What is it like to go mad, and be absolutely sane as you watch yourself do so?

When dawn broke on New Year’s Day in 2020, it was like watching the climate apocalypse cresting the horizon. Australia was in the grip of the Black Summer, and the horror of the bushfires, the scale of which few had ever seen, sent shudders around the world. For many, this was a time when, as one Guardian journalist put it, the climate truth-bomb finally hit.

The truth-bomb certainly hit me. In spite of having spent two decades writing about ‘climate change’, mostly in measured and understated tones, it seems I too was somehow caught in a slumber of partial denial about how badly our climate was unravelling.

Now, that was changing. The headlines were stacking up with news of one extreme weather event after the next. Those things I’d been writing about for years in clinical, remote terms — storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, that would spiral society out of control and lay waste to species and ecosystems and yada, yada, yada — weren’t going to hit at some vague time in the distant future, in a world that I’d happily have long departed. They were happening now, in my lifetime, right in front of my eyes.

And they were only going to get worse. Much, much worse.

It struck with an existential urgency: in the 50 short years that I’ve been alive, more than half of the carbon pollution driving climate collapse has been dumped into the ocean-atmosphere system. That I’ve spent 20 of those years writing about it, trying to add a small voice to the global collective so we can wake up from our shared coma of denial, and yet the situation is only getting worse, and far faster than anyone expected. And now we were being told that we had ten years to slow the collapse.

That’s one decade; ten birthdays; 130 full moons.

The enormity of this broke my brain.

Invisible Ink — writing from the edge of extinction is the story of one person going mad in the face of this awakening, and an attempt to fend off that madness. Or, as Dylan Thomas evokes, to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This story is a bare-knuckled account of the despair and rage of an ‘invisible’ female writer in the ‘invisible’ Global South trying to scream a message into a void of wilful denial and obfuscation, where the beneficiaries of patriarchy and predatory Capitalism refuse to give up their hold on power or wealth, even at the cost of all of life on Earth.

Climate collapse is already raining a firestorm down on our heads, but who is hearing this alarm call, and why can’t we upend the system that is driving it?

This is one writer’s story, but it is universal in its themes. From the unique vantage point of southern Africa, Invisible Ink explores the psychological and social roots of climate collapse: how we came to be the lonely, competitive, insatiable Capitalists that we are today; how human exceptionalism has deafened us to the voices of other creatures — our planetary kin — who we now treat as ownable, exploitable objects; how generations of Imperial and Colonial conquest and Cartesian thinking have separated the messy biology of body from the imagined purity of mind and soul; how these have torn us from nature and placed us — men, mostly — at the top of the pecking order; how we have agreed to a corrupted caste system that second-rates and third-tiers women, people of colour, the otherly-abled, the non-binary, and other-than-human species into an artificial hierarchy that invalidates the personhood of those lower down the caste system and gives us permission to exploit and destroy the ‘other’.

The progression of our individual waking up to the climate crisis tracks a common story arc: denial, depression, anger, bargaining, and acceptance. This is much like the emotional processing we go through when we’re given the diagnosis of a terminal illness. Invisible Ink is not concerned with a teacherly telling of these facts; it uses story to show how we are the way we are. It tracks one person’s existential and emotional collapse. But this descent into madness is followed by an emergence of sorts: a place of equanimity, along with a fiery urgency to act as never before. We may not be able to stop the collapse, but we can slow it down a bit. Every 0.1°C of warming that we avoid could avert untold suffering for others, those living with us today, and those who will inhabit this pale blue dot in the years to come.

This story is about the existential overwhelm of confronting climate collapse and the turmoil of clamouring to be heard in a world that is wilfully deafening itself to the message, and deafening itself to the messenger. But it is not just about my own experience of feeling like an invisible voice in the midst of a planetary emergency. With two decades of travelling and storytelling in the rear view mirror, I now have a sense of clarity about the dynamics that shape whose stories and perspectives make it into the village square, whose don’t, why, and what the implications are.

