In my recent Contemplation on affordability, collapse, and the architecture of hydrocarbon decline I argued that the ecological conditions necessary for the reemergence of a large, complex society are unlikely to be met after our global, industrial ones have collapsed. A reader challenged me on this argument with a well-thought-out, detailed, and well-sourced comment. He countered that collapse acts as a pressure release valve and that my oversight of the evidence to support this observation led me to underestimate the speed at which ecological recovery can occur once human pressures are removed. The evidence he used to support this was studies on ecosystem recovery times, the observations within the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and research on soil and forest regeneration. [NOTE: the full comment is provided at the end of this Contemplation.]
His comment is worth taking seriously given the evidence, and I want to acknowledge where I think he is correct, but I also want to explain where I believe this argument falls short and why I remain unconvinced on the central point that a large, complex society (or societies) will reemerge once ours have collapsed. I will readily admit that such a reemergence is possible, but I believe it is highly improbable.
Where the Challenge Has Merit
The observations of ecosystem recovery in the shadow of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster are quite instructive. Large mammals returned to the area relatively rapidly, with wolf populations, for example, flourishing after a decade of human absence. This does indeed suggest that when human pressures cease, some ecological functions can recover relatively quickly.
Some 240 independent studies synthesised by Jones and Schmitz along with research on forest regeneration do indeed provide further compelling evidence that ecosystems can recover within decades of lessened human pressures, and not the centuries to millennia I perhaps overstated.
The point made regarding aquifers is also noteworthy. Human preindustrial societies did not depend upon such water sources to the extent modernity does, and a future society that operates at a fraction of the energy and material throughput of ours would not face the same drawdown pressures.
Finally, the argument that soil recovery can occur relatively quickly once a field is allowed to go fallow is fair since reduced demand translates into reduced stress and topsoil can build up rather rapidly given the opportunity.
These are important points and I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect upon them and then address them in the context of collapse. Should collapse proceed relatively soon and be relatively “clean”, then indeed significant ecological recovery in many regions could occur. But there is a huge and massive caveat to this possibility that I will now explore.
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Where the Argument of Quick Ecological Recovery Falls Short
As compelling as these points are–and I’d love to believe they will indeed result in quick ecosystem recovery–I am going to argue that they rest upon an unwarranted assumption: collapse is going to be “clean”–that industrial civilisation’s machinery will stop without further human interference and Nature will proceed to reclaim itself. I do not believe society’s machines will simply halt their gears and withdraw to the backroom; I believe they will break, and break catastrophically. And upon this breaking will be a release into the environment of the accumulated dangers of a couple hundred years of industrial production, concentrated and completely unmanaged.
A slow, managed collapse is possible but I would argue that the trajectory our global, industrial civilisation is on makes that increasingly unlikely. Even were we to experience a gradual erosion of institutional capacity over generations, we would in all likelihood still eventually experience containment failure of the nature I am suggesting. We’re already experiencing supply chain disruptions, retirements of trained personnel, and maintenance budget shortfalls, and these are having an impact on our management of simpler complexities. So the question is not whether failure of the more dangerous complexities will occur, but when and how many fail simultaneously.
As I have pointed out in a number of my Contemplations, our species has spread across our planet thousands and thousands of dangerous complexities that depend upon significant and continuous human management to remain contained. Nuclear power plants, for example, are not designed to be left unmonitored and unmaintained–they must be managed by humans 24/7/365. The spent fuel rods–containing some of the most radioactive material ever created–sit in cooling pools that require active circulation to prevent overheating. When a prolonged collapse sees the power grid that ensures this circulation fail, each site will witness a boiling off of the cooling pools, followed by a fire that releases enormous amounts of radiation into the surrounding environment. And we have more than 400 such operating plants across the Earth along with hundreds of research reactors and fuel storage facilities.
Of course, not all of these are going to fail as catastrophically as some since modern reactors are designed to incorporate some passive safety features. Being complex technologies, it is more likely that these would only delay and not necessarily prevent the worst outcomes. However, even were they to prevent most from failing, even just a small fraction of failed reactors would be devastating, with the cumulative impact of multiple failures dwarfing the single incidents we have thus far experienced.
