Recommended Resources re Collapse Awareness

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Collapse refers to the collapse of modern industrial civilisation, brought on by our unsustainable situation of Overshoot, a combination of overpopulation and overconsumption on a planet that can’t sustain us all in the manner we have grown accustomed to.

Converging crises are coming to a head in a polycrisis, and undeniable ecological limits, damages and resource depletions have already sealed our ultimate fate. Our capitalistic societies and basic, flawed human psychology have led us into a trap we can’t and won’t escape from. All civilisations eventually collapse, and ours is no exception.

There’s a lot of denial and sheer unawareness of how bad things are, and the road to educating oneself is neither short nor pleasant. If you don’t want to engage with the topic, know that you are entirely normal and in the vast majority.

The sensible response to a lousy predicament is damage control. It begins with becoming aware of how bad the situation is, and this is what I’m trying to do with my blog. Whether you want to engage with the reality of the situation or not is a very personal matter. I wish you the best either way.

Collapse Awareness comes from studying (and respecting) facts and applying an understanding of many fields, including psychology. There's no ideology about it; no one is “pushing an agenda”. Just like nobody on Earth wants climate change (not even Big Oil), no one wants Collapse, either. We're all devastated about it. And no, most of us are not “doomers”: people who embrace the worst possible outcome as guaranteed, which is a way to cling to sanity by removing uncertainty. We're simply realists incapable of denial and who cannot look away.

I recommend studying from a neutral perspective; try Wikipedia. While you do, try this experiment: assume scientists are honest, literal and correct, so when they say things like "we need to prevent AMOC collapse at any cost" because "if it happens, we will all die", that is, to the best of our knowledge, accurate.

Unlike so many others, scientists are not trying to manipulate you. If anything, one of their main faults is not using dramatic enough language to convey their findings, a side effect stemming from living in a community that adopts rigorous evidence-based approaches with high standards for confidence intervals and ruthless peer reviews.

Studying behavioural science will reveal a lot about our predicament, too. It can be quite fun! My favourite Haidt book is The Righteous Mind, which is about why everyone (else) is crazy. In it, he studies things like morally outrageous victimless crimes (somehow not an oxymoron) that serve to illustrate our irrationality. He goes on to more important stuff, such as why the right has an in-built advantage in politics. Many people find our cognitive malfunctions quite fascinating and spend their entire lives studying them.

When looking at the evidence and not attempting to use it to plan for the future (i.e. applying one’s intelligence), one doesn't have to understand WHY things happen, only ascertain that they do. Include evidence of human behaviour, and remember that the best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour (especially on large scales such as civilisations). For example, we knew we needed to change course fifty years ago, and we didn’t. We know we must halve emissions by 2030 to avoid total disaster; we are accelerating them. We know we must eradicate them by 2050; we won’t — for all kinds of reasons.

During the massive COVID-19 lockdowns, we dipped a paltry 4.6% by “shutting down” as much as we could, only to rebound as much as we possibly could ASAP. It’s a mouthpiece problem, not a tailgate problem. The Western industrialised world needs to cut emissions and energy use by 80%; this means living like the Amish and being happy to have a refrigerator and nothing more. It ain’t happening, and you know it.

There are reasons politicians, the fossil fuel industry and well-meaning sustainability advocates try to sell you the narrative, but if you think it’s going to happen, you are either ignorant or naive. No offence intended; I was myself until fairly recently.

Sorry, that’s me going on off a tangent again.

I am assuming that you consider yourself able to change your mind when presented with contradicting evidence. You may be unaware of how difficult that is for most of us; indeed, I consider our cognitive biases a cornerstone of our predicament, as they are literally hardwired into us. But I presume you at least adhere to that philosophy. I mean, it would be odd to openly admit one does not change one's mind when presented with evidence, would it not?

There's an ocean of stuff to look into, and it's very easy to get lost following various fascinating/horrifying aspects of it. We all have different dispositions and situations, and what resonates with you will be unique to you. These are merely some of the ones that had a big effect on me; YMMV.

I'm going to include an Insanity Warning: if you are already suffering from anxiety or depression, stay the hell clear of this subject. It'll only make you worse, and you're no good to yourself or anyone else in an even worse state. Get better (disconnect!), and maybe one day down the line, you can look into it from a more robust standpoint. There's a reason r/CollapseSupport comes with a DISCLAIMER:

Overindulging in collapse may be detrimental to your mental health. Anxiety and depression are common reactions when studying collapse. Please remain conscious of your mental health and the effects this may have on you. If you are considering suicide, please call a hotline, visit r/SuicideWatch, r/SWResources, r/depression, or seek professional help. Suicidal content will be removed. Suggesting others commit suicide will result in an immediate ban.

List of resources

Overshoot — caused by the two variables of overpopulation and overconsumption (not just one of them!) — is a fundamental driver of the polycrisis leading to collapse. Read an excellent summary by the expert William Rees HERE.

Visuals:

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (free; view on a big screen)

Humans tend to react strongly to visuals, so if you're human, this book is for you. Some choice quotes are included for added oomph. You can skip the text, which is fairly run-of-the-mill environmentalism stuff.

Podcasts:

Breaking Down Collapse (pick an app)

It is about as straightforward, simple and cheery take there is on it - which, of course, still means that it is unbearably heavy. Two reasonable, young American humanists delve into it, structured as one person informing the other, who reacts to learning about it. The first eight short episodes will be enough to set you straight; by then, you will already need a long break from the abyss.

The Great Simplification

The podcast interviews “a wide range of scientists, leaders, activists, thinkers, and doers”. IMHO, 20-25% of the episodes are real whoppers that will leave you reeling. You can safely begin from the beginning. And if you're wondering why opposing views aren't represented much, well, they are represented exactly the representative amount: about 1% of scientists are not aboard the we-are-screwed "narrative", and a couple of the episodes do include a person with an ounce of hope that we might all somehow be okay.

Regarding hope, the very reasonable Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert guested the excellent podcast The Happiness Lab, and he points out that when educating people on climate change, you must necessarily choose between either telling the truth or instilling hope. (I'm surprised this wasn't edited out).

The reason not to tell the whole truth is to avoid people's knee-jerk reaction to say, “Well then, we might as well give up completely”, when damage control and making the most of a bad situation is the appropriate response.

Books:

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions (Edited by Greta Thunberg)

Probably the best go-to resource for a quick rundown of one hundred almost insurmountable issues critical to our survival (again, take the wording from scientists literally). One hundred bite-sized articles by 100 geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders, handy for sporadic consumption, interspersed with some excellent moralising by Greta that you can skip if you're just looking to understand the predicament.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (David Wallace-Wells)

It’s challenging to find language that gets the severity of the situation across, but David gives it a solid go. It’s much worse than you think.

The best Collapse nonfiction books:

“Fiction”:
The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)

The book blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction by dealing with believable events, using eyewitness account storytelling and being straight-up philosophical quite often, with little to no narrative involved. It may not be the best prose in existence, but it hits hard due to the sheer relevance of the subject.

Blogs:

Apart from my substack recommendations (bottom right), on the more colourful side of prose, I recommend George Tsaraklides.

YouTube:

William Rees is generally well worth paying attention to; his episode on The Great Simplification is one of the whoppers.

Other significant resources with enough further information to last a lifetime: