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<h1 style="border-bottom-width:0; color:#444444;
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Collapsology</h1>
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<p>Scott McLemee reviews <em>How Everything Can Collapse: A
Manual for Our Times</em> by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël
Stevens.</p>
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<h2 class="pane-title"> By </h2>
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<div class="pane-content"> June 19, 2020 </div>
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<p><strong>On New Year’s day,</strong> I posted on social
media a passage from the <em>Encyclopedia Galactica</em>,
a reference work to be published several millennia from
now but available to me, on occasion, because I know a
guy. (<a
href="http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf"
target="_blank">Long story.</a>) “Given developments
over the next several decades,” it read, “many looked
back on the 2010s as a period of relative stability …”</p>
<p>Well, that didn’t take long to confirm. In the meantime
Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens’s <em>How Everything
Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times</em> (<a
href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+Everything+Can+Collapse%3A+A+Manual+for+our+Times-p-9781509541393"
target="_blank">Polity Press</a>) 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>What the authors call</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>“Our living conditions <em>at this precise time and in
this precise place</em>,” the authors say, “depend on
what happened <em>a short time ago in many places on
Earth</em> … 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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>My overview here is</strong> 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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
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