When these fail, the result will not be a slow and diffuse release of radiation but a series of acute radiological events that will end in large regions of our planet being uninhabitable for generations–to say little of the millions of tons of low- and mid-level radioactive waste products sitting in caskets at all of these sites.
Then we have tens of thousands of chemical production and storage facilities all over the planet (along with the presence of related products in most retail stores and households) that contain highly toxic, reactive, and flammable substances.
While small, individual products may not require constant management, large production and storage facilities present a similar problem to nuclear power plants. Most of these sites are home to highly toxic, reactive, or flammable substances, and their design has been based on the assumption that there will always be humans present to manage and monitor them. Chlorine and ammonia tanks require monitoring and maintenance to ensure that corrosion or leaks are properly addressed. Failure of these tanks–and they will fail eventually should they be left unmanaged–will result in the release of gases that can kill everything downwind. Such failure has already occurred in a managed setting where thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands injured with the Bhopal disaster; now imagine thousands of such facilities failing over a relatively short period of time with no emergency responders, no evacuation, and no one to try and contain the disaster.
Then there are the high-containment biosafety laboratories that house some of the most dangerous pathogens ever studied by humans, such as Ebola, Marburg, smallpox, and engineered variants that nature has not ever experienced. Constant power, filtration, and trained personnel are required for each of these facilities to ensure negative pressure and that these biological agents never escape their lab confines. Collapse would not necessarily lead to the escape of all these contained pathogens into the wild, but the probability of at least some labs failing sufficiently to allow such escape increases dramatically with a lack of constant monitoring. Even the release of just some of these from a failure of a few such labs could trigger a widespread epidemic into an environment where the response capacity is basically zero. What makes this scenario even worse than a relatively regionally-contained nuclear or chemical contamination is that the pathogens tend to be self-replicating and mobile–they do not remain in the environment in which they get released.
The realisation of the above probable scenarios in the shadow of collapse is one of the reasons I have for some time argued that the best use of our quickly diminishing resources would be to safely decommission these dangerous complexities while we still have the capability. Rather than pour the final dregs of our surplus energy into data centres, solar farms, and more nuclear power plants and mines, we should be funnelling them into a careful and managed shutdown of the dangers we have already constructed and spread across the globe. I strongly believe that this would be the most logical, rational, compassionate, and far-sighted use of our resources; it would not prevent collapse but it could mitigate the suffering to all species when the simplification of our complexities arrives.
The fact that we seem to be doing the exact opposite leads me to believe such precautionary measures will not be pursued, with the possibility of a course correction increasingly disappearing over the horizon. Our societies are strongly resistant to simplification, with their refusal to acknowledge biophysical limits and preference for comforting narratives over inconvenient truths. The fact that our societies are accelerating the growth of such complexities says much about the narratives surrounding human “progress and ingenuity”.
I’ve also proposed that after such decommissioning, our efforts–and resources–should be directed toward the relocalisation of our basic survival needs: potable water, food production, and regional shelter requirements. I don’t suggest this in the hopes of building some form of utopian communalism but because of my recognition that the globalised–even regional–systems that currently provide these needs are fragile, energy-intensive, and completely unsustainable in a world of declining resource surplus. If a community can produce and provide such needs locally, the less vulnerable to fragile supply chain interruptions and failure they become. As with the decommissioning hope, I suspect this shift will not occur at any meaningful scale, if at all.
The Difference Between Passive and Active Hazards
The challenge to my argument overlooks that the ecosystem recovery at Chernobyl occurred mostly because the contamination was passive, albeit significant; it spread, settled, and then Nature began to work around it. Yes, the animals that have moved back into the exclusion zone are living with elevated radiation levels, but that radiation is not spreading outwards; it is not an ongoing event but a background condition. It must be acknowledged here that even passive contamination is not entirely static in nature since events can occur to spread radioactive particles–a wildfire, for example, could resuspend particles and cause them to spread more widely. Such an incident, however, pales in comparison to widespread meltdowns and their concomitant fires in the wake of global collapse.
