How I Came To Believe That Civilization Is Unsustainable

A Practical Guide - 3rd Edition

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The time has come for a third edition to the summary of our predicament. Not because the world will end tomorrow, but because we are hurtling ever faster towards a global tipping point, when change will accelerate beyond the capacity of many to comprehend. Let’s take this relatively calm period to stop for a minute and to take a broad view in order to escape the siren-song of narrow boundary narratives — both dismissive and catastrophizing ones. In order to remain level-headed, well informed, and to be able to make quick decisions, we must first understand where we are, how we got here and why common prescriptions won’t work. Read this post carefully, and if you’ve found it useful, share it far and wide.

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Introduction

Recently I found myself writing more and more about what’s happening in the economy, energy, markets and geopolitics. However, we must not forget that there are plenty of other things happening in the background, all converging into what many call the polycrisis... And while the word ‘crisis’ suggests difficult times ahead, it also indicates (at least to me) that all this is temporary, and can be somehow overcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. For reasons laid out below I prefer to call what we are going through a predicament with an outcome, and not a problem in search of a solution. Once you get to the bottom of this list, you will understand why is that so.

This post originally appeared on my Medium blog in 2022. Then, a year later, I published an updated version in 2023 to kick-start a new community on Substack. Now, after two years, I felt the need to share a 3rd, completely revised edition to all readers, not just for those who joined in the meantime. As with previous versions, the primary goal of this article is to educate and give a firm understanding as to why we are experiencing a major downturn — a tipping point — to global civilization. My aim with this piece is not to give ‘solutions’ nor ‘what can we do?’ type of advice. Those will have to wait. I will not judge you either: if you decide not to do anything at the moment, and accept things as they are, that is also a legitimate choice. (Whether you believe in free will and that we have a choice is also up to you.) In fact,

I encourage you to take ‘radical acceptance’ as the first step. Completely and totally accepting with your mind, body and spirit that we cannot currently change the present facts, even if we do not like them, is actually the best way to move past doom and gloom.

Finding what follows depressing, discouraging or simply labeling it as ‘pessimistic’ is a normal human response. These feelings are a part of the long journey towards acceptance — and not a permanent state of mind. Once you come to terms with what I have to explain here, and find your inner peace again, you will be much more resilient to whatever hardship might come. While others will have to confront their shock and their deepest fears of an uncertain future when the first major crisis hits, you will already know what’s happening and why, and perhaps will have already developed plans and mental maps how to move on. Trust me, unless you live in a war-torn, heavily sanctioned, economically ruined country you have seen nothing so far… But do not let that fact stop you from appreciating that what ‘others’ are experiencing at the moment might come to theaters near you anytime soon.

It’s also worth noting that what we are going through as a society is perfectly normal. All civilizations follow a similar pattern of growth, stagnation and decline — ours is no exception. What sets us apart from the hundreds of other fallen societies is our knowledge and information about our predicament. We have developed a scientific understanding why civilizations collapse, what true sustainability is, and how we got further and further away from that. Unlike prophets of prior times, we now have solid evidence for trends clearly pointing in the wrong direction. What’s laid out here is thus not informed by vague prophecies or scriptures written thousands of years ago. Contrast that to our prevalent myth — an unshakeable belief in unending progress and growth on a finite planet — an unresolvable contradiction on its own.

Although the “end of times” were forecast many times before, remember that the “end” did eventually come for all prior civilizations: the Romans, Mayans, and all the others before and after them.

What’s important to note here is that these topics are the net results of many positive and negative trends. None of them are news-bites about single events, which we could dismiss as pessimistic, then move on by reading some good news. Take biodiversity loss as an example: I read dire warnings about the ongoing mass extinction event almost every week, and while there were huge steps made in protecting a few fragile habitats or one or two endangered species here and there, the overall picture still remains a strong downward trend, with no signs of turning. You see, the problem is that we are not addressing the root causes of these issues. We are just fiddling around the edges, achieving quick wins here and there, while business as usual continues to roar full speed ahead… As a result, many of these topics were recurring over and over again throughout our short written history, affecting not just our but almost all civilizations before, while others remain unique to ours due to our use of technology. So, while you are reading the list, do not forget to observe the historic patterns and parallels, nor how they interrelate with one another. Take note also how a number of these phenomena have ended civilizations almost single-handedly before… And now they’ve got company. Quite a big one, for that matter.

