First, she quit sugar. Now, she’s ditched ‘hopium’: Sarah Wilson’s urgent new mission

This story is part of the July 26 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

Sarah Wilson says she doesn’t fit into a neat media tribe because “I talk scary stuff”.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk

It’s almost winter and Melbourne is 19 degrees, heading for a top of 20, “unseasonably warm” as the forecast says. It’s lovely but, you know, climate change. I wait for Sarah Wilson in the Tin Pot Cafe in Fitzroy North with its mismatched chairs and shabby cool. The trams rumble by, the sky pastel blue, the sun benign. Wilson strides across the road, AirPods in, wearing her uniform of cuffed jeans, white sneakers and black jacket.

I’m here because of my daughter. “You should interview Sarah Wilson,” she says. I remember Wilson wrote a book about quitting sugar years ago. I’ve seen her glamorous photographs in magazines here and there, and recall she has spoken in intensely personal terms about her anxiety.

I know little about her.

For the past few years, Wilson has been immersed in other matters. My daughter, in her early 30s, subscribes to Wilson’s Substack, where she wrote The Collapse Book chapter by chapter last year, encouraging feedback from her many subscribers as she went (she now has 62,000). It was about how life as we know is falling apart. Wilson packed out the Athenaeum Theatre at the Melbourne Writers Festival in May and delivered a TEDxSydney talk on the subject. She has an ideas podcast, Wild, for which she’s interviewed hundreds of scientists, philosophers, climate change activists, demographers and writers about big ideas, including the biggest: civilisational collapse.

Wilson defines it this way: “A gradual and then accelerating” shift in everything we’ve seen as normal over the past few hundred years: consumption will plummet, inequality soar, population fall, carbon emissions ever higher, an economy straining beyond breaking point.

Wilson’s ideas resonate with my daughter, who increasingly questions the detritus of capitalism: consumerism, waste, environmental catastrophe, growing inequality, the sins of her mother’s generation. She is hardly alone in her disquiet, particularly among younger people.

There are Wilson “meet-ups” where subscribers gather to discuss and question her ideas. In Sydney, about 55 fans turned up to a Bondi bookshop in May to talk to her, television presenter Julia Zemiro among the curious. She’s read all of Wilson’s books. If she raises climate change at a party, “at some point someone says, ‘Look, you’re being a bit of a Debbie Downer’ … it was nice to sit in that room with other people, no one was hysterical, no one was over the top, no one was crazy [but] people weren’t going, ‘Oh, calm down. It’ll be fine.’ ”

At 51, Wilson is high cheek-boned, beautiful with not a scrap of make-up. She’s intense, her hands doing the talking. I mention that another journalist was sceptical about writing about her because “she’s not an expert in any of this”. There’s a flash of temper. “It’s generally a white man who asks me for my qualifications,” she says (it was). Wilson’s website describes her as a “multi-New York Times and Amazon bestselling author, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, philanthropist and climate change advisor”. It’s a lot. She’s travelled a path from modelling on catwalks as a teenager to civilisational collapse. “In Australia, I don’t quite fit into the Guardian/ABC set and the mainstream don’t know what to do with me, either, because I talk scary stuff.”

“I’m not the expert. I’m absorbing and collating the information … I’m probably the only person in this space with a really large mainstream following.” She has 280,000 Instagram followers.

Sarah Wilson giving a TEDx Sydney talk in May on navigating the world’s “uncertain future”.Credit: Courtesy of Sarah Wilson

You can be sceptical about the “space” – writers and academics predicting the end of the world is not new –but it’s not fringe, either, at least not in Europe. And it at least grapples with a reasonable sense that things are not going well. (Climate change! Donald Trump! The Middle East! Ukraine! The collapse of the “rules-based” order! Billionaire tech bros! AI! The far right!). Wilson calls it making sense of a cognitive dissonance: that what we see with our own eyes is not what we’re hearing from political and civic leaders, who go on as though nothing much has changed.

We see Cyclone Alfred in south-east Queensland in March, the first in half a century to reach so far south. The Los Angeles fires in January that roared for weeks, killing 30 people and destroying 12,000 homes. We see temperature records tumble, again and again: 2023 was the hottest year on record, overtaken by 2024. And Wilson, who worked with Allegra Spender and other independent candidates at the federal election, was not alone in noticing that climate change was barely mentioned during the campaign. “It was crickets,” she says. Then one of the first post-election decisions of Labor Environment Minister Murray Watt was to approve the extension – to 2070 – of one of the world’s largest gas facilities, which will emit 10 years’ worth of Australia’s emissions over its lifetime. Whiplash seems appropriate.

