The 2025 book outline (an earlier form of DiP)

"Departure In Place: An outline for a wildly ambitious book" (April 2025, https://departurein.place/departure-in-place-an-outline-for-a-wildly-ambitious-book/). The earliest public statement of departure-in-place, from when he planned a serialised book of about 70 topics; by March 2026 he had questioned the book form, and the October 2026 idea network leaves the form open. A point-in-time reference, not his current position (James, 2026-10-26: his thinking has evolved a lot since he wrote it). Read it as where DiP stood in April 2025; where it differs from the idea network or later writing, the later statement wins. Recorded as history and as a source of ideas the network doesn't yet carry.

He framed himself as "not an expert in any of this", writing from inside technological organisations "not to proclaim, but to inquire". Collapse is "a long, uneven unravelling of systems that were never built to last", not apocalypse; the book is about how we meet it.

The chapters, compressed

1. Trapped between progress and collapse: the two myths totalise the future and paralyse agency; a "memetic trap".
2. The gospel of progress: teleology, techno-solutionism, GDP moralised as civilisational worth; progress persists partly through the horror of collapse.
3. Progress, the engine of collapse: growth subsidised by ecological, temporal and social externalities; overshoot beyond climate (soil, acidification, endocrine disruptors, microplastics); debt and financialisation externalise harm in time; rebound effects; collapse already under way for many communities, in the rich North too.
4. Survivals unseen: what we measure shapes what we see; written history and financial metrics erase subsistence, adaptation and mutual aid.
5. Patchwork futures: collapse is rarely total; post-Roman Europe, post-Han China, post-Gupta India and Dark Age Greece reorganised around local resilience, with diversity, subsidiarity and new forms.
6. Complex, high-energy, brittle: nonlinear failure from energy constraints, coupling and over-optimisation; declining EROI; efficiency produces fragility; material demand, not carbon alone, is the basis of overshoot.
7. No escape via clean energy: renewables still need mining and fossil supply chains; "no historical evidence of absolute decoupling at planetary scale"; relocalise, simplify, reorient.
8. No escape via money or power: elite insulation is brittle; "do not aspire to join the elites"; relational wealth is "the only form of security that scales"; redistribution as infrastructure for shared survival.
9. Departure-in-place: shift how needs are met from brittle global systems to resilient local ones; "not ... degrowth as a target, but ... mutuality and local adaptivity"; becoming "less capturable by the collapsing whole".
10. Design principles for break-away resilience: subsidiarity, polycentric governance, diversity; polyculture; skill webs and mutual apprenticeship; conviviality as quality over quantity; protection from co-optation "via legal avenues, decentralisation, building cultural legitimacy, networked federation and good old-fashioned stealth and guile".
11. Case sketches, 2020s: COVID mutual aid, Puerto Rican microgrids, Catalan co-ops, Detroit repair cafés, Indigenous fire stewardship, Kenyan pay-as-you-go solar.
12. Choosing our story: collapse "is where meaning becomes visible again"; met like death, with presence and courage; "become ancestors of viable futures".

Epilogue, A Larger Us: "not scale, but federation—not purity, but participation"; "the task is not to be safe, but to be in right relation".

What it adds to the network (author's reading; ideas from 2025, not necessarily held now)

• The progress/collapse duopoly as the frame to clear, an early form of clearing-captured-frames and of the "imagining normalises" question on thread-transition.
• Historical post-collapse reorganisation (chapter 5) as evidence for an "age of crisis, not a crisis" (macro-view); not yet in the wiki.
• Design principles (chapter 10) that overlap the convergent-signatures (Ostrom's polycentricity) and commons ("stealth and guile" is minimum necessary legibility in practice), and name conviviality (convivial-computation).
• "Not degrowth as a target": a nuance against the degrowth lineage on the hub.
• World claims in it a session could test, with evidence for and against: absolute decoupling (chapter 7); post-collapse continuity (chapter 5); relational wealth as the security that scales (chapter 8).

Provenance: James's post "Departure In Place: An outline for a wildly ambitious book" (2025-04-29, https://departurein.place/departure-in-place-an-outline-for-a-wildly-ambitious-book/), read in full 2026-10-26; saved in raw/notes/departurein-place-2026-10-26.md. His statement of his own position; not a sourced claim about the world. Disposition: stated.

Related: departure-in-place, clearing-captured-frames, convergent-signatures, commons, macro-view, thread-transition, convivial-computation