A spent fuel pool, chemical tank farm, or a biosafety lab is not a passive hazard that might fade into the background, but would be a potentially sudden and catastrophic release occurring decades or centuries post-collapse when any human containment-response would be absent. The hazards from such releases would not remain regional but spread widely with radiation from nuclear sites spreading via wind and water, and chemical toxins flowing into rivers and aquifers–both of these events would significantly undermine an ecosystem’s recovery. And, of course, lab pathogens completely ignore all ecological boundaries.
Beneath these three more obvious issues lie some deeper ones that we are only beginning to understand–to say little about ones we aren’t even aware of yet. Microplastics, for example, are now known to be spread widely across our planet. They have been found in our deepest ocean trenches, in our most remote mountain glaciers, in the air we breathe, within our blood, every bodily organ, and the placentas of unborn children. What this means for human (and all species) health and ecological functioning in the long term is only beginning to be explored; and this is just one example of a growing menagerie of novel entities we “smart” apes have introduced into our biosphere with little to no concern of the consequences. From industrial process nanoparticles to endocrine-disrupting chemicals to genetically-modified organisms to pharmaceutical residues (and many we likely have yet to identify), we have exposed our planet and its inhabitants to an experiment whose fallout only becomes apparent decades to centuries after the fact–and with collapse, the ability to respond to such threats is absent (not that we are doing much currently in the way of response despite our knowledge of the negative impacts; we continue to engage in all the processes that are placing these dangers into our biosphere).
And this may be the most crucial point to the challenge–true ecological recovery may not be merely a function of removing our species’ pressures and allowing Nature to rebound, it may be a question of what it is rebounding into. While a forest may regrow and animals may return, if the ground is full of microplastics and waterways carrying pharmaceutical residues and endocrine disruptors resulting in alterations to the environmental chemistry that we truly don’t understand, then it may be that recovery to a pre-industrial baseline may be impossible. The ecosystem that emerges in the wake of human societal collapse will in all likelihood be completely novel with no past analogue and whose functionality we can only guess at.
Novel ecosystems would not necessarily be dysfunctional. In fact, they could end up being more resilient in certain respects. We cannot count on them, however, to provide the conditions needed for a large, complex society to develop; and uncertainty, not doom, is the foundation of my position here.
Getting back to the passive contamination versus active release distinction, and analysing the Chernobyl incident in its light, I would suggest that recovery of the area is instructive but incomplete since it was a single event at a single site where the area was left to recover. Global societal collapse would involve tens of thousands of such events taking place at different times, in different places, each releasing unique hazards into a biosphere already stressed and degraded. As such, there would be no clean slate for recovery to take place but a world punctuated by dead zones due to toxins and radiation, watersheds contaminated by a variety of pollutants, and the release of pathogens that spread willy-nilly beyond their origins with no one left to control or respond to any of this–quite unlike the coordinated efforts at Chernobyl.
Decommissioning now, while we have the resources, expertise, and institutional capacity, seems to me to be the only way to mitigate the worst-case scenario outlined above. The capability to do this in the shadow of a collapse that will likely occur in a Seneca Cliff-type simplification would likely be one of the first things to disappear. How do we shut down nuclear power plants and ensure the safety of their radioactive wastes after the grid has failed and knowledgeable operators have fled? Or neutralise the chemical stockpiles when roads are impassable and supply chains broken? After the fall, the window to manage and decommission these complexities is in the rearview mirror.
We Are Not Winding Down; We Are Doubling Down
The optimism about collapse as a release valve runs into a rather hard wall once we realise that we are doubling down at a breakneck speed on the construction and distribution of these complexities, not winding them down as the precautionary principle suggests we do with all haste. Rather than simplify in the face of impending collapse, we are actively building more of the very infrastructure that requires maintenance, monitoring, and management in perpetuity.
Nuclear power plants are being constructed across the globe with the industry marketing Small Modular Reactors as the future of energy; subsequently, governments are pouring billions into their development. Each one of these new plants, along with its waste products, represents additional containment systems that require management for decades, if not centuries, to keep from irradiating vast ecosystems. Each one is another spent fuel pool needing active cooling and another site that once abandoned will result in an uncontrolled release of radioactive materials. And the nuclear renaissance being heralded in is contemplating hundreds if not thousands of these SMRs dotted across the planet.
