CONTENTS

1. Cover
2. Front Matter
3. Foreword
4. Acknowledgements
5. Introduction: We’ll Definitely Need to Tackle the Subject One of These Days …
   1. Collapse?
   2. The birth of ‘collapsology’
   3. Beware, this is a sensitive subject!
   4. Notes
6. Part I The Harbingers of Collapse
   1. 1 The Accelerating Vehicle
      1. A world of exponentials
      2. Total acceleration
      3. Where do the limits lie?
      4. Notes
   2. 2 When the Engine Dies (Limits that Cannot be Crossed)
      1. At the top of the peak, does energy starts to fall?
      2. At the top of the peak, there is a wall!
      3. And before the wall … a precipice
      4. Notes
   3. 3 Leaving the Road (Boundaries that Can be Crossed)
      1. Global heating and cold sweats
      2. Who will kill the last animal on the planet?
      3. The other boundaries of the planet
      4. What happens when we cross different Rubicons?
      5. Notes
   4. 4 Is the Steering Locked?
      1. How a system becomes locked in
      2. The problem of complexity
      3. Notes
   5. 5 Trapped in an Ever More Fragile Vehicle
      1. Finance: feet of clay
      2. Supply chains on the razor’s edge
      3. Infrastructures at their last gasp
      4. What will be the spark?
      5. Notes
   6. Summary of Part I
      1. An all-too-clear picture
      2. Notes
7. Part II So, When’s It Going to Happen:?
   1. 6 The Difficulties of Being a Futurologist
      1. From risk assessment to intuition
      2. The paradoxes of collapse
      3. Notes
   2. 7 Can We Detect Warning Signs?
      1. The ‘noise’ of a system about to collapse
      2. There will always be uncertainty
      3. Notes
   3. 8 What Do the Mathematical Models Say?
      1. An original model: HANDY
      2. A robust model: World3
      3. Notes
8. Part III Collapsology
   1. 9 A Mosaic to Explore
      1. What are we talking about exactly?
      2. What do past civilizations tell us … ?
      3. How far are we sinking … ?
      4. … up to our necks?
      5. Notes
   2. 10 And Where Do Human Beings Fit into All This?
      1. How many of us will there be at the end of the century? The demography of collapse
      2. Will we kill each other off? The sociology of collapse
      3. Why do most people not believe it will happen? The psychology of collapse
      4. Now that we believe in it, what shall we do? The politics of collapse
      5. Notes
9. Conclusion: Hunger is Only the Beginning
   1. Towards a general and applied collapsology
   2. The ‘hangover’ generation
   3. Other ways of partying
   4. Notes
10. ‘For the Children’
    1. Notes
11. Postscript
12. Notes
13. End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

1. Chapter 1
   1. Figure 1.1 Reaction of a living system to exponential growth (the continuous curve represen…
   2. Figure 1.2a The trajectory of the Anthropocene: a summary
   3. Figure 1.2b The trajectory of the Anthropocene: a summary
2. Chapter 2
   1. Figure 2.1 The concept of ‘peak’ was introduced by geophysicist Marion King Hubbert in 1956…
   2. Figure 2.2 Modelling the price of a barrel of oil as a function of the EROI (using the hist…
   3. Figure 2.3 Growth rate of oil, energy and global GDP
   4. Figure 2.4 Price of a barrel of oil and periods of recession
3. Chapter 3
   1. Figure 3.1 Causal links between climate change and major human crises in pre-industrial Eur…
4. Chapter 7
   1. Figure 7.1 Typical responses of complex networks to disruptions
5. Chapter 8
   1. Figure 8.1 Meadows model, ‘standard run’, updated by Graham M. Turner.

List of Box

1. Box 5.1
   1. Box 5.1 When Trucks Stop, the United States Stops

Guide

1. Cover
2. Table of Contents
3. Begin Reading