It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

by Christy Rodgers
A Review of Some Current Speculative Thinking on Collapse
And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night…
-- Archibald Macleish, “You, Andrew Marvell”

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother
It is murder…
-- Leonard Cohen

All of life is seven to five against.
-- Damon Runyon

A specter is haunting global civilization: the specter of “carrying capacity.” In one forum after another, the idea that we are nearing Malthusian limits in terms of the development of highly organized societies and human habitation of earth is making itself heard. Scientists and sociologists point to different specific phenomena: species extinction and habitat destruction, over-population, global warming, peak oil, falling water tables, the proliferation of super-viruses, and so on, but the theme of most of these analyses is simple: things cannot, and will not, go on as they are much longer. Some of the thinking associated with this idea is rather timid and narrow, some of it is lyrical and reasoned, some of it is flat-out apocalyptic. Sometimes the same author exhibits more than one of these characteristics in the same article or book. Some of the proposed prescriptions for our plight are just about as frightening as the worst-case scenario themselves.

What’s most interesting to me is not so much the army of statistics being brought to bear to construct these hypotheses, or the particular focus of any given argument, as the type of thinking that different proponents apply, its relation to the times, and its chances of actually being assimilated and acted upon in any way that truly meliorates the problems it identifies. Three influential authors who’ve recently looked at the whole enchilada (and found that the cheese is disappearing fast) are the nominal subject of this review.
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