4.3 - The Intermediate Decades and The Humbling of Homo colossus
Existential Zugzwang
In chess, to be “in zugzwang” is “a situation in which you don’t want to move because any move you make will only worsen your situation, but you cannot not move; you must move and thus make matters worse”. The process of a civilization’s development is a process of the population positioning itself in zugzwang. We (“we” meaning: human communities who require electricity and food-from-more-than-a-few-miles-away to survive) are damned if we do, damned if we don’t:
Our complex manmade systems destroy the environment that our survival depends on. They drive their “host” (this time, the entire planet) toward burnout.
But if we ratchet-down our industrial foundation, the human empire would collapse anyway, taking much of our technology-dependent population with it.
If you’re willing to admit that sometimes there’s no cure-all for a happy ending, then this does seem an awful lot like one of those times. We face a predicament, not a problem that can be solved. Biology, physics, psychology and sociology have made things such that no realistic path ahead could be labeled an unambiguous victory for Homo colossus.
Moreover, due to the forces that my previous post subscribes, we probably won’t do this “the easy (or easier) way”. Society could deliberately, strategically dismantle technology. People could voluntarily move from cities to the countryside, adopt low-tech lifestyles and farm with ecologically restorative techniques. Individuals who give birth could opt to bear no more than one child each. But this is unlikely to happen widely, and therefore the fading of technology, the depopulation of cities, and depopulation of the planet will occur in ways that entail more suffering.
Defining “Collapse”
The marker of collapse that I prefer to work with is: when a species’ activity within a given environment goes from expanding to contracting (and then so does its population). For our purposes, that’s Homo sapiens and Earth.
Fiction commonly portrays a single event that suddenly kills all but a handful of people (conflict, disease, etc), and then the protagonist enjoys a clean slate and free rein for their adventures. However, it’s more likely that we’ll experience a “messy middle” period that the scriptwriters skip.
The 2020s and/or 2030s are when we will likely see thus-far-upward trends in food production and industrial activity begin their downward trajectories.
Our systems of banking, loans, investments and employment are designed to function only while human activity increases (i.e. while the economy is “healthy”/growing). You do something that somebody deems valuable and deserving of compensation, and you receive a token that you can presumably exchange for goods or services. When, after 200 years of expansion, our energy and material bases begin to shrink, authorities will need to establish new mechanisms for allocating labor and distributing goods and services. Nate Hagens refers to the coming financial recalibration as a “Wile E. Coyote moment”. On an episode of the Post-Carbon Institute’s “Crazy Town”, he predicts that before 2035, the Global North will experience a 30% cut in purchasing power.
Some areas where reduced availability would be the most disruptive are:
goods: food, fertilizer, pesticide, medicine, medical devices, gasoline
services: running water, electricity1, waste management, emergency response, medical procedures, public transit, internet, cell phone service
The USA has no (declassified) plan for food production decline and no (declassified) plan for widespread prolonged electricity outage.
In “Dark Age America”, Greer invites us to consider technology “suites”, where one tool is relevant only when much else is operational. Only when a civilization enjoys an auspicious era does it all come together. An LED lightbulb requires inordinate steps and inputs. An interruption would cause the whole endeavor to fail. Off-grid electric charging for your vehicle is useful only as long as roads continue to be fairly well-maintained.
Our modern forms of governance (nation-states), settlements (cities and suburbs connected by rail and highways), transportation (engines/motors powered by liquid fuel, coal or electricity), trade (employment by corporations), communication and record-keeping will fade. Life will become slower, more localized, more physical.
This will squander many long-term plans and strain our health and relationships. Everyone will have to adapt to new conditions and interact constantly with others who live within walking distance.
Technological “Solutions” Backfire
Many of our endeavors to remedy (what we saw as) problems will ultimately turn fatal as complexity declines.
