How Everything Can Collapse

A Manual for our Times

Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509541409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política medioambiental y energética

What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment. In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people's ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it's the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.

Part I
The Harbingers of Collapse

1
The Accelerating Vehicle

Take the metaphor of the car. At the beginning of the industrial era, the car suddenly appears. Only a few countries get in and drive off; they are then joined by others as the century proceeds. All the countries that have climbed on board – what we call industrial civilization – took a very particular route, one that we describe in this chapter. After a slow and gradual start, the car picks up speed at the end of the Second World War, and embarks on a breathtaking ascent called ‘the great acceleration’.¹ Today, after some signs of overheating in the spluttering engine, the needle on the speedometer is starting to flicker. Will the needle continue to climb? Will it stabilize? Will it go back down?

A world of exponentials

Although we came across the idea at school, we are not accustomed to think in terms of ‘exponential growth’. Of course, we can see a curve that goes up, indicating a growth. But what a growth it is! While the human mind can easily imagine arithmetical growth, for example a hair that grows one centimetre a month, it struggles to imagine exponential growth.

If you fold a large piece of cloth in half, after four folds its thickness will measure about 1 cm. If you could fold it in two another twenty-nine times, its thickness would have grown to 5,400 kilometres, the distance between Paris and Dubai. A few more folds would be enough to exceed the distance between the Earth and the Moon. A gross domestic product (GDP) (for example, China’s) which is growing at 7 per cent a year represents an economic activity that doubles every ten years, and so quadruples in twenty years. After fifty years, we are dealing with a volume of 32 Chinese economies, i.e., at current values the equivalent of almost four additional world economies. Do you sincerely believe that this can be possible in the current state of our planet?

There are plenty of examples to describe the incredible behaviour of the exponential curve, from the water-lily equation, dear to Albert Jacquard,² to the chessboard on which each successive square is filled with twice the number of grains of rice as the previous one,³ all showing the amazing and indeed counter-intuitive dynamic at work: when the effects of this growth become visible, it is often too late.

In mathematics, an exponential function goes all the way up to the sky. In the real world, on Earth, it hits a ceiling long before that. In ecology, this ceiling is called the capacity load of an ecosystem (denoted as K). There are usually three ways for a system to react to an exponential (see Figure 1.1). Take the classic example of an expanding population of rabbits in a meadow. Either the population gradually stabilizes before the ceiling, i.e., it does not grow any more, but finds a balance with its milieu (Figure 1.1a), or the population exceeds the maximum threshold that the meadow can support and then stabilizes in an oscillation that slightly damages the meadow (Figure 1.1b), or it breaks through the ceiling and continues to accelerate (overshooting), which leads to a collapse of the meadow, followed by that of the rabbit population (Figure 1.1c).⁴

Figure 1.1 Reaction of a living system to exponential growth (the continuous curve represents a population and the dotted curve represents the carrying capacity of the milieu)

Source: after Meadows et al., 2004.

These three theoretical diagrams can be used to illustrate three eras. So the first schema corresponds typically to the political ecology of the 1970s: we still had the time and opportunity to follow a path of ‘sustainable development’ (a ‘steady-state economy’). The second represents the ecology of the 1990s when, thanks to the concept of ecological footprint, we realized that the overall carrying capacity of the Earth had been exceeded.⁵ Since that period, every year, humankind as a whole has been ‘consuming more than one planet’ and ecosystems have become increasingly undermined. The last diagram represents the ecology of the 2010s: for the past twenty years, we have continued to accelerate quite knowingly, destroying the Earth system at an ever faster pace – the very system that welcomes and sustains us. Whatever the optimists may say, the time we are living is clearly marked by the spectre of a collapse.

Figure 1.2a The trajectory of the Anthropocene: a summary

Source: after Will Steffen et al., ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, 2015: 1–18.

Total acceleration

We should by now realize that many of the parameters of our societies and of our impact on the planet are increasing at an exponential rate: population, GDP, water and energy consumption, the use of fertilizers, the production of engines and telephones, tourism, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, the number of floods, the damage to ecosystems, the destruction of forests, the extinction rate of species, and so on. The list is endless. This overall picture⁷ (see Figure 1.2a and 1.2b), very familiar to scientists, has almost become the logo of the new geological period called the Anthropocene, a time when humans have become a force that upsets the major biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system.

Figure 1.2b The trajectory of the Anthropocene: a summary

What has happened? Why this dramatic increase? Some Anthropocene specialists date the beginning of this period to the middle of the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution when the use of coal and steam became widespread, giving rise to the railway boom of the 1840s, followed by the discovery of the first oil deposits. As early as 1907, the philosopher Henri Bergson, with extraordinary prophetic insight, wrote:

A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam-engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave us. But the revolution it has effected in industry has nevertheless upset human relations altogether. New ideas are arising, new feelings are on the way to flower. In thousands of years, when, seen from the distance, only the broad lines of the present age will still be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all; but the steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times: it will serve to define an age.⁸

The age of heat engines and the technosciences replaced the age of agrarian and artisanal societies. The appearance of fast and cheap transportation opened up new routes for commerce, and shrank distances. In the industrialized world, the hellish rhythms of automatized production lines became widespread and, gradually, overall material comfort levels increased. Decisive progress in public hygiene, food and medicine increased lifespan and reduced mortality rates considerably. World population, which had doubled about every thousand years over ...