam (2023, emphasis added) describes his view of mainstream political institutions and elites in the following manner:

A friend from XR told me this week about this soul rotting trying to jump through the hoops of humiliation to get NGOs to be “partners” for “The Big One” demonstrations in April. Efforts are being made to get the liberal elites to act but the window of opportunity for them is closing fast, as the surging of the repressed rage of the young grows by the month. The institutions of our societies are utterly moribund, in a suicidal death spiral of hypocrisy and cowardice.

The almost complete mistrust in mainstream elites and institutions on display in Thunberg and Hallam’s statements is noteworthy.

The A22 Network (2022) presents itself as an overarching network that organizes groups such as the British Just Stop Oil and the German Letzte Generation. Just Stop Oil draws attention to their cause with provocative acts directed at famous art.⁴ For example, the group smashed the frame of the “Rokeby Venus” by Diego Velásquez (Nicholls and Ronald 2023) and covered the famous Stonehenge stone pillars in orange powder (Boobyer and Harcombe 2024). Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprisings) is a similar group formed in France (Les Soulèvements de la Terre, n.d.; Meaker 2024). These groups share not only a sense of urgency but also an acceptance of the use of civil disobedience and, in some cases, sabotage directed at facilities and structures (Meaker 2024).

In an international survey of self-identified climate activists, Jean Léon Boucher et al. (2021) found that 27% thought climate change would lead to further mass extinctions, including the end of humanity, but 49% thought humanity still had a chance to survive. It is likely that many of the groups mentioned operate within this minority space, where one believes in future mass extinctions. Doubts and tensions whereby one must navigate between feelings of despair and more hopeful thoughts are probably commonplace within these activist groups. Before we look at some examples of how activists think about this, let us observe the tension at play in a public statement, the A22 declaration (A22 Network 2022). It first focuses on the end of the world as we know it:

The old world is dying. We are in the last hour, the darkest hour. This world is being decimated before our eyes. We are in between moments. What we do decides the fate of both this world and the next. (A22 Network 2022)

Yet, there are also positive forces at work:

Together, in community, we are taking hold of a higher purpose. The source of what it is to be truly human. It calls to us across the ages, and with its power we will bring down those who kill to maintain their regimes of extraction. This is the old world. It cannot continue. (A22 Network 2022)

This statement is suggestive for the presence of strong emotional tensions within climate activist groups. Such tensions can also occur within each individual. Let us consider Diana Stuart’s (2020) interviews with Extinction Rebellion activists about their emotions. Some respondents said they had given up hope:

Personally, I have no hope. We have failed miserably. It is already too late. (anonymized Extinction Rebellion activist, Stuart 2020, 491)

However, the respondents did not think giving up hope meant giving up on action:

It is a misunderstanding that you have to be hopeful to act, that you have to have hope for action. If you know how bad it is, you realize you have nothing to lose. (anonymized Extinction Rebellion activist, Stuart 2020, 494)

Stuart (2020) found that despite their pronounced pessimism, Extinction Rebellion activists did not just give up. Importantly, hope was a central theme, but not the hope that “we can still fix things” (Stuart 2020). Members of a Swedish online network devoted to collapsology, an existential outlook centered around the belief that the world will end, expressed similar ideas. One interviewee, who had left the network, described how hope was referred to as hopium, an addictive expectation that things will eventually work out well. In this network, such optimistic tendencies were “policed” and “prohibited” (Malmqvist 2025, 560).