Air-Conditioning
People move to Arizona because they believe they’ll be able to rely on air-conditioning. Start-up Cul-de-Sac debuts its first neighborhood-of-the-future in Arizona. Meanwhile, 2023 saw people getting third-degree burns from the ground and morgues needing extra refrigeration capacity for all the heat-related deaths. Related episode of Post-Carbon Institute’s “Crazy Town” podcast = “Infinite, Unlimited, Forever: Water in the Desert”.
Modern Buildings
A structural engineer posted this write-up on Reddit about how, without maintenance, most buildings will fall into disrepair (and release dangerous toxins).
Elevators
We’ve built high-rise apartments so tall that that residents can reach their floors only by elevator. What could go wrong? … Related episode of Post-Carbon Institute’s “Crazy Town” podcast - “Colonizing the Sky: The Untold Environmental Toll of Skyscrapers”
Kurt Cobb notes that America is already facing an elevator crisis, since: 1. Some elevators are so old that repair parts for those models are no longer being made; 2. Manufacturers cater to countries that are establishing new development; 3. Most Americans who know how to repair elevators are aging out of the workforce. The article also looks at America’s fragile electricity and water systems.
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Dams, Levees, Sea Walls
China’s sponge cities fail to keep up with heavy rain (but article puts a “they’ll just have to try harder and their eventual triumph will be an example to all countries who are digging themselves into a similar hole!” spin on it)
sea level rise, disappearing coastline and low-lying nations … 2023 “Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ [aka Thwaites] –nicknamed because its collapse could drive catastrophic sea level rise– is melting rapidly in unexpected ways, according to new research.” … 2024 Thwaites sea ice tongue has disintegrated
“Going Paperless”
Although much seems to occur “in the cloud”, our civilization is very reliant on physical infrastructure. Data centers for our Cloud now consume more energy than the airline industry (200 TWh annually as of 2024). As we fail to cool data centers and maintain satellites and deep sea cables, we lose digital records.
Urban Depopulation
The system of vehicles, highways, cities/suburbs and grocery stores makes us vulnerable. James Howard Kunstler gave a TED Talk on how our dwellings far from where farming, foraging or hunting is possible were the "greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world". A documentary anticipates “The End of Suburbia”
When we think only in terms of climate change, it creates misleading space for bargaining: If we stay under +1.5C, large populations of humans will be able to continue inhabiting cities.
However, as fossil-hydrocarbons become scarcer, survival will become very difficult in our concrete jungles. The previously-robust supply chains on which cities are entirely dependent will flicker. Alice Friedemann observes: “In the US, trucks deliver 80% of goods … with 80% of towns completely dependent on trucks.” Diesel powers the trucks that deliver food and remove waste. Petroleum derivatives supply our fresh asphalt and new tires. In the countryside, when trucks stop arriving to restock the local grocery store, residents might be able to resort to gardening and foraging. City dwellers have no such option. Moreover, in densely-populated areas, disease spreads and violence escalates more rapidly.
Besides, as net energy declines, non-essential economic sectors will fade and our current resource allocation system (employment-income-purchases) will become untenable at-scale. Many occupations that city-dwellers had, justifying their residence there, will become obsolete. In contrast, the more-critical lower economic tiers will require physical labor to replace the machinery that we can no longer power. People will filter from the tertiary tier into primary and secondary roles, which will require that they flood into surrounding regions.
"Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative."
- David Fleming
Jason Bradford and interviewer Rachel Donald discuss:
RD: Wouldn’t that initial shift to more rural localized farming communities cause a lot of deaths initially? Surely there’d be a huge loss of lives in the transition…
JB: Yeah, kind of help me understand where you’re coming from with that.
RD: Well, okay. Say we take what you just said, that we’re continuing to double-down consistently on modernity and that it’s probably going to take a couple of crises to shift our society in a different direction. Surely that will mean at the peak of these crises there won’t be a plan in place... It’s going to be a reaction to the necessity to feed oneself. And that shift … especially as urbanites leave the centers to go to the more rural areas without the adequate knowledge to feed themselves, and also with the loss of industry that will then come… We will have fewer doctors and we will have fewer scientists…
…
JB: You’d need a land base that’s large enough. Some countries are so food-import-dependent and they’re way overpopulated and they’ll never be able to feed themselves and that’s gonna be an unfathomable tragedy unfolding over the next several decades… I think the really big cities are kinda gonna be a mess.