There’s no collapse timeframe or movement leader –and there’s lots of debate about what it all means or what may fall apart first – but at heart, it’s about joining the dots. It’s too late to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to Wilson: “We missed the deadline,” as she puts it, to slash emissions fast enough to limit warming to a target of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, with two-, three-, even an unthinkable four-degree rise on the horizon. Pile on cascading, interconnected problems – a dizzying rate of species extinction and the destruction of the natural world, the prospect of tens of millions of climate refugees, a fertility crisis, political instability and democracies straining with online disinformation, soaring inequality, rising social unrest, artificial intelligence and an economic system reliant on endless growth on a finite planet – and the whole thing is beginning to … collapse.

Other civilisations have flourished and declined, says Wilson, and so will ours. She says this with such certainty, I find it a little chilling. The resultant deindustrialisation, simplification, whatever you call it, would mean much lower standards of living, fewer people, a harsher world – Wilson tells the Melbourne Writers Festival crowd that within our lifetime we probably won’t have reliable internet, and it would be useful for children to join Scouts to learn practical skills.

Longstanding activist

Wilson grew up the eldest of six children on Canberra’s outskirts and has a complicated relationship with Australia. One of the reasons she moved to Paris in 2023 – apart from loving the city and its culture of debate – is that she felt she struggled to be taken seriously here. A journalist and wellness columnist for years – she would find that description patronising – Wilson was editor of Cosmopolitan magazine at 29 after years of writing columns about health and how to live a good life, a short-lived host of MasterChef, and then the author of 2012’s international bestseller I Quit Sugar.

Wilson aged eight in 1982.Credit: Courtesy of Sarah Wilson

She always had one foot in the mainstream, one foot out. Canberra journalist Emma Macdonald, who befriended Wilson when they were modelling, said the teenaged Wilson had no interest in clothes or make-up, and “she still wears dresses she wore 20 years ago”. I ask Wilson why on earth she would be interested in editing Cosmopolitan, focused on fashion, beauty and lifestyle, and she says that she was offered it, it was a challenge, and she was “extremely ambitious” at the time despite feeling an “incredible imposter syndrome”.

“I’m aware that I look very mainstream, you know, put on a big smile, let people do my hair, [but] I’ve never owned a hair-dryer. I don’t take part in any of that stuff, it’s all smoke and mirrors … I’ve always known how to play the game.” Because she was so palatable to a mainstream audience, “I was able to get away with socially progressive, often feminist outbursts.”

The I Quit Sugar book turned into a business employing more than 20 people, but Wilson closed it in 2018, saying at the time that she was not interested in scaling the business as a money-making exercise. All proceeds went to charity. And there were other interests. In 2017, she published First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, a deeply researched and personal book about anxiety and her physical and mental health challenges, including bipolar and an autoimmune disease. In 2020 Wilson followed with This One Wild and Precious Life, detailing how she hiked across the world from Slovenia to the Australian desert, exploring how to live in a disconnected, crazy world, especially the existential crisis of climate change.

Wilson’s I Quit Sugar book was a global phenomenon.

“She’s a lot,” her friend Macdonald says with affection. Wilson has at times felt ostracised in Australia, “whereas overseas I’m treated as like an intellectual, a public intellectual,” routinely invited to international conferences and festivals. She knows she’s controversial here. Independent ACT senator David Pocock is a friend, but his media person says he’s too busy to talk even for 15 minutes with a month’s notice. “It would be far too compromising [for him],” says Wilson, explaining that he’s still a firm believer in the green economy’s possibilities.

British philosopher A. C. Grayling meets Wilson regularly at a Paris cafe on Sundays. She is “super-smart, perceptive, goes like an arrow to the nub of a question,” he says. As for collapse, “she might, alas, well be right”.

Wilson split with her Australian publisher Pan Macmillan after This One Wild and Precious Life came out during the pandemic; she had complaints about how they marketed and promoted it. Now she tells me of a six-figure US-dollar advance – “10 times more than I thought I’d get” – from Penguin Books in the US to turn her self-published collapse e-book into a physical book, due out next year. “I don’t know how wedded you are to the Australian publishing industry, but I’m ‘f--- you’ because they would not have supported it.”