I must admit here that SMR advocates assert that they are significantly safer than the hundreds of traditional reactors already present. But even the safest reactor still produces radioactive waste–and lots of it if we include the mid- and low-level radioactive materials produced during reactor operation and outside the very highly-radioactive spent fuel. All of these waste products require active and for all intents and purposes in-perpetuity management. So the issue is not necessarily the safety of a specific reactor type under normal operating conditions, but whether the reactor and its waste products will remain safe once those “normal operating conditions” cease to exist.
But it’s not just nuclear energy plants to supply evermore energy; it’s renewables also being touted as a solution to our predicament. This additional layer of energy complexity carries with it additional abandonment hazards: toxic heavy metals that will leach into water cycles; unrecyclable composite materials that will persist for centuries; reactive chemicals that burn uncontrollably. The mining industry that supplies the materials for these technologies has been expanding rapidly and there are calls to increase that expansion even more significantly to propel a massive buildout of renewables. The result? Vast new toxic landscapes with gargantuan tailings ponds. This “green” transition is neither clean nor a simplification; it is more complex, energy-intensive, and hazardous layering atop the layers hundreds of years of industrialisation have already built.
And the new technologies we are introducing carry with them the creation of a variety of novel materials and chemical processes whose long-term impacts we have little data on, if any. These technologies will degrade over time, releasing substances into our soils, waterways, and atmosphere that we have not studied and do not understand. What we have already released–let alone what will be as we rush to expand and explore new processes–will persist for centuries with probable devastating consequences over the long term. The proposed buildout of these cannot help but introduce novel entities into our biosphere at an exponential rate, but whose compensatory sinks are already overburdened by our industrialisation to date.
On top of all this, we have a population continuing to grow, with UN projections suggesting another 2 billion humans by 2050. Now, this may be an optimistic forecast given the constraints we are facing, but the point is that we have not yet encountered a declining population, which means the demand for resources continues to grow. The response to this is quite natural–if misguided: expand the infrastructure that will become dangerous once unmanaged. Every new nuclear power plant, chemical facility, biosafety lab, solar farm, battery storage facility, etc., creates another node in the network of abandoned hazards awaiting our planet’s future.
Given all the above, the nature of collapse changes. A clean collapse that occurs relatively soon could possibly allow for broad ecological recovery before too many of these facilities are constructed. The trajectory we are on, however, suggests collapse could come later after we have built many of these unmanageable complexities and pushed the biosphere even further past the limits we have already grossly broached. The longer collapse is delayed–and we will try to delay it as long as possible through a variety of machinations–the greater will be the eventual failure. More: spent fuel pools to boil off; chemical tanks to rupture; biosafety labs to release pathogens; mines to leach heavy metals into watersheds; and novel substances to scatter across the planet.
The precautionary principle suggests the most sensible path–and the one I have been advocating for–is to halt our expansionist tendencies and their addition of new complexity layers to an already overburdened system, and to begin a decommissioning of those dangerous complexities we have constructed around the globe. Yes, this would require us to abandon our pursuit of the perpetual growth chalice and accept that a simpler lifestyle with lower standards of living would result. After decommissioning these complexities should be a concerted effort aided by what remains of our energy surpluses and by as many as possible of a relocalisation of potable water procurement, organic food production, and regional shelter needs. Ideally we would manage our descent as per the degrowth philosophy as opposed to experiencing a chaotic collapse.
This, of course, is nothing more than hopium-laced thinking. It’s politically unrealistic and completely unlikely, but this does not make it any less rational. I will assert here that we ought to be following the precautionary principle, but I am not naive enough to believe our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems will find the will to do this. This will is not simply missing in action; it is actively opposed. So this is not the path we are on, and there’s no evidence we will find or follow it should it present itself.
