Collapsology

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The term collapsology is a neologism used to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization.[1] It is concerned with the general collapse of societies induced by climate change, as well as "scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters."[2] Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.

Background

The word collapsology has been coined and publicized by Pablo Servigne [fr] and Raphaël Stevens in their essay: Comment tout peut s’effondrer. Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes[3] (How everything can collapse: A manual for our times),[4] published in 2015 in France.[5] It also developed into a movement when Jared Diamond's text Collapse was published.[2] Use of the term has spread, especially by journalists reporting on the deep adaptation writings by Jem Bendell.[6][7]

Collapsology is based on the idea that humans impact their environment in a sustained and negative way, and promotes the concept of an environmental emergency, linked in particular to global warming and the biodiversity loss. Collapsologists believe, however, that the collapse of industrial civilization could be the result of a combination of different crises: environmental, but also economic, geopolitical, democratic, and others.[8]

Collapsology is a transdisciplinary exercise involving ecology, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, biophysics, biogeography, agriculture, demography, politics, geopolitics, bioarchaeology, history, futurology, health, law and art.[4]

Etymology

The word collapsology is a neologism invented "with a certain self-mockery" by Pablo Servigne, an agricultural engineer, and Raphaël Stevens, an expert in the resilience of socio-ecological systems. It appears in their book published in 2015.[9]

It is a portmanteau derived from the Latin collapsus, 'to fall, to collapse' and from the suffix -logy, logos, 'study', which is intended to name an approach of scientific nature.[10]

Since 2015 and the publication of How everything can collapse in French, several words have been proposed to describe the various approaches dealing with the issue of collapse: collapso-sophy to designate the philosophical approach, collapso-praxis to designate the ideology inspired by this study, and collapsonauts to designate people living with this idea in mind.[11][12]

Religious foundations

Unlike traditional eschatological thinking, collapsology is based on data and concepts from contemporary scientific research, primarily human understanding of climate change as caused by human economic and geopolitical systems. It is not in line with the idea of a cosmic, apocalyptic "end of the world", but makes the hypothesis of the end of the human current world, the "thermo-industrial civilization".

This distinction is further stressed by historian Eric H. Cline by pointing out that while the whole world has obviously not ended, civilizations have collapsed over the course of history which makes the statement that "prophets have always predicted doom and been wrong" inapplicable to societal collapse.[13]

Scientific basis

As early as 1972, The Limits to Growth,[14] a report produced by MIT researchers, warned of the risks of exponential demographic and economic growth on a planet with limited resources.

As a systemic approach, collapsology is based on prospective studies such as The Limits of Growth, but also on the state of global and regional trends in the environmental, social and economic fields (such as the IPCC, IPBES or Global Environment Outlook (GE) reports periodically published by the Early Warning and Assessment Division of the UNEP, etc.) and numerous scientific works[3] as well as various studies, such as "A safe operating space for humanity";[15] "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere",[16] published in Nature in 2009 and 2012, "The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration",[17] published in 2015 in The Anthropocene Review, and "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene",[18] published in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. There is evidence to support the importance of collective processing of the emotional aspects of contemplating societal collapse, and the inherent adaptiveness of these emotional experiences.[19]

History

Precursors

Even if this neologism only appeared in 2015 and concerns the study of the collapse of industrial civilization, the study of the collapse of societies is older and is probably a concern of every civilization. Among the works on this theme (in a broad sense) one can mention[citation needed] those of Berossus (278 B.C.), Pliny the Younger (79 AD), Ibn Khaldun (1375), Montesquieu (1734), Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), Edward Gibbon (1776), Georges Cuvier, (1821), Élisée Reclus (1905), Oswald Spengler (1918), Arnold Toynbee (1939), Günther Anders (1956), Samuel Noah Kramer (1956), Leopold Kohr (1957), Rachel Carson (1962), Paul Ehrlich (1969), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows & Jørgen Randers (1972), René Dumont (1973), Hans Jonas (1979), Joseph Tainter (1988), Al Gore (1992), Hubert Reeves (2003), Richard Posner (2004), Jared Diamond (2005), Niall Ferguson (2013).

