Every civilization that has graced the earth has collapsed eventually. Mentioning it makes you by definition a pessimist, catastrophist or millennarian. This unhelpful popular imagination is part of the reason why it’s hard to talk intelligently about collapse. And yet Greece and its people remain, and you can visit without being pursued by Mad Max style road gangs. Recent events in Greece, for example, would qualify as a collapse.
History shows that collapse can be slow, that people cope, and that life carries on afterwards. Collapse happens fast, leading to social breakdown. In our minds, we tend to jump to Hollywood visions of a post-apocalyptic society. “Nor is it a simple crisis from which we can emerge unscathed.” Instead, we’re talking about a process of erosion of economic and political structures that leave people’s basic needs unmet – things like water, food, clothing and energy. What do we mean by collapse? It’s “not the end of the world” say the two self-described ‘collapsologists’ who have written the book. Generally though, as the authors here say in their introduction, “the question of collapse is not taken seriously.” That book fed into the movements that were seeking to avoid collapse by making a transition, something that informs the Transition Towns movement.
The last time there was a serious discussion around it in the public sphere was probably when Jared Diamond’s book Collapse became a bestseller fifteen years ago. Collapse is something we don’t talk about much.
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