Crises, disasters, collapses, decline … Apocalypse can be read between the lines of the daily news from across the world. While some disasters are real enough and supply our newspapers with their news items – plane crashes, hurricanes, floods, the decline in the number of bees, slumps in the stock market, and wars – is it justifiable to suggest that our society is ‘heading for disaster’, to announce a ‘global planetary crisis’, or to point to a ‘sixth mass extinction of species’?
It has become a paradox: we have to face this deluge of disasters in the media, but we’re unable to talk explicitly about the really big catastrophes without being called alarmists or ‘catastrophists’! Everyone, for example, knew that the IPCC had issued a new report on climate change in 2014, but did we see any real debate about these new climate scenarios and their implications in terms of social change? No, of course not. Too catastrophist.
Perhaps we’re tired of bad news. And in any case, hasn’t the end of the world always been looming? Isn’t taking the darkest possible view of the future a typically European or western piece of narcissism? Isn’t catastrophism a new opium of the people, distilled by ecological ayatollahs and scientists in need of funding? Come on, everybody, give it a bit of welly – we’ll soon have put paid to the ‘crisis’!
But perhaps we don’t actually know how to talk about disasters – the real ones, those that last, those that don’t fit into the news cycle. After all, let’s admit it: we’re facing some serious problems to do with the environment, energy, climate change, geopolitics, and social and economic issues, problems that are now at a point of no return. Few people say it, but all these ‘crises’ are interconnected, influencing and intensifying each other. We now have a huge bundle of evidence suggesting that we’re up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the ability of several human populations – and indeed human beings as a whole – to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment.
It’s not the end of the world, nor the Apocalypse. Nor is it a simple crisis from which we can emerge unscathed or a one-off disaster that we can forget after a few months, like a tsunami or a terrorist attack. A collapse is ‘the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc.) can no longer be provided [at a reasonable cost] to a majority of the population by services under legal supervision’.1 So it’s a large-scale, irreversible process – just like the end of the world, admittedly, except that it’s not the end! It looks as if the consequences will last for a long time, and we’ll need to live through them. And one thing is certain: we don’t have the means to know what they will consist of. On the other hand, if our ‘basic needs’ are affected, it is easy to imagine that the situation could become immeasurably catastrophic.
But how far will it all extend? Who will be affected? The poorest countries? France? Europe? All the rich countries? The industrialized world? Western civilization? All of humankind? Or even, as some scientists are predicting, the vast majority of living species? There are no clear answers to these questions, but one thing is certain: none of these possibilities can be ruled out. The ‘crises’ we are experiencing affect all these categories: for example, the end of oil concerns the whole of the industrialized world (but not the small traditional peasant societies that have been left out by globalization), whereas climate change threatens human beings as a whole, as well as a large proportion of living species.
Scientific publications that envisage global catastrophes and an increasing probability of collapse are becoming more numerous and better supported by the evidence. The Royal Society published an article by Paul and Anne Ehrlich on this subject in 2013, leaving little doubt about the outcome.2 The consequences of the global environmental changes viewed as likely in the second half of the twenty-first century are becoming all too evident in the light of ever more precise and overwhelming numerical data. The climate is heating up, biodiversity is collapsing, pollution is ubiquitous and becoming persistent, the economy risks going into cardiac arrest at every moment, social and geopolitical tensions are growing, etc. It is not unusual to see decision makers at the highest level, and official reports from major institutions (the World Bank, the armed forces, the IPCC, banks, NGOs, etc.), discussing the possibility of collapse, or what Prince Charles calls ‘suicide on a grand scale’.3
More broadly, the Anthropocene is the name given to this new geological era, namely our own present.4 We – human beings – emerged from the Holocene, a time of remarkable climatic stability that lasted about twelve thousand years and allowed the emergence of agriculture and civilization. In recent decades, humans (or at least many of them, in growing numbers) have become capable of upsetting the large biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system, thereby creating a new era of profound and unpredictable change.
However, these findings and figures are ‘cold’. How does all this affect our daily lives? Don’t you feel that there is a huge gap that needs to be filled, a link that needs to be forged between these great scientific statements, so rigorous and all encompassing, and the everyday life that gets lost in the details, in the clutter of the unexpected and the heat of our emotions? It’s precisely this gap that our book seeks to fill, drawing a connection between the Anthropocene and your gut feelings. For that purpose, we have chosen the notion of ‘collapse’ because it allows us to play on several registers, tackling both the rates of biodiversity decline and the emotions related to disasters, and to discuss the risk of famine. This is a concept that involves both popular images drawn from cinema (who can fail to visualize Mel Gibson out in the desert, armed with a pump shotgun?) and narrowly focused scientific reports; it allows us to approach different temporalities (from the urgency of daily life to geological time) while comfortably navigating between past and future; and it allows us to draw a connection between, for example, the Greek social and economic crisis and the large-scale disappearance of populations of birds and insects in China and Europe. In short, it is this concept that brings to tangible life the notion of the Anthropocene.
