It’s everywhere now
. . . intimations about collapse.
I first read some articles by William Kotke about thirty years ago that took a broad view of the ecological crisis and suggested we might be heading for some kind of collapse. He would put his thoughts all together in his 2007 book:
https://www.amazon.com/Final-Empire-Collapse-Civilization-Future/dp/143433130X
I found his viewpoint rather unusual and radical at the time. But it’s everywhere now:
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/392-fallwinter-2014/word-civilization-collapse/
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Two years ago there was the article “Soon To Be Picturesque Ruins!” by David Watson in Issue 41 of Green Horizon Magazine:
https://green-horizon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/GHM-41_web.pdf
The latter begins:
Recently I was invited to comment on “collapsology.” It was the first I had heard the term. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that mass society’s tendency to baroque proliferation, and capitalism’s tendency to turn everything into commerce, would leverage widespread anxieties about social collapse and even potential human extinction into fodder for an academic discipline, literary fashion, YouTube jeremiads, experiential retreats, and consulting businesses. “Seems / everybody’s having them dreams,” Dylan once put it. And since anyone who takes up the subject of the current peril could be called a collapsologue, I must be one, too.
Yes, a specter now haunts industrial capitalism, and with it our species and the entire life web in which we evolved. What is commonly called the “end of the world as we know it” is no longer a matter for the future tense: invisibly, and also very visibly, the specter is already turning its grim wheel. A sense of ecological dread, depression, even panic (now categorized by psychologists as “climate grief”) has become a topic hard to avoid for anyone stopping to consider human prospects and the prospects of so much that is precious to us. It’s a daunting subject. Activists continue to advocate and organize against complacency and distraction. But already by 2018, that inveterate optimist of the will, Bill McKibben, was writing that if the present situation continues to unfold as it has, “we will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it.”
Anyway, modern civilization is too solipsistic. Good riddance.