Invisible Ink is a collection of stories, using mine as the runway to bring in the tales of some of the remarkable people and more-than-humans I’ve encountered along the way.

In between the stories in these pages, though, in the negative spaces, are the myriad other untold stories, the ones that will never be heard because there aren’t storytellers to bear witness, or platforms to publish these stories on. That’s what makes this book universal, and I hope that it will show how poorer our public discourse is for not having those stories present in the public square.

There are plenty of misadventures along the way to telling the stories that are here, though.

There’s a confrontation with a self-proclaimed ‘witch hunter’ that is worthy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There’s an airlifted escape from insurgents in the remote northern Mozambican bush veld. There’s a nautical near-miss with a rock in Antarctica. There’s an incident that involved getting stoned, but not in the way you’re thinking. There’s a life-saving encounter between a human and a psychedelic-coloured nudibranch in the amniotic waters of a bit of ocean that is the marine equivalent of the Notre Dame. And there’s South Africa giving us a master-class in separate-ness, and the suffering that comes with othering.

There’s also a deity manifest in the shape of a cat, because no story is complete without a cat. Even dog people know this to be true.

Invisible Ink is furious and urgent. Human history is beyond the point where we’ll tackle climate collapse cap-in-hand. It’s time to be a bit more shouty and frank.

The answer to climate despair, though, isn’t just found in anger. It’s in agency and action. Invisible Ink is my reclamation of agency and action: storytelling is how I make sense of the world, connect with others, and try to contribute towards a common good. I tell stories, because I can’t darn socks, or mend broken pipes.

It’s also a way to feel less lonely. Soldiering forward into such an uncertain future is existentially lonely in a way that even being in the company of others often can’t quite soothe.

The stories in this book speak to our most fundamental needs as socially-evolved mammals: that we aren’t alone in our grief and fear; that we can rally together to be effective in our communities as the climate becomes ever more unstable; that we can do our bit to tear down the system that is threatening all of life on Earth, without even leaving the comfort of our armchair activism.

When I started writing this book, we had ten years to slow the collapse.

Back then, that was one decade; ten birthdays; 130 full moons.

Now, we have even fewer.

Every second counts.

Is 2024 the year that things go ka-BOOM!?

2024 had barely tied its shoelaces, and the bookies were putting money on it being an annus horribilis.

Democracy looked like it was heading down the crapper. Half the world’s population was preparing to go the polls — over four billion people, from the United States and Pakistan, to South Africa and Mexico — in a world where public consensus is curdling with information holograms spread on social media by shadowy interests wanting to put their thumb on the scale of democratic processes. Generative AI was about to make this go from annoying cough to raging flu. How do we know what’s true anymore, with deep fakes looking more real than the real thing? How do we clean up the polluted information-scape when we’ve lost the newsroom mechanisms that are supposed to vet the could-be-facts and could-be-falsehoods circulating in the public discourse?

Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, who scooped a Nobel for breaking the story of how social media is being used to rig elections and stoke political violence, warned that 2024 is at a tipping point.

‘With no shared reality… democracy will fail,” she told the BBC in the podcast series The Gatekeepers.

At the same time, legacy media was facing an extinction-level event, and the near slaying of my two mainstay publishing homes proves the point made by The New Yorkers’ Clare Malone.

National Geographic magazine, the grande dame of natural history and travel writing, dating back to 1888, had such dramatic staff cuts that it made global news. The editor I reported to, my anchor point there and more than a writing mentor, was among those who fell to the ax. He’d been with the magazine for over three decades and worked with some of the world’s best writers in that time.

Here at home, the Daily Maverick has had to cut its freelancer budget so dramatically that it can barely pay specialist writers like me a living wage on story commissions.

Two titles, two completely different geographies and audience reach, representing opposite ends of the media market spectrum, both succumbing to the same industry collapse. Both were my main source of bread and butter but are themselves starving and cutting loose staff writers and freelancers.