Wilson was the editor of Cosmopolitan, despite never owning a hair-dryer.Credit: WireImage

“Hopium” for the masses

There’s nothing novel in the idea that the end of the world is nigh, a Mad Max world our destiny. During the Cold War, fears of nuclear armageddon were routine (and not foolish). Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, investigated why past civilisations disappeared, drawing – controversially – lessons for modern ones. Easter Island is “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by over-exploiting its own resources”, he wrote, a “metaphor, a worst-case scenario” for our own possible future.

Online, I disappear into the r/collapse group on Reddit and its weekly newsletter, Last Week in Collapse, that collates the week’s grim news: “An unprecedented heat wave moved through much of western and southern Europe, setting new monthly records in Spain and Portugal and England and Slovenia, where temperatures hit 46 degrees … Sea ice in the Arctic hit another all-time low.”

No wonder people become very, very interested in a mushroom murder trial. People need hope, but not “hopium” as it’s dubbed by those like Wilson who argue that what we really need is the truth and an all-in plan to prepare for it. “In fact, there are not even any ‘solutions’ to our predicament,” Frenchmen Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens wrote in their 2015 bestseller, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, “just paths we can pursue to adapt to our new reality”.

It was these two who are credited with the at-first tongue-in-cheek term “collapsologie”, which Wilson identifies with. The French seem especially alive to the idea of a discipline studying what could happen: Wilson tells her audience at the Melbourne Writers Festival that the top-selling book in France in 2022 was about collapse. It was the graphic novel World Without End, by climate expert Jean-Marc Jancovici and cartoonist Christophe Blain, that at least acknowledged that fossil fuels were once superheroes because of all the advantages, prosperity and poverty reduction they bestowed on us since the Industrial Revolution – it’s just now there’s a price to pay.

In late March, the European Union urged its member states to develop a 72-hour survival kit for citizens to prepare for “the reality we are facing”, such as possible wars, natural disasters, pandemics and civil unrest. France advises a kit consisting of at least six litres of water, a dozen tins of food, batteries and a torch, and basic medical supplies with instructions on how to prepare for an imminent threat, including armed conflict, a health crisis or a natural disaster. Sweden and Finland have similar instructions. “The discussion is not happening in Australia,” says Wilson, “so the conversation when it finally happens is going to land as particularly frightening and weird.”

Wilson’s disillusionment with the belief that resourceful humans could “fix” things began with her awareness of climate change. She has been a climate change activist for decades, in 2023 working with the Climate Council on an “I Quit Gas” campaign urging governments to help Australians switch from gas, a fossil fuel.

Her personal habits are austere. She doesn’t own a house or a car. She lives out of a couple of suitcases, wears mostly second-hand clothes, owns no handbag. She notes that Mail Online seems fascinated by her admission she owns just several pairs of underpants, rinse and repeat. She is single and has no children.

Wilson noticed a few years ago that climate experts were privately contradicting their upbeat public assurances that a solution was possible via collective action.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk

About three years ago, she noticed that when interviewing experts on climate change that they felt obliged after warning of the urgency of reducing global warming to offer an upbeat conclusion: “If we rally together, we can make it.” Interview over, she’d ask them if they really believed that. “And then they admit, ‘No, we can’t.’ And this was increasingly the conversation I was having off mic” with people reluctant to say it publicly for fear people would give up the struggle.

Apart from stubborn climate change deniers and a handful of News Corp columnists, few deny climate change is with us and will get worse and that global efforts, while unprecedented and remarkable in their way, have not been fast or deep enough to meet the crisis.

The reports from the United Nations and scientists ramp up the urgency and rhetoric until we glaze over. The UN Environment Program, in its Emissions Gap report late last year, found that global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming remain catastrophically off track, with current policies putting the world on course for a 3.1 degree rise by 2100.

Although renewable energy from wind and solar is soaring, demand for electricity is rising even faster, mainly in developing countries. The result: global carbon emissions are still rising.

Under the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, leaders pledged to hold global warming to “well below” two degrees above pre-industrial levels and preferably closer to 1.5 degrees. There is always scientific uncertainty about timelines and impacts, but these figures weren’t plucked out of the air – research suggests they can help avoid triggering irreversible environmental “tipping points” that would accelerate the impact of climate change. At a three-degree rise, for example, it’s projected that the annual average number of days in Darwin hotter than 35 degrees would leap from a couple of dozen now to as many as 265 in 2090.