Remaining hopeless over time can be interpreted as an “emotional practice” (Malmqvist 2025). The term practice indicates that there is something routinized about one’s behavior, whereby repeated actions or deliberate thoughts over time lead to alterations in one’s disposition to feel and react in certain ways (Malmqvist 2025, 558). A similar concept of deliberate attempts to alter one’s emotions for specific purposes has been analyzed by Ara Hochschild (2013, 25) under the label of “emotional labour,” which she describes as “the work of trying to feel the appropriate feeling for a job by evoking or suppressing feelings—a task we accomplish through bodily or mental acts.” The context for Hochschild’s analysis is “emotion workers,” often females, who provide professional care for others. An emotion worker needs to be emotionally attuned to her (or his) clients, show empathy, and manage her own emotions. The intentionality and the effort required to achieve this so that one can provide professional care indicates that one is engaged in real work (Hochschild 2013, 27). The goal toward which collapsologistic climate activists strive is of course entirely different. Their emotional practice is geared toward removing the tendency to feel hope when engaging in social activism. As Karl Malmqvist (2025, 557–59) points out, this is puzzling because hope is widely seen as an emotion that helps mobilize for collective action. Why would a social activist group deliberately target and undermine this emotion? According to Malmqvist, the practice of “non-hope” in some environmental groups is about emotional detachment from mainstream narratives, of not being invested in them anymore. Hence, it is about opposing and leaving behind the mainstream (Malmqvist 2025, 557).

If Malmqvist’s interpretation is correct, then at least in some social activist groups, beliefs in progress are seen as emotional signals that one is still within the mainstream and therefore not fully committed to the cause. That explains the need to monitor not only one’s behavior but one’s emotional reactions. But how can one say there is a “cause” if one presupposes the disaster is inevitable? What could one be seen as fighting for? Some activists think the unavoidability of the crisis affects us in spiritual and moral ways, where “hope,” if there is any, must be understood in a paradoxical sense where it is not about optimism but dignity and moral obligation. These activists believe that one should simply “do the right thing” regardless of the outcome with respect to climate change (Stuart 2020; Cassegård and Thörn 2022; de Moor and Wahlström 2022; Malmqvist 2025). For example, 70–80% of respondents to a survey that targeted Fridays for Future activists agreed that they participated because they felt a moral obligation to do so (de Moor and Wahlström 2022, 273). More data is needed, but we suspect that among these respondents, there are probably some collapsologists who have given up on saving the world. That this is the case is further supported by Cassegård and Thörn (2022, 102–3), who summarize themes found in interviews with a group of climate activists as such: “[E]ven if the struggle to avoid the collapse is doomed to failure, it is still morally meaningful, or even a duty, to do what one can to reduce suffering, injustices, and harm to nature.”

Social activism involving conflicting emotions and perceptions can lead to paradoxical language. As an example, consider statements made by the Dark Mountain collective, a network of artists and writers who focus on moral self-development as well as concrete preparation and adaptation to the new reality of unavoidable climate change (Cassegård and Thörn 2022, 91–94; Dark Mountain Project, n.d.). In their view, we need to give up hope and simply “stare into the darkness” of climate collapse. We will then obtain a state of “hopeless hopefulness” (Cassegård and Thörn 2022, 100). Such a term illustrates what we mean by paradoxical language, a language where two opposing terms, “hopeless” and “hopeful,” are juxtaposed.

We now present an underlying end-time narrative that we believe guides and structures the climate change social activism we have portrayed. We then discuss this narrative in the final two sections.

Activism in the Context of Narrative: Introducing the Green Apocalypse

By “narrative,” we mean a representation of a set of events such that they make up a meaningful sequence (Herman and Vervaeck 2019, 13). In the context of such a sequence, we shall treat the statements presented earlier such that they belong within a story. This story starts in medias res on a ruined planet. From here, the story peers back to past events that explain how we got to the current situation. The story also peers into imagined futures where most of the calamity will unfold. This story can be seen as an example of what Thompson (1955–1958) would index under “world calamities and renewals.” In other words, it is an end-time story, the structure of which we presented in the introduction to this article.

In the following, the non-italicized parts represent the end-time narrative structure, and the italicized parts are based on our review of statements and views in the previous section:

Green Apocalypse. The world is coming to an end as the result of catastrophic climate change. Given that catastrophic climate change is already happening and will only get worse no matter what we do, there is very little we can do to change it. The evil people in the fossil fuel lobby are responsible. But given that we still need to come together, take hold of a higher purpose, and engage in resistance, it is still possible that through personal action and changing the system we may perhaps be able to save ourselves, at least in a moral or spiritual sense.

