In Part 1 of this Contemplation (see: Website Medium Substack) I argue that Gail Tverberg’s affordability argument complements my supply-side, EROI one. Extraction costs rise as EROI falls, and the subsequent increase in energy prices erodes affordability for the 90% of income earners whose incomes have stagnated over the past 50 or so years. The reduced demand curtails consumption, which results in energy spot prices falling below marginal extraction costs, leading to the stalling of investment and an acceleration of supply decline. I reviewed the three “Troubled Periods” Gail identifies in the historical data, using the Soviet collapse as a template for cascading failures resulting in collapse or simplification–whereby EROI falling below the surplus necessary to maintain complexity is part of a terminal decline. I suggest that collapse, as in the past, will be uneven and occur along different timelines for different regions.
In Part 2 (see: Website Medium Substack) I examined what all of the above means for the Architecture of Collapse thesis I have been developing. I argue that Gail Tverberg’s proposal regarding energy affordability reinforces my argument that collapse of industrial civilisation is likely to be characterised by a cascade of interacting and self-reinforcing failures. I then examine this in the light of the arguments made by Joseph Tainter regarding diminishing returns and investments in complexity, and Ronald Wright on progress traps and the tendency for solutions to create further problems. Tainter’s thesis reflects well the rising extraction costs as EROI declines, and Wright’s traps the knock-on impacts of short-term “solutions” that increase supply temporarily but speed up its depletion and deepen the crisis–such as deep-water drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
In this third part I offer some final thoughts on my ever-evolving thesis regarding the Architecture of Collapse.
A Final Reflection
Gail Tverberg ends her argument with a suggestion that economies, with their self-organising properties, may be “God-organised” and as such a continuation of creation is ensured; certainly natural systems do tend towards a reorganisation post calamity. Even human societies have demonstrated such ability over time, so it’s not out of the question that some form of restructured society arises when modernity fails.
Questions that some have regarding this “transition” are: what form a future society may have, and what the costs will be in terms of suffering for our species and the associated ecological destruction for our planet. There’s no specific outcome I would offer in the shadow of the architecture of collapse I have been describing, but there are possible boundaries as far as what might occur.
Human pre/history, as shown by Tainter, is periodically punctuated by societal collapse; this is not an aberration but a recurrent pattern. Numerous large, complex societies have arisen through time and all have proven unsustainable and eventually experienced decline that few present at the time recognised and none could reverse. The Roman Empire, Easter Islanders, and Anasazi all left behind lessons, but no one that followed their simplification learned them in order to avoid repeating the pattern.
Our predicament is similar but also vastly different. Ours is global in nature and quite irreversible given the resources and technologies we have come to depend greatly upon. While past collapses have been regional with neighbouring societies absorbing those impacted and continuing on, ours is increasingly looking to encompass the planet and impact a number of planetary boundaries causing ecological collapse at about the same time.
The all-encompassing progress trap we are caught within has led to our failure, with the ingenuity and technological capability to extract a finite cache of stored photosynthetic energy and leverage it to build a planetary complex civilisation making us dependent upon a resource we cannot replace at scale or in time. We have been blinded to our dependence by the social stories that celebrate our brilliance: the progress we venerate has been a gargantuan trap we have willingly walked into. The progress trap appears to be a structural blindness built into the narratives we have created that help define modernity, not simply a mechanism of our failure–it is a primary, underlying cause.
Simplification is not a choice, as Tainter reminds, but a necessity. Societies must and will shed the various layers of their complexity and return to a much smaller and simpler form of social organisation, but he also reminds us that societies don’t choose this path; it is forced upon them–and they resist. Internal decay and external pressures forced the Roman Empire’s fall; Mayan rituals and monumental architecture construction continued unabated until they could no longer be sustained. Regardless of when or where, the pattern of those who most benefit from complexity and its growth is to defend and attempt to extend them and resist simplification until they can no longer do so.