This work, however, can never be complete or fully comprehensive: we are dealing with an extremely complex topic here. Therefore my aim here is to give a more-or-less coherent picture according to my current — still rather shallow — understanding of our situation, rather than a fully detailed analysis. I hope it can still serve as a useful guide for you in understanding what is really going on behind the scenes of this great unraveling, and that it won’t stop you from doing your own research. One caveat, though, while doing so, don’t let yourself to be lured into thinking that these issues can somehow be “tackled,” or dismissed out of hand by saying: ‘we will find a technology to solve that.’ It was precisely this hyper-focused approach what got us to this point.

Time is also running short: we don’t have decades to complete an energy transition, figure out a way how to supply an ever growing amount of food, energy and raw materials just to keep things stable, or how to prevent a complete ecological collapse from fully unfolding. As a result of these trends, things have already started to slide and can be expected to worsen exponentially in the years ahead. So, if you still think that high-tech industrial civilization can continue — without a radical simplification lasting many decades — after reading (and processing) the catalogue below, then you might want to broaden your narrow focus and read the list again…

This time, without the pink glasses.

Ecology

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1. We are in a state of ecological overshoot on a planetary scale. Simply put we, humans, consume and pollute more each and every year than what could be regenerated and absorbed by Nature under the same time period. This worsening tendency has eventually led to the draw-down of many stocks previously deemed ‘inexhaustible’: fish, forests, farmland, minerals, freshwater, wildlife… Thanks to the temporary abundance of food and other resources we — just like any other species in a similar situation — have ended up overshooting the carrying capacity of the world we occupy (i.e. the number of humans an area can feed indefinitely, not just for a generation or two). We are well past the point where our numbers, combined with our level of consumption, have become totally unsustainable. Not just in the developed world, but basically all across planet Earth. Much, if not all, what follows stems from this root cause.

2. Enter the maximum power principle. In a self-organizing system, such as the natural world, designs that maximize the rate of energy capture and transformation (power) will be selected for — and prevail over — designs that are less efficient. More efficient in this sense means an ability to outproduce and outnumber any rivaling species, leading not only to their extinction, but in many cases to ecological overshoot as well. Thanks to our global civilization, appropriating half of the planet’s habitable land for agricultural use, we have become the most efficient mammals in turning solar power into more bodies. Humans now appropriate 23.8% of the entire planet’s biological productivity — yet we constitute a mere 0.01% of all life on Earth.

3. We live on borrowed time. All this appropriation of Nature was made possible by the use of finite resources, and especially that of crude oil. The use of this vast energy resource has not only enabled food production, fishing or wood harvesting on a hitherto unprecedented rate, but also smoothed out productivity differences between various regions of the world via ship-borne trade. Diesel powered machines have added billions of human worker equivalents to the global workforce, none of which, on the other hand, required farmland to feed and bio-capacity to maintain… Hence the term: phantom carrying capacity; a productivity gain which is not only entirely artificial but also temporary, and thus by definition even more unsustainable than overshoot alone. Technology just keeps pushing out the boundaries, but cannot replace Nature. It can temporarily increase the carrying capacity of the land by feeding more people than ever before, but only at the cost of destroying the living world and thus our future prospects.

4. We are already past peak farmland. Thanks to soil erosion, aquifer depletion, urban sprawl, sea level rise, drought conditions turning permanent, loss of soil life and nutrients — all due to our disastrous civilizational practices — the amount of arable land in the world has reached its peak, then began to decline. And while overall farm productivity seems to be increasing still, it comes at a cost of further destruction… Ever since humans developed agriculture, we’ve been transforming the planet and throwing the soil’s nutrient cycle out of balance. The use of mined potash, phosphorous and diesel fuel has just turbocharged this process, giving us a temporary food surplus before peak soil fertility hits and yields start to decline.

5. Peak fish. Over-fishing, and the increasing demand to feed an ever growing world population, has led to a similar peak and decline in the amount of catch brought to harbors every year. (In case you were wondering why your tuna steak has become so expensive lately, look no further for an answer.) And while fish farming is on the rise, the nutrient pollution released by such enterprises has led to algal blooms — besides making us even more dependent on a range of industries (fish feed manufacturing being chief among them). Again, we are supplementing real carrying capacity with artificial, phantom capacity, making the human enterprise even less sustainable in the long run.