On Extinctions, Climate, and the Conditions for Complexity
In a relatively narrow sense it is true that the loss of a salamander in the Amazon doesn’t have an impact on a civilisation on the other side of the world, but this loss of a single species is not really the issue. The issue is loss of functional biodiversity at landscape and regional scales. It is not important to future civilisations whether a particular species survives but whether an assemblage of species can provide necessary ecosystem services such as pollination, pest regulation, water filtration, and nutrient cycling. Should these not remain intact then all bets are off as to ecosystem survival. The sixth mass extinction is not simply a list of lost species but is an unravelling of the services provided by the appropriate assemblage of species. While it may be quite impressive that a forest regrows to 90 percent of its previous abundance and 75 percent of its beginning composition of species, if the missing 25 percent of species includes any keystone species it could be a totally dysfunctional ecosystem–real recovery but incomplete and defective.
One could respond here that such keystone species are rarely lost during extinctions; they tend to involve rather obscure organisms with limited roles in the proper functioning of an ecosystem. It’s a gamble to assume this will be the outcome with our current sixth mass extinction; we cannot possibly know which losses will prove critical to future ecosystems, nor what the cumulative impact of many small species losses could be–such losses could result in impacts as dramatic as the loss of a single keystone species.
The challenge cites the Zero Emissions Commitment paper to address climate concerns. It’s important to note here that this is one data point in a highly contested literature. There exist many other studies that argue even if atmospheric temperatures stabilise, the climate impacts that we are beginning to experience will very likely continue to occur and possibly grow for centuries to millennia. This disagreement, however, is perhaps moot since the concern may not be whether CO2 levels stabilise but whether the disruptions we have begun experiencing are locked in. Will permafrost thaw, shifts in precipitation patterns, and ocean acidification continue to alter the conditions under which future human societies must operate? Some systems may have already been pushed past tipping points from which they can’t return, at least not on a timescale relevant to humans.
What Does This All Mean For Societal Renewal
I must agree that the collapse of global, industrial civilisation will serve as a release valve for the pressure on our biosphere. And, indeed, some regions might flourish as Chernobyl suggests is possible. But the world of 10,000 years ago, in which our species began experimenting with large, complex societies and set out on the road to our current global iteration, will not greet post-collapse peoples–if any make it to the other side of the bottleneck we’ve led ourselves into. The world that emerges in the shadow of our collapse will be altered in fundamental ways with many regions poisoned to an extent that they will, for all intents and purposes, be off-limits to most living species.
The question then for humans and any possibility of large, complex societies once again forming and proliferating is not whether Nature may recover in certain locations but whether it can recover where the conditions necessary for complexity exist; for example, stable climate, fertile soils, surplus energy, reliable and potable water, and abundant biodiversity. It may be possible, but it is highly improbable that such conditions will once again arise post collapse–especially due to the legacy of our current infrastructure and the expansion of it we have planned.
Recovery, if it occurs, will tend to be patchy and punctuated by ongoing disasters. Some regions may indeed recover fully and be havens for a number of species, including humans; others may be uninhabitable for millennia. Possibility is, of course, not probability, and I remain convinced that the odds of a large, complex civilisation arising like a phoenix from the ashes of our collapsed world are as close to zero as one can be. I’m not willing to state that this is a certitude for I know not what the future holds; as I state to others when asked about my thoughts on how something will turn out, “I’ll give you my prediction after it happens.”
So much depends not just on what we have already constructed and spread around the planet, but on what we continue to build and introduce to the biosphere, and which of these will be disastrous once left unmanaged. The tendency for the advocates of these technologies to only highlight their potential “benefits” and downplay or ignore the negative impacts suggests we don’t know nearly enough about the fallout from our continued pursuit of them.
The most rational response to all these uncertainties would be to stop expanding, start decommissioning, and begin simplifying. But as Robert Heinlein observed, “We are a rationalising animal, not a rational one.”
Reader comment:
I’d really like to argue against the “no future civilisations” point, for the main reason that collapse itself acts as a pressure release valve, and that you dramatically underestimate (some) ways nature can recover.
You state that “Today’s industrial societies do not have the luxury of large, widespread, and fully-intact ecological havens from which to restart. Our blasting past the natural environmental carrying capacity of our planet and overshooting numerous planetary boundaries have significantly altered the biosphere upon which our existence depends. The planet’s climate appears to be destabilising at a rate unprecedented in our species’ history; a sixth mass extinction seems well underway, with species loss rates thousands of times faster than prehistoric records show; global food production is threatened by soil loss and lack of organic life to sustain its fertility; aquifers are being drawn down significantly faster than they can recharge; marine food webs are threatened by ocean acidification. The toxins and pollutants from our massive industrialisation and expansion have pushed the planetary sinks that have served to absorb our waste beyond their ability to continue to do so.”
