Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCVI
A ‘Great Simplification’ Is On Our Doorstep.
If you’re new to my writing, check out this synopsis.
I have been wanting for some time to connect in an aggregate fashion a few of the ‘texts’ I’ve been exposed to over the past two decades and that have greatly informed my thinking on what I tend to write about. This past couple of weeks I’ve finally gotten around to doing this in between the demands of my expanding food gardens and some family obligations. I begin with a short summary of each (in no particular order) and then attempt to tie their general arguments together into a coherent summation of what they portend regarding humanity’s future.
If you’re looking for a happy ending to this story, you may be disappointed…
A Short History Of Progress
Archaeologist Ronald Wright’s monograph (2004) provides a critical examination of the widespread assumption that technology and social evolution inescapably results in an improved future for our species. He argues that what we have termed ‘progress’ (and attributed to our ingenuity, technological prowess, and problem-solving abilities) is a double-edged sword that creates a ‘trap’ whereby our ‘solutions’, while seemingly successful and beneficial in the short-term, are almost always unsustainable and lead to greater problems/predicaments in the long-term.
A great example is our adoption of agriculture (and especially modern, industrial agriculture). While this form of food production has so far been able to support ever-larger populations, it has resulted in deforestation, significant land system changes, social inequality, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, and significant vulnerability to crop failures and long-distance supply issues.
In assessing the rise and fall of various complex societies/civilisations, Wright demonstrates how each case study he analysed declined in complexity by way of classic ‘progress traps’. After a period of relatively rapid growth, each society experienced significant stress as a result of their technological ‘success’: depletion of essential resources (e.g., water, forests, fish stocks, soil fertility); damage to their immediate environment and its ecosystems (e.g., water salinisation, deforestation, soil erosion); and, the ‘Masada Effect’, whereby having recognised the growing crises, the elite exacerbate them by concentrating wealth/resources amongst themselves resulting in increasing disparity between them and the masses which, in turn, leads to a loss of social cohesion and growing domestic strain.
‘Modernity’, Wright posits, is caught in a variety of overlapping progress traps of unbelievable scale. In addition to those just listed above, modern societies have added: runaway consumption; weapons of mass destruction; and, globalisation.
Wright demonstrates that: ‘progress’ is not linear or inevitable; past success does not guarantee future success; technology cannot inevitably solve the ‘problems’ it has created; and, that the biogeophysical limits of a finite planet cannot be overcome via human ingenuity and technology.
Limits to Growth
Meadows et al. (1972) used complex systems dynamic modelling to simulate a number of possible scenarios for humanity’s future based upon key variables (i.e., food production, population growth, resource depletion, industrialisation, pollution generation). The modelling demonstrated that even small growth rates (i.e., 1-2% per annum) could lead to a significant increase in the drawdown of resources and/or overloading of compensatory sinks on a finite planet and almost invariably resulted in societal ‘collapse’.
The Standard Run (or Business-As-Usual) scenario projected that a sharp decline in key growth indicators (i.e., population and industrial capacity) would occur around 2050 or shortly thereafter. The primary reasons for this contraction in growth would be: declining food production per capita; resource depletion; and, increased pollution.
A prominent concept in the text is that of ‘overshoot and collapse’ whereby global society surpasses the carrying capacity of the planet by way of resource depletion and sink overloading. As a result, industrial civilisation would ‘collapse’ back to a much reduced regional carrying capacity.
Scenarios where ‘collapse’ did not occur were found but required significant alterations in the key variables prior to finite limits being encountered. The possibility of avoiding ‘collapse’ lessened with the passage of time before such changes were made.
Limits To Growth: The 50-Year Update (2022)
Given the ‘warning’ above, it’s enlightening to review humanity’s ability to avoid the Standard Run scenario after five decades. The view is not very good.