The rise of the tech giant mega-monopolies is why. In their global conquest, multinationals like Google and Meta have been able to reach into what used to be discrete local media markets and are hoovering up the advertising revenues that kept local and regional titles ticking over. With the mega-rich getting richer, the middle-of-the-market media houses are going belly up. This doesn’t just leave talented journalists and other editorial staff in a state of looming penury, it’s a tearing down of a central pillar of democracy: a vigorous and robust free press.

Journalism is the Fourth Estate, a load-bearing wall in a healthy democracy. It’s how we stoke active citizenry, inform the public, and hold government accountable. How do we warn our fellow citizens of the gravest threat that society has ever faced — climate collapse — if the main channel for communicating this has its tongue ripped out by oligarchic corporate greed?

As I write this, the Daily Maverick has a case with the South African Competition Commission, arguing for limitations to be put on the tech giants’ dominance in the South African market.

The other thing that’s got 2024 looking good with the doom-bookies is the temperature. At the start of 2023, our global average temperature, which had been creeping up steadily and slowly after three centuries of dumping mountains of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, had increased by 1.2°C relative to the pre-industrial average. But in 2023, each month’s temperature readings shattered historic records. By January 2024, we were looking at a global average that had lurched upwards by a staggering extra 0.3°C, pushing us to the 1.5°C average that we’re supposed to avoid crossing.  This is the moon-shot goal that the United Nations Paris Agreement had set as the guardrail of warming beyond which we shouldn’t go.

Climate scientists started this year with a single, urgent question: is this sudden leap of 0.3°C of additional warming a temporary blip on the graph, or is it a sign that warming is finally accelerating, and hurtling us out of the safe zone at increasing speed? Global heating isn’t a linear change, they’ve been warning all along, it’s exponential.

Is this where it goes ka-BOOM?

We’re currently riding the wake of an El Niño, the yin to the La Niña’s yang, and part of the natural ocean-atmosphere system that cycles between warmer and then cooler conditions in different parts of the globe, depending on where we are in the cycle. By the end of 2024 we should know if things are settling back down to below 1.5°C again as the El Niño wanes. If it doesn’t, it’s not good news at all.

Time is running out. As are my patience and nerves. These stories need to get out into the world now.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein reckons that a potential answer to the crisis in our collapsing middle-of-the-market media is micro-publishing. Substack, Patreon, and other subscriber-based small-scale publishing initiatives can be a way for journalists and writers to stay in the game, publish directly to their readers, and keep the lights on without perishing in the funding famine created by Google, Meta, and the rest of the big tech bros. Is there no end to their appetite for profit, no matter the cost to others?

This is what I’m doing with Invisible Ink.

Publishing on a digital platform means that good, honest, carbon-absorbing trees don’t have to offer themselves up in sacrifice to some writer’s vainglory (this is a kind of memoir, after all). It also means that the book might be able to travel beyond the publishing backwater that, sadly, the limited South African market is. This is a chance to reach a wider audience, without hoping that there will be the Barnes & Noble publishing equivalent of the casting agent discovering a tantrumming Charlize Theron in a bank queue one random day.

We have to try so many new things as we abandon the economic model that has got us into this mess, and micro-publishing Invisible Ink is one small experiment from the ideas world.

By supporting the project, you’ll also be enjoying the fruit of genuine human creativity. None of the text in Invisible Ink has been written by a robot. Given how quickly generative AI is evolving, I wonder if this might be my last book? Writers look increasingly like hand weavers as the Industrial Revolution was bringing steam powered looms online: quaint, arcane, and about to go down with the dodo.

The voice reading of the audio book, on the other hand, is done by an AI voice clone trained to sound like me. Yeah, that’s true. And the cover art is also done by a robot.

If you’ve signed up, thank you. If you know of others who might appreciate Invisible Ink, please spread the word. The more we talk about these challenging matters, the closer we come to a social tipping point that will bring about the collective action we need to address them. What on Earth can one person do? Asked eight billion people.

Together, we are the eight billion.

Chapter 1…