[D66] How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times

[R.O.]

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/06/19/review-pablo-servigne-and-rapha%C3%ABl-stevens-how-everything-can-collapse-manual-our


  Of Collapsology

Scott McLemee reviews /How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our 
Times/ by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens.


    By

Scott McLemee <https://www.insidehighered.com/users/scott-mclemee>
June 19, 2020
<https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/styles/large/public/media/1509541381.jpg?itok=d-lhQuJ7>

*On New Year’s day,* I posted on social media a passage from the 
/Encyclopedia Galactica/, a reference work to be published several 
millennia from now but available to me, on occasion, because I know a 
guy. (Long story. 
<http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf>) “Given 
developments over the next several decades,” it read, “many looked back 
on the 2010s as a period of relative stability …”

Well, that didn’t take long to confirm. In the meantime Pablo Servigne 
and Raphaël Stevens’s /How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our 
Times/ (Polity Press 
<https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+Everything+Can+Collapse%3A+A+Manual+for+our+Times-p-9781509541393>) 
has arrived in English translation, offering an assessment of several 
trend lines already obvious when the book was published in France five 
years ago. The authors (an agronomist and an expert in the resilience of 
socio-ecological systems, respectively) have coined a semi-sardonic 
term, “collapsology,” to name the transdisciplinary field of study for 
which their book is a primer.

A little irony is understandable insofar as “collapse” implies a 
discrete event, unmistakable and undeniable: the sudden, swift implosion 
of a structure. Given that connotation, to speak of the collapse of 
industrial civilization means risking the suspicion that you are, like 
Chicken Little, extrapolating wildly from dubious information. Servigne 
and Stevens do not make forecasts or resort to scenario building. (In 
that regard, collapsology differs from the old futurology, which was 
prone to blending social science and science fiction into projections 
that seldom aged well.) For them, collapse is an array of processes 
developing at different tempos, with effects that may vary by geography, 
and interacting in ways that defy generalization, much less prediction.

*What the authors call* their “manual for our times” is part of the 
ongoing effort to re-evaluate globalization-think in the wake of the 
2008 financial crisis and its anxious aftermath. With hindsight, the 
integration of whole continents into even larger networks of 
transportation, communication, supply chains and currency flows was 
predicated on an expectation that continual economic growth would 
establish durable harmonies of interest. The emerging order would be 
complex but self-reinforcing. A rising tide would lift all boats, which 
would all have Wi-Fi eventually.

Unsustainable elements of this system, particularly of the environmental 
kind, were in view even before the end of the 20th century. If not just 
the tide but the ocean level itself were rising, it would obliterate the 
existing coastline, with an incalculable impact on the residents, human 
and otherwise. When the specter of global financial collapse returned in 
2008, the sharp increase in food prices caused riots in at least 35 
countries, followed by a prolonged phase of reduced growth. That did 
not, however, reverse the trend toward longer and more complex supply 
chains:

“Our living conditions /at this precise time and in this precise 
place/,” the authors say, “depend on what happened /a short time ago in 
many places on Earth/ … A shock such as the insolvency of a supplier 
spreads vertically and then horizontally as it destabilizes competitors. 
To crown it all, supply chains are all the more fragile as they depend 
on the good health of the financial system that provides the credit 
lines necessary to any economic activity.”

Here the potential for myriad social and political upheavals is 
practically built into the system. But Servigne and Stevens identify a 
more fundamental element of instability than either financial volatility 
or the precarious long-distance functioning of production networks: the 
declining rate of energy return on investment. EROI is the amount of 
energy surplus generated per unit of energy required to generate it. “At 
the beginning of the twentieth century,” they write, “U.S. oil had a 
fantastic EROI of 100:1 … In 1990 it had fallen to only 35:1, and today 
[2015] it is about 11:1. As a comparison, the average EROI of the 
world’s production of conventional oil is between 10:1 and 20:1.”

Nor is the problem limited to petroleum, since renewable energy sources 
have a significantly lower return, with solar energy’s EROI in the range 
of 1.6 to 2.5 units generated for the amount invested in manufacturing 
the technology. Hydroelectricity’s EROI is a quite respectable 35 to one 
or 49 to one but can do serious damage to the natural habitat. The 
existing infrastructure of 21st-century global capitalism -- “swift 
transport, long and fluid supply chains, industrial agriculture, 
heating, water purification, the internet and so on” -- was forged in a 
period of high EROI that there is no reason to expect will return. 
“Ultimately,” the authors say, “modernity will not have died of its 
postmodern philosophical wounds but because it has run out of energy.”

*My overview here is* very schematic, while the book itself is packed 
with both data and salient conceptual distinctions garnered from 
numerous studies -- most of them published over the past 20 years. One 
is the NASA-funded Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model of a 
civilization’s development given certain biophysical constraints and 
parameters of economic inequality. The HANDY results were published in 
2014, indicating that growing disparities in wealth rendered even a 
presumably “sustainable” or eco-friendly economic system susceptible to 
long-term decline. Optimism seems imprudent.

“Today, as most poor countries and the majority of people in rich 
countries suffer from astonishing levels of inequality and the 
destruction of their living conditions, ever more piercing cries of 
alarm rise into the media sky,” write Servigne and Stevens. “But those 
who find this annoying inveigh against ‘catastrophism,’ while others 
shoot the messengers, and nobody really cares.” I think the authors 
would admit that last bit is an overstatement. But the point is that we 
have no idea what it would take to change the situation, or to find the 
will.


    Read more by

Scott McLemee <https://www.insidehighered.com/users/scott-mclemee>
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