This story is our attempt to distill a plotline from the conglomeration of statements, ideas, and attitudes of various climate activists. Notice that given the pessimism and distrust exemplified, “changing the system” should not be interpreted as referring to political changes occurring within the current civilization and political order. That order must go. In this story, the “system” that needs to change is rather something like the emotional reactions or spiritual stances the activists take towards the oncoming end. We especially find traces of this narrative in the fringes of environmentalism, in groups largely operating outside of mainstream political institutions. Activists within these groups do not necessarily convey the narrative exactly as we have outlined. As de Moor and Wahlström (2019, 426) point out, the content activists often recount to each other is “small stories” or “snippets” whereby experiences are related to a larger narrative structure that is often tacitly assumed or implied.

In the next section, we apply a biocultural perspective to the Green Apocalypse, discussing the evolutionary origin and psychological function of such a narrative for activists.

The Green Apocalypse as a Mental Simulation Device

Our biocultural approach begins with the assumption that stories about world calamity figure into a circular interplay wherein underlying cognitive processes influence the design of the narratives and where, once they have become cultural products, these stories can work back on human cognition by triggering emotional reactions (Høgenhaven, Bach, and Geertz 2024, 339). Furthermore, we assume that the storytelling tendency from which the narratives ultimately emerge helps define us as a species. In other words, we are a storytelling animal (Boyd 2009).⁵ For example, stories were an important means to organize and preserve information in oral societies, but even today, when digital technologies let us organize large amounts of information, stories remain an important way to do so. That is also true regarding the enormous amount of information about how humans are affecting the climate.

Stories create meaning by putting events into a linear sequence. Storytelling therefore involves some element of fictionalization, because putting events into a linear plotline unavoidably simplifies the reality of the past, present, or future by isolating and focusing on specific events that drive the story; another storyteller could pick out other events to isolate and emphasize. A similar point has been made already in relation to climate change narratives by Alexandra Nikoleris, Johannes Stripple, and Paul Tenngart (2017), who argue that science and literary fiction both must use narratives. They compare five scientific narratives about climate change, or “shared socioeconomic pathways, SSPs” with five works of literary fiction about climate change. They argue that the latter may have more potential to “open up our imagination” (Nikoleris, Stripple, and Tenngart 2017, 308) so that possible solutions can be “tested in a fictional environment” (Nikoleris, Stripple, and Tenngart 2017, 316). We expand on this idea that fiction is an imaginative testing out of possible realities. However, by “fiction” we do not mean only literary fiction but all storytelling, since all storytelling involves fictionalization in the sense outlined. This is true for both literary fiction dealing with climate change and other forms of storytelling about climate change more scientific in their make-up.

Among a host of interesting theories, a small consensus has emerged that our ability to tell stories is an adaptation connected to simulation (Amstrong 2019; Boyd 2009, 16; Sugiyama 2001; Oatley 1999). In other words, the ability to play out (fictive) scenarios in our heads has an adaptive purpose. It allows us to both learn from past mistakes and to plan ahead. We often create small narratives when we do this: we do not just remember isolated episodes; we place them in a narrative structure, a plotline that connects the intentions and goals the characters pursue as well as the causes of events and many other aspects of a story. Thus, information is packaged into a coherent chunk we intuitively use when we act and when we anticipate the actions of others.

Stories about the end of our species, our way of life, our cosmos, and so on are captivating and keep recurring in different versions (Wojcik 1996; Diamant 2022). Part of the evolutionary context for understanding this is that the simulations we run and have run in the past are often targeted specifically at threats and danger.⁶ Much of this point comes out in research around horror and horrible things happening in popular fiction (Morin, Acerbi, and Sobchuk 2019). Based on the idea that people are more likely to die in popular fiction than in real life, Oliver Morin, Alberto Acerbi, and Oleg Sobchuk argue for the “ordeal simulation hypothesis.” According to this hypothesis, simulation is a useful way to prepare for threats to an organism. Some threats are preventable because we can infer their existence. Other threats we can only react to once they are manifest. These are “reactable” threats. Some reactable threats are one-off occurrences, rare or particularly powerful, and it is these the authors refer to as ordeals. Since some catastrophic things can only happen once (our death, for example), we cannot possibly experience those events to learn from them. Thus, we must simulate them to learn from them. We learn to deal with them virtually (Morin, Acerbi, and Sobchuk 2019). Consider the Green Apocalypse: there is no greater one-off calamity than a world catastrophe where not only the individual organism dies but possibly the entire species, or all of life as we know it on Earth. Furthermore, notice that we cannot prevent this from happening but only react to it once it already is happening. Hence, the calamity unfolding in the Green Apocalypse presents an ordeal in this technical sense as a dangerous loss of agency.