Meanwhile, Daniel Zetah and interviewer Nate Hagens opine:
DZ: We're getting to a position … where we have to teach more people more things in a shorter period of time than ever in human history. And the bottleneck is going to be: Who has those skills and are there enough of them to teach the amount of people that we need to teach?
…
NH: The most likely thing is, within a decade, you are going to be incredibly busy, popular and in demand because people that have your skillset are fewer than they should be. And so, a lot of people will choose to live closer on the spectrum to what you're doing when they're forced to.
Assuming that a country has been lucky enough to retain access to diesel for as long as it possible and that whoever controlled the supply prioritized the agricultural sector over more wasteful industrial ends, there nevertheless will come a day when supply decline starts to impact farm machinery, and “office-refugee” labor won’t be a simple substitute, obtaining the same yields as machines did. Human muscle won’t be able to force plants to grow in now-inhospitable regions as we now do, with mechanized irrigation, genetically-modified seeds and chemical fertilizers and -cides. (And yes, it’s because of civilizations that groundwater is depleted, the hydrological cycle is disrupted and soil is degraded in the first place.)
Competition Versus Cooperation Under Pressure
From Inside Climate News:
“At times of such huge uncertainty, a veritable plague of toxic public feelings can be unleashed, which provide the effective underpinning for political movements such as populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism … When climate reality starts to get tough, you secure your borders, you secure your own sources of food and energy, and you keep out the rest of them”
“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent … And it will lead to clashes.”
From PCI’s “The Big Picture”, referring to this study:
“In the early phases of crisis, people typically respond with extraordinary degrees of cooperation and self-sacrifice …. But if privation persists, they may turn toward blame and competition for scarce resources”
Prompts to be more aware of mortality exacerbate tribalism.
On an episode of Post-Carbon Institute’s “Crazy Town” podcast (“An Ecofascist and a Social Justice Warrior Walk into a Bar: Extremist Politics and Censorship”), the hosts wonder:
“We’ve seen a frightening rise in recent years of violence and violent rhetoric by so-called ecofascists, who use environmental and resource limits arguments to justify hateful views around immigration and population. But does that mean those of us who are concerned about ecological limits should keep our mouths shut? … squelching discussions about limits might actually backfire and fuel ecofascist views instead”
Catton’s Overshoot describes how, when a given environment is oversaturated with one species, we see increasing rates of “mutual interference” and “redundancy anxiety”:
"As other mammalian species have moved into a post-exuberant stage, increased antagonism and competition typically have led to increased violence and behavioral degeneracy. Status hierarchies become more abrasive. Care and training of the young become inept and even reluctant; the young come to be treated as intruders. One result of these changes is a slowing down of the rate of population increase. Another is the suffusion of fear, hostility, and misery into all aspects of life."
Because coordinated action across a large population is difficult during times of adversity, resource shortages do not necessarily inspire conservation. For example, as Sudan’s civil war left people desperate for fuel, they decimated 45% of its forestland from 1983-2021.
Wealth inequality and political polarization also preclude the cooperation necessary for a civilization to overcome challenges, leading to collapse.
“Temperature spikes drive surges in everything from domestic violence to online hate speech … Baseball pitchers are more likely to intentionally hit batters with their pitches ... US Postal Service workers experience roughly 5% more incidents of harassment and discrimination on days above 32°C [89.6°F], relative to temperate days.”
It’s common for pro-social and anti-social behavior to coexist. For example, during the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, there were acts of heroism and arson and looting.
General Depopulation
When a population falls, it’s because the annual death rate is especially high and/or the annual birth rate is especially low, so that deaths exceed births. The last time deaths exceeded births was in the mid-1300s, due to the Black Plague. The LTG BAU scenarios predict that this phenomenon will begin again by mid-century.