6. Water scarcity — made all the worse by an increasing frequency of droughts, unsustainable practices and urbanization — will result in a 40% shortfall between forecast demand and available supply by 2030. As most water is used by agriculture, industry (mining, textile and paper pulp manufacturing) and energy production, expect increased conflict over who gets to use the last gallon of water in an area. Again, yet another trend made much worse by our over-reliance on technology and ecological overshoot. (And no, water desalination is not a solution either, as it requires even more energy and finite resources, while producing dangerous waste.)

7. Global warming is real, and it will get worse. Burning fossil fuels is just part of the problem. Methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture and mining, or deforestation and ice melt, has all contributed to more and more heat being trapped by the atmosphere. With the phase-out of fossil fuels, perhaps paradoxically, the climate predicament is set to worsen, though. A lot of sunlight is currently reflected back into space by particulate air pollution. Once that goes, temperatures are set to jump, as they did after the lock-downs in 2020 and the banning of bunker fuels in shipping cleaned up the atmosphere somewhat. This sudden temperature rise can tip ice and permafrost melt, or the Amazon rain-forest over their respective thresholds, making change irreversible and forcing warming to continue well into the future. Climate change has a profound effect on biodiversity and crop yields (here and here) as well as causing damages to (and a loss of) infrastructure due to intensified rainstorms, hurricanes, sea level rise, wildfires etc. Changes in weather patterns alone have ended civilizations before, and climate change, even at its current rate, has a pretty good chance against our current society as well. However, the full effect of our experiment with the planetary thermostat will still take decades, centuries, if not a millennia to fully unfold — what we have seen so far was thus just a prelude.

8. Pollution, especially from novel entities. Emissions of toxic compounds such as synthetic organic pollutants and radioactive materials, but also genetically modified organisms, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics are linked to biodiversity loss, endocrine disruption in mammals (leading to a global fertility crisis), insect die-off etc. among many other things. Mitigating these effects and cleaning up what has been already released, however, would cost multiples more than all the profits made by releasing these chemicals into the environment. As long as industrial civilization lasts — with or without fossil fuels — this predicament is set to worsen. As a result of human activities seven out of the nine planetary boundaries have now been breached. This is what ecological overshoot means in practice and how it triggers a range of negative consequences.

Energy Technology

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1. Ours remains a civilization powered entirely by fossil fuels. 85–91% of our primary energy still comes from fossil fuels (depending on how you count it). Electricity, even though it is being “decarbonized” is still amounts to a mere 21% of global energy use, the rest comes directly from fossil fuels. This is especially true for transportation, mining, agriculture and construction, where more than 90% of the energy used comes from oil due to its high energy density, portability and affordability. Since coal and metal ores are mostly transported with oil to power plants and smelters, and mechanized agriculture also runs on liquid fuels, peaking oil supply will become the major limiting factor in everything we do from industry to food production and construction. (Oh, and by the way world natural gas production is also on a high plateau, and expected to decline right after oil begins its long descent.) On such a relentlessly dwindling fossil fuel supply, however, it would be impossible to maintain our current transportation and energy infrastructure, let alone building out (and maintaining) a “new” one.

2. Alternative energy is just a “smarter” way to burn coal oil and gas. All so called “low-carbon” energy harvesting technologies from solar panels to wind turbines, geothermal power plants to nuclear reactors or hydro require metals, concrete, glass, silicon and a range of other non-renewable inputs. These materials, on the other hand, are still mined, delivered, made and built into said technologies with the power of fossil fuels. So while the production of these so called “green” (but in reality completely non-renewable, and in many cases un-recyclable) energy harvesting technologies might continue even after fossil fuel use begins to decline, their maintenance and eventual replacement will become impeded as the availability of carbon rich fuels continues to shrink. Alternative energy is not really an independent alternative, but a complementary system; built on a range of existing technologies and coming at a cost of further ecological destruction (mining).