Data indicates that the Standard Run scenario has been the trajectory most closely playing out. Humanity has surpassed the planetary carrying capacity and continues to draw down ‘renewable’ resources and produce pollutants faster than the planet can regenerate and absorb them. The peak, after which contraction will occur, appears to have moved closer in time by a decade or more. And, further continuation along this path is simply making the inevitable ‘collapse’ all that more severe. The text also introduces the relatively recent discussions about planetary boundaries and how several of those have already been broached by humanity.
The text basically highlights that humanity has continued business-as-usual, entering the overshoot phase that species do when they surpass their environmental carrying capacity, with ‘collapse’ all but assured.
The Collapse Of Complex Societies
Archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s (1988) monograph outlines that societal ‘collapse’ is a recurrent phenomena that appears to be the result of economic processes, particularly that of diminishing returns on investments.
Tainter views societies as problem-solving ogranisations. Problem solving requires significant resources to perform (especially of energy and labour) and typically results in evermore complexity (e.g., increasing organisational levels–bureaucracies). While investments in addressing societal problems result in significant benefits as the cheapest- and easiest-to-accomplish approaches are pursued initially, these ‘solutions’ eventually encounter diminishing returns and societal benefits get smaller and smaller as time passes–sometimes to the point of exceeding the costs.
As problem solving becomes more costly, the population bears the brunt of this (e.g., increasing taxes, resource shortages) and societal resilience decreases (i.e., the ability to address new challenges successfully wanes) leading to increased vulnerability to stress surges. (e.g., crop failure, war). For an increasing percentage of those in society, the costs of the benefits accrued become overly burdensome and they ‘opt out’ of the centralised systems. Eventually, the support required to maintain the sociopolitical systems is absent and it simplifies to a level that can be supported by any remaining local population.
Basically, ‘collapse’ is the result of a centralised system becoming increasingly unsustainable–due to greater complexity and costs–and more vulnerable to stress surges. This tendency for increasing ‘costs’ to overtake the ‘benefits’ eventually leads to increasing numbers of society’s members making an economic choice to withdraw their support, resulting in a simplification of its sociopolitical and connected systems.
Arithmetic, Population, and Energy
Physicist Albert Bartlett’s presentation (initially made 1969, but updated regularly) on the mathematics of growth concludes that humanity’s inability to understand the exponential function has resulted in a significant miscalculation of how growth and consumption impact sustainability–especially as it pertains to population and resource use (particularly energy).
Exponential growth occurs when increases of fixed percentages (e.g., 3%) take place over a fixed time (e.g., a year). One way to think about such growth is to consider ‘doubling time’ that can be determined by the ‘Rule of 70’: 70 divided by the growth rate = the doubling time; so a 3% per year rate would have a doubling time of about 23 years. Even very small annual growth rates can eventually result in huge impacts on growth and sustainability.
Human population growth tends to follow an exponential trajectory and is ultimately unsustainable upon a finite planet. As our resource consumption and energy use tends to follow or exceed our population growth, our ‘fixed’ resources (e.g., hydrocarbons, arable land, minerals, fresh water) have an increasingly shortened lifespan.
Bartlett argues that our ‘leaders’ tend to promote infinite growth without acknowledging the mathematical impossibility of it on a finite planet. Their ‘solutions’ to this dilemma (e.g., efficiency, technology) ignore Jevon’s Paradox and the fact that exponential growth overwhelms supposed gains. True sustainability would require consumption to never exceed regenerative abilities of ‘renewable’ resources.
Bartlett’s presentation argues that the root cause of our various predicaments is our inability to understand the simple arithmetic of exponential growth.
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
Environmental sociologist William Catton Jr.’s (1980) text argues that through the temporary availability of hydrocarbons, humanity has been able to exceed the planet’s long-term carrying capacity for the species. This is an unsustainable situation given the finiteness of the resource that will lead to a significant correction via population decline and societal ‘collapse’ as it has artificially and temporarily increased the species’ carrying capacity.
