4.3 - Homo colossus, Humbled: A Play-by-Play of the Next Few Decades

Defining “Collapse”

The marker of collapse that I prefer to work with is: when a species’ activity (and population) within a given environment goes from expanding to contracting. For our purposes, that’s Homo sapiens (or Homo colossus) 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.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

The 2020s and/or 2030s are when we will likely see food production and industrial activity begin to trend downward. The USA has no (declassified) plan for food production decline and no (declassified) plan for widespread prolonged electricity outage.

"Global agricultural production will level off and then fall. What food remains will be local and not enough. And all these things will come to pass while people continue to argue about them. Until there is no more argument, because there is no more doubt."

Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark

Some areas where reduced availability would be the most disruptive are:

• electricity

• gasoline, diesel and kerosene-jet » less transportation of all kinds

• fertilizers and pesticides

• food

• treated running tap water

• garbage collection & recycling

• wastewater management

• medicines, medical devices

• emergency response, medical procedures

• internet, cell phone service

• schooling, record-keeping

• anything made in a factory or with materials from far away (including repair parts)

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.

Many of our technological “solutions” will backfire, as alluded-to in Post #3.2

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 alternative 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.

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.

[I quite like Turiel’s analysis, as of 2025, of Trump’s edicts and Europe’s position]

After a civilization has risen and fallen, life doesn’t return to the way it was before. In some parts of the Roman Empire, after its fall, hierarchy, violent conflicts and military conscription were common. People drank weak ale instead of water, which had become unsafe to drink.

Joseph Tainter notes in “The Collapse of Complex Societies“ that as societies’ complexity unwinds, they become:

“smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated. Specialisation decreases and there is less centralised control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there is overall lower coordination among individuals and groups … Population levels tend to drop, and for those who are left the known world shrinks.”

Photo by Pierre Herman on Unsplash

Cooperation Versus Conflict Under Pressure

During difficult times, many humans behave pro-socially. However, it’s important to think beyond feel-good anecdotes and keep in mind how stress can lead to more violence and environmental destruction. This section discusses general trends. Post #3.3 list specific examples.

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”

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."

“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.”

Prompts to be more aware of mortality exacerbate tribalism.

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.”

Wealth inequality and political polarization also preclude the cooperation necessary for a civilization to overcome challenges, leading to collapse.

Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash

Urban Depopulation

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 fuels (especially diesel) become scarcer, survival will become very difficult in our concrete jungles.

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". 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. When trucks stop arriving to restock the local grocery store, city dwellers won’t even have the option to attempt to survive off of foraging, gardening or hunting. Moreover, in densely-populated areas, disease spreads and violence escalates more rapidly.

Besides, as net energy declines, non-essential economic sectors will fade. Many occupations that city-dwellers had, justifying their residence there, will become obsolete. With frequent electricity outages affecting everything from subways to refrigerators to subways, air conditioning to elevators, cities will lose their appeal.

"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

source

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.

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.)

Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

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).

Photo by Emerson Vieira on Unsplash

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