And yet, in media and intellectual circles, the question of collapse is not taken seriously. The notorious computer bug that threatened to strike in 2000, and the ‘Mayan event’ of 21 December 2012, put paid to the possibility of any serious and factual argument. Anyone who publicly mentions a ‘collapse’ is seen as announcing the Apocalypse, and relegated to the narrow category of those ‘credulous believers’ in the ‘irrational’ who have ‘always existed’. End of story. Time to change the subject! The process of automatically dismissing such talk – a dismissal which, as it happens, itself appears truly irrational – has left public debate in such a state of intellectual disrepair that it is no longer possible to express oneself without adopting one of two simplistic standpoints which often border on the ridiculous. On the one hand, we are subjected to apocalyptic, survivalist or pseudo-Mayan language; on the other hand, we have to endure the ‘progressive’ denials of Luc Ferry, Claude Allègre, Pascal Bruckner and their ilk. These two postures, both frenziedly clinging to their respective myths (the myth of the Apocalypse vs the myth of progress), reinforce each other, view each other as a scarecrow and share a phobia for dignified and respectful debate. All of this just reinforces the attitude of uninhibited collective denial that is such a prominent feature of our times.
Despite the high quality of some of the philosophical reflections on this topic,5 the debate on collapse (or ‘the end of a world’) fails because of the absence of factual arguments. It is stuck in imaginary or philosophical speculation without any real factual grounding. The books dealing with collapse are usually too specialized, restricted by their point of view or discipline (archaeology, economics, ecology, etc.), while more systematic discussions are full of gaps. Jared Diamond’s bestseller Collapse, for example, sticks to the archaeology, ecology and biogeography of ancient civilizations and does not address some of the essential questions of the current situation.6 As for other popular books, they usually tackle the question by adopting a survivalist position (telling you how to make bows and arrows, or how to find drinking water in a world plagued by fire and the sword), giving the reader all the thrills of watching a zombie movie.
Not only do we lack any real inventory – or better, any systematic analysis – of the planet’s economic and biophysical situation, but above all we lack an overview of what a collapse might look like, how it might be triggered and what it would imply in psychological, sociological and political terms for the present generations. We lack any real applied, transdisciplinary science of collapse.
We here propose, by drawing on information from many scattered works published across the world, to create the basics of what, with a certain self-deprecating irony, we have called ‘collapsology’ (from the Latin collapsus, ‘a fallen mass’). The goal is not to indulge in the mere scientific pleasure of accumulating knowledge but rather to shed light on what is happening and might happen to us, in other words, to give meaning to events. It is also and above all a way of treating the subject as seriously as possible so that we can calmly discuss the policies that need to be implemented.
The issues that emerge whenever the word ‘collapse’ is so much as mentioned are many and varied. What do we know about the overall state of our Earth? Or the state of our civilization? Is a collapse in stock market prices comparable to a collapse in biodiversity? Can the conjunction and perpetuation of ‘crises’ actually drag our civilization into an inescapable whirlpool? How far can all this go? How long will it last? Will we manage to maintain our democratic reflexes? Can we live more or less peacefully through a ‘civilized’ collapse? Will the outcome inevitably be entirely negative?
Immersing ourselves in the word ‘collapse’, understanding its subtleties and nuances, distinguishing between fact and fantasy – these are some of the objectives of collapsology. We need to take this notion apart and conjugate it in different tenses to give it texture, detail, and nuance: we need, in short, to make of it a living and fully operational concept. Whether we are thinking of Mayan civilization, the Roman Empire or more recently the USSR, history shows us that there are varying degrees of collapse, and that, even if there are constants, each case is unique.
Moreover, the world is not uniform. The question of ‘North-South relations’ needs to be considered in a new light. An average American consumes a lot more resources and energy than an average African. However, the consequences of global heating will be far worse in countries close to the equator – precisely those which have emitted the least gas and contributed least to the greenhouse effect. It seems obvious that the temporality of a collapse will not be linear and its geography will not be homogeneous.
So this isn’t a book that is meant to scare you. We will not be dealing with millenarian eschatology, nor with the potential astrophysical or tectonic events that could trigger a mass extinction of species of the kind the Earth saw sixty-five million years ago. We have enough to deal with when we look at what humans can do all by themselves. Nor is this a pessimistic book that doesn’t believe in the future, nor a ‘positive’ book that minimizes the problem by providing ‘solutions’ in the last chapter. It’s a book that attempts lucidly to set out the facts, to ask relevant questions, and to assemble a toolbox which will make it possible to grasp the subject other than through Hollywood disaster movies, the Mayan calendar or ‘techno-bliss’. We are not just presenting a ‘top ten’ of the century’s bad news stories, we are mainly proposing a theoretical framework for hearing about, understanding and welcoming all the small-scale initiatives that are already facing up to the ‘post-carbon’ world, initiatives that are emerging at breakneck speed.