We now turn to the other side of the circular interplay described by Jesper Høgenhaven, Melissa Sayyad Bach, and Armin W. Geertz (2024), the process by which cultural products work back on our cognition by triggering emotions. What is it like to be immersed in a story that ends with the end of the world? Environmental activists immerse themselves in this narrative by listening to one another’s stories and experiences and by engaging in collective action, such as marches and various forms of civil disobedience. By engaging in such behaviors and acting as if the story is real, they enter a mental simulation of the end of the world. By this we mean that activists get to experience and react to an ordeal, a catastrophic event that one cannot prevent but only react to. The plotline of the story comes alive. This resembles how immersion in literary or popular fiction makes its characters and plot feel real, but with a difference. When we consciously regard something as fiction, we stop suspending disbelief when the story ends. In contrast, the climate activists immersed in the Green Apocalypse remain in the story: their simulation is directed at current and future episodes mentally represented as real world events.⁷

The literature on simulation suggests that emotions are a crucial part of cognition (van Mulukom 2020; Zerrudo 2016). Simulations activate the specific emotions that would occur in the situation simulated. Emotions are the motor of action; without emotions, we have no ability to make decisions or act. Simulations are a way of playing out the right emotional approach to take given future possibilities. But mere information does not elicit emotions. Instead, the narrative frame in which events are placed in a storyline with characters is central to move activists on an emotional level. Except for hope, which for climate activists sometimes has a paradoxical sense (discussed earlier), many of the emotions environmental activists engage in their simulations are negative (Stuart 2020; Cassegård and Thörn 2022). Cassegård and Thörn (2022, ch. 4) argue that the emotions tied to the most pessimistic narratives of green social movements are fear, despair, anger, sadness, and anxiety. As we saw in the second section, for some activists, such emotions are considered normatively correct responses to the disaster, responses one “must” have. Furthermore, hope, if there is room for any, must be separated from the optimism of mainstream society.⁸ These examples suggest that negative emotions are central to the activism that plays out the narrative of the Green Apocalypse. In this regard, the Green Apocalypse is like “end of the world narratives” in general; they tend to engage emotions such as fear and horror (Høgenhaven, Bach, and Geertz 2024, 349).

We now ask how the virtual simulation of the end of the world influences behavior, arguing that the anxiety the Green Apocalypse evokes is in turn alleviated ritualistically.

“Hope Dies, Action Begins”: Fatalistic Climate Activism as Ritualization

People are repressing all of this emotion. Taking-action is like a geyser or emotional release. A chance to do something. (anonymized Extinction Rebellion activist, Stuart 2020, 495)

Among the many people who engage in social protest because they are alarmed by climate change, a majority believe humanity has a chance to survive and that the worst-case scenarios can be avoided (Boucher et al. 2021). Some of these activists operate within the narrative framework of optimism, in the sense of a view that even though climate change is extremely dangerous, humanity has a chance to turn things around before it is too late (Cassegård and Thörn 2022). As Boucher et al. (2021) found, however, a smaller minority of climate activists believe humanity will end. In the second section of this article, we provided various sources, including from websites and interviews (Stuart 2020; Cassegård and Thörn 2022; de Moor and Marquardt 2023; Hallam, 2024) to indicate how these activists think. These are the activists whose activities we relate to the Green Apocalypse, the narrative outlined in the third section. In this section, we propose that some of their behavior is ritualized. Support for this hypothesis comes both from sociology and the cognitive science of religion.

