A better world is possible — for now, here's collapse

I decided I was in love with Pecier sometime in 2016, the year both Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump were declared Presidents, the planet steadied towards environmental destruction as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached 403.3 parts per million, and I fumbled through hazy days of depressive aimlessness having been just diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

By all means, thanks to an imbalance in brain chemistry that I had yet to come to terms with, I had no business getting into a relationship. But as is characteristic of that year, everything else won against all reason. To this day I joke that our meet-cute was social and ecological collapse and that Pecier and I got together just as everything started to break apart. The truth is, I had no sense of wholeness, to begin with. 

Pecier, however, was – is – patient. He does not mind if other people mispronounce his name or when word processing programs autocorrect it to Peter. An astronomer and science communicator, he responds respectfully when people ask him about their horoscopes and UFO sightings. He holds my hand outside doctor’s offices, through turbulent flights, throughout protests so we don’t lose each other, and during the exact moment when something particularly heartbreaking – fires razing through poor neighborhoods, the state-sponsored massacre of activists, typhoons decimating entire provinces, working-class electoral candidates losing to yet another billionaire – comes on-screen during the evening news. 

Most of the time, his patience and gentleness are enough to calm me down without the help of panic attack pills. He strokes my back as I close my eyes and I imagine being onboard a spaceship escaping the world and looking out the window as I am whisked away to nothingness, so far away that the Earth — all its violence, trauma, injustice, and noise —is reduced to nothing more but a pale blue dot.

***

I say “decided” instead of “fell in love” because much of love is a choice. This is true both in romantic relationships and in fighting to help save the planet, decisions that I made as a wide-eyed twenty-one-year-old despite the unshakeable belief that we are headed straight and soon to the end of the world.

I started working on climate change through a newly-established non-profit in the Philippines. It was my first full-time job. I found it more meaningful than anything I’ve ever done in my life, so much that I dropped out of school to do it, school striking as it is way before Greta Thunberg united a youth climate movement. At first, it was very selfish – I liked the flexible hours, earning my own money, and feeling that I am making a difference. Then, it became a lifeline – I traveled a lot and spent my days making sense of mitigation targets and emissions pathways that I didn’t have much time to deal with the darkness that settled in whenever I am home.

Despite not having finished my degree, it seemed I was doing well. I got invited regularly to talk about climate action. I represented the youth at United Nations conferences. Decision-makers in national climate policy and international negotiations, including senators, commissioners, and a few legislators knew me by my first name. I genuinely thought I found my place.

Around the same time, Pecier waltzed into my life after being a Facebook acquaintance for years. He brought a telescope to one of our first meet-ups, where I invited another friend because I didn’t realize he wanted to be alone. The second time he asked me out, a full five months after this mistake of mine, he was the one who brought friends from an online group that spent hours dissecting why the country will be in a much better shape if secularism was genuinely upheld. Extrajudicial killings and troll farms were unheard of and we lived in ignorant, privileged bliss as budding armchair activists not knowing everything was going to change dramatically just in time for the 2016 Philippine national elections.

Weeks before Rodrigo Duterte assumed the presidency, a good friend received death threats from anonymous accounts on social media. A lot of us from progressive spaces were quick to sound the alarm, so much so that I received at least two myself and Pecier had to hide his workplace and other identifying details from his profile. Our friend eventually filed a cybercrime complaint with the National Bureau of Investigation who tracked down the accounts’ owners and their cities of residence, but by then it was useless – for every user suspended, three more troll accounts popped up in its place. 

The lack of civility in online discourse that we all claimed as the hallmark of the 2016 elections was merely a smokescreen for something more insidious going on: an industry to mainstream propaganda and fake news targeting activists while propping up elite political families was taking off. This was not a handful of rude social media users who thought ad hominems were fair game to prove a point. It was a well-funded and well-networked disinformation campaign that was just getting started. 

Meanwhile, 2016 climate trends continued to break records and environmental activists who went up against corporate interest in fossil fuels closer and closer to home continued to receive threats and intimidation. One evening, a grandmother who organized with a community we worked with in Bataan against a coal plant was gunned down by still unidentified men.

