An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson & Robert Jensen

Author:Wes Jackson & Robert Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2022-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

Is Collapse Coming?

We realize that “apocalypse” for many people has become synonymous with a reactionary theology that turns a book of the Christian Bible into the handbook for a death cult’s predictions of horrors to come and fantasies about a magical deliverance for the righteous. That’s not us.

We are focused on the evidence about the biophysical realities we need to face, paying close attention to the assessments of people with relevant expertise. For example, a survey of more than two hundred scientists from fifty-two countries who study global change highlighted a set of global risks—climate change, extreme weather, biodiversity loss, food crises, and water crises—that could lead to a global systemic crisis.13 Their conclusion: “Together these five risks threaten the continued integrity of the biosphere and its capacity to support itself and human life.” Increasingly, scientists are speaking of the connection between ecological crises and an unsustainable economic system.14

With assessments like this stacking up, it’s irresponsible not to ask hard questions. Are the political and economic systems that shape the contemporary world consistent with a sustainable large-scale human presence on the planet? Does mass-consumption consumer capitalism premised on endless growth have a future? How long can a high-energy/ high-technology system that draws down the nonrenewable ecological capital of the planet expect to continue?

We are apocalyptic; we think modern systems are coming to an end, and we need to lift the veil that obscures an honest assessment of what those end times will require of us. But we are not scholarly “collapsologists,”15 a term that has been used by some to describe an emerging research community studying systemic risk in industrial society. We have great interest in the question but have not studied the history of societal collapses in the kind of depth that might allow us to make predictions,16 which we don’t like making anyway. We also are not practicing “collapsonauts”17 in our daily lives, in the sense of belonging to a group that is creating alternative ways of living “off the grid.”18 We try to be frugal but haven’t significantly changed our own living arrangements, beyond keeping a certain distance from a lot of so-called cutting-edge technology and trying to practice traditional virtues of thrift.

Still, basic questions are impossible to avoid. How much time do industrial societies have left, and what is their collapse going to look like? For some people in the most vulnerable locations, collapse has already begun. Is collapse coming for us all? The questions are now common enough to warrant a feature in the New York Times Magazine that summarizes the scholarly research on collapse.19 The same newspaper ran a story on the popularity of a British professor’s paper arguing that it is too late to prevent a breakdown in modern civilization in most countries within our lifetimes.20 Curiously, the article ran in the “Style” section.21

Scholars study past collapses and look for patterns that can help us plan for the future, but they have yet to come up with a widely accepted definition of collapse.

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