WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

Are we poised at the brink of catastrophe or the edge of evolution? With a plummeting economy, accelerating climate change and the onset of Peak Oil, this is a very timely question. Author Graeme Taylor shares his answers in Evolution's Edge - our latest release.

This excerpt from Evolution's Edge examines the potential outcomes of societal and economic collapse.

The consequences of system failure

We don’t have to look to the ancient past to see the consequences of societal collapse — the world is full of failed and failing states. In the last few decades many societies have collapsed, with consequences ranging from war, genocide and ethnic cleansing to civil wars and economic ruin. Some examples are Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and the Soviet Union. In almost every case government services such as law and order, public health care and education almost disappeared, living standards sharply declined, mortality rates rose and criminal gangs took control of entire regions.

While failed states are a major source of conflict, terrorism and drugs, they do not destabilize the global economy.The real danger to the survival of our species does not come from the collapse of individual nations, but from the collapse of major ecosystems and the global economy as a whole. The global economy was able to recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s because major ecosystems were intact and the world was still full of undiscovered resources. But if the next great depression is caused by a combination of climate change and resource shortages, the world may not have the ecological or economic resilience to recover.

Follow up:

Attempts may be made to try to avert a global depression through intensifying the exploitation of already degraded ecosystems. If this is done, a vicious cycle of environmental, economic and social destruction will ensue. Environmental crises will rapidly escalate, triggering a cascade of uncontrollable economic and political crises. At some point interacting crises would converge and create a perfect storm that causes the catastrophic collapse of the global system. As both international and national institutions begin to fail, wars will break out over scarce resources. The fall of the Roman Empire would be repeated on a global scale, but with wars fought with weapons of mass destruction.

As ecosystems, economies and social institutions progressively collapse, human populations will sharply decline due to starvation, disease and warfare, and cities will be abandoned. Survivors will have to learn how to use primitive technologies to eke out livings in devastated environments. Social and biophysical systems may be damaged to the point where it becomes impossible to support advanced civilizations on Earth.

The industrial system, which has been able to manage crises and changes for over two hundred years, is becoming increasingly unable to cope with interacting environmental, economic and social crises. As the global economy begins to fail, it will become more disorganized and dysfunctional. However, at this stage disaster is not inevitable. Two (but only two) future outcomes are possible: the global system will either continue to disintegrate to the point where it suffers irreversible damage and collapse, or it will reorganize itself into a new type of sustainable system.

Although most of the human societies and civilizations that ever existed have disappeared, not every one has suffered catastrophic collapse. Some met the challenges of changing conditions by developing new and more environmentally relevant worldviews, technologies and institutions. The weakening of the existing system is not only a time of great danger, but a time of great opportunity.

We are now entering a time of increasing global crises that can only result in either the catastrophic collapse of our unsustainable industrial system or its transformation into a sustainable planetary civilization. We are already well into the first part of this process — growing global crises. The question is no longer whether our unsustainable system will eventually collapse; the question now is whether humanity has the time and ability to avert disaster through creating a sustainable planetary civilization.

Click here for more details about Evolution's Edge.