So, when’s it going to happen? 2020? 2030? 2100? Don’t worry: we’re not going to make a prognosis in this chapter. The difficulty, of course, lies in knowing what exactly we want to fix a date for. ‘The collapse event’ involves different time horizons. The rhythm of finance isn’t the same as that of rising sea levels. The financiers are talking about an impending crisis because no lessons were learned from the 2008 crisis. Climatologists, meanwhile, deal both with current events and with what could happen in a few years or a few decades.
To try and find out what the future holds in store for us, we need to start out with certainties. We have seen that climate catastrophes are already occurring and will intensify. The same applies to the erosion of biodiversity, chemical pollution, wars for water and resources, major droughts, massive migrations, terrorist attacks, epidemics, financial crises, social tensions stemming from inequality, and so on. All this is a huge reservoir of potential disruptions (some very small) that can at any time unleash domino effects through the highly interconnected and locked-in structure of the world economic system. Scientists call these little sparks that can trigger an explosion ‘femtorisks’, in reference to the apparent insignificance of causes in comparison with their potential effects (femto- is a prefix meaning 10-15).1
But how could we still believe in the urgency of the situation, given that disasters have been announced for more than forty years (actually since Malthus!). In the 1970s, many scientists tried to predict the future. Some were wrong, like Paul Ehrlich (in respect of a demographic prediction),2 but others got it right, like Rachel Carson on the problems of using pesticides3 and the meteorologist John S. Sawyer who, in an article published in the journal Nature in 1972, calculated the difference in temperature and the exact increase in CO2 in the atmosphere for the period up to 2000.4
How can we still believe in all these tireless predictions? And who are we to believe? Warnings from the Club of Rome go back to 1972, and their model still remains valid (as we will see in chapter 8); and yet there are many who still do not believe it. Perhaps people are tired of apocalyptic warnings? Forty years waiting is a long time …
However, the two eras are very different. Half a century ago, the Apocalypse took the form of a potential nuclear winter. The fear was real (and survivalist communities did appear) but ultimately nothing happened. Today, climatic and environmental catastrophes are less spectacular, but they have actually started. They cannot fail to take place.
On the other hand, if the possibility of industrial civilization collapsing is ever more palpable and real, we cannot be certain of its date. To predict the future, scientists build up their knowledge from dispersed data. From the millenarian prophecies of yesteryear to the contemporary fear of a nuclear winter, all the predictions of our societies’ collapse have so far failed – everyone can see that no global collapse has occurred. So how can anyone be sure that we’re not mistaken yet again? The answer is easy: we can’t be sure. But there is evidence.
To try to predict and avoid disasters or systemic shocks similar to 2008, some experts including insurers are developing tools for risk assessment and management. But ‘the factors that determine the outcome and impact of invasions [… ] are frequently complex and poorly understood’.5 Femtorisks cannot be apprehended by traditional risk-management tools. Most societies clearly do not have adequate and sufficient resources to assess these risks.
If by chance all these risks can be identified, their evaluation and mitigation require a certain transparency and accountability on the part of institutions and decision makers. Now, this is increasingly difficult to obtain in highly complex systems because the unintended or unknown consequences of each person’s individual actions increase considerably (this is also valid at the level of a state or an enterprise). This is the moral hazard: we behave as if we were not ourselves exposed to the risk. Some agents refuse to accept responsibility for their decisions but, more importantly, although their actions may be considered to be rational in normal times, they can lead to an inevitable collective failure.
Worse, there are insurmountable theoretical obstacles. Science does not have the tools to predict everything, and will never have them, as there are events that it is impossible to predict – the famous ‘black swans’.6 As the philosopher, mathematician and former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains, classical methods of risk assessment are of little relevance to the forecasting of rare events or the behaviour of complex systems. Devised by Bertrand Russell and taken up by Taleb, the celebrated ‘inductivist turkey problem’ illustrates this perfectly. For turkeys on a turkey farm, everything is the best in the best of all possible worlds: the breeder comes every day to scatter grain for them, and the temperature is always comfortable. The turkeys live in a world of growth and abundance … until Christmas Eve! If there were a turkey statistician specialized in risk management, on 23 December she would say to her fellow turkeys that they need have no worries for the future …
The global economy survived the 2008 crisis. We can infer that the system is hyper-resilient, or that it has become considerably weaker, but we cannot prove that it will collapse or not collapse. According to one distinction made in 1921 by two economists, Knight and Keynes,7 risks can be given a certain probability, whereas uncertainty can’t. Uncertainty is the territory of the black swans; it is not quantifiable. You can’t chart your way through it with Gauss curves and other risk-management tools. Moreover, confined within their disciplines, risk specialists see that ‘for each of the risks they focus on, it is unlikely that the future holds a major tragedy in store for us’.8
Now, our society doesn’t like uncertainty. It uses it as an obvious pretext for doing nothing, and society’s functioning rests on its ability to predict future events. When this ability evaporates, we seem disoriented and lose the ability to come up with real projects.
So how are we to manage black swans? How are we to ‘manage’ the next ‘Fukushima’? We cannot really do so. Instead, we need to let go and move from the ‘observe, analyse, command and control’ mode to a ‘probe, act, sense, adjust’ mode.9 Open up reason to intuition. In collapsology, it is intuition – nurtured by solid knowledge – which will be paramount. All the information contained in this book, however objective it might be, does not therefore constitute formal proof that a major collapse will take place soon, it merely allows you to increase your knowledge so you can refine your intuition and finally act with conviction.
The reflections of the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy are of great use in trying to understand the temporality of a collapse. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, something strange happened in the imaginations of people living in rich countries. Something clicked. ‘The worst horror is now possible, as many people have been saying.’ But, continues Dupuy, ‘if it is becoming possible, it is because it was not possible before. And yet – so common sense (?) objects – if it has occurred, it must have been possible.’ So we have experienced, as it were, an ‘irruption of the possible into the impossible’. Before, it existed only in the minds of a few novelists. After, it has passed from the world of the imagination into the real world.
The philosopher Henri Bergson saw the same phenomenon in a work of art that, when it still does not exist, cannot be imaginable (otherwise it would have been created before). Thus the possibility of the artwork is created at the same time as the work. The time of catastrophes, explains Dupuy, involves this ‘inverse temporality’: the work, or the catastrophe, only becomes possible retrospectively. ‘That’s the source of our problem. If we are to forestall a catastrophe, we need to believe in its possibility before it happens.’10 This paradox is, for Dupuy, the main obstacle (a conceptual obstacle) to a politics of catastrophe.
To solve this problem, Hans Jonas, in 1979, suggested that we listen more to prophecies of misfortune than to prophecies of happiness11 in situations which have a catastrophic potential. In the same vein, Dupuy proposes a posture – which he calls enlightened catastrophism – to chart a way through the uncertainty of disasters. For him, increasing threats are not to be viewed as fateful probabilities or risks but as certainties. If we view them as certainties, we will be better able to avoid them. ‘Unhappiness is our destiny, but it is a destiny only because human beings do not recognize in it the consequences of their own actions. Above all, it is a destiny we can choose to ward off.’12 Collapse is certain, and that is why it is not tragic. For, in saying that, we have just opened the possibility of avoiding its catastrophic consequences.
There is another temporal curiosity mentioned by Bergson, namely the fact that after the occurrence of a catastrophic event, this is not experienced as catastrophic but as banal. And Dupuy comments:
The terrible thing about a catastrophe is that not only do we not believe it will happen even though we have every reason to know that it will happen, but once it has happened, it appears to be part of the normal order of things. Its reality makes it banal. It was not considered possible before it actually occurred; after, it is integrated without further ado into the ‘ontological furniture’ of the world, to speak the jargon of the philosophers.13
So a collapse could become our new normal, thus gradually losing its exceptional, i.e., catastrophic character. From then on, there is every likelihood that we will be able to describe the collapse of our civilization only when it is far too late, through the work of historians or archaeologists. And it is certain that these scholars will not agree on how to interpret this event.
One last paradox: if, conversely, we predict a collapse too early – i.e., now – and too authoritatively, for example through an official speech given by a head of state, it then becomes possible to instil panic into the markets (or the populations) and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This then raises the following strategic question: can all of us together prepare for it without triggering it? Should we talk about it in public? Can we do so?
Beyond all these paradoxes and the impossibility of knowing with any certainty how many black swans exist, there are still some scientific tools that enable us to collect evidence about the nature of the future (and thus about the future of nature).