world was to be a world of easilyunderstood slogans, everything simple and straightforward. All we had to do was to keep on growing, without considering the consequences, to tear ourselves away from nature, to focus more and more on the individual, to automate everything, to go always faster and further … towards a world where finally we dread the coming of summer for fear of suffocating, or of being the victim of some extreme event, where seeing a ladybird fly has become a rare occurrence, where cities have become refuges of biodiversity because the countryside has been devastated, where the sciences, those of climate or biodiversity, that still seek to understand the world rather than to oversimplify it even more, describe nightmare futures. And so on.
It’s time to stop. We have spent too long sliding down the slope of this destructive modernity. It’s time to oppose to it our inner world, our emotions and passions, our children, our friends, our networks, our intelligence and our creativity. We can learn again to accept the complexities of reality (or rather of realities). We can learn again that our world is more than just what we can dominate, directly or indirectly, and more even than we can understand. We can restore ourselves with the wisdoms that the world has accumulated through centuries past, without sneering at them, but also without being afraid to create something new. We can bring into being the spirituality, and the spiritualities, that will allow us to remain upright in the coming storm and to rebuild a shared, open house in which we can all live.
Dominique Bourg
Philosopher, University of Lausanne
Notes
1 1. The reference is to Serge Reggiani’s 1967 song, ‘Les loups sont entrés dans Paris’ (‘The wolves have entered Paris’) – Tr.
2 2. Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
Preface Facing the collapse of our world
Don’t you think our epoch has a scent of collapse? Something has toppled over, something is dying on a grand scale. There are signs of the end of this world appearing in the speeches of Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and Antonio Gutierrez, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in conversations at Davos and in commentaries on the fires in Australia and Brazil and now on the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is no longer surprising: the idea that our world can collapse in the coming years is widespread. In February 2020, an opinion poll on ‘collapsology’1 conducted by the Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP) in five countries (France, United States, United Kingdom, Italy and Germany) found that 56 per cent of British people and 65 per cent of French think that Western civilization as we know it will soon collapse (23 per cent of British people expect it within twenty years, and 9 per cent before 2030).2
We are now beyond discussing whether the threat is real or not. Dozens, even hundreds of ‘top scientists’ agree that global catastrophic risks (GCRs3) need to be taken seriously. For the most sceptical readers (and it is normal to be sceptical), we have summarized the scientific works dealing with these risks in How Everything Can Collapse published by Polity in April 2020 (in French in 20154).
As we expected, everything is speeding up. Not so long ago, some scientists claimed that a global systemic collapse of our society and of the biosphere was possible in the near future, though without being able to specify a date. Today, we have gone a step further: some top scientists say this is the most likely scenario.5 The Doomsday Clock, which symbolizes the imminence of a planetary cataclysm, was brought forward in January 2020 to midnight minus 100 seconds.6 This cold and relentless statement is in line with that of wellknown authors from the English-speaking world who have inspired us, such as Donella and Dennis Meadows, Joanna Macy, Jared Diamond, John M. Greer, Richard Heinberg and Naomi Oreskes, to name a few.
In 2015, the rational and scientific approach of collapsology was considered ‘pessimistic’ by the political establishment and most of the mainstream media. However, the general public was already open to discuss the matter. We have seen a growing number of readers coming to our lectures who had reached similar conclusions: neither ‘sustainable development’, nor ‘green growth’, nor promises of wealth redistribution will be able stop the disasters from happening, should business-as-usual prevail. There is no doubt that humanity and the planet are heading down a catastrophic path.
Once people realize the situation, bewilderment strikes to the very roots of the soul. Then, two questions arise over and over again: How do we live through our lives with this constant flow of bad news and disasters? How can we rethink politics in the aftermath of catastrophes? In other words, which ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ paths must we explore?
The book you are holding in your hands tries to answer the first question. This is the psychological, metaphysical and spiritual question of our relationship to the world, of interdependencies between humans as well as between humans and non-humans, of meaning, of narratives, of the sacred, and so on. We wrote it during the summer of 2018, when a conjunction of events caused the theme of collapse to go viral in France: the first articles in the mass media, a particularly hot summer, the publication of a study dubbed ‘Hothouse Earth’ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the spectacular resignation of the charismatic French Minister of the Environment, Nicolas Hulot, and fifteen days later, the publication of the IPCC’s special report on the impact of global warming of 1.5°C. The following autumn saw the almost simultaneous emergence of the powerful movements of the Gilets jaunes (‘Yellow Vests’) in France, of Extinction Rebellion and Deep Adaptation in the UK, and of course of the Fridays for Future initiated by Greta Thunberg.
Another End of the World is Possible was published the same autumn and added a missing piece to deepen the conversation. Since then, the word ‘collapsology’ has become an uncontrollable media monster that has slipped away us, feeding on catastrophic news but also on criticism and praise, superficial mumbo-jumbo and scholarly analysis. It has even entered the famous French dictionary Le Petit Robert.7
The unravelling of the biosphere is bad news. So, do we need to wish for a breakdown of the current social order in order to avoid an even greater collapse of earth systems? This question becomes more relevant than ever with each passing year. The latest news on climate change and mass extinction of species is breath-taking. The European Environment Agency does not disagree with that statement. In a collection of maps published on 10 February 2020,8 this public body tries to figure out our children’s and grandchildren’s future in Europe at the end of the century: rising sea levels, torrential rain, droughts, mega-fires. A Hollywood movie featuring all these disasters would hardly be credible.
Since 2018, protests and rebellions have erupted across the globe. And, in the midst of the heated political debates on collapses (biodiversity, climate, geopolitics, finance, etc.), a microscopic coronavirus has unleashed a series of cascading effects: fear and entrenchment, a voluntary slowdown of economic activity, domestic political upheavals, diplomatic and geopolitical crises, shortages of medicines, masks and food, the injection of massive amounts of liquidity into the markets by central banks around the world to stabilize the financial system and avoid a major crash, and so on. Covid-19 has proved to be a huge stress-test for the globalized economy. It is also a stark reminder of what matters deeply in our daily lives, as well as a real-time dress rehearsal for future disasters and psychological mayhem, which will be much more intense. And more unexpectedly, the lockdown of half of the world’s population has demonstrated the extraordinary capacity of wildlife to adapt and self-regenerate!
The Covid-19 pandemic also showed that while we have the political power to shut down non-essential businesses, it is not enough to