3. In reality we face a net energy predicament — phasing out fossil fuels is just a convenient story we tell ourselves. As oil and gas wells, just like coal mines, have to go deeper and deeper into ever trickier geological formations, at an increasing distance from civilization, and ultimately at an ever growing energy and raw material cost, the net energy returned to society falls. Below a certain energy (and consequently monetary) return on extracting these resources, however, the global economy simply can no longer afford to consume more, as energy gets cannibalized by energy extraction itself. So called alternative (synthetic and bio-) fuels, however, offer even lower energy returns on investment, besides being entirely dependent on cheap fossil fuels to make. In case of hydrogen, for example, we face a net loss of 66% of the energy invested, while the equipment necessary to generate, store and use H2 is still made entirely with coal, oil and gas. Fusion remains an elusive myth; besides requiring rare elements (such as Niobium to make the superconducting magnets around reactors from) or an ultra-rare hydrogen isotope (tritium) to start the fusion reaction itself. Net energy wise, all of these alternatives offer worse outcomes, and look like a relatively good idea only because fossil fuels have begun losing their edge. However, with an ever worsening return on investment in fossil fuels, the energy return on investment of these “alternatives” will become worse still, as we first have to burn carbon rich fuels to get to these non-alternatives.

4. Mining non-renewable resources is essential to every civilization — ours is no exception. Mines have a certain amount of metals that can be “produced” economically; net returns are just as important and just as limited by returns on energy invested as with fossil fuels. As the highest grade, closest to surface ores (having a higher rock to metal ratio and relatively little overburden) get consumed, the mining industry has to dig deeper and bring up lower and lower grade stuff requiring much more energy to shovel and process. This infers that the extraction of both fossil fuels and minerals are set to peak as the easiest to get (high return on investment) part is gone, then decline below a level where maintaining our current infrastructure, agricultural productivity or industrial activities eventually become impossible. (Due to the huge amount of energy needed, colonizing other planets or mining in space won’t save us either.) Relying on non-renewable, rapidly depleting resources for our technology is what makes our civilization utterly unsustainable. This is why all prior gains in our capacity to feed 8 billion humans, or our tendency to live in cities are both temporary and wholly incompatible with planetary limits. And if a net energy predicament, and the utter reliance of “renewables” on fossil fuels were not enough, we simply do not have the necessary amount of materials to build out even a first iteration of an electrified future — let alone subsequent replacements to all the equipment lost to entropy. Eventually every civilization used up all of its cheap, easy to extract resources available to them, then perished. And while some natural resources replenished over time, allowing successive waves of civilizations, much of these resources ended up permanently destroyed or depleted. Hence, once this industrial saga is over, there will be no more cheap coal, cheap oil or cheap metals to start another high-tech civilization with.

Human Systems

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1. We have already hit diminishing returns to increases in complexity. We respond to challenges by increasing complexity, but it takes more and more energy to uphold our ever more elaborate systems. It also involves creating an increasing number of social roles, specialty areas, expert functions and the like; expanding the portion of people working in overhead, administrative or non-productive roles. Adding more members to an already huge organization, introducing more laws, regulations and norms ceases to be effective beyond a certain point, though. Worse still, as organizations, the number of specialties, technical constructs etc. grow ever more complex with time, they risk eventually becoming gridlocked or plain ineffective. Think large multinational corporations or supranational organizations, such as the IPCC or the EU and NATO, which continue to suck in huge amounts of resources — while raising complexity to a point where solving practical real world problems (let alone disputes with outside parties) slowly becomes unworkable. In the end, they end up doing nothing but a perpetuation of the problem they were created to “solve”, besides producing meaningless communiques no one’s happy about.

2. Human ingenuity is nowhere near infinite — patents and science, too, have reached diminishing returns. Simply put, more and more scientists and engineers are needed to produce smaller and smaller increments. The reason is simple enough, but often debated: physical limits do apply to both our technology and our brain capacity. As a result each technological and scientific advancement requires greater and greater material and energy investment as we approach those limits — which is at odds with our net energy predicament. Once these two conflicting trends — the exponentially rising energy cost of achieving the next increment in scientific/technological progress on one hand, and the falling net energy available to fund such activities on the other — collide, progress can be expected to halt abruptly.