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Tverberg’s affordability thesis points to our global civilisation already being in the initial stages of involuntary collapse. New home construction is falling; incomes for the bottom 90% of income earners are stagnating; car sales have plateaued. These appear to be structural shifts reflecting energy constraints and not merely temporary fluctuations. We can see the economic manifestation of an affordability crisis that we have thus far refused to acknowledge; and it is the result of physical limits, not failed innovation or technology.
As many of my previous Contemplations document, humanity’s response has tended to be a doubling down on the processes and patterns driving us towards collapse–both societal and ecological. Ever-more complex extraction technologies for less energetically-profitable resources. Elaborate financial instruments and manipulations to sustain the illusion of economic growth. Fantastical salvation stories to blind us to our situational and biophysical realities.
It is a formidable challenge to alter our trajectory towards a deliberate and well-thought-out simplification, and I am increasingly doubtful we will do so. The pursuit of perpetual growth upon a finite planet must be abandoned, despite every modern institution being founded upon it. The many layers of complexity have to start being shed in a thoughtful manner if we are to avoid the chaos of unmanaged simplification; yet this imperative is resisted by the powerful interests that are profiting from status quo arrangements, and by most whose identity is embedded in the concept of modernity.
Relocalisation of our basic living needs is necessary but is next to impossible given that our economic and financial systems are organised and sustained via global integration. Our cultural narratives are blinding us to the enormous progress trap we must confront, and our political systems that might be able to take the lead on this are heavily supported by the idea of continual improvements in prosperity–an idea that must also be abandoned. The momentum of our societies is also blocking our ability to choose a different path.
The question of agency may be asked at this juncture, but all the above suggests the answer is obvious: we have little to none. How this plays out has already been chosen through our ongoing self-deception and decades of carrying out actions that do the opposite of what we should be doing: we are resisting; we are ignoring biophysical limitations and chasing impossible solutions; we are forestalling management of our decline in favour of creating stories about our ingenuity and building Potemkin villages to give the appearance of perpetual growth and its benefits; and we are clinging to past patterns as they are familiar and comforting, rather than confronting the unfamiliar ones of an uncertain future. Such choices have perhaps not been made consciously but they have been made nonetheless via our investments, institutions, and social commitments.
It’s important here to distinguish between what we can and cannot do in the face of our predicament. I’m convinced that our ability to alter the trajectory of our civilisation is absent–we have no structural agency; however, I do believe we have a limited amount of personal agency where we as individuals and perhaps even as small communities can respond within the descent we are experiencing; and this matters. While we cannot prevent what is coming our way, we have some say in how we meet it.
Biophysical limits are real, and quite binding. Declining EROI. Extraction growth plateauing. Energy inputs to support modernity constrained. And these seem to be expressing themselves through the affordability crisis Gail Tverberg describes. Wright’s progress trap thesis suggests we will pursue actions that exacerbate our predicament, not recognising the trap we have walked into because of how embedded it is in our logic and sense of self.
The future is sure to be one of unravelling, of cascading and interacting failures accelerating in a Seneca Cliff of simplification. Unsustainable debt collapses our financial superstructure. Tax revenue declines alongside growing obligations cause the failure of our governing institutions. Competition over dwindling resources intensifies geopolitical tensions and sparks wars. The dissolution of legitimacy erodes social cohesion. Rising energy costs and disruptions break supply chains. All of these are likely to occur somewhat simultaneously and amplify each other–and recall Tainter’s argument that competing polities tend to collapse together.
This is not a prediction of doom but a summary of the vulnerabilities of societal structures that make our modern world susceptible to the converging limits our growth has bumped up against.
The immediate constraint may quite well be the affordability one Tverberg recognises. But both Tainter and Wright contribute something that may be more fundamental: complexity is our problem and our social stories are blinding us from recognising this. We’ve constructed a global-spanning civilisation of extreme complexity based upon a one-time geologic gift of a finite resource while telling ourselves tales that prevent us from seeing reality clearly. The result? Continuation of our current trajectory until the entire edifice crumbles.