Max Weber ([1930] 2001) already shed light on the profound effects of culturally mediated anxiety on behavior in his analysis of anxiety and fatalistic determinism in modern European cultural formations. Weber points out that Protestantism, especially the Calvinist version, emphasized a linear form of predestination. Some people are destined to be saved, others destined to be damned by God. This is preordained; there is nothing anyone can do about it. Furthermore, one cannot really know whether one is saved. The result of combining the fatalism of predestination with uncertainty about salvation was a predominant mood of anxiety where people dedicated themselves to meaningful work (vocations) to reassure themselves they were one of the predestined saved.

Martin Riesebrodt (2010, 71) more recently argues that in an environment characterized by anxiety, religious practices give people a sense of control.⁹ There is something paradoxical about such practices in the context of fatalistic thought. If one believes in predestination, one has no reason to think behavior can make any difference with respect to one’s destiny. Why act? We believe a similar question can be put to the climate activists at the radical end of the spectrum. Some of them see escalating global warming as simply out of control. But giving up hope is not the same as simply giving up. Consider, for example, the Extinction Rebellion slogan described by Stuart (2020, 488): “Hope dies, action begins.” What sort of action is that?

The cognitive science of religion provides an answer that draws from earlier insights in anthropology (e.g., Malinowski 1948). There is a general consensus that human beings tend to ritualize more of their behavior when they lose agency under conditions of stress, uncertainty, or hazards more generally (see, for example, Xygalatas 2022, ch. 3; White 2021, ch. 10). One could argue that rituals are a way to focus control on an uncontrollable world, to act despite a loss of agency and thus regain a virtual sense of agency. We follow Pierre Liénard and Pascal Boyer (2006) in viewing ritualistic behaviors as behaviors characterized by compulsion, rigidity, and goal demotion. These are behaviors people feel must be performed in “just the right way,” often involving repetition of the same sequences, and which are not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, the actions participants perform are not causally related to specifiable goals in a physical sense. The goals are opaque and often understood symbolically. Where a sense of proximate causal agency fails, ritual can come in to fill the gap by providing a more abstract sense of agency (Liénard and Boyer 2006, 815).

The conditions of stress and anxiety to which religious practices provide a solution are sometimes first evoked by religion. Jonathan Turner et al. (2018) argue that religion plays a role in reducing anxiety and uncertainty, “even as it often increases the anxiety to be reduced by ritual appeals to the supernatural” (Turner et al. 2018, 158). Something similar is true of the most pessimistic version of climate change activism. First, anxiety is evoked through a fatalistic, apocalyptic story about a global threat we cannot avoid no matter what we do (i.e., the Green Apocalypse). But then, through social activism, anxiety is reduced.¹⁰ In this respect, climate change activism can be interpreted as providing ritualistic outlets through which activists alleviate anxiety by obtaining a (simulated) sense of agency in the face of an uncontrollable threat.

Ritualistic climate change activism is often spearheaded by charismatic figures. What role do they play in the storyline of the Green Apocalypse? By conducting social protests, often at the risk of legal prosecution or social ridicule, some climate activists stand out as the virtuosos in the story, exemplars out on the edge. Weber also helps shed light on this. He describes religious virtuosos as charismatic figures such as monks, shamans, and prophets (Weber 2009, 287; see Riesebrodt 2010, 125). As Riesebrodt (2010, 123) states, “virtuosos show in an exaggerated form what society expects from everyone.” Furthermore, even though they ultimately seek salvation, they “court misfortune” in the sense of making personally costly (and credible) sacrifices, such as abstaining from pleasure and allowing themselves to be socially ridiculed (Riesebrodt 2010, 122).