Arnold J. Toynbee

In his monumental (initially published in twelve volumes) and highly controversial work of contemporary historiography entitled A Study of History (1972), Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) deals with the genesis of civilizations (chapter 2), their growth (chapter 3), their decline (chapter 4), and their disintegration (chapter 5). According to him, the mortality of civilizations is trivial evidence for the historian, as is the fact that they follow one another over a long period of time.

Joseph Tainter

In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter (born 1949) studies the collapse of various civilizations, including that of the Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory. For Tainter, an increasingly complex society eventually collapses because of the ever-increasing difficulty in solving its problems.

Jared Diamond

The American geographer, evolutionary biologist and physiologist Jared Diamond (born 1937) already evoked the theme of civilizational collapse in his book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005. By relying on historical cases, notably the Rapa Nui civilization, the Vikings and the Maya civilization, Diamond argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, many of the same issues as these civilizations did, with possibly catastrophic near-future consequences to many of the world's populations. This book has had a resonance beyond the United States, despite some criticism.[20] Proponents of catastrophism who identify themselves as "enlightened catastrophists" draw from Diamond's work, helping build the expansion of the relational ecology network, whose members believe that man is heading toward disaster.[1] Diamond's Collapse approached civilizational collapse from archaeological, ecological, and biogeographical perspectives on ancient civilizations.[4]

Modern collapsologists

Since the invention of the term collapsology, many French personalities gravitate in or around the collapsologists' sphere. Not all have the same vision of civilizational collapse, some even reject the term "collapsologist", but all agree that contemporary industrial civilization, and the biosphere as a whole, are on the verge of a global crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to them, the process is already under way, and it is now only possible to try to reduce its devastating effects in the near future. The leaders of the movement are Yves Cochet and Agnès Sinaï of the Momentum Institute (a think tank exploring the causes of environmental and societal risks of collapse of the thermo-industrial civilization and possible actions to adapt to it), and Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens who wrote the essay How everything can collapse: A manual for our times.[4]

Beyond the French collapsologists mentioned above, one can mention: Aurélien Barrau (astrophysicist), Philippe Bihouix (engineer, low-tech developer), Dominique Bourg (philosopher), Valérie Cabanes (lawyer, seeking recognition of the crime of ecocide by the international criminal court), Jean-Marc Jancovici (energy-climate specialist), and Paul Jorion (anthropologist, sociologist).

In 2020 the French humanities and social science website Cairn.info published a dossier on collapsology titled The Age of Catastrophe, with contributions from historian François Hartog, economist Emmanuel Hache, philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, art historian Romain Noël, geoscientist Gabriele Salerno, and American philosopher Eugene Thacker.[21]