What emerges from this unravelling is sure to be more local, simpler, and much poorer; and I make this prediction with resignation, not satisfaction. The patterns seem obvious and the trajectory quite clear.
Another question to pose is what will survive–if anything–and what will be lost forever? Much of our modern knowledge is sure to be lost while bits and pieces may be preserved. There will likely be some local communities that endure but most will not. And some of our values may be carried forward but many will be abandoned in the struggle for survival.
I do part ways with some analysts with respect to the idea of civilisational renewal post collapse. Tainter’s analysis of past societies concluded that the precedent is for such renewal, but these past collapses occurred in a world whose planetary boundaries had not been breached to the extent they are currently and where vast regions of intact and mostly pristine ecological systems remained, providing a fundamental resource base for such renewal. Despite the vastness of the Roman Empire, its fall occurred within a Mediterranean world that could still support agriculture and was still quite biodiverse with ecological capital for reconstruction. And while the Maya greatly degraded a good deal of their landscape, it retained sufficient resilience to support future complex societies. Those experiencing these collapses faced hardship and tragedy but the broader experiment of human complex societies was not greatly impacted; there was plenty of planet left to sustain complexity when and where it arose.
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.
These issues are not temporary blips on the path to progress, prosperity, and sustainable growth, nor even ones that can be resolved if we were to simplify tomorrow; they are irreversible changes that will impact our planet and every species for millennia. Should our hydrocarbon-based energy disappear tomorrow, the greenhouse gases that have been loosed upon our world and the land system changes we have carried out will continue to affect the planet for centuries. The species that have been wiped out by our global deforestation will not suddenly return.
The damage done to our soils, water, biodiversity, and ecological systems is not going to be undone by a dramatic reduction in our population; not for a very, very long time, if at all. And then there are the thousands of dangerous complexities spread across the planet that require human management in perpetuity but will likely be abandoned as our societies decay–nuclear power plants and their radioactive wastes; chemical production and storage facilities with their toxins and pollutants; and biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens.
Previous collapses occurred on a planet where most of its ecological systems were relatively untouched and intact–a world in which new experiments in large, complex societies could be supported and tried. Modernity is collapsing into a very different world; into a world that has been significantly altered by our ingenuity and technology. Humans haven’t merely depleted a few resources; we have fundamentally changed the operating system of the Earth.
This should provide a sobering insight with respect to the possibility of any large, complex societies arising from the ashes of modernity’s collapse. As Tainter stressed, human societal complexity requires energy and resource surpluses; but it also requires a stable climate, fertile soils, reliable freshwater, and abundant biodiversity to provide the ecological foundation upon which it is built. This fundamental base has been damaged severely, and in some respects beyond all repair. The ecological conditions necessary to found a large, complex society don’t exist any more and the time needed to restore such conditions is likely beyond any relevant to human history.
While some of modernity’s knowledge might be preserved and some communities might endure, the vast majority will likely be lost. There may also be some of our current values carried forward but much will be abandoned in the struggle to survive. What can be almost guaranteed to not emerge will be a society resembling our modern, global and technologically-advanced one given the ecological foundation upon which to build it is gone and not coming back for a very long time–if at all. Any survivors that make it out the other side of the bottleneck we have led ourselves into will inherit a world of unstable climates, diminished biodiversity, depleted soils, acidified oceans, and many potential “dead zones”, along with less energy, fewer resources, and far, far narrower margins for error relative to anything in our species pre/history. The idea of rebuilding, even surviving, is quite questionable.
Despair is a reasonable response to this proposition, but I don’t write out of despair but out of the conviction that a clear-eyed understanding of this situation is healthier than holding onto a comforting delusion. Our species has constructed a global-spanning, massively complex, technologically-based civilisation upon a foundation of finite resources, using them up with little to no regard for what to do when they are no longer available, nor for the waste and damage they have produced. We have for the most part refused to acknowledge the unsustainability of our ways, creating comforting narratives that it will all simply work out for the best instead. As a result, we will continue on the current trajectory and, in fact, actually accelerate our errant ways until something–or perhaps everything–breaks. And once broken, things will not heal quickly nor easily; the wounds we have inflicted upon the planet’s ecosystems and other species are too deep, and the recovery required too long, for our species to experience any rebirth of the type of societal complexity modernity reflects.
