Climate is Death
AD
September 2026
“Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God:
When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?”
Psalm 42 vv1-2 [BCP]
One searingly hot afternoon this summer my friend who is a clinical cancer consultant looked out over the tinderdry fields and questioned their work in these times.
Part of their expertise is in meeting patients to assess if they are fit enough to receive treatment. Treatment which will give them another few years of life, or a decade. During which they will fight cancer and maybe win then maybe fight it again and definitely lose in the end.
“They have been given a ticket out of here” the consultant said. “Why can’t they take it?”
Maybe they want to be here. The market wants them to be here. To spend time with their children and grandchildren. To go on a cruise. To book into a care home and spend all their savings.
That’s an extra decade of consumption my consultant friend has just bought them.
And what a privilege that is: a longer lifetime (noting that the people in the poorest places in this country die 10 years earlier than in the richest).
And the medical industrial complex wants to keep us alive too. More intervention, more income. Everyone over 70 on statins by default. No one goes away empty handed.
Medicalisation also keeps us away from death. Hence the care homes.
We used to have our elders at home. When they passed we might have a wake. In other places and cultures they still hold, wash or witness the body:
Nine Nights in the Caribbean
Ikwa Ozu in Nigeria
Torajan rituals in Indonesia
Tsuya in Japan
Ghusl in Muslim countries
And many more…
But here in the UK we have forgotten how, or have chosen to look the other way.
Two thirds of our elders die in hospitals and care homes.
Most of us haven’t seen a dead body, even less held the hand of a dying person.
(That said, numbers dying at home increased under covid, and have since remained at that level: perhaps because we are more isolated now, not less).
A natural death is too slow too hard too unpredictable. Too human.
Like a natural birth: 45% of births in England in 2024/25 were by caesarean (against 21% in 2000).
Now turn to the climate collapse: the deaths of all people and nature.
We won’t deal with this until we can deal with death.
We‘ll try to buy our way out of it (literally, go on a cruise when it gets too hot or too wet, if we have the money).
Rather than prolonging our journey around the world, we’ve been given a ticket out of here. Why won’t we take it?
Because we are afraid of death. Because it is kept from us.
So one answer to the question “What should I do?”
- when we know our actions can’t save us or nature, so it doesn’t matter what we do now -
Is to say:
Hold the hand of a dying person.
Because then you will see that to die can be beautiful.
Another cancer specialist I know has held the hand of many a dying person (20 perhaps or more).
Usually because there was no one else there to do so: no relatives came, or they were out of the room at that moment (the dying apparently like to do this).
And in every case the specialist has said it is a privilege to be there:
When the breath changes
The air changes
The light changes
Everything changes
At point of death
And the ease which descends on the dying and those who watch and wait with them.
Not all death is like this. But it can be, given its chance,
If life is not taken by force, if people are not killed, if there is love.
Left to run its course the body dies as a leaf dies
Grows brown and sere
Lets go its branch
Wafts down to the floor
And lands softly.
This is what we want for our loved ones.
A beautiful death.
A return to the earth.
As living human beings,
We have all done this before
Many many times,
And in our individual lives, at birth.
This isn’t something we need to learn how to do,
It is something for us to remember - we know how to do this.
In the same way as we care for a baby at the moment of birth,
Tenderly, gently, softly spoken (because you know they can hear you),
Fully present, in awe of what is happening,
A seemingly unbeautiful thing, horrific even,
And with the inescapable potential to transform us,
The certain and inconceivable knowledge that we will be changed,
Knowing we will cross the line to life but unable to imagine how
This all shall come to pass.
This too shall pass.
In the same way we must do this for our loved ones
As we care for them at the moment of dying,
Tenderly, gently, softly spoken (because you know they can hear you),
Fully present, in awe of what is happening,
A seemingly unbeautiful thing, horrific even,
And with the inescapable potential to transform us,
The certain and inconceivable knowledge that we will be changed,
Knowing we will cross the line to death but unable to imagine how
This all shall come to pass.
This too shall pass.
So let us do this:
Hold the hand of a dying person
Make death beautiful
Because there will be a lot more dying
More than ever before
From climate breakdown and from wars.
Let us make this as beautiful as possible.
And maybe if we do so
We will not be afraid to die
And will not be afraid that nature will die.
Let us sit and hold the hand of the dying planet
And fear nothing
Because we know how this ends.
[References]
Illich, I (1975) Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, Calder & Boyars.
ONS (15/4/26) Healthy life expectancy by national area deprivation, England and Wales: between 2013 to 2015 and 2022 to 2024
Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. Public health profiles (2026)
Palliative and End of Life Care Profiles
https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile/end-of-life/data
NHS England Maternity Statistics 2024-25 (December 2025)
BBC News (6/2/26) ‘Why there's been a 'rapid' rise in death doulas’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7v9rjv99z5o