The die-off of a large portion of our population could stretch out over a few decades, with major tragedies punctuating it and experiences differing by location, power (wealth) and individual factors (health, skills, social network).
Factors that would decrease births-per-year:
Falling sperm counts due to microplastics and forever chemicals
Miscarriages due to heat
Miscarriages due to microplastics
Amenorrhea due to increased physical activity
*The net impact of individual choice is hard to predict. There may be more women who, given rising hellishness, might prefer not to give birth. But, counteracting that, we’ll also have:
rape, which becomes more prevalent during larger conflict
the disappearance of fossil-fuel-derived modern birth control (although low-tech methods will persist)
Factors that would increase deaths-per-year:
The fading of modern medicine, including modern obstetrics, and sanitation. As recently as the 1930s, even Americans who made it to their 25th year could expect to die before their 70th birthday.
The fading of modern food cultivation, transport and preservation
War and isolated acts of homicide
Exposure to pathogens and extreme conditions
Suicide - especially as countries like the USA “de-develop”, and people haven’t been encouraged to understand and process what’s been happening or to take any deliberate steps toward avoiding a worst-possible experience
“Collapse Will Look Nothing Like the Movies” - a play-by-play of the century ahead, from the Honest Sorcerer substack
“The Enshittification of Everything”, a piece by journalist Andrew Nikiforuk
From a post on the Honest Sorcerer substack: “The collapse of the grid will not come in the form of one massive blackout, though, but rather in the form of a series of planned (and sometimes unplanned) outages and brownouts — taking longer and longer to recover from. First an hour here and there. Then a day. Then for years everything returns to normal as a long overdue repair finally gets done. Then shit happens at a major electrical distribution station, and you receive a calendar in your mailbox informing you about a rolling blackout schedule for the next three months, or till it gets repaired. Then power returns, only to be turned on/off randomly… And so on, and on, and on for years and decades, till you notice that you haven’t switched on the lights for a month now. Then you talk to a friend from another town and learn that electricity supply is more or less OK in their neighborhood — so you decide it’s time to do some coach surfing.”
Laudable attempt at future casting but many inaccuracies: 47% of Americans 18-50 are choosing NOT to reproduce for a variety of reasons; population density stress is driving higher levels of the chronic stress hormone "cortisol", which inhibits the master reproductive hormone "GNRH" and thus sperm production and female reproduction; we are clan/band evolved animals and the nuclear family is the last phase of societal collapse; the 70+ yrs. of animal crowding researches are nowhere mentioned (Calhoun, Southwick, Christian, etc.); the inevitable collapse of the American constitutional Republic under the Fascist takeover now in full progress is not mentioned; climate collapse is not mentioned and it is well underway--we may well see an unlivable 6 degC increase over preindustrial by 2047; full-on civilizational collapse is already baked-in to our massive overpopulation/overconsumption (3,000 times too numerous); God does not like what He/She/they are seeing. Perhaps most importantly, our educational systems are floundering and the general populations are dumbing down at accelerating rates, as predatory Capitalism consumes itself. Again, thanks for your effort.
Excellent, as always, but I still see a giant absence in your meta-analysis, an absence that Hagens, the now mentally-deficient Kuntsler and Greer share. - the C-word.
The systems you allude to are not governed by a “We.” They are not governable by an indistinct “Us.” These systems are now wholly owned and operated by Corporations. Trucks, employment, housing, money, environmental destruction. - all completely under the rule of mindless, amoral psychopathic ultra social command entities populated by power calculus cyborgs like Musk, Dimon, Andersen, ad infinitum. And no thought-guru is anything more than a speck of dust compared to this global human extinction delivery system.
Sorry to be repetitive in my comments. - you of course write really well about this largest of subjects. You should write what you want to write. But Substack does have this commenting feature, which offers at least the idea of actual reaction from interested readers.