I. Analysis Paralysis

On one hand, I think it’s wise to establish a really solid foundation of Describe-Predict. Otherwise, you might not have enough structure to confidently take the Decide-Plan-Implement or enough motivation to stick with it.

I think this might be why someone who has only a shallow grasp of our predicament might hesitate to invest in rerouting their life more radically.

This is also why all 18 posts on my home page are focused on Describe-Predict.

On the other hand, I sense that people can get bogged down in doomscrolling (and often still without developing that deeper grasp of the underlying dynamics!) and never integrate the information into how they’re living.

Hence my attempt to distill and repeat the ultimately takeaway:

Bigger Memo: “Civilizations” (distinguished by large-scale grain agriculture technospheres) have a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and therefore a necessarily short tenure.

(I explain why in ELI5: Collapse’s Inevitability and at more length in my 18 core essays)

Key Actionable Implication: The industrial-digital system on which many of us rely for thermoregulation, water and food has no future and will be expiring over the new few decades.

(I explain why in Let’s Eat Cake! Part 3 and at more length in my 18 core essays)

It’s difficult to pinpoint how rapidly this will occur. Instead, I’d express the timeline as: Rapidly enough that you’ll wish you’d started “aligning” sooner. There’s a lot to learn, and every day that you spend living as if the Old Narrative still applies while knowing that it doesn’t is a precious day wasted. Even if a certain item or skill won’t become vital until 2040, you won’t necessarily be able to wait until in 2039 to cram. Firstly, expertise in certain skills doesn’t come that easily. Moreover, you might lose access to the Internet and public library and book sales in 2034.

I think that anyone who has the luxury of time for hobbies has an ethical duty to be doing something to align their lives more closely with reality.

II. A Helpful Framework: Asset Table

For the following exercise, it might be help to keep two of my past posts open in new tabs:

• Let’s eat cake! | 1. Refresher on Life’s Requirements

• living with collapse | 2. “Hope” I can get behind

Now you’re going to create an Asset Table. (I made this up.)

1. At the top of a page, make 4 columns, labeled: Stuff | Skill | Habits | Context.

   There might be a better word than “Context”. This will be a catch-all for efforts that, unlike the other categories, aren’t clearly improving your resilience in isolation (although even your solo skill-building can benefit your neighbors). If this were a SWOT analysis, it’s is closer to the “Opportunities and Threats” items, whereas all else is more like “Strengths and Weaknesses”. I have some examples below.

2. Going column by column, and referencing the frameworks from the other two tabs, list every “investment” that someone might make, even if you don’t intend to make it.

3. Sort chronologically:

   • At the top go “assets” that you already “possess” (loosely defined - see my example below).

   • Below that are “investments” that are in-progress.

   • Further down are those that you haven’t yet tackled but plan to get underway within the next few years.

   • At the very bottom are assets that you have no plan to acquire. This way, the Table also displays your liabilities. Making this visible ensures that you’re owning your choice to not invest in those and allows you to appreciate which assets in someone else might complement yours.

   Tips for sorting:

   • Consider usefulness.

   • Consider how quickly/easily you could gain the asset.

   • Consider how soon you might need it.

III. Example

Below is my own slightly-redacted Asset Table.

Some entries are generic/universal and should appear somewhere on your Table, too. Others are more personal and don’t necessary apply to you. Likewise, yours might have entries that mine doesn’t.

My full version has a few more entries and breaks them out in detail (e.g. specific gardening practices that I hope to master).

Listing something as “Never?” just means that I don’t foresee myself engaging with it any time soon. There’s only so much time in a day (and year), and I’m better at certain things than others, and I want to be investing my time where it will deliver the highest return, which benefits everyone.

IV. Feedback Round

I’ve written about revising your Describe-Predict to align more closely with reality. Your Decide-Plan-Implement can be subject to a refinement process, too. It’s wise to regularly evaluate and, if appropriate, reroute.

Here are some things you might want to ask yourself periodically (quarterly?):

• Has my Describe-Predict changed?

• What matters? (Has my answer to this changed?)

• What role do I want to play in what’s unfolding? How can I make myself useful? (Has my answer to this changed?)

• Are my efforts successfully moving assets upward in my Table?

• If so, does that outcome feel as valuable as I expected it to?

• Do my allocations of time and energy and emotion feel right?

