The Unraveling: A Clear-Eyed Look at Humanity’s Future

An Introduction of Dieback and Collapse

I have a daughter (she’s 29 years old), and I am scared for her at times, especially in my early morning awakenings, when the sun is still far from rising, and I despair about the world our generation has left for her.

I have spent most of my life studying the human relationship with Nature, with the cosmos, Earth, Life, society, and the individual, and teaching what I understand about this relationship to thousands of thoughtful and optimistic students in New York City and in my adopted home on the East End of Long Island. And whether they were poor, rich, or somewhere in between, Puerto Rican, Chinese, American, black or white, Jewish, Muslim, gay, geek, stoner, goody-two-shoes, or of whatever other possible designation, these young people have softened my heart to mush with how loving and loveable they have been.

Through them and in my yearlong travels with my wife through Asia, I have learned the profound depth, creativity, and beauty of the human soul. And in my travels and from my research I have learned how synchronously destructive we have been to ourselves and to all of nature. These Substack posts has been written to help the young generations and mine explore this paradox of our species. By honestly facing the futility of the easy solutions thus far offered by pundits and leaders, I hope to engage us in the difficult work ahead.

The human species and its agriculturally-based civilization are dangerously out of balance with the rest of life. This relationship has already proven fatal to trillions of organisms and to numerous species, billions of human lives, and potentially to civilization, itself. The evidence of our imbalance is the ongoing destruction to the rest of the planet and the growing unrest in the general human population across the world.

First, I’d like to be clear about the three principal theses of the following posts:

(1) Within the lifetimes of most of us alive today, there will likely be a drastic dieback of the human population. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people will experience untimely deaths, dying long before their natural expectations, from starvation, contaminated water, and related diseases.

(2) Much of the world’s civilization will collapse. The complex, globally interdependent civilization shared by somewhere between eight and eleven billion people will fragment into numerous societies of varying size and complexity, into everything from unions of small nation states to completely failed states.[i]

(3) We – “we” being humanity – have all the solutions and capabilities necessary to avert these tragedies, but it is unlikely that we will be wise enough to enact them in time.

The catastrophic dieback[ii] of human population and the collapse of societies may well be precipitated by a decade of unusually severe weather, or, far less likely, it may involve a global crop failure following the super explosion of a massive volcano that kills a billion people and darkens our summer skies. And, yet, as much as there is evidence in the geological and archeological record for these sorts of devastating phenomena, they will not be required for our demise.

We have assured it ourselves. Like a pestilence, we have multiplied and fed upon all the Earth until it can no longer sustain us, and naturally, we have done so in a time when it has been most hospitable to our kind. Because of our still growing global population and rising consumption, we will be asking more of the Earth as, unfortunately, it becomes less hospitable and less capable of providing for our wants. Its deteriorating organic conditions and the heating of the air and oceans are becoming impediments to our endeavors.

If this comes off full of sound and fury, reminiscent of the biblical doomsday prophets, or if it sounds like a parody of the recent fad of the entertainment industry’s post-apocalyptic and dystopian nightmares, not the stuff of reasonable and modern minds, then you are likely a reasonable, modern person. You are not easily swayed by provocative, stirring prognostications. You are circumspect. You want to see the evidence, and even when presented with persuasive data you are skeptical, because you know how numbers and logical argument can be twisted for one’s ends and, indeed, you know this is done daily.

The following Substack posts were written for you. They describe the methodology of this perspective, and they acknowledge the problems of epistemology (that is, how certain we can be about the evidence presented), and it suggests how—in the maze of competing ideas and information—we can come to an agreement about many of the issues most important to us.

ENDNOTES

[i] As Middleton (2012) noted, within the academic literature, “Collapse is a term ascribed to a range of processes and events that at their core have rapid or dramatic political and social change. That change has correlates in material culture, whether at the level of the political fragmentation of large empires or the demise of individual polities within a culture zone.” In his seminal work The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter (1988:4) wrote, “A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” Tainter (1988:198) emphasized that collapse does not mean a “fall to some primordial chaos”; nor is it “uniformly a catastrophe”. On the other hand, it does involve a “return to normal human condition of lower complexity,” and a “rational, economizing process that may benefit much of the population,” and still may be accompanied by a “major loss of population.” Schwartz (2006:5-6) includes “the fragmentation of states into smaller political entities; the partial abandonment or complete desertion of urban centers, along with the loss or depletion of their centralizing functions; the breakdown of regional economic systems; and the failure of civilizational ideologies.” In Middleton’s words, Cowgill (1988/2003) cautioned “that the fragmentation of an empire may not involve loss of complexity in the parts that outlast it; the empire itself no longer exists, politically, but the societies involved do not collapse socially.” Very different in perspective, Jorgen Randers proposes that “…collapse is a sudden, unwanted, and unstoppable decline in the average welfare of a number of global citizens. It is a temporary phenomenon, something which does come to an end and (hopefully) is followed by a new period of advance in human welfare.” Randers (2008) writes, “Rather arbitrarily I define a collapse as “global” if it affects at least 1 billion people, who lose at least 50% of something they hold dear, within a period of 20 years.” The things that people may hold dear, Randers explains, include life, income, life expectancy, freedom, the ability to travel, or physical safety.

[ii] In these pages, dieback (sometimes also called dieoff) refers to a catastrophic crash, or pruning back, of the population of a species, in this case humans. The term is borrowed from botanists who use the term dieback to describe the death, damage, or destruction to a plant, tree, or forest.

REFERENCES

Cowgill, G. L. (1988). Onward and upward with collapse. Pp. 244-276 in Yoffee, N., and Cowgill, G. L. (Editors) The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Univ. of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Middleton, G.D. (2012) Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies. Journal of Archaeological Research; 20: 257-307.

Randers, J. (2008) Global Collapse—Fact or Fiction? Futures; 40: 853-64.

Schwartz, G.M. (2006) From Collapse to Regeneration, in G.M. Schwartz and J.J. Nichols (eds) After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies. The Univ. Arizona Press, Tucson.

Tainter, J.A. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK.