TEAM
Keeping watch over Post-doom has been passed from Michael Dowd’s widow, Connie Barlow, to a small team dedicated to stoking the embers to ensure the flame of Collapse Acceptance continues to burn and spread.
Contact us via the Post-doom Team email.
Karen Perry, Michael Ressl, and Jordan Perry at the Bear River, CA
GERRY RUSSELL
An education including a B.S. in Industrial Technology with a focus on Technical Processing and an Associate degree in Electrical Science, propelled Gerry Russell to land where he is today. Working in many different professional environments provided him with a better understanding of the predicament we are currently facing. Experience includes: building electrical control systems for marine oil spill recovery vessels, industrial mechanic, local church sexton, hardware engineer for a Fortune 500 that was a former “Four Horseman of the Internet“, and an IT administrator for a multi-municipality school district.
Life threw Gerry a huge curve in 2005 with a back injury requiring multiple surgeries trying to repair the damage. He was forced to slow down and start a new path. It led to becoming collapse-aware in early 2019 after seeing what was happening to the world.
Michael Dowd’s teachings really helped Gerry through some dark times. He feels blessed to have been able to get to know Michael personally through helping provide technical support to the Post Doom No Gloom zoom calls. Gerry is now passionate about being able to thank him by using some of his G🌎D given skills to support sharing Michael’s work and legacy.
Having the support of Gerry’s wife and two adult children is also the fire that keeps him going. Providing people a safe place to discuss collapse acceptance is now a focus as the world becomes more chaotic. Along with his website work, making art and being a space nerd are ways of helping him connect to the universe we all are part of.
JORDAN PERRY
As a fully-present participant in the community of life, Jordan Perry’s primary focus is on calling attention to Global Industrial Civilization as the core predicament facing homo colossus and the wider biosphere. Simply put, he knows nature is primary, civilization isn’t. Rewilded life on Earth is the only ethical thing to pursue, even if it spells doom for most hominids, which it will.
To support his commitment to the wild world and Less is More, Jordan chose the challenging path to leave behind many successful dominant culture careers. Michael Dowd considered him to be one of his closest colleagues, which compelled Jordan to accept Connie’s Post-doom torch pass after Michael’s death in October 2023.
For more granular explanations embedded in Jordan’s work, check out jordanperry.substack.com or to swim in the cesspool of hot takes & circle speak, follow @JordanPerry on X/Twitter
KAREN PERRY
Perhaps best known in the collapse community for her 15 Benefits of Collapse Acceptance and Tenets of GRAC/E (Getting Real About Collapse/Extinction), Karen Perry humbly accepted the Post-doom torch passed by Connie after Michael’s death in October 2023.
Prior to her collapse support work, she retired early from her teaching career to focus on environmental activism and energy literacy advocacy, both in the streets at many protest events, and in speaking engagements at a variety of venues. Through multiple grants of books from The Post Carbon Institute, she was able to freely distribute thousands of copies of ENERGY: Overdevelopment and Delusion of Endless Growth, each with a personal conversation. Karen, along with partner Jordan Perry, was arrested twice for civil disobedience with 350.org protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline and fossil fuels.
Since 2012, Karen has been living and working at Chickenfoot Ranch, the “experiment in living differently/dominant culture walkaway” homestead in the Northern California Sierra Foothills she currently shares with Jordan and her two adult sons. Her passions are reconnecting to the wild world through finding the creature inside born wild and free, but taught otherwise – and using her BA in Communications, teaching credential, and other talents to push back on dominant culture as much as possible, through something she calls Finding Feral.
Local highlights include helping stop a dam threatening the nearby Bear River, re-wilding an abusive campground on same river (now a day use only area), and surviving a 2021 wildfire. She has no illusions about wriggling out of our global collapse predicament, only that perhaps we could do a better job to reduce suffering for all, human and non, on the inevitable way down.
MIKE REZL
The original Post-doom website was created by Mike Rezl, a freelance technical consultant and web designer, who continues to host it and offer support. He has also created websites for Dean Walker’s Living Resilience and Shaun Chamberlin’s Dark Optimism.
Since 2018, Mike has been a moderator of r/Collapse, the largest online forum related to the study of the collapse of complex systems. He is also the creator of the Collapse Wiki, a collaborative guide to collapse and the community resource for the Collapse subreddit.
More of Mike’s work can be found at MikeRezl.com.