The news showcased so much suffering it was unbearable. I started crying about feeling helpless during therapy as a far more mentally-stable Pecier waited outside for me to finish my sessions. All of the mental health professionals I approached told me the same thing: to focus on the present, the here and now, every time the future got too overwhelming. But the present – filled with headlines about impunity and worsening climate change – did not help. Everything I did felt absolutely performative when nothing really changed on the ground. I retreated more and more into depression and spent so much time thinking about killing myself, I did not know if I was going to make it out of 2016 alive.

***

“Collapse” traces its roots to the Latin medical word “collapsus” meaning to fall together. Its most common use in English, which Merriam-Webster defines as to fall or shrink together abruptly, not only means mere simultaneous destruction. For something to collapse – a chair and its whittled legs contending against foreign weight or perhaps a fault-lined street of buildings through just one earthquake – the devastation must be caused by a suddenness that can never be overturned, resulting in complete and total ruin.

By its very definition collapse is not incremental, like environmental degradation or mass disenfranchisement with political institutions, and so from an activism perspective, it is harder to organize support against gradual destruction when the illusion of more corrective time is always present. 

We have learned to dramatize ruin through dates on our calendars. Perhaps this is easier to accept than the reality of us having fallen deaf to the screams in the background on each day that precedes our final collapse. In the Philippines, we focused concerns over voting machines malfunctioning on election day last May 9, realizing too late that thirty million voters ended up electing the son of a dictator as President because of a decades-long political project that pushed out a narrative of a savior amidst widespread abject poverty. And who could ever forget about 2030, the year we’re projected to breach the infamous Paris Agreement climate target of no more than 1.5 degrees of global warming, and the statistical improbability of memorizing all the lives lost in every single climate change-intensified disaster just before?

What the grand mission of preventing collapse forgets is that immense suffering already exists outside one single cataclysmic event. Activists of color have long faulted our western counterparts for thinking of catastrophe as a date to be plotted in the preventable future when the present day already brims with so much pain. If we are to construct all action as hinged on preventing only the worst that could happen, what is to become of all the days that preceded this always looming collapse, of our people’s episodic resistance to apocalypse in our own backyards, will these pile up and finally form a revolution?

***

Pecier and I almost met four times before we got together. The first almost-meeting was in 2012 during a forum hosted by an online group we were both part of. Celebrate three years of reason, science, and secularism, the colorful event page poster said. This was the first community I ever encountered that debated social issues for fun, which middle-class, self-important seventeen-year-old me thought was the best use of my time online. 

I remember feeling entirely out of place because everyone spoke in perfect English and ordered frappuccinos during breaks. Meanwhile, I commuted for an hour and a half to the venue and debated riding the ordinary versus the airconditioned bus on the way home so I can afford a sandwich. I recognized the more dominant voices from the group from their profile pictures and wished I had their confidence. Pecier, apparently, was somewhere feeling exactly the same things, but we never crossed paths. 

Remember when our main issue in life was that religious groups in this country were exempted from paying taxes, Pecier would often joke, usually whenever we were in the company of friends from this community, our political opinions lukewarm at best mostly because everything still functioned well enough in our little bubble that it did not merit an uprising.

This detachedness from the reality of widening inequality and structural violence had me pursuing random interests from the years of eighteen to twenty-one. The next three times that I almost met Pecier were in fact at the sites of these curiosities: he was at the Manila Observatory to observe the once-in-our-lifetime transit of Venus the same day I was, months later he was walking around the science museum where he taught just as I was leaving and wondering if the man I saw from a distance really was him, and he was trailing behind his hiking companions just as I was greeting them descending Mt. Pico de Loro sometime in 2013.

When Pecier and I finally intentionally made plans to meet just by ourselves in December 2015, our first real-life conversation alone lasted for eight hours. We mainly talked about our dreams: he wanted to pursue astrophysics, and I wanted to write and grow old in the activism space long enough to make a mark in the climate fight that I run myself out of a job. We promptly decided to be together to make these happen. 

Instead, he burned out and dropped out of graduate school. One day, I resigned from the non-profit sustaining my medication and therapy with neither a savings account nor a new job lined up in the middle of a manic episode, thoroughly disillusioned with climate politics and the seeming futility of people-powered resistance with the 1% raking in billions as the planet burned further to a crisp.

