Societal Collapse

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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A History of Possible Futures: Multipath Forecasting of Social Breakdown, Recovery, and Resilience

Peter Turchin and his colleagues explain their design of a computational method to predict social collapse: multipath forecasting. By incorporating quantitative data (i.e. demography) as well as qualitative data (i.e. cultural value), a system trained on historical data predicts “a history of possible futures, in which the near- and medium-term paths of societies are probabilistically

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Unifying Research on Socio-Ecological Resilience and Collapse

After reviewing different definitions of collapse across several fields, Graeme Cumming and Garry Peterson outline specific criteria with which to assess collapse and apply them to historical and ecological examples. They emphasize the need for standard, testable, definitions and a baseline measurement, or “identity,” of a system to better understand if it has collapsed. “It

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Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies

The authors propose that socio-ecological systems feature the co-evolution of ecological systems and self-reinforcing complexes of (human) worldviews, institutions, and technologies (WITs). Contemporary WITs arose in a world of abundant resources and immense potential for growth but are now reaching the biophysical limits of the ecosphere. The authors thus advocate a deliberate shift from and

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Global Catastrophic Risks

Global Catastrophic Risks

This book explores global catastrophic risks that threaten civilization and humanity’s continued existence, addressing key methodological, ethical and policy issues. Chapters by leading experts address such risks as astronomical and earth-based natural catastrophes, nuclear war, terrorism, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and social collapse.

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