Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is disrupting supply chains just as previously suppressed government reports warn that ecological breakdown and resource depletion are converging into systemic collapse. This may be a preview of what lies ahead if we don’t confront this reality.
As civilizational systems buckle under ecological and social strain, this chapter of Seeds Volume 2 argues we must stop chasing solutions and instead dismantle the toxic logics of hierarchy and supremacism to rebuild regenerative, collapse-resilient cultures.
In the concluding installment of this discussion series, Tom Murphy and Dave Murphy wrestle with whether a just energy transition can truly be sustainable, or whether modernity itself is a dead end on a finite planet.
A new volume in the r3.0 “Seeds Series” brings together thinkers, activists and systems scholars exploring how societies might move through ecological and institutional breakdown toward more regenerative, place-based and cooperative forms of life.
History offers a grim account of how structural change occurs. But concealed within that bleakness is a window of possibility that opens just when things fall apart.
When have we ever truly steered our path as a species? Are we actually in control at all?
My conclusion, after years of studying environmental research literature, is that some form of societal collapse is indeed highly probable this century, depending on how we define “collapse.” … Collapse needn’t imply that nearly everybody dies at once, or that the survivors become wandering cannibals. Rather, it means our current institutions will fail to one degree or another and we will have to find alternative ways to meet basic human needs—ways that are slower, smaller in scale, and more local.
What we are witnessing as a result of this pandemic is a widespread challenge to metastable systems upon which our societies depend. The most obvious are those related to hospitals and health care products. We often read in the news that hospitals are near “the breaking point” as if the hospital walls will burst when too many patients crowd into the building.
From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse.
A new paper by a long-time sustainability academic and consultant says that minor tweaks in our current system won’t help us. We are likely headed for societal collapse and need a radical new way of thinking about the future. The first necessary casualty is hope–hope that we can keep things largely the way they are.
Our actions have planet-wide consequences that we don’t fully understand.
So those who claim that Malthusian limits don’t apply to humans are effectively assigning our species the status of permanent evolutionary winners.
