Societal Collapse

The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ is Inevitable

Using an evolutionary ecology perspective, William E. Rees argues that modern techno-industrial society is in a state of advanced ecological overshoot. Fossil fuels have enabled a massive expansion of humanity that constitutes the most globally significant ecological phenomena in 250 000 years of human evolutionary history. He concludes that humanity is exhibiting the dynamic of […]

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The Global Polycrisis Reflects a Civilizational Crisis that Calls for Systemic Alternatives

Zack Walsh argues that the current level of globalization, number of systemic risks, and continued depletion of the Earth’s resources will generate some sort of societal collapse. He details these systemic risks, defines polycrisis and existential risk, and discusses the distressing impacts of climate change on our global trajectory. “Current forecasts suggest that unless we

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Navigating Polycrisis: Long-Run Socio-Cultural Factors Shape Response to Changing Climate

Societies throughout history have faced polycrises, but the outcomes range widely from collapse to positive adaptation. The authors have developed a Crisis Database of 150 past societal crises and find that three pressures make societies especially vulnerable to environmental stresses (and consequent polycrises) by impeding collective action: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and conflict, and state

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Crude Futures

In this blog, Richard Hames discusses polycrisis, societal collapse, existential risk, and related themes. Notable entries include: · “Existential Risk and The Method of Collapsology” (23 June 2022) · “The decisive moment” (01 July 2022) · “On Staying Woke in Polycrisis Futurism” (06 July 2022) · “Attention Deficit Hyperobject Disorder” (18 July 2022) · “The Stakes of Sri Lanka”

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Decline and Fall, Growth and Spread, or Resilience? Approaches to Studying How and Why Societies Change

Daniel Hoyer examines qualitative, case study, complex system, and societal dynamics approaches to explain “historical precedents of collapse, growth, and resilience.” He explains drawbacks to each method, and stresses “the importance of developing formal (especially mathematically articulated) mechanistic theory, as only by explicating what we think drives societal outcomes in a structured, formal way can

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Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy (revised 2nd edition)

Starting from the premise that society will collapse in the near-term, Jem Bendell argues that rather than debating the inevitability of that collapse we should consider what to do when it happens. He proposes a “deep adaptation agenda” as a framework for community dialogue to face the challenges, including four themes: resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and

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Integrating Collapse Theories to Understand Socio-Ecological Systems Resilience

This longitudinal case study applies collapse theory to the Piura Basin of Peru, a region subject to extreme El Niño weather events, that has previously seen societal collapse in the ancient Moche civilization. By examining factors from the Robustness Framework such as centralized governance, system interconnectedness, and central elites, the researchers examined the interactions of

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