• Is there any challenge where I want to stick with it but need to seek more support?

• + Celebrate accomplishments!

  Maintain a clear sense of ends versus means. If you only wanted to get good enough at carpentry to construct a raised bed and composting toilet, and you did, don’t beat yourself up over not being the top performer at the workshop.

Stories & Behavior

In my (apo)calyptic voices series, I wrote about how, generally, animals have evolved to perceive information about their situation that allows them to maximize their wellbeing, with “their” possibly extending beyond themselves as individuals.

I recently read a suggestion that intelligent behavior looks like attunement to one’s circumstances, whereas some are inclined to think it looks like control over those circumstances.

I think the colonial-industrial-digital system in which we’ve grown up, from pre-school through adulthood (as we read articles about the Sustainable Development Goals), immerses us 24/7 in the Describe-Predict below.

It also offers a pipeline of resources to guide you through the Decide-Plan-Implement stages (e.g. your school’s Career Services office, portrayals of “normal adults” in media).

This whole package becomes your identity - not just the behaviors, but also the internalized stories that steer your choices.

Going Off-Script

Some people find themselves in a different story.

Sophie Strand is one of them. Her GoFundMe conveniently summarizes:

• She was misdiagnosed with Lyme disease and wrongly prescribed antibiotics, which led Sophie to develop a mast-cell activation disorder “that further ravaged her digestive system and made eating a minefield”

• Eventually, she was diagnosed with “Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a complex collagen disorder, with at least 15 different variations and expressions, and a host of problems—with GI function, eyes, lungs, hearts, kidneys, joints, etc.”

• More recently “Sophie has the highest blood mercury levels ever recorded in New York state, which may be a complication of the EDS and another genetic disorder (recently found out) that affects how she metabolizes certain vitamins.” These intersection issues have caused neurological problems.

• “Her severe autoimmune issues have also now resulted in frightening masses in her lungs”

Nothing can fix Strand. It can only provide some relief. In her PHENOMENAL (seriously - go read it) The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope and the Human, she describes how her diagnosis felt:

“I’d finally gotten a diagnosis that seemed to accurately explain years of disease. But what happens when the answer to your prayer feels like a curse? Because that diagnosis didn’t come with a cure. With a happy ending. Instead, it seemed to come with a death sentence. A decay sentence. A punctuation mark in a story I did not want to live out.”

The colonial-industrial-digital system’s script for Perpetual Human Betterment doesn’t have a part for Strand. Now what?

Among other things, she has written several books, appeared on many podcasts (my favorite was guest spot on Rooted Healing - Rewilding Myths and Redefining Health), and publishes a Substack, Make Me Good Soil.

So, (some?) people are capable of attuning to less-than-thrilling information.

The Script Proves Universally Inapplicable

Now we find ourselves at the point on the timeline when the entire society realizes the Describe-Predict that they’ve been handed for generations, over millennia, was always fundamentally flawed and is therefore becoming universally inapplicable. As our society grew larger and more complex, it brought an end to any (human or other species) who defied it. Our state of domination and elevation was never going to be possible to maintain, and now the bottom is dropping out from under us.

The posts displayed on my substack’s main page explore this deterioration in more detail.

I picture it as: We got to this level of “advancement” by piling and climbing up boxes, but those boxes are now inevitably rotting and the tower is wobbling.

Barriers to Attunement

The following are some reasons I can think of, for why people continuing to Decide-Plan-Implement as if the defunct Describe-Prescribe is still in-play. I think you can try to deliberately address some of these, but much of it might just shift with time.

They’re finding/receiving no replacement for the old Describe-Prescribe. Better explanations of our reality aren’t reaching them. We could be communicating the superior model with a more effective quality and creating that content in more quantity.

The process of synthesizing a new Describe-Prescribe seems often to occur in private, at one’s own pace. Despite our proclivity for turning everything into a live, in-person, time-bound workshop, asynchronous solo consumption of online content seems to be functioning best for this. It could also occur as a Trojan Horse. I had just put on Breaking Down: Collapse for background noise as I worked.

In preparation for when people do come across paradigm-shifting content and wish to process it with someone, we can be practicing how to have these metabolizing conversations skillfully.