So I’ll take the main arguments from there.
1. Today’s industrial societies do not have the luxury of large, widespread, and fully-intact ecological havens from which to restart. Good point, but for how much longer? Post- collapse, with an absolute cessation of human pressure, recovery is rather swift. The best natural experiment is Chernobyl. Researchers running aerial surveys of the exclusion zone from 1987–1997 found animal numbers were already comparable to nearby uncontaminated nature reserves, with wolf densities more than seven times greater than in reserves — this after just over a decade of human absence. Four decades on, the zone is now home to flourishing populations of wolves, foxes, Eurasian lynx, elk and wild boar, with brown bears and European bison having returned, largely because the single greatest factor in the transformation is the complete cessation of human development and resource exploitation — the end of industrial logging, large-scale farming, and hunting removed the most severe constraint on wildlife populations. So animal populations and “wild feel” can come back surprisingly fast once the pressure (hunting, farming, habitat conversion) actually stops.
Middle tier: ecosystem function (soil, vegetation structure, biodiversity) — decades to about half a century. The most-cited systematic study here is Jones & Schmitz (2009, PLOS ONE), a synthesis of 240 independent studies of ecosystem recovery from major disturbance. Their finding directly contradicts the “centuries or never” assumption: most ecosystems globally can, given the removal of pressure, recover from very major perturbations on timescales of decades to half-centuries, not centuries.
even for the havens of biodiversity we call forests: nature.com/articles/s41…
“Abundance and diversity regained more than 90% and composition approximately 75% similarity to old-growth forests within 30 years, but full recovery takes several decades.”
this goes double with “a sixth mass extinction seems well underway, with species loss rates thousands of times faster than prehistoric records show”, as forests regrow, previously “doomed” species may well get their habitat back. Also, to be a heartless bastard, only a rather smal lfraction of those extinctions really matter to human civilisation as a whole (Eg a salamander being lost in the amazon doesn’t affect a japanese civilisation at all)
“global food production is threatened by soil loss and lack of organic life to sustain its fertility”
sure, but again, recovery. 2 factors are at work here, 1. What happens when food demand is reduced by a factor of (generously) 20? I’d assume our fields would be much less stressed. Second, topsoil recovers surprinsingly fast once you fallow it! one study i saw estimated 75% recovery in about 120 years. Ditto for the organic food webs.
Furthermore, a significant portion of topsoil can last a hell of a long time, even at CURRENT depletion rates (orders of magnitude higher compared to the old ways which we will hopefully go back to)
“aquifers are being drawn down significantly faster than they can recharge;” except preindustrial civilisations never used aquifers at all?
“The toxins and pollutants from our massive industrialisation and expansion have pushed the planetary sinks that have served to absorb our waste beyond their ability to continue to do so.”” This is true, but I’d argue that runoff into deep ocean or deep soil lowers their burden rather fast too, especially when exposure stops, even if they do not chemically break down they are too far away to matter.
as for climate, have you seen this paper?
“This warming effect is difficult to constrain due to high uncertainty in the efficacy of ocean heat uptake. Overall, the most likely value of ZEC on multi-decadal timescales is close to zero, consistent with previous model experiments and simple theory.”
In a word, collapse is better for future civilisations.
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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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Oh, Steve. So well presented. Some time I will give a lengthy comment of my observations as I have traveled the same highways for many years (85 to be exact), course I was not always observing the landscape nor was I the driver. Good job, rational.
Both of you are conveniently forgetting, or have never heard of, the inconvenient Bill Gaede Hypothesis of the Sixth Mass Extinction, a simple prediction that postulates that humans will EAT every single one of our fellow Earthlings during the upcoming global economic crash, and there will be nothing left standing bigger than a mouse or a goldfish, so there will be no "ecological recovery" from humans for several million years, at least. My money is on octopi. It is a great century to be an octopus.