3. Jevons paradox explains why improving energy efficiency just keeps worsening our predicament. As a technology (say, an aircraft engine) becomes more energy efficient, and thus cheaper to operate, more and more people — who previously could not afford it — will end up using it. Through this increased overall use of said technology, however, society as a whole ends up consuming more energy at the end of the day, not less. (Similarly, should the 1% give up their consumption, the remaining 99% would happily jump on the bandwagon and use up all the newly freed up resources.) Jevons paradox is the technological equivalent of the maximum power principle, where “designs that maximize the rate of energy capture and transformation (power) will be selected for — and prevail over — designs that are less efficient.” This, however, only guarantees that eventually all available energy and resources will be used up: the only real limit to human endeavors will be resource and energy depletion.

4. Artificial Intelligence, should in fact be called artificial information. Let’s be clear, while Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might arrive sometime in the future, AI’s current iterations (running on large language models) are already close to their limits, and quite possibly beyond the point of diminishing returns. So, while there are many claims that AI will take our jobs / solve planetary problems / take over the world (pick your favorite), none of these scenarios seem to be plausible in the near future. And how could we reach and build AGI anyway, let alone achieve any of those goals, on a falling resource and energy base in a failing economic system? AI can’t and thus won’t change these trends: the energy / resources saved or accessed through the use of artificial “intelligence” is already far surpassed by the amount of energy and raw materials needed to build and operate these systems. And should these machines somehow provide a net benefit, we humans would use up those resources made available in no time. So unless AI is somehow granted the power to launch all nukes, it won’t achieve anything ascribed to it.

5. Fragility and tight coupling. As transactions become ever more efficient and faster and as our technology becomes ever more complex and interconnected, a small failure can ripple through a system and snowball into a disaster faster than a blink of an eye. As the case with the Spanish grid collapse (bringing down Portugal as well) has amply demonstrated, our tightly coupled systems have become more fragile than ever. And what’s our answer to that? You bet, doubling down by digitizing and centralizing even more services while propping up this increasingly fragile system by burning even more fossil fuels.

6. Technological systems all suffer from lock-in. Our technologies have co-evolved with one another. These technologies form a complex web, a suite of technologies, which is very hard to change as it follows its own logic. Think about your car: it requires wheels made of rubber, an engine, a chassis, an asphalt road to run on, gas stations, oil wells, refineries etc. Despite their planned obsolescence each link in this chain lives for decades. Since it takes many generations of products to get rid of an old design, and massive incentives are needed to facilitate a switch to a new one, it would take many decades to replace an old infrastructure with something else. A time frame we simply don’t have.

7. Failing infrastructure. An exponential boom in infrastructure building (roads, bridges, dams, transmission lines, pipelines etc.) in the 20th century has brought about a similarly exponential increase in maintenance / replacement budgetary needs in the 21st. What we have built 50–75 years ago have all started to reach the end of its life. Almost all at once. Combined with disasters caused by climate change and war, we are facing an ever steeper increase in infrastructure repair costs in the decades ahead, placing an even higher demand on our dwindling resource base, while providing no added benefit and creating no new added value to society. Damage and deferred maintenance accumulates over time, though, eventually leading to a permanent loss of infrastructure (bridges and roads, power plants, sewage treatment facilities etc.).

8. There is no such thing as steady-state economics, at least not at this level of consumption. Civilizations are growth machines: they need to expand into new territories, occupying other lands for their cheap resources. Once growth stops, however, maintenance costs quickly overwhelm dwindling incomes and the system topples over. In a globalized economy on a finite planet reaching this point was only a question of when, not if. As you have seen from the above, even maintaining our current level of consumption, state of infrastructure, or manufacturing and food output would require a relentless growth in energy and material supply... Even as energy and mineral extraction itself becomes more and more material intensive every year with the depletion of the easy to get portion of these resources. Make no mistake, we will eventually reach a ‘steady state’, if we don’t, we will go extinct. And while industrial civilization could never reach such status, using permaculture practices, living in earth berm homes made from locally available, truly renewable materials, like wood, stones, clay, hemp etc. we could build a civilization lasting many millennia, albeit on a rather primitive technological level compared to today’s standards.

9. The financial system risks tipping us into abrupt decline. 80% of our money is literally lent into existence by commercial banks, creating claims on future economic growth which might never materialize. Such a banking system geared towards infinite growth and the expectation that compounding interest can always be paid, however, is by definition unsustainable. You see, monetary claims are just numbers on a clay tablet / paper / computer screen, and thus face no practical limitations — unlike the real economy built on a limited bio-capacity and a set of finite resources. Whether this current experiment with a fiat money system will end in hyperinflation, bail-ins, bail-outs or asset price collapse and a general deflationary crisis is anyone’s guess at this point. History provides us with examples for all of these scenarios.

10. Humanity is not a static collection of individuals but a constantly evolving complex adaptive system. Fate, as C. Wright Mills observed, is “the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.” It’s thus more accurate to describe our collective as a giant superorganism, churning up the planet one bite, one car, one washing machine at the time, than a group of rational actors planning ahead. There is no one in power to decide which direction humanity as a whole takes. No one is to blame, no one is to be held accountable. We are all in this together.

Politics and Power Dynamics

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1. Resource, energy and technology blindness. Perhaps it’s not an exaggeration to say that our elites no longer have the faintest idea how things work. None of the heads of state or CEO’s of large corporations could explain how ecology, energy, technology and human systems interact. Not that any of them would be allowed anywhere near the levers of power should they have a clue how unsustainable everything we do is. This is not a recent phenomena, either. Unsustainable behavior always trumped sustainability. So guess what happens if you have 10 sustainable cultures on a continent, then suddenly an unsustainable one appears among them? Which one survives…? Well, none of them. The later, in its frenzy for resources, kills or outcompetes all other cultures then drives itself extinct. It doesn’t matter if this culture happens to be a bacteria, an invasive species or white colonists on Turtle Island.

2. Short-termism. Giving priority to immediate profit or reward, quickly executed projects and short-term results prevents any state or corporate level long term adaptions to the coming decline in resource and energy availability to be made. Short-termism is one of the key drivers of the economic superorganism described above. This, however, can only result in rushed decisions, panic and maladaptive behavior once the crisis hits, leading to a rapid reset (bankruptcy). Till that happens the ruling elites across the world will continue to paper over the end of material growth with deficit spending, and going ever deeper into debt. ‘What could possibly go wrong with that?’

3. Growing inequality. A debt based money system, combined with an unequal distribution of opportunity, virtually guarantees an exponential growth in social inequality. In this system the wealthy get wealthier simply by owning assets and seeking rents, effectively operating a ‘wealth pump’, at the expense of the less fortunate. (Contrary to what ‘trickle-down-economics’ used to teach us, wealth and power can only migrate upwards.) This naturally results in the rise of a billionaire class (called oligarchs or plutocrats elsewhere), and eventually leads to democracy and capitalism self-terminating themselves. As the middle class disappears, consumption declines and people end up spending all of their income on food, medicine, energy and housing, the service and manufacturing sector start to decline as well — leaving nothing but a few monopolies behind. And as wealth gets increasingly translated into political power (hello, donations) this leaves little to no option for counter-elites (still produced in vast quantities) than to attempt a constitutional coup. What usually follows is an increase in political violence, rebellion, or civil war, customarily ending in tyranny, then finally: dissolution or subjugation to rising powers. History books are chuck full of examples — but did we learned anything from those? (Rhetorical question.) Again, growing inequality is yet another sure killer which has caused the fall of many civilizations almost single-handedly before.

4. Migration. While news cycles are still dominated with stories about international migration, we are still at levels considered normal throughout history (when viewed as a percentage of global population on the move). The true crisis will come from internal migration: people displaced by war, floods, drought, wildfires, infrastructure failure etc. putting an immense pressure on still viable communities and regions. Beyond a certain threshold migration has the potential to spill over to neighboring countries, creating a humanitarian crisis there as well. Sudden inflows of people were already a leading cause behind the fall of many civilizations in the past, it won’t be different this time either.

5. Declining social cohesion and failed states are a direct consequence of the trends discussed above, as the peoples of all nations eventually lose faith in a common goal and a uniting power. Societies can first be expected to fracture into ever smaller factions, gradually becoming incapable to cooperate in any matter. This is where we are at the moment. As pressures grow on the political system, however, states will become harder and harder to govern, as every faction will have an opposing idea what to do… Some states have already buckled under this pressure, sinking into a permanent state of civil war, chaos and thus becoming failed states. There is really no reason to expect that it would happen otherwise with large countries once material and energy decline really kicks in. Once it becomes clear that nothing can be done to save their country, people will have to start coping with the situation based on a practical approach. Communities will increasingly have to self-organize, focusing on solving everyday matters, such as securing food and water supply, adapting to a drastically lower energy and transport availability, and localizing as many activities as possible.