Even if the term remains rather unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, many publications deal with the same topic (for example the 2017 David Wallace-Wells article "The Uninhabitable Earth" and 2019 bestselling book of the same name, probably a mass-market collapsology work without using the term).[5] It is now gradually spreading on general[22] and scientific[23] English speaking social networks. In his book Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Ted Kaczynski also warned of the threat of catastrophic societal collapse.[24][25][26]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Bold, Rosalyn (2019). Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 163. ISBN 978-3-030-13859-2.
  2. ^ a b Daoudy, Marwa (2020). The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-1-108-47608-9.
  3. ^ a b Servigne, Pablo; Stevens, Raphaël (2015). Comment tout peut s'effondrer : petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (in French). Ed. du Seuil [fr]. p. 253. ISBN 9782021223316. OCLC 908244398.
  4. ^ a b c d Servigne, Pablo; Stevens, Raphaël (2020). How Everything Can Collapse. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9781509541393.
  5. ^ a b Stetler, Harrison (2020-01-21). "'Collapsologie': Constructing an Idea of How Things Fall Apart". The New York Review of Books. New York City: Rea S. Hederman. Archived from the original on 2020-03-05. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  6. ^ Jones, Lucy (25 April 2023). "Adapt or die: Jem Bendell's radical vision to survive the climate crisis". GQ. Archived from the original on 14 September 2023. Retrieved 14 September 2023.
  7. ^ Doig, Tom (9 November 2023). "If the world's systems are already cracking due to climate change, is there a post-doom silver lining?". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 12 November 2023. Retrieved 12 November 2023.
  8. ^ "Collapsologie". Futura (in French). Archived from the original on 2020-03-08. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  9. ^ Faure, Sonya (11 June 2015). "Collapsologie [nom]: du latin, collapsus, " tombé d'un seul bloc "". Libération (in French). Archived from the original on 7 May 2016. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
  10. ^ Garric, Audrey; Bouanchaud, Cécile (5 February 2019). "Le succès inattendu des théories de l'effondrement". Le Monde (in French). Archived from the original on 8 June 2020. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
  11. ^ Servigne, Pablo (February 2021). Another end of the world is possible : living the collapse (and not merely surviving it). Stevens, Raphaël, Chapelle, Gauthier, Samuel, Geoffrey. Medford. ISBN 978-1-5095-4465-3. OCLC 1152054578. Archived from the original on 2020-06-25. Retrieved 2020-06-24.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  12. ^ Citton, Yves (2020). Générations collapsonautes : naviguer par temps d'effondrements. Rasmi, Jacopo. Paris. ISBN 978-2-02-144740-8. OCLC 1150810193. Archived from the original on 2020-06-25. Retrieved 2020-06-24.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  13. ^ Eric H. Cline (2014). "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed"
  14. ^ Meadows, Donella H; Meadows, Dennis L; Randers, Jørgen; Behrens III, William W (1972). The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. ISBN 0876631650. Archived from the original on 2020-10-25. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  15. ^ Rockström, Johan; Steffen, Will; Noone, Kevin; Persson, Åsa (2009-09-23). "A safe operating space for humanity". Nature. 461 (7263): 472–475. Bibcode:2009Natur.461..472R. doi:10.1038/461472a. PMID 19779433.
  16. ^ Barnosky, Anthony D.; Hadly, Elizabeth A.; Bascompte, Jordi; Berlow, Eric L. (2012-06-06). "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere". Nature. 486 (7401): 52–58. Bibcode:2012Natur.486...52B. doi:10.1038/nature11018. hdl:10261/55208. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 22678279. S2CID 4788164. Archived from the original on 2020-03-19. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  17. ^ Steffen, Will; Broadgate, Wendy; Deutsch, Lisa; Gaffney, Owen; Ludwig, Cornelia (2015-01-16). "The trajectory of the Anthropocene : The Great Acceleration". The Anthropocene Review. 2 (1): 81–98. doi:10.1177/2053019614564785. hdl:1885/66463. S2CID 131524600. Archived from the original on 2020-06-10. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  18. ^ Steffen, Will; Rockström, Johan; Richardson, Katherine; Lenton, Timothy M. (2018-08-14). "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115 (33): 8252–8259. Bibcode:2018PNAS..115.8252S. doi:10.1073/pnas.1810141115. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6099852. PMID 30082409.
  19. ^ Kieft, J.; Bendell, J (2021). "The responsibility of communicating difficult truths about climate influenced societal disruption and collapse: an introduction to psychological research". Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) Occasional Papers. 7: 1–39. Archived from the original on 2021-03-10. Retrieved 2021-04-03.
  20. ^ Diamond, Jarde (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (PDF). Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-01-14. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  21. ^ The Age of Catastrophe Archived 2021-02-02 at the Wayback Machine, Cairn.info (International Edition), Vol. 4, Issue 9, October 2020.
  22. ^ "French collapsology – "If you didn't know this, in recent years France has seen a big societal movement around the idea that we are approaching a collapse."". reddit.com. 2019-04-22. Archived from the original on 2023-06-08. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  23. ^ "Collapsology! Have you heard about?". researchgate.net. 2019-07-07. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  24. ^ Kaczynski, Theodore (2020). Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (expanded 2nd ed.). Fitch & Madison Publishers. ISBN 978-1-9442-2802-6. Archived from the original on 2020-04-23. Retrieved 2021-12-21..
  25. ^ Fleming, Sean (2021-05-07). "The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism". Journal of Political Ideologies. 27 (2). Informa UK Limited: 207–225. doi:10.1080/13569317.2021.1921940. ISSN 1356-9317. S2CID 236599877.
  26. ^ Li, Ivy (2016-11-10). "A neo-Luddite manifesto?". The Tech. Archived from the original on 2021-12-20. Retrieved 2021-12-20.
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