Accelerating Glacial Collapse

At 1115 on Wednesday, 26 August 2026, I bought two roundtrip airline tickets to Winnipeg, Manitoba, triggering a catastrophic glacial collapse in Lāṅṭāṇ National Park, Nepal, near the border with China. The debris flow and flooding the collapse of this glacier caused travelled nearly 100 km and impacted populated areas downstream along the Lende Kholā and Trishuli̇̄ Kholā rivers. Satellite imagery and reports from the ground depict a scene of unprecedented devastation.

In his book, The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a calamitous heat wave that kills untold thousands of people in India. But it is this glacial collapse, precipitated by my wanting to take my wife to see her best friend via air travel that will release ≈1.50 tons CO₂e into the atmosphere, that has proven to be the first large-scale disaster of the climate crisis. It won’t be the last.

Broadly speaking, I have become an accelerationist. Not the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit kind, although I generally agree with their line of questioning, but more the “let’s just get there already” type. Of course, this isn’t really new territory for me; I have a long history of assuming Mad Max was a foregone conclusion. But here I’m more referring to the self-deprivation I’ve made a practice of in hope of somehow averting what increasingly appears as inevitable.

For the longest time, I lived out of my backpack. For well over a decade, I alternated between mooching space to throw my sleeping bag and renting rooms in houses and apartments from my friends. This was both a rejection of the 80s Risky Business through Cocktail lifestyle I had initially imagined for myself, nicely bookended by actor Tom Cruise, and the capitalist system that engendered it. My rationale was, while I don’t wish to speed our arrival at Fury Road, there isn’t much I can do to stop it beyond non-participation. That opinion has long since reversed.

As this blog documents, albeit spottily, upon occupying our smallholding, Brandi and I did practice a low-impact lifestyle, to the extent we could. But somewhere between then and now, my indulgent Eighties tendencies began to bleed through. It started with Legos and advanced from there, usually through the channel of buying for the lads things I myself desired. At this point it has reached expensive Premier League replica jerseys and tickets to the 2028 Olympics in LA. I, admittedly, very much want an electric Porsche Macan.

But as much as this is wish fulfillment and keeping up with the Joneses, it is equally a symptom of my impulse to accelerate the crisis. I don’t actually want to live this way - it causes me immense amounts of undue stress to continuously engage in a manner that is antithetical to my values - but there are no incentives to do otherwise. Send my sons to school in haggard second-hand clothes and listen to other people’s stories from their World Cup experience, with the only reward being an alienating sense of self-righteousness? I think I’ll take the Road.

It was this surrender that motivated my buying the plane tickets to Winnipeg that caused the glacial collapse in Nepal. People will say, oh you didn’t cause that, but they are wrong. I did, along with every one of my peers in the global 1%, which includes basically anyone reading, or having the ability to read, this blog. As Robinson foretold, these are the catastrophes that will become commonplace, slowly at first, as Hemingway said, then all at once. And they are the direct consequence of the lives we are living right now.