How Everything Can Collapse by Pablo Servigne;Raphael Stevens; & Raphaël Stevens

Author:Pablo Servigne;Raphael Stevens; & Raphaël Stevens [Servigne, Pablo & Stevens, Raphaël]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509541409
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Summary of Part I

An all-too-clear picture

Let’s pause for breath. And summarize what we’ve said so far.

To maintain itself and avoid financial disorder and social unrest, our industrial civilization is forced to accelerate, to become more complex and to consume ever more energy. Its dazzling expansion has been nurtured by the exceptional availability (though this will not last long) of fossil fuels that are very energy efficient, coupled with a growth economy and highly unstable levels of debt. But the growth of our industrial civilization, today constrained by geophysical and economic limits, has reached a phase of decreasing returns. Technology, which has long served to push these limits back, is less and less able to ensure this acceleration and ‘locks in’ this unsustainable trajectory by preventing the development of new alternatives.

At the same time, the sciences of complexity are discovering that, beyond certain thresholds, complex systems – including economies and ecosystems – suddenly switch to new and unpredictable states of equilibrium and may even collapse. We are more and more aware that we have crossed certain ‘boundaries’ that guaranteed the stability of our living conditions, as a society and as a species. The global climate system, and many of the planet’s ecosystems and major biogeochemical cycles, have left the zone of stability that we were familiar with heralding a time of sudden large-scale disruptions which in turn will destabilize industrial societies, the rest of humankind and even all other species.

The paradox that characterizes our era – and probably all eras when civilizations came up against limits and crossed boundaries – is that the more powerful our civilization grows, the more vulnerable it becomes. The modern globalized political, social and economic system, which provides half of humankind with life, has seriously depleted the resources and disrupted the systems on which it relied – the climate and ecosystems – to such an extent that it has dangerously undermined the conditions that formerly allowed it to expand and guarantee its stability and survival.

At the same time, the ever more globalized, interconnected and locked-in structure of our civilization not only makes it highly vulnerable to the slightest internal or external disruption but now subjects it to processes of systemic collapse.

That’s the situation we are in. To preserve ourselves from serious disruptions to the climate and the ecosystems (the disruptions that threaten the species), we need to turn off the engine. The only route to follow if we are to find a safe space for ourselves, then, is to stop in its tracks the production and consumption of fossil fuels, as these lead to economic and probably political and social collapse, and ultimately to the end of thermo-industrial civilization.

To save the engine of our industrial civilization, we have to cross more and more boundaries, i.e., continue to prospect, dig, produce and grow ever faster. This inevitably leads to climatic, ecological and biogeophysical tipping points, and to a peak in resources, and so ultimately to the same result – economic collapse – albeit one that might also involve a collapse of the human species, even almost all living species.

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