Younger Dryas Dreaming
Thinking-with modern-resilience and earth-attuned adaptation
The Younger Dryas was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years ago, characterized by rapid glacial and freezing temperatures, which changed weather patterns, deeply impacting ecosystems and lifeways.
For some time now, I’ve been thinking-with and imagining-through the difference between resilience and adaptation of cultures during the Younger Dryas profound environmental changes, over the current expectation that technology, in a hubristic anthropocentric demand, will save us—or at least some of us, asserts the modern-colonial reductionist thinking.
I’m trying to identify contrasting elements in the modern psyche when comparing “modern resilience” to “earth-attuning adaptation.” This is important because it reveals vulnerabilities in both emotional and institutional attitudes toward the current polycrisis and collapse.
We can smell the scent of mammoth bones and melting ice sheets.
The Younger Dryas was a breath of cold dizziness in the Earth’s exhale. Cultures moved, listened, and transformed. They were not "resilient" in the modern sense and didn’t bounce back. Indeed, resilience is a torn word… in its modern formulation, it is secretly cloaked in progressive logic, implying a return to normal, to the stable known. But when everything shatters, the known is no longer an option. Younger Dryas populations adapted, as contemporary indigenous cultures still do (despite continuous dispossession and oppression), mimicking practices by non-human kin, sensing, and recalibrating their way into new and unknown rhythms. Some perished, others migrated, and many hibernated into new forms of being. It so happens that non-human beings don’t treat collapse as failure. Groups of beings navigate through paradoxical impermanence, listening and attuning to situated instructions.
We can listen to the ancient ice cracking under the weight of a family of woolly mammoths passing through.
But systemic upheaval leaves modern humans quite lost, having been severed from the wider ecological kinship relations long ago. So, instead of listening or recalibrating, the impulse is to build more control systems, using decontextualized data to generate predictive models in a self-deceiving dream that projects linear salvation through technological expertise. Managing the storm, not learning her songs.
There's a story to this, and we should remember.
We ought to reclaim severed threads, mourning, and refusing the amnesia. So let’s name some yarns of the long arc of ontological containment, where non-human kin and ancestors were banished and rebranded as demons. First, in the 5th century, when Bishop Martim of Braga1 said that Neptune, Lamias, nymphs, and Dianas were “nothing but demons,” he was enacting an ontological confinement, reassigning beings from sacred kin to moral threat. This was a colonizing and geopolitical act, claiming theological and civilized space, silencing non-humans, and severing relational memory. Dispossessing long-term ecological wisdom by injecting judgment and shame. The banishment didn’t erase them, but it orphaned us from the land. All that we have left are unnamed ghosts, remnants of primal reciprocal ecologies.
But there is more.
Deep-time pedagogies we should recall. Raymond Pierotti’s2 work names how wolves, salmon, and songbirds carry generational memory of harshness and abundance. They have always been teachers. Pierotti also names the dark fantasy of ecological stability, cloaked in economic concepts, that arrogantly states, “If we control variables well enough, the system will be stable.”
Can you hear the mammoths' deep-time laugh while playing in the defrosting ice?
But cosmic ecologies don’t do stability. The Earth fluxes, ruptures, restabilizes impermanently, transforms, dies, and is reborn. The animals know this. So did the nymphs and rivers and lamias. Ecology lives and weaves at the edge of chaos. But the modern mind has been conditioned to treat these cycles as failures and management as salvation.
So here we are, so numb and afraid that the only option is to control.
The current emphasis on technology, driven by a hubristic, anthropocentric demand for saviorism, assumes collapse as failure, and so resilience must be engineered. This modern and linear idea of “resilience” demands the maintenance of privileged convenience and comfort, thus preserving the dominant systems while minimizing disruption.
In naming the adaptation during the Younger Dryas period, I’m aiming to find contrasting threads in the modern psyche that appear when compared to “modern resilience.” This is important, for it opens cracks in the posture, both affective and institutional, towards the contemporary polycrisis and collapse.
I speak of modern resilience’s orientation as control and return, based on systems optimization, where technology is the savior or the solver. But Earth-attuned adaptation’s orientation is centered on listening and transformation, grounded in relations within a broader metabolism, where technology is one of many diverse tools used in context. This is because modern resilience’s relation to collapse is to avoid or swiftly and neatly fix it, causally and linearly (not losing a step on the relentless ideation of progress). It is expected that specialists, experts, and engineers will teach and inform the public on how to recover from the strife. While in earth-attuned adaptation, the whole body, place, and community, compost and transmute, because impermanence and change have always been cyclical and life rhizomatic. The teachers are the land, waters, and animals, and the learning is not to avoid change, but how to become otherwise.
Let's ask the moss and lichen how they move in times of peril. What stories do they hold?
Recalibrating out of colonial theologies.
Earth-attuned adaptation is a paraontological recalibration. If ontology is the study of being within the confines of a colonial mindset; paraontology is the vibration beside being, under the floor, the haze between breaths, where meaning hasn't crystallized yet, still moving, meandering. Paraontological recalibration enables one not to bounce back or become a new stable thing. It opens the possibility of repatterning through paradoxical impermanence, listening, and attuning to situated instructions. This is the realm of the potential of non-human teachers—when animals could speak. When the Younger Dryas cooled the Earth, animals fostered different relations to place through motion and limitation—synchronizing soft-bodies to new rhythms before settling into final forms.
Let’s keep the last mammoth breath in our bones, listening to his song.
But modernity utterly fears that fuzzy, indeterminate space-time where the self isn't fixed. Where the nymphs still swim in the undercurrents. What do you mean the “problem” isn't clear?
That is precisely why, for the modern mind, muffled in colonial theology and control logics, re-weaving a relational technology of attunement could make survival less anthropocentric and more feral, reverent, and humble. It could allow a change in posture, approaching our cultural disorientation not with diagnosis or resistance, but with embodied and situated listening. Becoming more sensitive to what's already changing us, for attuning to the new relational rhythms, requires less control and more surrender.
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Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.
I write about this Bishop at length both in Tales of the Serpent and the Moon and The Sanctuary.
https://ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/article/view/729/444 O papel do mito na compreensão da natureza Raymond Pierotti1* 1Departamento de Ecologia e Biologia Evolutiva, Universidade do Kansas, Lawrence, KS, EUA. *pierotti@ku.edu Recebido a 19 de junho de 2016. Ethnobiology Letters 2016 7(2):6-13 | DOI 10.14237/ebl.7.2.2016.729