make to avoid a dramatic loss of the vital earth systems that sustain life are immense and we are not yet up to the task. Nonetheless, the real-life experiment of quarantine has at least made it possible to distinguish the essential (e.g., health, food, the local economy, love, mutual aid, the living world) from the trivial (e.g., holidays on the other side of the world, extravagant gadgets, stock market speculation, trendy clothes, advertising, Formula One Grands Prix). In Western countries, it is totally feasible to considerably reduce industrial activities and stop overconsumption while meeting people’s basic needs.
Unfortunately, the post-Covid era is demonstrating the inability of political and economic elites to see this health emergency as a historic opportunity to phase out fossil fuels, drastically reduce inequalities and address poverty. Instead, we have witnessed the development and implementation of non-eco-friendly recovery plans as illustrated by the billions of dollars made available to the aeronautics and automotive industries. Moreover, we must bear in mind that whatever the outcome of this crisis, extreme weather events are locked in for the next twenty to thirty years due to climate system inertia. There is a whole process of acceptance and mourning before us.
This book is dedicated to people who find themselves running on a perpetual treadmill of emotions (anger, fear, rage, sadness, grief, guilt, etc.). It may help you to keep up with the times and to transform your relationship to the world. It may provide some ‘useful’ tools for people who want to contribute to the emergence of new livelihoods built on the ruins of capitalism. It is not a call for an individual journey; the need is to bring people together and reclaim the commons, to imagine collective stories, so as to ride the wave of the next centuries without capsizing. In this sense, the task ahead is fundamentally political. More precisely, the political task is a precondition for devising policies of resilience that can cope with the unpredictable roller-coasters of the Anthropocene, that can manage great ‘collapses’ and imagine what may come ‘after’.
Our generation must therefore work on three fronts simultaneously, as Rob Hopkins says, with our heads, hearts and hands: understanding what is happening (collapso-logy), imagining and believing in other worlds (collapso-sophy) and gathering the forces of life to lead the fight against destructive powers and to build alternatives (collapso-praxis).
After How Everything Can Collapse, this book lays the foundations of collapsosophy. It is a step. Everything remains to be written, to be felt, to be shared, and above all, to be done. With wisdom and compassion. With love and rage.
Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens and Gauthier Chapelle
Notes
1 1. A neologism we proposed to refer to the emerging field of research in the scientific community that studies global catastrophic risks (GCRs), the category of risks that could cause mass deaths and disasters on a global scale. See Gorm E. Shackelford et al., ‘Accumulating evidence using crowdsourcing and machine learning: a living bibliography about existential risk and global catastrophic risk’, Futures 116, 2020: 102508.
2 2. Jean-Laurent Cassely and Jérôme Fourquet, La France: Patrie de la collapsologie? (Paris: Fondation Jean Jaures and IFOP, 2020). https://bit.ly/37jzvOv. For a press dispatch in English, see https://bit.ly/2XKNWaU
3 3. M. Ivanova, ‘Global risks: a survey of scientists’ perceptions’, in Our Future on Earth (Future Earth, 2020), pp. 14–17.
4 4. Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, Comment tout peut s’effondrer (Paris: Seuil, 2015).
5 5. Asher Moses, ‘“Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome”: top climate scientists’, Voice of Action (5 June 2020). https://bit.ly/2MI2H8j
6 6. The Doomsday Clock was created during the Cold War, and is maintained by the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. Since 23 January 2020, the clock has been displaying midnight minus 100 seconds (23:58:20), for the first time since 1953, due to the inability of world leaders to deal with the imminent threats of nuclear war and climate change, and the proliferation of ‘fake news’ as a weapon to destabilize democracies.
7 7. Le Petit Robert, Les mots nouveaux du Petit Robert (15 May 2020). https://bit.ly/3dS3Zt4
8 8. European Environment Agency, ‘Climate change and its impact in Europe’ (EEA, 2020). https://bit.ly/3f7xuHJ
Introduction Learning to live with it
The idea of a possible collapse no longer seems to worry us much. These days, the realization that global disasters are already happening is more and more widely accepted, as is the understanding that along with them comes the possibility of a global systemic collapse.
The monumental shocks caused by Fukushima, by the successive waves of refugees in Europe, by the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, the large-scale disappearance of birds and insects, the Brexit vote and the election of Trump have seriously ruptured the sense of peaceful continuity that had been reassuring so many of us.
One of the barriers that stops us from accepting this idea of collapse is the caricature that has been made out of it. When we think of collapse, scenes from Hollywood disaster films rush up in front of us, feeding the vision of a single, unavoidable event that will suddenly annihilate everything with which we are familiar. We fear such a moment much as we fear the moment of transition from life to death in our own dying.
This is to forget that there are other, worse things about death. There is its anticipation, having to see others die, or seeing oneself suffer in the eyes of others. The collapse of our civilization will not be a single event or catastrophe, but a series of disastrous events (cyclones, industrial accidents, attacks, pandemics, droughts, etc.), taking place against a backdrop of equally destabilizing gradual changes (desertification, the disruption of the seasons, persistent pollution, the extinctions of species and of animal populations, and so on).
We envisage the collapse of what we call ‘thermo-industrial civilization’ as a process taking place in many different locations. It has already begun, but it has not yet reached its most critical phase, and we cannot say how long it will continue. It is both distant and close, slow-moving and fast, gradual and sudden. It will involve not only natural events, but also (and especially) political, economic and social disturbances, as well as events at a psychological level (such as shifts in collective consciousness).
This is no longer a Nostradamus-like prediction, nor is it yet another reason for a passive or nihilistic attitude. ‘Collapse’ is not a fashion, or a new label. However, this is likely to be a period that historians or archaeologists of future centuries will comes to label and to look upon as a coherent whole, or which future intelligent species will regard as a quite specific historical event.
If you think that we are exaggerating to get your attention, just remember what two climate scientists were saying in 2011 at a conference in Oxford about climate goals for the twenty-first century (and keep in mind that greenhouse gas emissions are directly proportional to economic activity). They recommended the following: The emerging countries had to start reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, then maintain this decline at 3 per cent annually. The developed countries had to reach their peak emissions in 2015 and then decline by 3 per cent annually.1 If these very ambitious goals were reached (and we already know that they are not being reached), then
