Lately, I've been contemplating the impending collapse of civilization. In many ways, my writings have been my attempt to shift the direction of our civilization to stave off the impending collapse. Perhaps this is responsible for the authoritative, intense tone of some of my earliest writings. I was operating with a desperate agenda to alter the course of our civilization. I had hoped to galvanize action among the public so we can get to the real work of altering the trajectory of our society. Though something has shifted lately. I've begun to let go.
As I've written more and more, my intentions have evolved. I sounded the alarm early on, called people to action, and I've begun to think about what I would have people do if I did have the attention of society. I realized I don't actually know. Our society is so complex and the circumstances of people's lives are so vastly different that it would be absurd of me to prescribe any course of action for such a diverse group. Though, deeper than that, when I've set my mind to the task of imagining a solution to stave off our impending collapse, I simply cannot do it. Perhaps this is because my own imagination is atrophied in the way I've described before. Or maybe the problem is too complex for any single mind to conceptualize. The explanation I've come to believe, though, is that there is simply no solution. No matter what we do, our collapse is inevitable. It is all destined to come crumbling down.
I'm sure a good number of you don't believe that. I won't try to convince you here. If you're open to being convinced, I encourage you to listen to the first few episodes of the podcast Breaking Down: Collapse. Though, be prepared for a paradigm shift. If you don't accept the idea of the impending collapse of our civilization, the rest of my writings will probably seem pretty absurd. I am taking the impending collapse as a given.
That has been perhaps the biggest shift in me lately. I used to think that civilization would collapse unless we take action now. Now I believe civilization will collapse no matter what. Perhaps if we made a massive cultural shift tomorrow and all devoted our efforts to cleaning up our mess, we could make some massive leaps forward and shift our trajectory. Though I don't see that happening. If humanity comes together as one mind, it will only probably happen after the ice caps have melted, after fossil fuels have ceased to become a viable resource, after most of the topsoil has eroded into the sea. As it stands, current trends predict we could lose all arctic summer sea ice in a mere thirteen years. It would take a miracle of cooperation for us to reduce greenhouse gases enough to prevent this by then. A miracle of cooperation that appears impossible to achieve.
So I've been acclimating to a new reality, a new objective, a new model of the world. I live in a civilization that is destined to collapse. Even if I devote all my precious energy and intentions into averting this, it will still happen; and it will happen in my lifetime. That's a reality that is only just now beginning to sink in for me, and it is shifting my perspective on everything. If I cannot avert the biggest crisis our species and our planet has ever faced, what am I here to do? What is worth dedicating too?
I for one want to survive whatever crisis may be coming. I don't anticipate the extinction of our species. I believe there will be a small number of us who survive. I want to be one of them. I believe life is worth living, regardless the circumstances of it. As well, I believe my life is a minor priority when it comes to the lives of countless other human and non-human beings. So what do I do with this one life I have?
The way of life most of us take for granted now is not going to exist for much longer. I don't know how long. There are countless experts who have modeled that. What I will say is that it is certain to be sooner than the vast majority of us think. Like a person with a terminal cancer diagnosis, this realization has begun to radically alter how I think about my life.
I see little value in activities that improve my standing within the disappearing bubble of post-modern civilized society. That is, unless it is directly related to helping as many people as possible prepare for the coming collapse.
While I no longer think there's anything we can do to stave off global collapse, I still feel basically the same about what kinds of choices we should be making now.
I learned a definition for the term “collapse” as it relates to the end of our civilization. It has to do with the loss of societal complexity and the decrease of human population. I've been thinking about that first part.
As I've alluded too in previous articles, our current society is tremendously complex. In order for me to simply write this article, I depend on countless societal complexities. I depend on the electricity that reaches my home, produced in a coal plant thousands of miles away, transported to me on miles of power lines, distributed to me by an electric company that is paid by my salary that is earned through my job guiding troubled teens through the wilderness. That's just one thread of complexity. I haven't mentioned the capitalistic forces that underpin the whole system. I haven't mentioned the coal that must be mined, the workers who mine them, or the transportation systems that allow them to reach the power plant. I haven't mentioned the government that maintains the roads that Apple uses to run its supply chains (I'm typing this on a macbook).
