Back to basics: averting global collapse

A growing number of books are appearing that present a picture of global catastrophe if civilisation does not radically change. “Big picture” experts like Martin Rees, Jared Diamond and most recently Thomas Homer-Dixon warn of total collapse if things don’t change in a hurry.

These scientists are concerned with the basic material conditions of civilisation on Earth. They are not beholden to some ideological fashion but focused on the relationships between the core global systems, environmental, technological, economic and so on. It is this broad overview that allows them to see the emergent situation and cut through the daily commentary of all-too-often vested interests.

Their message is stark: things are coming to a head, and we must generate new ideas to deal with the new situation.

Ultimately it’s about the principles on which society operates. The great debates of modernity - revelation versus rationality, religion versus science, markets versus society, war versus negotiation, and so on - have been made largely redundant. The new debate, only just getting under way, is this: how can we live decently with suddenly too many people, too few resources and too much pollution?

The roots of the problem lie in our material success. In the last two centuries industrialisation, increasingly fuelled by ever cheaper fossil fuels, has generated unprecedented growth. This then brought about the invention of a raft of information technologies which stimulated a new round of development known as “globalisation”. Despite the evidence of world wars and global depression, governments and peoples began to believe never-ending economic growth was sustainable, and that all resources, human and material, should be turned to this purpose.

This belief was of course mistaken, and now we face the reality. There are material limits to growth, and we must think up a new set of ideas to run our global civilisation.

At the core of our dilemma is a very simple problem which we have created for ourselves. We are in a race with ourselves, and our own creations, which we can only lose. As things stand we are in a self-built treadmill in which we can only go ever faster until the whole thing flies apart.

We started this race around ten millennia ago by maintaining a higher population growth than could be supported by prevailing material conditions. For hundreds of thousands of years we had lived within our natural limits, but something changed that. In forcing ourselves to develop ever more material bounty, we strapped ourselves into the treadmill, going ever faster as we try to keep ahead.

Most simply, more mouths meant the need for more food, the great Malthusian dilemma. Our first response was the invention of agriculture, which led to urbanisation and eventually civilisation. This led to organised social competition, and then competition between political entities, originally city-states and empires. This competition is at the essence of what we call politics and of war.

Politics and war kept the treadmill rolling, the hope of final peace, final security, final prosperity always just ahead. Generation after generation passed, prisoner to this dream, never facing the fact that concentrated wealth and power only generated the forces that would destroy them.

Eventually, with industrialisation, civilisation became so materially powerful it needed a more effective means of controlling the utilisation of natural resources to social purpose. Capitalism, the combination of open trading, or markets, and a common currency enabled rapid expansion of the productive capacities of civilisation.

One big problem with capitalism was that it made competition systemic. Capitalism made it impossible to rest, to simply operate at a stable state, because built into capitalism was the profit imperative. The profit imperative meant that if a business did not make as much profit as another, it would eventually fail. This logic reached its limits in the unrestricted global financial system that came to connect every person on the planet through 24-hour global currency and securities trading networks.

The logic of these mathematically-based finance systems came to outweigh all other concerns. Culture, religion, family, nature, even war became subordinated to the need to make and keep making money. This, some people said, was the end of history and our fate for ever more.

Recently, however, another product of this great civilisational project, modern science, has been sounding a warning. Basically, science tells us, there are now so many people using so much of the Earth’s natural resources, the world is running out of essential resources and space to put the waste products. The rapid depletion of fresh water and fossil fuels are the resource problems most identified, and atmospheric and oceanic pollution leading to global warming is the worst environmental problem.

Science also tells us that the complexity of our civilisation is causing basic problems. Mostly that complexity comes from the scale of our global socio-economic system, the sheer numbers of diverse people and things involved. In particular, the interconnected systems we have created to control and power this civilisation are increasingly at risk. Electrical power grids, the Internet and the global economy share a similar vulnerability to accidental or deliberate systemic damage.

There are also threats from the products of science itself. The construction of super weapons, nuclear, biological, and so on, is one aspect, but the overall risk added by advances in things like genetic manipulation of species (including humans) and machine intelligence also loom ever larger. We are reaching the point where we can no longer understand let alone control the technologies we build.

So far the logic of seeking profit has outweighed the logic of averting collapse, and little or nothing has been done about these threats. Our various institutions - some of which, like the family or religions, are millennia old, while others, like the state or business firm, are only a few centuries old - are unable to respond.

Most importantly, those institutions which were tasked with generating and interpreting new information and decision-making - academia, the media and governments - have become moribund. They were captured by vested interests pursuing profits, and steadily neglected their proper roles as they made their own grab for wealth and status.

What we need is a new balance in all aspects of life. We need to end the human population explosion, and the associated growth in exploitation of resources. We need to develop a new economy not based on endless growth. We need to bring as many people as possible into information flows and decision-making processes. We need to recover a sense of meaning, of social solidarity, beyond material gain and social status.

Fortunately, there are a multitude of good ideas out there about how to do these things (such as those of our own Geoff Davies), but we must immediately start to really invest our best efforts.

We are an extraordinarily wealthy civilisation, and we can solve all our problems and create a new and better world. But we cannot do this without radical change, without fundamentally new ideas, and we must act now. Otherwise, we will lose everything we have created over the long millennia.

The Germans called 1946 the Year Zero. Huddling in their ruins, once the most civilised people on earth, they had fallen to irrational beliefs that exploited their fear. Too many young men were dead, too many young women were prostitutes, everyone did what they had to to survive. And they all wondered how it could have come to this.

But the German people at least had the Allies to help them out of the mess. Dying in the billions as the complex natural systems reset themselves under the weight of climate change, as food supplies collapse and water dries up, as even more die when desperate states fight over the remnants of food and oil, we won’t have any one to give us a hand. There’ll be no second chance for our civilisation, and so we’d best get on with saving it.