1: Collapse, survival and transformation
14/04/25
Civilisation as we know it is founded upon one big, fat, dirty black lie: that growth is sustainable. Even now, as we reach the point where what was always unsustainable can actually no longer be sustained, there is a complete absence of willingness among our political leadership to acknowledge the reality. When the UK's current government took office in the summer of 2024 they made their economic strategy abundantly clear. Chancellor Rachel Reeves's first major speech basically consisted of this: “Growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, GROWTH!” That things have not quite gone to plan is not a reason to change it, of course. “It will be a battle”, she said in early 2025, “but we must not give up! Growth is the only way!” Among the practical consequences has been a major u-turn on Labour's long-standing opposition to expand Heathrow airport. Until very recently their position was that an expansion of air travel capacity was inconsistent with Labour's commitment to drive down carbon dioxide emissions. Now Reeves assures us that advances in fuel technology means that this expansion is no longer inconsistent with the need to combat climate change – that somehow the increased emissions won't count. Meanwhile, back in reality, nothing has changed – it is not remotely possible to operate the world's existing fleet of aircraft on recycled cooking oil or synthetic fuels, let alone even more of them. The expansion will result in an increase in the amount of carbon moving from fossil sources into the atmosphere, which can only accelerate climate change.
We can't really blame the politicians for lying. It is not as though the majority of the public want the lie exposed for all to see. There is plenty of opposition in London itself – London's Mayor has vowed to do everything in his power to block the expansion of Heathrow, including taking the government to court. (That is...a Labour Mayor of London is committed to taking the Labour government of the UK to court in order to attempt to prevent that government from making good on its core economic promise to generate economic growth, and we are expected to just accept this as normal.) But beyond the reach of the NIMBY effect my sense is that the majority opinion is something along the lines of “Any negative effect on the climate is a price we have to pay to get growth going. We have no choice, because the alternative is that we're economically f***ed.”
The truth is that because our economic system is built on a lie, if the lie is revealed to be a lie then the whole system will come crashing down. If the world's economists and politicians had to work within the constraints of physical and ecological reality then all confidence in the future would instantaneously disappear. It would become immediately clear that the majority of todays ever-growing pile of debt can never be repaid. Even worse, there would be no way to reboot the system – even if all those debts were to be written off then it still wouldn't be possible to restore confidence in the future without fundamentally changing the assumptions on which modern economics has always operated. We would have to create a post-growth economic system – something which is currently politically unimaginable. And we'd have no time at all to figure out how it would actually work, because economists and politicians haven't done the necessary theoretical groundwork required. They never question the lie; that is not permitted.
So there we have it – our economic system is both unsustainable and unreformable, and we are closing in on the point where it cannot be sustained any longer. That is one of the main reasons why things just seem to keep getting worse – not just the climate, but the economic situation, the political situation, the socio-cultural situation, the mental health situation and pretty much everything else. The process whereby civilisation as we have known it actually falls to pieces has begun.
On a personal level, there aren't many options available as a response. You can't just continue as if you don't understand what you do understand – that would just drive you completely insane. So you can either just give up – you can become a nihilist and do your best to enjoy whatever time you have left – or you do whatever you can to prepare for what is coming. For many people, serious prepping is not an option. It is either financially non-viable or they have reasons why they cannot move away from where they currently live to somewhere it is possible to live in a much more self-sufficient and off-grid manner. One of the things that is going to have to change is that this needs to be made much easier for people – we need to think about adapting to what is coming, not just at the level of individuals and families but whole countries. Above the level of the sovereign state it will inevitably become more and more difficult to get anything done at all, for one of the things which is collapsing is what remains of the post-WW2 global order. We must learn how to walk properly before we can aspire to run.
Attempting to predict how the collapse will play out is a mug's game. Most of those who tried to do that with respect to Peak Oil ended up looking silly. It wasn't that Peak Oil itself was unpredictable, and you didn't have to be Einstein to figure out that the consequences were going to be very bad, but there was a widespread assumption that the price of oil would go sky high and stay there, and based the rest of their predictions on that. When global demand first overtook production capacity in 2008 that is not how things played out. Nobody knew that there was a giant financial accident waiting to happen because of systematically irresponsible lending by banks, particularly in the US sub-prime mortgage market. The resulting economic crisis has never ended, but one of its initial consequences was to depress global demand for oil, which rapidly lowered the price, and thus many of the detailed predictions made by the peak oil theorists turned out to be completely wrong. One of the defining features of collapse (generally, not just in this case) is that it is chaotic and unpredictable.