Most scientists think the 1.5-degree goal is now unachievable; we already breached it in 2024, but the headline figure is calculated over a decade. Globally, the planet has warmed by about 1.3 degrees on land; in Australia, one of the world’s most vulnerable countries, the rise is 1.3-1.7 degrees since 1910.

“I want to say this with all my care and love,” Wilson writes. “I can no longer support the idea that ‘we can still make it’, that we can bring global warming and emissions down within the ranges set out by the poor scientists who’ve been warning for decades that we’d reach this point where hopeful outcomes could no longer be promised. Further, the energy transition and the net zero ambition simply does not stack up – we can’t do it in time, not without doing further damage to the planet, other species and the human condition.

Wilson often catches up with prominent Australians in Paris, including Governor-General Sam Mostyn.Credit: @_sarahwilson_/Instagram

“Finally, to hang everything on some miracle technology or AI upgrade saving us, which is where I think most climate folk I know now land, is precarious at best. It’s not even hopeful, it’s desperately wishful.”

I want to know if that’s true, or whether it could unintentionally play into the hands of those who would do nothing about climate change. Wilson understands that risk, “but there are times in history where we’ve got to, not frighten people and numb them into a freeze state where they do nothing … [but] where we’ve got to go, ‘This is the situation and game on right now.’ ”

Internationally recognised climate scientist David Karoly, professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, says 1.5 is gone, the Great Barrier Reef is “doomed” but two degrees remains possible – and urgent. “It is too late, but it’s never too late because unless we reduce emissions, every tonne of additional greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels adds to global warming,” he says.

Renowned Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki said earlier this month that the world failed to act urgently when it was warned in the 1990s. “Now, it is too late … we have failed to shift the narrative, and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems.” Trump’s election as US president in November was “the dagger in my heart”, Suzuki, who is 89, said. Trump has withdrawn the US, the world’s second-highest emitter of carbon emissions after China, and one of the highest per capita, from the Paris Agreement. He has slashed tax breaks for wind and solar energy, expanding the production and support for fossil fuels like gas, oil and coal. For Wilson, even the election of Trump – with his authoritarian instincts, a rage against dissent and a disdain for climate action – is another sign of collapse.

Persistence of denial

Dr Clive Hamilton, author, academic, and founder of the progressive think tank The Australia Institute, published Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet last year with energy expert George Wilkenfeld. It concluded that the steep emissions falls need to limit warming to two degrees by 2100 “are simply unachievable given continuing disputes between countries and blocks, backsliding from previous commitments, and the enduring power of the fossil fuel corporations”. Hamilton, who has been interviewed by Wilson on her podcast, says we should be talking about ideas around collapse: “It may mean our society takes it seriously and prepares for it. [But] if collapse is coming, it’s very hard to know which form it might take.”

He supports efforts to reduce emissions, but argues for a “rebalancing [of] our priorities” towards adapting for a world where a child born today will live in an Australia lurching from one climate-linked disaster to the next. What we need to do now (and should have begun decades earlier) is for governments to come clean about how we prepare. It would mean everything from shifting cities too vulnerable to flooding, fire or coastal erosion (think Ballina and Lismore in NSW and the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria) to banning building in flood- or bushfire-prone areas and along the coastline. Northern Australia will become too hot to live comfortably, agriculture will need to change, and we need to plan for more frequent disruption of the electricity grid.

It will cost billions. Wilson talks the same way, although she wants us to prepare psychologically, even spiritually, too. She meditates, reads Buddhist books, hikes in nature as much as possible and aims to “be of radical service to humanity”.

Wilson’s Substack subscribers at a Bondi meet-up to hear her talk.Credit: Courtesy of Sarah Wilson

I want to talk to Ross Garnaut, a distinguished economist, for another perspective on Wilson’s conclusion that capitalism – the grasping for endless economic growth – is the crucial reason the world has struggled to deal with not just climate change but other huge challenges. Garnaut’s 2008 review on the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy concluded that the economic cost of acting would be far less than the cost of inaction. His view hasn’t changed.

He was a joint founder of the reassuringly titled The Superpower Institute, whose mission is “helping Australia to seize the extraordinary opportunities of the post-carbon world”. His people tell me he doesn’t want to contribute to a story that could veer into conspiracy, but to a few emailed questions he sends a 3000-word response and agrees to talk. “You have asked important questions and I have answered them seriously and at length,” he writes.