In 2020, I thought of my new hobbies as “pandemic-proof”. Similarly, a “dumpster-fire-compatible” identity/attitude/morale source is one that remains powerful no matter how badly our situation deteriorates.

People’s identities are strongly wrapped up in the narrative of fixes:

• Maybe they organize an annual walk to fund cancer research

• Or they mentor women in (corporate) leadership

• Or they’re really passionate about vaccines and/or (high-tech) gender affirming hormone therapy and/or (high-tech) abortion

• On the Venereology episode of Ologies with Alie Ward, guest Dr. Ina Park said, “What keeps me up at night is the idea that we would lose any progress that we’ve made … The World has come so far and we could maintain this and we could really be in an era where we could end the HIV epidemic.” (I think it’s safe to assume that Park’s mental model of Our Triumphant New Era includes elements that we take for granted, such as Widespread Refrigeration Forever.)1

If that specific Happily Ever After vision is their whole personality, they’ll have a harder time scrapping it. I don’t know if someone can change this aspect of themselves.

Sometimes engagement is circumstantial. Few people were interested in proactively learning about COVID in summer 2019. Our neighbors might just procrastinate on this too. We can be patient and focus on identifying effective Decide-Plan-Implement tutorials and/or preparing our own, for when they’re ready to hear it.

They’re finding/receiving no replacement for the old Decide-Plan-Implement. We could be making more visible the many still-relevant alternatives, so they can find one with which they resonate.

A friend recently told me that he thinks a lot of people do realize that we’re entering collapse, but they’re too downtrodden to care. He said something like “They need a desire to live before they can care about dying.” I’ve modified this into: Amp them up before you bum them out. People are craving camaraderie and purpose.

Preexisting Pastimes: To free up bandwidth to devise a fresh Describe-Predict and invest in a different Decide-Plan-Implement, a person probably needs to forego one of the ways they usually spend a few hours per week. With an increasing number of Americans embracing (what I would call) an “indoor cat/dog vibe” over an “outdoor cat/dog vibe”, this represents a disturbance to their:

• Identity – Reality is asking them to behave as someone they’re not.

• Enjoyment - Replacing a interest that arose from within your artificial bubble with something externally imposed could mean trading Fun Hours for Misery Hours.

• Mastery - You’ve spent your whole life investing in skills relevant to an indoor cat existence. Developing new skills requires starting over as a beginner and possibly sucking. Some people dislike that.

• Praise - When society sees what you’ve managed as an indoor cat, they’re impressed. Now, when they see you abandon your forté to work on projects that remind them of a reality that they aren’t yet facing, they’ll judge you or maybe avoid you, if your activity makes the thing that they’re denying feel more real.

• Camaraderie – When you repurpose time that you were spending in a way that made sense only within the Old Narrative, you’re also taking time away from that crew, and spending it instead with people who are at best unfamiliar. But maybe you can’t even see yourself ever feeling like an “us” with them and enjoying their company as your did your other group’s.

Narrative Vacancy Chain

Here’s an insight from Sophie Strand:

“The curious moment occurs when a hermit crab, spilling out of its shell, exceeding its narrative, finds another shell that is a little too big. Instead of trying to enter this spacious shell, it waits patiently, sometimes for up to eight hours, for another, slightly bigger hermit crab to arrive and take the big shell, discarding a protective home more suited to the original hermit crab. Sometimes as many as twenty crabs will congregate and perform a truly amazing ritual called a vacancy chain. When they have finally assembled, the crabs will quickly evacuate and exchange shells each claiming the new one that best suits their size.

What does it feel like to be that first hermit crab, overflowing its shell, waiting beside another shell that it also cannot properly inhabit? What does it feel like to be so soft, unprotected, and incapable of immediately producing a new story? The hermit crab says wait. And he also says that we never reach the next story on our own. We need a group. A group of people all willing to vacate and exchange their stories.

Sometimes I catch myself (and I think this is true of many others) thinking of life the wrong way. You may have heard this 2-minute talk by Alan Watts:

I think (and I assume many others arrive at this realization) that you don’t craft a good life through the achievements that you accumulate, especially if sacrifice your wellbeing to get there. Generally, you’ll be happier if you have a daily routine that you enjoy. And that lifestyle is planned around and fulfilling despite (or sometimes because of) the circumstance of inevitable aging and death.

I’ve also thought about how surgeons aren’t saving lives. They’re just extending them. The person still dies eventually.