Pecier and I slowly and steadily racked up debt as the inflation rate in the Philippines reached a record high. We fought with our parents so much that we were pretty much isolated from our entire families. We refused to be vulnerable enough to share our anxieties out in the open, confiding in so many other people except each other. The few memories I have of the months that followed were entire days spent in bed, watching the sky switch colors, wondering if I’ll ever feel anything was meaningful again.

These days, we’re in a much better place. I like to think that a version of our dreams really did come true. Seven years have passed and Pecier is now a science journalist and pursuing astrophysics again. I’ve published pieces here and there and spend my days training and organizing alongside youth climate activists. We’re kinder to each other and ourselves, preventing collapse through learning over the years that time, rest, and leaning most into the pieces of work that bring us joy means we can sustain ourselves as we confront all sites of struggle in the long haul.

Most importantly, in a world plagued by so much desolation and despair, we continue to choose to stand together, hoping amidst clockwork destruction that a better world will be made possible by defiant, stubborn, and yet divinely beautiful love. 

***

I stopped feeling iffy about being called an activist just last year. I’ve always told Pecier that I never deserved it, doing most of my work in cozy conference rooms or through Zoom trainings when the pandemic hit. I’m able to hit pause and take leave whenever my disability prevented me from working, all while community activists and environmental defenders have no choice but to cuss out state forces and private armies, protecting their land despite guns being pointed at them every single day. 

Until now, I am much more comfortable being called an organizer, a term I imagine to be more accessible as it only means you lead people to each other. The magic happens later, I believe, when the campaigning work is done for the day and people retreat into smaller groups sharing about where they’re from and who they’re going home to. Despite our obsession with charismatic leaders and lionizing lone individuals, movements are given birth to by nameless thousands, all carrying a generational burden to leave a better world behind. Within these thousands, somewhere along the way, groups share a drink or have a meal together, instantaneously finding commonality in the things they hold dear, each child or mentor or parent adding up to be a renewable resource of hope and fight.

We often think of movements as corrective forces for the grave mistakes of the past, but I like to think of activism and organizing as primarily geared toward safeguarding the future, which is why I find working with young people the most fulfilling. Almost always, the meetings turn intensely towards the question of co-creation: “What do we want? Climate justice!” is after all our generation’s battle cry during mass protests and climate strikes. My life’s work is curating and facilitating days upon days of learning movement-building strategy and managing group dynamics, but somewhere along evening socials, after every long day of co-designing plans or protests together, every group I’ve ever trained or worked with always turns to the question of love. It gets especially rowdy as the night wears on and people swap dating horror stories or give the latest update about our respective relationships whether it is the decision to work on campaigns together or to get married someday – sana all, a Tagalog quip loosely meaning “if only everyone can”, a new battle cry to add to the repertoire. 

Over the years, I have told the story of how Pecier and I got together so many times I lost track, but it does not matter anymore because by now he has learned to open our home to countless youth organizers and good friends who share the same beliefs and desire to fight. Despite and perhaps because of the weight of a burning world and the collapse of democracy looming as persistent threats to their future, they seek mentorship or at least a shoulder to cry on through heartbreaks and disappointments of every scale. I am not always able to be fully present, but I try.

I wish I knew the value of community too when I was younger – that I am never really alone and thoroughly loved. On especially drunken nights, our friends joke that they’ll stop hoping for love if Pecier and I ever went our separate ways. Some days I think that, too. 

To stop believing in love or liberation, however, is to take for granted that every bit of care, tenderness, and joy we have exists only on this planet, through the sheer cosmic accident of being alive at the exact same time, to not only stand our ground but to hold each other close. 

To hope, I’m learning, is ultimately to love, against all reason, in the face of collapse.

—

The Very Best of Us is a newsletter imagining care, hope, and solidarity as we collectively confront the climate crisis and other social shocks. Authored by Filipina writer and climate justice organizer Beatrice Tulagan, it explores leaning into vulnerability as an organizing practice, activism as finding strength in tenderness as much as we find it in resistance, and holding our loved ones close as we hold out hope for people and planet.

In a world plagued by so much desolation and despair, The Very Best of Us reflects on the many intersections between the personal and political: the infinite ways human beings continue to stand together, defiantly believing amidst clockwork destruction that a better world will be made possible by collective care and love.

For collaborations, inquiries, and general messages, send Beatrice an email via hello@theverybestofus.org or a DM via @thevbestofus on Instagram.