Since his report 17 years ago, “enough has gone well in Australia and in the world for it still to be possible to hold global temperature increases to two degrees above industrial levels,” he says, the limit of the report’s ambition then. Yes, it will be difficult to achieve net zero by 2050, yes, limiting rises to 1.5 degrees is almost certainly out of reach without even bigger emissions cuts later, yes, Trump’s election is a blow, but if the rest of the world keeps going, “we can carry a Trumpist America for half a decade”.

Collapse theory “misrepresents the nature of our choices”, he says. Garnaut agrees with Wilson to this extent: at some point it will be just too late. “If the world fails to reduce industrial emissions much … there will be some point at which national and international political order is overwhelmed by the effects of climate change.” He says, “That really would be a point of collapse, the end of time for all government policy,” adding, “We are not at that point now.”

Unbridled growth is out

One of Wilson’s central criticisms of the environmental movement is its reluctance to question the god of economic growth. “The big problem with the energy transition message or green energy message in Australia is it’s all about you can consume as much as you want. You don’t have to change one bit of your lifestyle,” she says. The federal government doesn’t want to talk about declining standards of living, adapting the “renewable energy superpower” mantra and championing the “unlimited potential to build a pathway to secure jobs and economic security for all Australians”.

For Garnaut, there is nothing contradictory about pursuing economic growth and improving the environment: they are linked. And it’s not consumption itself that’s the problem, it’s what and how we consume. Wilson disagrees. Consumers might be told they don’t have to stop consuming so much, but “they’re going to have to, because it’s going to be forced upon them, whether it’s by the climate crisis or AI or the collapse of democracy”.

The climate might have been Wilson’s introduction to collapse ideas, but it’s just one thread. A looming fertility crisis is another, that would lead to far fewer people available to work, pay taxes and care for the elderly. This is contentious – for Garnaut, for instance, it is overpopulation in poor countries that is harming the environment.

Wilson cites projections that the global population – an estimated 8.2 billion now, more than quadrupling over the past 100 years – will peak close to 2080 at about 10 billion and then go into precipitous decline, stabilising at around 1 to 2 billion (in 300 years or so, although there is no consensus how fast this will happen). Australia hasn’t had replacement fertility, for example, since 1975 (for a population to remain stable or increase, a replacement rate is 2.1 live births per woman is necessary; our population growth is due to immigration). Population decline won’t come in time to help the environment, but will likely “severely disrupt – and potentially start to collapse – other vital systems, like the economy, civil stability or democracy”, Wilson observes.

Garnaut says the pressures on the environment from overpopulation in desperately poor countries can be eased by economic growth and rising living standards. “Wherever you have successful economic growth, your fertility falls and population falls. Income growth, economic growth, is actually the only way in which we can reduce the pressure on the environment.”

Garnaut turns 79 on Monday and he hasn’t given up. “I might be stupid for doing it, but I was taught as a kid no matter how far behind you are, you keep going flat out till the final siren. And I’m gonna go flat out till my final siren.”

Life gets “a bit more shit”?

Wilson’s ideas aren’t about giving up, either. As depressing as they are, she finds them strangely liberating. She can sound emphatic – “Cities will likely crumble, some reduced to ghost towns” – but she stresses that nobody knows exactly what will happen, or when, or how. It might “rip hard and fast. Or things might be just … a bit more shit for a few generations.” AI could wipe us out or usher in dangers to our security and safety, she says. The health of democracies is undoubtedly wavering, with almost 40 per cent of people now living under authoritarian rule, according to one estimate. Economic inequality continues to worsen, including in Australia.

There’s a hint that Wilson, while she often speaks of her grief, feels that it won’t be all bad if collapse comes to pass. It could be a “gift … returning us to our humanity”: “What I’m doing is steering everybody to asking things like, ‘Well, who do I want to be in this? Who must I be?’ ” There’s a back-to-nature emphasis on simplifying, getting off the phone, shopping less, being kind to neighbours and preparing to be more self-reliant when weather and other disasters hit. “I love the fact that I’m doing this,” she says. “It’s brought me so much joy, the humanness that comes out of this.” The work can be despairing, but “it’s raw, and it’s big”.

Wilson plans to buy land outside Canberra where her family could live if they need to. She’s not a prepper; she seeks no bunker. “None of my family have money, I’m the moneybags, and I don’t have children, and I’m leaving everything to my brothers and sisters when I die, and nieces and nephews, so I figure I might as well buy the land now.”

If things “go to shit, we can all go somewhere”.

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