I think it would be helpful to adopt the same perspective about our current predicament and collapse. This isn’t about securing a victory that’s permanent or racing toward some happily-ever-after. It’s more like figuring out, like you might as an individual, how to craft an existence (for you and the beings around you) that optimizes within the given constraints.

For example, when much of the world was in lockdown in spring 2020, there was a lot that was out of your control. But you could also adapt and make the best of it, striving with your behavior to live the best story possible based on what you had to work with. The person who was prepared to fill their time with new hobbies or who hosted a nightly group Zoom, had a better time that those who struggled to shape their lives around the unfamiliar conditions (*this is assuming financial and medical security).

The minutes are ticking by anyway. You may as well make them better minutes. And it’d also be wise to behave proactively to (at least potentially) produce better future minutes.

Pick Your Adventure(s)

Bigger Memo: The Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and therefore a necessarily short tenure.

Key Actionable Implication: The industrial-digital system (on which I’ve become reliant for food, water and thermoregulation) has no future and will be expiring over the new few decades.

I think of actions in three categories:

Oxygen Mask

It’s 2037. You’re bringing home your monthly ration of rice and beans in a wheelbarrow. This sucks … OR … You’re bringing home your ration, thinking about how you’ll prepare it with the fresh veggies and herbs that you’ve been growing in your yard. This past spring, you traded some oregano seeds that you’d saved for an envelope of your neighbor’s hot pepper seeds, and the plants have been surprisingly productive!

Build skills, focused on meeting your essential needs (thermoregulation, water, food) in the absence of a functional larger system. As you become adept at supporting yourself, you’ll be in a position to help other. Develop healthy habits that protect your wellbeing - again, also so that you can be of aid to others. Acquire literal tools and equipment that facilitate everything you’re doing. “Craft your context” - If you can, and if it’s justified, relocate. Connect with others.

Extricating yourself even just slightly from reliance on the formal food system also frees you up to be active in the two other ways that I’ll describe.

I’ll have more concrete examples of all these in a future post.

Less Werld, More Earth

It’s 2043. You walk past a lawn that’s littered with trash and yellowed in the patches where people have relieved themselves. It’s disheartening to see that, after municipal garbage collection and plumbing systems dwindled, people just adopted the most careless behaviors … OR … You walk past an abandoned lot that you and your friends converted to a meadow several years ago. It’s abuzz with insects. You’re happy to offer them a home to raise their families or a pit stop along their migratory paths. It’s nice to spend a moment thinking about other species and their experiences, as opposed to the latest human drama. The flowers are gorgeous. You think back to when you and your friends seeded this space. It was a rough time - The manufacture of life-saving modern medications was tapering off. You all planted this as a reminder that there could still be beauty amid pain.

As I described in ELI5: Collapse’s Inevitability, what’s occurring is a war between “the Werld” and Earth. It’s been ongoing for 12,000 years, it’s nearing its end and only Earth can win. Nevertheless, she could use our help to resist and recover from the Werld’s campaign. Actions under this category are ones that propagate the (“wild”) Biosphere and protect it, along with the Lithosphere and Abiosphere, from extraction.

Hospice the Werld

It’s 2045. As you search in an old drawer for scissors, you find a plane ticket from the last spring break trip you ever took. It reminds you of navigating the airport, lounging at the beach, taking a hot shower, perusing a mouthwatering menu and dancing at a nightclub. Mostly it just reminds you of that feeling on unquestioning confidence (which you recognize now was an illusion) that everything would always be that way. You feel empty. …OR… You and your friends have a routine where you check in on each other every evening. They find you feeling downtrodden and convince you to join them on a walk. By the end of it, you’re feeling enlivened and grateful.

This is about helping the Werld (a.k.a. modernity a.k.a. civilization) “die gracefully”. It’s about practicing gratitude for the perks while they last and allowing ourselves to grieve as they fade.

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Bigger Memo: The Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and therefore a necessarily short tenure.

(I explain why in ELI5: Collapse’s Inevitability and at more length in my 18 core essays)

Key Actionable Implication: The industrial-digital system on which many of us rely for thermoregulation, water and food has no future and will be expiring over the next few decades.

