Are We In the First Stages of Civilization's Collapse?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I am pessimistic about the future of our technological civilization. (See my We're Toast topic for reasons).  

There is a pattern to the collapse of civilizations, even successful ones, as described by Jared Diamond in his seminal book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  In this article by Michael Klare, he looks at the state of our civilization in the light of Diamond's framework. We are not looking good.

The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.

These historical examples of social disintegration spurred lively discussion among my students when, as a professor at Hampshire College, I regularly assigned Collapse as a required text. Even then, a decade ago, many of them suggested that we were beginning to face severe climate challenges akin to those encountered by earlier societies — and that our contemporary civilization also risked collapse if we failed to take adequate measures to slow global warming and adapt to its inescapable consequences.

But in those discussions (which continued until I retired from teaching in 2018), our analyses seemed entirely theoretical: Yes, contemporary civilization might collapse, but if so, not any time soon. Five years later, it’s increasingly difficult to support such a relatively optimistic outlook. Not only does the collapse of modern industrial civilization appear ever more likely, but the process already seems underway.

I'm afraid that I have to agree with him.