However, rationality alone is not enough to tackle such a subject. We have been interested in collapsology for some years now, and our experience – especially our meetings with the public – has taught us that facts and figures alone are not enough to give an adequate picture of the situation. We definitely need to add intuition, emotions and a certain ethics. Collapsology is not a neutral science detached from its object of study. ‘Collapsologists’ are directly affected by what they are studying. They cannot remain neutral anymore. They must not do so!
Taking such a path is a risky business. Collapse is a toxic subject that reaches right down into the core of your being. It’s a huge shock, a sobering wake-up call. During these years of research, we have been submerged by waves of anxiety, anger and deep sadness before feeling, very gradually, a certain acceptance, and sometimes even hope and joy. By reading books on transition, such as Rob Hopkins’s famous handbook,7 we have been able to connect these emotions to the stages of mourning. We can mourn the loss of one vision of the future. Indeed, starting to understand and then to believe in the possibility of a collapse finally involves giving up on the future we had imagined. It means being forcibly deprived of the hopes, dreams and expectations that we had forged for ourselves since earliest childhood and those that we had nursed for our children. Accepting the possibility of a collapse means accepting the death of a future that was dear to us, a future that was reassuring, however irrational it might have been. What a wrench!
We have also had the unpleasant experience of seeing the anger of those close to us projecting itself onto us and crystallizing in us. This is a well-known phenomenon: in order to stave off bad news, we prefer to kill the messengers, the Cassandras and the whistle-blowers. But besides the fact that this does not solve the problem of collapse, we will warn the reader right now that we are not very fond of this kind of outcome…. Let’s talk about collapse, but calmly. It’s true that the possibility of a collapse shuts down certain futures dear to us; this comes as a real shock, but it opens up countless other futures, some surprisingly cheerful. The challenge, then, is to tame these new futures and make them viable.
In our first public interventions, we took care to deal only with figures and facts, to stay as objective as possible. Every time, the emotions of the audience surprised us. The more clearly the facts were set out, the stronger were people’s emotions. We thought we were talking to people’s heads and we were touching their hearts: sadness, tears, anxiety, resentment and outbursts of anger frequently erupted from the public. Our language gave words to intuitions that many people already had, and it struck a deep chord. In return, these reactions echoed our own feelings, which we had tried to conceal. After the lectures, the warm expressions of gratitude and enthusiasm were more numerous and above all more intense. This convinced us not only that we had to add to our cold and objective discourse the heat of subjectivity – ensuring that emotions too had plenty of room as we built up our arguments – but also that we had a lot to learn from the discoveries of the behavioural sciences when it came to denial, mourning, storytelling and all the other themes that could link psychological realities to collapse.
A gap has sometimes yawned between us and friends and colleagues who still clung to – and defended – an imaginary vision of continuity and linear progress. Over the years, we have clearly distanced ourselves from the doxa, that is to say the general opinion that gives a common meaning to the news of the world. Carry out the experiment for yourselves: listen to the news with this perspective in mind and you’ll see the huge gap between doxa and reality. It’s a strange feeling to be part of this world (more than ever), while being cut off from the dominant image that other people have of it. This often forces us to think about the relevance of our work. Have we gone crazy or become single-issue bores? Not necessarily. On the one hand, dialogue is always possible and, on the other, we cannot ignore the fact that we are far from being alone, as the number of collapsologists (which includes, strangely enough, many engineers and scientists) and other people sensitized to this theme is growing and turning into a self-aware movement, an ever denser and more interconnected network. In many countries, economic, scientific and military experts, as well as certain political movements (the degrowth movement, transition movement, Alternatiba, etc.), have no hesitation about openly discussing collapse scenarios. The worldwide blogosphere, although mainly English-speaking, is very active. In France, the Institut Momentum8 has done pioneering work in this field, and we owe it a great deal. It is now difficult to ignore the coming collapse.
In the first part of this book, we will discuss the facts: what is it happening to our societies and to the Earth system? Are we really on the brink of disaster? Where is the most convincing evidence? We will see that it is the convergence of all ‘crises’ that makes this outcome possible. However, an overall collapse has not yet taken place (at least not in North Europe – Greece and Spain may be premonitory examples). We must therefore tackle the perilous subject of futurology. So, in a second part, we will try to gather the evidence for this future. Finally, the third part will be an invitation to give concrete thickness to this notion of collapse. Why don’t people believe in it? What do ancient civilizations teach us about it? How do people manage to live with it? How will we as a social body respond if this process lasts for dozens of years? What policies should we consider, not to avoid this eventuality but to get through it as ‘humanely’ as possible? Can we suffer a collapse in full awareness of what’s happening? Is the situation so serious?