However, the chaotic nature of collapse does not completely rule out the drawing of conclusions about what is going to happen. Another defining feature of collapse is that eventually, just like an avalanche, it must come to an end in a new stable state (stable relative to the collapse, at least). It is a process, and it has a limited number of possible outcomes. Some collapse-aware individuals believe that human extinction is either very likely or absolutely guaranteed. This opinion is frequently held very strongly, which is an indication on the reasons why it is held at all. Extinction is the ultimate in levelling down – from a human perspective it is the worst thing that can happen, but by definition it is equally bad for everybody. The alternative is, for many people, far more cognitively troubling, because the implication is that at least some people are going to survive the die-off. And that in turn means that all sorts of questions arise about who is likely to survive and who isn't, and why. The questions are of both a practical and theoretical nature, and some of them rank among the most difficult moral dilemmas it is possible to think of.
In reality, near-term human extinction is highly improbable, precisely because we are by far the most intelligent species in the history of life on Earth, a talent that has also made us the most adaptable. There is also a limit to how much damage we can do to the global ecosystem before our numbers are reduced to the point where we have effectively removed ourselves from the equation, at least at that level. We couldn't turn Earth into Venus if we tried – eventually the atmosphere would lose heat into space faster than the greenhouse effect can warm it up. [see: Scoping of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report Cross Cutting Issues(PDF).Thirty-first Session of the IPCC Bali, 26–29 October 2009 (Report).] Even if we collectively choose the worst possible scenario for climate change, there will still be places on this planet that humans can eke out a living. Clearly the global population will be far smaller, but even if it is reduced to six figures then we will still not be threatened with extinction.
Another popular prediction is that we will return to the Stone Age, or abandon farming entirely and go back to hunter-gathering. This won't happen because we aren't going to forget what books are for, or how to make them, and the more valuable or useful a book is, the more reason there will be to look after it, and make copies of it. The paraphernalia of 20th and 21st century techno-industrial civilisation is going to be very much in evidence for a long time to come. Certainly we are going to go backwards in some respects (for most people, most of the time, collapse will be experienced as declining living standards) but that doesn't mean we can return to the Stone Age, or to any other stage of human development. What is coming is very bad, but it is the future, not the past.
So what is going to happen? Nobody has a crystal ball, but a very broad answer is available, because there are limits to the way evolution and ecology operate. Ecosystems evolve dynamically in response to what is happening to their parts and that isn't going to change because a new sort of apex predator has destabilised the whole system. No species can remain out of ecological balance with its ecosystem forever. Not even a very clever one.
It seems probable that humans have got a very long future stretching out ahead of us. Certainly long enough for all sorts of evolutionary changes to take place, to both humans and the Earth's ecosystems. The broad answer is that at some point a new ecological balance will emerge between the descendants of the survivors of the die-off and an Anthropocene ecosystem very different to the Holocene ecosystem that nurtured civilisations for the last 6,000 years. There can be no return to nomadic tribalism, and no sustained anarchism. Civilisation is too powerful. Civilised humans will always eventually overpower or displace uncivilised and disorganised ones. We cannot uninvent civilisation, so we are doomed to keep trying to make it work until we finally figure it out. And crucially, “figuring it out” can only mean the creation of a form of civilisation which is completely ecologically sustainable – an ecocivilisation. The question is not whether we will eventually arrive at such a solution, but what that it might look like and how we might get from here to there.
In this website/blog I intend to explore all of the issues covered in this first post. Firstly I am interested in the collapse itself – what is happening to us as a species, and what is happening to Western society. Secondly I am interested in both the theory and practice of adaptation and survival, at all levels from individuals to the whole of Western society. Thirdly I am interested in the final goal of ecocivilisation – what a real ecocivilisation might look like, especially an ecocivilisation that is culturally descended from the West, and how the process of collapse can become a process of transformation.