Catton points out that pre-industrial Homo sapiens lived within the planet’s natural environmental limits until our technology began to divert resources from other species and helped us to drawdown finite resources, with both of these creating a ‘phantom’ boost to our carrying capacity. Through this depletion of non-renewable resources, our population grew beyond the natural and more permanent limits, leading us into ‘overshoot’. This path sped up significantly with the Industrial Revolution and our leveraging of hydrocarbon resources.
Hydrocarbons, in particular, have led to an illusion of ‘sustainability’ and increasing carrying capacity. It is ‘phantom’ in the sense that it is based upon a finite resource and is exacerbated by its negative impact upon our ecological systems (thereby reducing our future carrying capacity from its pre-overshoot level–see Model D in Figure 3 above).
Nature’s inevitable correction to this situation is already underway according to Catton as we increasingly encounter resource depletion issues, pollution crises, and social unrest. Technology cannot ‘fix’ this [in fact, it could be argued that this is actually making it worse as it increases the phantom carrying capacity through its increased resource drawdown and ecological systems degradation].
The conclusions made in each of these texts are quite distressing on their own. When combined, the diagnosis for our species is extremely dispiriting; in fact, quite a few people would say terminal–especially for our industrial civilisation.
‘Collapse’ of our complex societies seems no longer speculative but highly probable, if not guaranteed. Overshoot is a reality that is already impacting our planet and human-made systems–a finite cache of hydrocarbons has helped us to consume even our ‘renewable’ resources at almost twice the rate that our planet can regenerate them. Progress Traps are global and interlocked. Social cohesion is being increasingly strained due to diminishing returns on our investments in complexity–especially as it pertains to resource extraction and global energy averaging systems. It would appear that pursuing exponential growth on a finite planet is the main cause of our predicaments and has been exacerbated by our technology.
‘Collapse’ will likely be in the form of a systemic unravelling, not a cataclysmic apocalypse. A number of cascading failures will probably be a decades-long affair where resource wars erupt (especially over water, arable land, and minerals), economic decline/crises emerge (e.g., hyperinflation, debt crises, supply constraints), ecological disasters arise (e.g., crop failures, pandemics), centralised institutions fail (e.g., sociopolitical simplification), and significant population decline occurs. And all of these will be exacerbated by the ‘solutions’ our elite will implement, especially the technological ones.
A managed descent (degrowth) is unlikely, if not impossible. The purposeful contraction of this latest human experiment in large, complex societies will probably not be pursued due to psychological impediments (e.g., our misunderstanding of the exponential function prevents timely approaches; our faith in technology to save us is widespread and likely will be doubled-down upon) and structural barriers (e.g., short-term incentivisation of market gains over long-term survival; elite hoarding of resources; lack of a mechanism to enforce widespread cooperation). Nature’s corrective measures are far more likely to occur than some coordinated ‘awakening’ by humanity.
A ‘great simplification’ is on our doorstep. Given the texts summarised above, industrial civilisation’s prospects are looking to be quite different from the technoutopian one painted by many of today’s ‘leaders’ who tend to push growth as the ‘solution’ to overcoming our many pressing issues. There is, however, no avoiding the cyclical ‘collapse’ that impacts complex human societies, and this time it’s global in nature.
The only questions that remain may be: how expedient will the ‘collapse’ be (i.e., will it occur more rapidly than typical ‘collapses’ take due to a nuclear catastrophe such as a global war or massive failure of the hundreds of nuclear power plants around the globe); how severe will the corrective ‘die-off’ of our species be; and will the growth-decline cycle repeat itself after this iteration has ‘collapsed’?
What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:
“Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.
Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.”
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You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
Most excellent summary, I couldn't agree more. 'there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by collapsing now to avoid the rush'. Just what I'm doing
One of the other (unmentioned) frightening impacts of the LtG seems to be political, where democracy is an artifact of abundant resources and as they deplete, authoritarianism seems to take over. We are witnessing this in the US at present.