6. It gets harder to tell what’s true — the effects of propaganda and ‘truth decay’. In order to preserve their failing status quo and power, elites often resort to state propaganda, the suppression of dissent, narrative management and curtailing free speech via direct government agency interventions. The process eventually reaches a point when even the intelligence agencies, responsible to provide truthful data to the ruling elite, begin to filter and distort information presented to their higher ups in order to support their beliefs and the desired outcome. Group think emerges as a result, as the leadership class drifts further and further away from reality.

7. Global conflict: the current world order, marked by five hundred years of Western hegemony, is unquestionably coming to an end. This is nothing new, however. Empires grew, prospered and fell many times before, as global power tends to shift with changes in who controls energy flows, industrial and agricultural output. Since these shifts are already well underway, and the tipping point has been already passed, the rise of new power centers cannot be stopped with rhetoric, threats, or tariffs. As this gets clearer by the day, so will our clueless elites become ever more desperate, and this is what makes the times we live in especially dangerous. (Needless to say nuclear war could upend everything in a matter of hours.) Caveat: new power structures on the rise will not have another 500 years to reign, as ecological overshoot, resource depletion and the net energy predicament will equally affect every last one of the nations surviving the coming shift.

Individual Level

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1. Our inability to comprehend exponential growth. Humanity has experienced the greatest growth in its history in economic output, population, GDP growth, consumption etc. in a single human lifetime (from the 1950s to the present day). This synchronous acceleration of trends is known as The Great Acceleration for a reason, yet most of us think it is normal. Exponential growth (the doubling of any variable over and over again), however, is anything but. Even single digit growth (expressed in percentages) leads to a runaway trend: be it interest rates, or pollution. And since we are talking mathematics, there is no upper limit, unless you find yourself bumping into planetary boundaries. So what seemed to be impossible to reach 75 years ago, is just a few years away — or in many cases — is already in the past. Simply put, there won’t be another doubling.

2. Being hyper-focused on lived (recent, personal) experience and failing to grasp complexity, many upper class citizens still believe that life and technology can only get better. And while there may be temporal setbacks, such as an economic downturn, a loss of a job etc. there is a strong sense among them that human progress cannot be stopped. Sure, humans were not evolved to understand planetary scale phenomena (hyperobjects) but to deal with local issues and minor conflicts within our immediate neighborhood. As you have seen from the list above, however, we cannot exclude ourselves from global trends; eventually they will come back to haunt each and every one of us. Our lives are just a tiny subset of a much bigger whole. Our political system and nations are embedded into a global economic system, which in turn is rooted in a global structure of energy and raw material extraction and distribution. Our technosphere (the human extractive system) is also part of and draws upon a bigger whole: the living world. In fact, it is eating it from within and tries to replace it with its own copies. That, however, is a fools errand as this ultimately leads to the destruction of the very foundations our civilization was built upon.

3. Everybody believes what they want (conditioned) to believe. From an early age we are all subject to cultural indoctrination, about what’s important, what to expect from the future, what to believe in. This gives us our sense of belonging and urges us to seek information confirming our deeply held beliefs (even though they are not even our own). Too bad that we have been conditioned to believe in a future which is at odds with our bio-physical reality. So when we are faced with all this information, we experience severe cognitive dissonance and grief as (almost) everything we hold dear gets called into question. For most, the discrepancy between the reality of overshoot, resource depletion, climate change and species extinction is too big to bear: hence denial and a retreat into magical thinking. (And I haven’t even mentioned the plethora of cognitive biases, or mental shortcuts, distorting our thinking in so many ways.) ‘Someone somewhere is surely working on a solution’, has become a mantra for many — which is kinda sad, as the quandary we are in is not a problem with a solution, but a predicament with an outcome.