As an example of the activities of a climate change virtuoso, consider Greta Thunberg’s transatlantic voyage in 2019. Thunberg’s chosen vessel, the sixty-foot sailboat Malizia II, is described as containing sophisticated technology like solar panels, hydro-generators, and a CO²-measurement lab (Law 2019). When we situate this act within the fatalistic logic of the Green Apocalypse, such a costly act is ritualistic: it is about doing something in “just the right way,” even if the act is not causally related to the specifiable goal of changing the outcome of the story.¹¹ We also suspect that the sense of agency of the most pessimistic social activists is reaffirmed vicariously through Thunberg’s virtuosic ritual, sailing the Atlantic to symbolically fight the system that created the climate catastrophe simply because that is the right thing to do. With this example, we conclude our analysis of the Green Apocalypse.

Potential Weaknesses and Limitations of Our Argument

In this section, we indicate some potential weaknesses and limitations of our attempt to connect the end-time narrative structure to highly pessimistic forms of climate change activism within some parts of the larger environmental movement.

First, let us consider a limitation of the ritualistic framework in which we situate climate activism, for example, when arguing that social protests, acts of sabotage, and symbolic acts (like sailing the Atlantic) are ritualistic. This ritualistic framework is developed by Boyer and Liénard (2006). It has some limitations in its ability to explain the behavior of social movements as ritualism. For example, it does not take into consideration the lived reality of (allegedly) ritual participants (i.e., social activists). The activists might, if asked about it, not recognize as relevant or correct that their behavior counts as ritualistic. Of course, sometimes people are simply wrong about the real causes of their behavior. But in qualitative research, which our narrative analysis is an example of, one should also consider the lived experiences of the people whose behavior one is analyzing. For this reason, we also included qualitative data on the way climate activists think and (in their own words) feel about the situation.

Second, we recognize that social movements could be animated by many different behavioral logics. Although we have indicated some possible steps that link narrative and agency, it is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article to describe in detail the complex processes that animate social movements. Literature on social movement theory, for example the work of Charles Tilly (1978), would help elucidate the origins, structure, and function of environmental movements in more detail. To truly understand the complexity of a movement, it is not enough to think about the psychological function of narratives and rituals. One also needs to go into detail about the interests of various members of the community and how such interests are eventually mobilized in the form of collective action.

Third, as we pointed out, the overarching framework for our argument is a biocultural one, informed by the idea of a circular interplay between biology (cognition) and culture (see, for example, Turner et al. 2018). We understand all human phenomena to ultimately be a product of our biology. However, humans are also defined by culture—by narratives, tools, technologies, and linguistic communities. Such an approach can easily become unbalanced in one direction or another whereby one focuses too much on either biological or cultural processes. Furthermore, attempts to ambitiously explain complex social phenomena only in terms of biocultural processes are problematic. However, that is not our goal in introducing the biocultural approach. We believe the biocultural approach, in dialogue with psychology and sociology, sheds new light on climate change activism. A more complete explanation cannot be based solely on a biocultural theory alone but would consider political processes and cultural trends as well. However, such an attempt would also be beyond the scope of this article.

Conclusion: The Human Quest to Regain Agency

With scientific advances like the carbon combustion engine or nuclear power, humanity gained control of some aspects of nature that were once beyond our control, but at the same time, we lost control of equally as much in terms of the new possibilities such technologies unleash (Bostrom 2019). Is climate change out of control? There are a lot of excellent reasons to believe humans are affecting the Earth’s climate in bad, dangerous, and potentially catastrophic ways (IPCC 2023). We do not challenge the scientific consensus in that respect. We have defended an interpretation of a story that emerges from parts of the environmental movements, a story that describes in a fatalistic fashion the end of the world as the result of climate change. We think it is imperative that we better understand the stories various groups tell and the narrative frameworks that provide their overall sense and meaning. Which narratives promote human flourishing in the long term? Are they on the pessimistic or optimistic end of the spectrum? Pessimistic narratives might not be destructive but could facilitate increased resilience. It follows from what we have argued, especially in the section “The Green Apocalypse as a Mental Simulation Device,” that pessimistic, anxiety-evoking stories function as simulation devices that help people prepare for real world adversity. At the same time, such narratives leave room for a sense of agency beyond hope.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Panagiotis Mitkidis, István Czachesz, John Teehan, and Bernt Øyvind Thorvaldsen.