Collapsology

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The term collapsology is a

industrial, and globalized
societies.

Background

The word collapsology has been coined and publicized by

Collapsology is based on the idea that humans impact their environment in a sustained and negative way, and promotes the concept of an environmental emergency, linked in particular to

global warming and the biodiversity loss. Collapsologists believe, however, that the collapse of industrial civilization could be the result of a combination of different crises: environmental, but also economic, geopolitical, democratic, and others.[8]

Collapsology is a transdisciplinary exercise involving

Etymology

The word collapsology is a neologism invented "with a certain self-mockery" by Pablo Servigne, an agricultural engineer, and Raphaël Stevens, an expert in the resilience of socio-ecological systems. It appears in their book published in 2015.[9]

It is a

portmanteau derived from the Latin collapsus, 'to fall, to collapse' and from the suffix -logy, logos, 'study', which is intended to name an approach of scientific nature.[10]

Since 2015 and the publication of How everything can collapse in French, several words have been proposed to describe the various approaches dealing with the issue of collapse:

philosophical approach, collapso-praxis to designate the ideology inspired by this study, and collapsonauts to designate people living with this idea in mind.[11][12]

Religious foundations

Unlike

scientific research, primarily human understanding of climate change
as caused by human economic and geopolitical systems. It is not in line with the idea of a cosmic, apocalyptic "end of the world", but makes the hypothesis of the end of the human current world, the "thermo-industrial civilization".

This distinction is further stressed by historian Eric H. Cline by pointing out that while the whole world has obviously not ended, civilizations have collapsed over the course of history which makes the statement that "prophets have always predicted doom and been wrong" inapplicable to societal collapse.[13]

Scientific basis

As early as 1972, The Limits to Growth,[14] a report produced by MIT researchers, warned of the risks of exponential demographic and economic growth on a planet with limited resources.

As a systemic approach, collapsology is based on prospective studies such as The Limits of Growth, but also on the state of global and regional trends in the environmental, social and economic fields (such as the IPCC, IPBES or Global Environment Outlook (GE) reports periodically published by the Early Warning and Assessment Division of the UNEP, etc.) and numerous scientific works[3] as well as various studies, such as "A safe operating space for humanity";[15] "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere",[16] published in Nature in 2009 and 2012, "The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration",[17] published in 2015 in The Anthropocene Review, and "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene",[18] published in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. There is evidence to support the importance of collective processing of the emotional aspects of contemplating societal collapse, and the inherent adaptiveness of these emotional experiences.[19]

History

Precursors

Even if this neologism only appeared in 2015 and concerns the study of the collapse of industrial civilization, the study of the

(2013).

Arnold J. Toynbee

In his monumental (initially published in twelve volumes) and highly controversial work of contemporary historiography entitled

Arnold J. Toynbee
(1889–1975) deals with the genesis of civilizations (chapter 2), their growth (chapter 3), their decline (chapter 4), and their disintegration (chapter 5). According to him, the mortality of civilizations is trivial evidence for the historian, as is the fact that they follow one another over a long period of time.

Joseph Tainter

In his book

The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter (born 1949) studies the collapse of various civilizations, including that of the Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory
. For Tainter, an increasingly complex society eventually collapses because of the ever-increasing difficulty in solving its problems.

Jared Diamond

The American

Modern collapsologists

Since the invention of the term collapsology, many French personalities gravitate in or around the collapsologists' sphere. Not all have the same vision of civilizational collapse, some even reject the term "collapsologist", but all agree that contemporary industrial civilization, and the biosphere as a whole, are on the verge of a global crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to them, the process is already under way, and it is now only possible to try to reduce its devastating effects in the near future. The leaders of the movement are Yves Cochet and Agnès Sinaï of the Momentum Institute (a think tank exploring the causes of environmental and societal risks of collapse of the thermo-industrial civilization and possible actions to adapt to it), and Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens who wrote the essay How everything can collapse: A manual for our times.[4]

Beyond the French collapsologists mentioned above, one can mention: Aurélien Barrau (astrophysicist), Philippe Bihouix (engineer, low-tech developer), Dominique Bourg (philosopher), Valérie Cabanes (lawyer, seeking recognition of the crime of ecocide by the international criminal court), Jean-Marc Jancovici (energy-climate specialist), and Paul Jorion (anthropologist, sociologist).

In 2020 the French humanities and social science website Cairn.info published a dossier on collapsology titled The Age of Catastrophe, with contributions from historian François Hartog, economist Emmanuel Hache, philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, art historian Romain Noël, geoscientist Gabriele Salerno, and American philosopher Eugene Thacker.[21]

Even if the term remains rather unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, many publications deal with the same topic (for example the 2017 David Wallace-Wells article "

Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Ted Kaczynski also warned of the threat of catastrophic societal collapse.[24][25][26]

See also

References

  1. ^ .
  2. ^ .
  3. ^ .
  4. ^ .
  5. ^ a b Stetler, Harrison (2020-01-21). "'Collapsologie': Constructing an Idea of How Things Fall Apart". The New York Review of Books. New York City: Rea S. Hederman. Archived from the original on 2020-03-05. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  6. ^ Jones, Lucy (25 April 2023). "Adapt or die: Jem Bendell's radical vision to survive the climate crisis". GQ. Archived from the original on 14 September 2023. Retrieved 14 September 2023.
  7. ^ Doig, Tom (9 November 2023). "If the world's systems are already cracking due to climate change, is there a post-doom silver lining?". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 12 November 2023. Retrieved 12 November 2023.
  8. ^ "Collapsologie". Futura (in French). Archived from the original on 2020-03-08. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  9. ^ Faure, Sonya (11 June 2015). "Collapsologie [nom]: du latin, collapsus, " tombé d'un seul bloc "". Libération (in French). Archived from the original on 7 May 2016. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
  10. ^ Garric, Audrey; Bouanchaud, Cécile (5 February 2019). "Le succès inattendu des théories de l'effondrement". Le Monde (in French). Archived from the original on 8 June 2020. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
  11. OCLC 1152054578. Archived from the original on 2020-06-25. Retrieved 2020-06-24.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  12. OCLC 1150810193. Archived from the original on 2020-06-25. Retrieved 2020-06-24.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  13. ^ Eric H. Cline (2014). "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed"
  14. from the original on 2020-10-25. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  15. .
  16. from the original on 2020-03-19. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  17. from the original on 2020-06-10. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  18. .
  19. ^ Kieft, J.; Bendell, J (2021). "The responsibility of communicating difficult truths about climate influenced societal disruption and collapse: an introduction to psychological research". Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) Occasional Papers. 7: 1–39. Archived from the original on 2021-03-10. Retrieved 2021-04-03.
  20. (PDF) from the original on 2020-01-14. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  21. ^ The Age of Catastrophe Archived 2021-02-02 at the Wayback Machine, Cairn.info (International Edition), Vol. 4, Issue 9, October 2020.
  22. ^ "French collapsology – "If you didn't know this, in recent years France has seen a big societal movement around the idea that we are approaching a collapse."". reddit.com. 2019-04-22. Archived from the original on 2023-06-08. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  23. ^ "Collapsology! Have you heard about?". researchgate.net. 2019-07-07. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
  24. from the original on 2020-04-23. Retrieved 2021-12-21..
  25. .
  26. ^ Li, Ivy (2016-11-10). "A neo-Luddite manifesto?". The Tech. Archived from the original on 2021-12-20. Retrieved 2021-12-20.