I could trace this thread of complexity from the simple act of typing on this computer and it would be an infinitely branching thread that encircles the entire globe. The shift in one element in this massive web would effect all the rest (like how the war in Ukraine is affecting food security worldwide). Complexity is not a bad thing. In fact, this infinitely branching network sounds very much like an ecosystem.
It seems to me that complexity is the way all of nature functions. When society collapses and our civilization loses complexity, it's not that complexity will disappear. It will just exit the purely human domain. The water cycle, the gas exchange between the ocean and the land, the countless relationships that exist within the forest will continue to exist. In fact, they may become even more complex.
If our civilization is complex, it has come at the cost of the complexity of the natural world. An article by The Guardian reveals that humans have eliminated 83% of wild mammals. At the same time, humans and our livestock account for a full 96% of mammalian biomass on Earth. If those numbers don't startle you, read them again.
It seems that human society is only complex because we've devoured the complexity of the natural world. In order to care for so much livestock, for example, requires massive amounts of animal feed, grown mostly in monocultured fields of corn. Those corn fields could only exist after the previously existing ecosystem was bulldozed to make room for the farmer's field. Who knows what complexity was erased for the relative simplicity of rows of corn with virtually no other plant life to speak of. What must have happened to the native plants and animals? Surely, this is part of what's happened to the 83% of wild mammals that we've decimated.
Taken this way, it appears to me that the collapse of civilization is not a decrease in complexity, it's a release of complexity from the human domain—returning that complexity to the infinitely more sophisticated natural world. Ecosystems depend on biodiversity (and by extension, complexity) to thrive. While our society has become more complex, the ecosystem of the planet as a whole has surely become less so. Beyond greenhouse gases, this is surely the cause of the tremendous climate crisis that has characterized the 21st century.
So civilization will collapse and complexity will return to the natural world. Of course, the complexity of the natural world is not just in service to humans, thus our population will certainly decrease. Though, it appears to me that those who survive will be those who depend on the complexity of the natural world rather than the merely human-created one.
Our ancestors all depended on natural complexity in order to thrive. The cycles of the seasons, the migrations of the herds, the fruiting times of the local plants were all deeply attended to for our ancestors to flourish. When our civilization collapses, it will be these same cycles that we will need to attend to in order to survive.
Thus, it seems to me the wisest among us will begin the process of willingly offering our human complexity back to the Earth in order to thrive through the coming crisis. If we can connect ourselves with our local land and local ecosystem and learn to live from the natural complexity there, we may be okay when global supply chains crumble. We have the complexity now. We can utilize the complex economic system, the complex information systems of the internet, the complex highway system to reinvigorate the complexity of our local ecosystem. Every corn field in the midwest is a thriving ecosystem waiting to happen again.
I don't know what the coming century will look like. I know it will be difficult, but I don't know precisely what we'll face. I'm still learning to conceptualize my life in the face of that. Though the one thing that hasn't changed is that devoting our efforts to the revitalization of nature is to be the key to our survival. The day will surely come where we can't have a giant box of native, food-producing plant seeds delivered to our house from Amazon.
Thus, it would be a wise choice for us to wield this power intelligently while we still can.
Here’s a link to Charles Eisenstein:
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com?r=fibbn&utm_medium=ios
Unbelievably sad, but like you, I know we must accept the reality. I am trying to embrace Charles Eisenstein’s idea of ‘falling in love with the world again’- to regain a spirit of ‘being part of’, to seek adventure, to take risks WITH our world as opposed (!) to against our world. We have to continue to live fully while we can, love fully while we can, and choose to make the Earth the subject of our love 🌍