4. Ultimately, a fall for demagogues, seeking authority and herd mentality is what remains for those, who cannot cope with reality. Naively believing that a self-proclaimed strong leader, an economic policy, technology or war can bring back the good times misses the forest for the trees. No technology, no good (or bad) leader can print cheap resources or restore energy returns on investment to its previous levels, nor reduce overshoot. All they can do is to protect the interests of their donors and supporters: an ever shrinking group of individuals at the expense of the many. Not realizing that we are all in this together, however, can only make matters worse. Remember, there is no way around this bottleneck, only through.

Hey, but it’s different this time!!! No, it’s not. Overshoot is overshoot. Once your civilization starts to consume more than what can be naturally regenerated, in its folly to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet, collapse is only a matter of time. The crumbling of this civilization won’t happen overnight though: it will take decades, if not half-a-century to fully run its course. And by fully I mean a complete breakdown of all current political, economic, and social structures; resulting in a loss of cultural identity and complexity, and leading to a simplified or fragmented state with a much reduced technological and industrial base.

The process starts slowly with stagnation and a series of smaller crisis, leading to an eventual acceleration of events, as growth tips over into decline and as multiple crises converge, overwhelming both economic and governance structures. This is where we are at the moment: on the precipice. Then, as the consumption of resources subsides below a level which can be supported by a shrinking supply of raw materials and energy, a stabilization of sorts follows. That quasi equilibrium, however, will end in a matter of years (or decades at best) as the continued decline of resource extraction and food production forces the arrival of another major downturn. Rinse and repeat, till we finally end up in a much smaller human world, finally fitting into the ecosystem around it.

Epilogue

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Knowing what I know today, I became comfortable with the idea of collapse. I’ve also made peace with the fact, that the main issue of overshoot won’t be, and honestly cannot be addressed. There is no one to blame, and nothing to do to save civilization. No leader, be it a dictator or an elected official can turn this around. This is a systemic issue and comes from the very nature of how complex systems form around energy — only to dissipate it all, then disappear into the mist.

Knowing how much of Earth we have consumed in the past two hundred years, how far we have depleted every resource from forests to fisheries or from coal to sand during our rapacious growth period, it is not hard to understand why we got here. Ever since the rise of our first civilizations, societies always struggled with overshooting “their” land’s carrying capacity and depleting “their” resources. It’s really not a tad bit different this time, either. Humanity’s long history, spanning hundreds of thousands of years, has been all leading up to this point in an immensely complex chain of causes and effects. The rise and fall of this fossil fuel based civilization, for me at least, seems just as inevitable in hindsight as the formation of stars and galaxies. The energy and resources were there, and since we were already struggling with overshoot, we’ve started to use them up. The rest is history.

Such is life. Birth, growth, maturing then growing old. The same cycle repeats itself at all scales: from bacteria, to human societies, solar systems and galaxies. This is the world we live in. Be grateful, Dear Reader, for you have seen the peak of human civilization. You have made it! It’s time to make peace with the fact that this way of life now has to end, and to prepare for the bumpy ride ahead. And despite all the hardship and challenges, always keep in mind that the best things in life — friendship, love, a good laughter — will always be free.

May you and those who you care about the most succeed in their journey.

Until next time,

B

Thank you for reading The Honest Sorcerer. If you value this article or any others please share and consider a subscription, or perhaps buying a virtual coffee. At the same time allow me to express my eternal gratitude to those who already support my work — without you this site could not exist.

Book Recommendations:

Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter

Limits to Growth — the original study and the latest update

Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals by Walter Lewellyn Youngquist — there is also a free audio recording by the late Michael Dowd

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William R. Catton Jr. — here is a link to a free audio recording, read by the late Michael Dowd

Blogs and further resources (in no particular order):

Post Doom — Michael Dowd

Do the Math — Tom Murphy

Problems, Predicaments, and Technology — Erik Michaels

How to save the world — Dave Pollard

Ecosophia — John Michael Greer

Low Tech Magazine

The Consciousness of Sheep — Tim Watkins

Our Finite World — Gail Tverberg

Energy Skeptic — Alice Friedemann

Surplus Energy Economics — Tim Morgan

Peak Oil Barrel

Steve Bull (https://olduvai.ca)

Art Berman

Of Two Minds — Charles Hugh Smith

Resource Insights — Kurt Cobb