Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	Monday, November 23, 2009

What Happens Next: A Timeline for Civilizational Collapse A number of readers have asked me for an "elevator speech" that describes how I think our civilization will collapse by the end of this century. Being more of a "picture" person I decided to try to answer that question graphically. The result is shown above. There seems to be a growing consensus among those who have studied the history of civilizations, past and present, and who are informed about the current state of our economic, political, social and ecological systems, that we are headed for a wall -- a series of cascading crises that we will not be able to prevent, mitigate, or adapt ourselves to. These crises will be principally of three types (listed in the order in which the systems underlying them will collapse): Economic and Political Crises: We are already weathering the early signs of these, though I don't think the real economic or political crises have yet really begun. Because our economic and political systems, predicated on accelerating and endless growth, are unsustainable, we are starting to see evidence of great volatility in the industrial growth markets as awareness of this unsustainability mounts. This will produce a crisis of confidence as unemployment soars, wages collapse, and citizens lose the capacity to buy, which will precipitate market collapse and a chronic great depression -- a "Long Emergency" -- that will steadily worsen over the next 20 years and peak in the 2030s. Energy Crises: Our economy is based utterly on the availability of unlimited inexpensive energy. As the economy collapses for the reasons noted above, investment to seek new sources of cheap energy will evaporate, and an energy crisis will compound and accelerate the economic crises. As all the economic engines -- employment, inexpensive energy, inexpensive resources, and inexpensive capital -- all dry up, the economy will crash, leading to increasing regional and then global political turmoil, and finally, as the energy crisis peaks in the 2050s, the beginnings of civilizational collapse. Civil chaos, compounding the collapse of the fragile global economic system on which almost all humans depend for their very life, will lead to the quick collapse of national and regional governments, and power will devolve by default to local communities. Death will come not from massive war or bioterror (though there will be some, perhaps lots of that) but from the familiar killers of humans throughout civilization -- famine and disease. Ecological Crises: The excesses of our economic system have already unleashed irreversable climate change, which is just beginning to show up in extreme weather events and accelerating glacial melting and temperature rise, and will soon produce ecological system collapses that will exacerbate the economic and energy crises. By the 2060s, human civilization will be in rapid descent as the ecological crises ascend. We will lose the last of our forests, crops will be devastated, pandemics will kill humans, their food crops and farm animals, our oceans will become devoid of life, fresh clean water will become desperately scarce, and deserts, droughts and floods will become commonplace. Underlying all of these crises are the industrial growth society, economy, and civilization we have built up, over the past thirty millennia but especially over the past three centuries. This civilization was both enabled and required by the discovery of tools (arrowheads, fire, and catastrophic monoculture agriculture) that in turn enabled us to expand outside our natural rainforest habitat, become carnivores, become settlers, eliminate natural predators, and hence expand exponentially our species' numbers and consumption of resources. To try to sustain this, we created a fragile economic and political system that depended on the exhaustion of natural ecosystems, the extermination of alternative cultures and all species not required for human food, and the ruthless repression of all forms of diversity and dissent. The discovery of fossil fuels allowed us to replace human labour with that created mechanically by the burning of these hydrocarbons -- hundreds of millennia worth of stored energy consumed in just a century or two. This allowed us to completely pillage the planet, just as quickly, to the point that we now have nothing left for other species or for future generations, and this has precipitated the sixth great extinction of life on Earth, and the destruction, in the blink of an eye, of an ecological balance that was co-created and sustained collectively by all-life-on-Earth for millions of years. Reg Morrison, in Spirit of the Gene, tells us what to expect after that: If the human plague is really as normal as it looks, then the collapse curve should mirror the growth curve. This means the bulk of the collapse will not take much longer than 100 years, and by 2150 the biosphere should be safely back to its preplague population of Homo Sapiens -- somewhere between a half and one billion. Category: Why Our Civilization is Unsustainable 11:54:25 PM  trackback []  comment []

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