The simplification that is fast approaching our human societies is going to be chaotic, uneven, and very costly; it will not be managed. It will be resisted–and the resistance led by those most profiting from the current unsustainable and destructive arrangements. It will usher in suffering, conflict, and loss on a scale so massive it is difficult if not impossible to imagine. What remains–if anything–of the human species and its living arrangements after the collapse will be a pale shadow of its former glory. It will be simpler, poorer, and local in nature; but also more fragile and precarious than all previous experiments. The future world of humanity will be one of constraints, where margins are thin and risk runs high.
Ours is not the first civilisation to face simplification but it may be the last to have the opportunity to rebuild and run the experiment again. Perhaps the most significant difference between our trial and those of the past is we have had the benefit of understanding the patterns and seeing what caused previous runs to fail. We developed the tools to help us comprehend our plight and the opportunity to choose differently, but we have chosen not to–or, perhaps, it never was a choice and we were simply beholden to the Maximum Power Principle without agency of any kind. If it was a progress trap as Wright suggested, then it was simply a matter of the awareness that might have helped save us from ourselves being part and parcel of the very narratives that kept us trapped. Perhaps we know we’re in a predicament but we can’t act on that knowledge because our worldviews, identities, and societal institutions are entirely invested in the story that we are not in a predicament because of our ingenuity and technological prowess.
It’s exceedingly improbable that a new civilisation arises after ours has burned out in what may be a long and slow decline–but perhaps not as slow as past ones given how far into overshoot we are and how dependent upon finite resources we have become. Humanity’s future will certainly be much simpler and more precarious given the planet’s ecosystems have been permanently diminished by the extreme excesses of modernity. While pockets of resilient communities that adapt may remain, and there may even be moments of beauty and meaning during the collapse, our grand experiment of a global-spanning civilisation will not likely be repeated because the ecological conditions that made it possible have been destroyed and may never return.
I get no satisfaction in penning this conclusion but offer it because I believe it to be true based on the evidence I have examined and the patterns pre/historians have observed. We have built the architecture of collapse with our own hands and now it stands before us. How we meet what is coming may be the most important thing left to determine. I don’t believe that this is a contradiction of my earlier point above regarding agency; in fact, I would argue that it acknowledges that while the structural outcome is fixed, the way in which we as individuals and communities navigate the coming simplification remains open. My guess is that this will not be accomplished for the most part with grace and humility but in a fashion similar to how our ancestors reacted when their societies faced the same fate–denial, resistance, and a doubling down of the behaviours and actions that created the predicament in the first place.
Maybe all I’m hoping for in trying to help others understand the patterns and consequences is that our navigation of the coming descent will be accomplished with a bit more awareness and a little less self-deception so that we can be graceful in our responses and just to others as modernity goes increasingly sideways…
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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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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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680978/
even for the havens of biodiversity we call forests: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10365-2
"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)
https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans
"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?
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/17/2987/2020/
"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.
You've got it about right, but why all the bargaining, like:
"pockets of resilient communities that adapt may remain"
"some communities might endure"
"we have a limited amount of personal agency where we as individuals and perhaps even as small communities can respond within the descent we are experiencing"
What could communities do to respond to collapse of civilisation, especially to endure? I've yet to find some ideas that make sense to me.
On this, did you actually mean what you wrote:
"it may be the last to have the opportunity to rebuild and run the experiment again."
It suggests that this civilisation will have the opportunity to rebuild and run the experiment again. Did you mean that it may be the first to not have that opportunity?
I find this to be so true:
"it never was a choice and we were simply beholden to the Maximum Power Principle without agency of any kind."