(I explain why in Let’s Eat Cake! Part 3 and at more length in my 18 core essays)

Scenarios

Disclaimer / Clarification / Things Lost to Simplifying Assumptions

• I’m specifically referring to the systems that meet civilization’s human members’ essential needs for food, water and thermoregulation.

• Conditions will vary by location.

• Conditions will vary over time.

• In reality, we aren’t dealing with a 🟢/🔴 binary. Earth systems and manmade systems are already in bad shape. We’re dealing with shades of orange. I’m going to stick with green as meaning “good enough”.

• Earth: 🔴 & Manmade: 🟢 = Survival with this combination is mostly impossible. Granted, a weak example of movement toward this might be hydrologists’ drought-inspired (or desertification-inspired) advice to Iran that it drop ambitions of food security self-reliance and “switch from growing thirsty staple crops such as rice to higher-value, less water-intensive crops that can be sold internationally in exchange for staples”. But surviving indefinitely in a completely hostile environment (whether that’s outer space, Mars or a decimated Earth) isn’t an option, no matter how much impressive the technology. Scenario A below isn’t realistic either, but it’s a less absurd place to start for those who aren’t yet thoroughly familiar with how impossible-to-sustain our current state is.

Scenario A

Earth: 🟢, Manmade: 🟢, human competence: n/a

The engineers manage to keep the Titanic from sinking any further and maybe even manage to remove some of the floodwater, so that it rights itself and remains afloat for at least another 50 years.

Scenario B

Earth: 🟢, Manmade: 🔴, human competence: 🟢

The Titanic sinks and “enough” people in “my radius” have learned to swim and built rafts.

“Learn to swim and build rafts” = Master skills and implement techniques to meet our essential needs (thermoregulation, water, food) in the absence of the larger industrial-digitized system.

“Enough” people = It’s hard to know what any person’s “relevant radius”1 will be or how many competent people (per total population) are enough to get everyone else functioning optimally. We know that in 1790, 90% of Americans were farmers. There’ll be a maximum % of people whom my radius will be able to afford as non-farmers. I can’t be sure what it is. There’ll be a maximum student-teacher ratio before the teacher is supervising more acreage than they can effectively manage, and crop yields suffer. I can’t be sure what it is.

For many humans, swimming and raft-building will be impossible.

Scenario C

Earth: 🟢, Manmade: 🔴, human competence: 🔴

The Titanic sinks and NOT “enough” people in “my radius” have learned to swim and built rafts.

Scenario D

Earth: 🔴, Manmade: n/a, human competence: n/a

The Titanic sinks and “enough” people in “my radius” have learned to swim and built rafts but the powerful waves drown us anyway.

This could be a situation where, by 2050: Climate had changed so rapidly that growing crops is a major challenge. And/or, in our desperation, humans have cut down so many forests and burned so much trash and foraged so many wild plants and hunted so many wild animals that we’ve created a toxic, lifeless wasteland.2

Evaluating the Scenarios

Scenario A is off the table. The Titanic is in a lose-lose situation. (I explain this here.)

Scenario B might be possible. It would be nice. This is what I want. But no one else can make Scenario B instead of C happen for you. Individuals, collectively, make it happen at the hyperlocal and bioregional level. And in my county, people simply aren’t putting in the work that is required to put us clearly on track to it, so I can’t say that I see it materializing here.

Where I am, I see people’s attention and effort mainly focused on futile Scenario A, or else pursuits that aren’t geared toward Scenario B. Scenario C or D are currently the most likely outcomes.

I think that, in the future, every individual will succumb to a personal Scenario D eventually.

Ironically, when society is overly attached to Scenario A, they compress Scenarios B/C/D into a single outcome: doom. This lack of nuance discourages investment in Scenario B, thereby driving us toward the worst-worst case. And it’s because some humans built the Titanic in the first place that most of us are now all at risk of drowning.

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This week, I’ve just collected some very general information about farmland at three scales: the USA, New York State and Tompkins County.

I think a lot of this will shift over the coming decades - both what’s grown and where. Nevertheless, it’s good to have a sense of the situation in the 2020s.

📍Global 🌏

I think we can sort humans into three broad categories based on main calorie source:

• foraging plants and hunting animals

• growing plants and raising animals

• consuming plants that someone else grew and animals that someone else raised

Here’s my attempt to figure out how much of the human population falls under each:

Foraging and Hunting: 10 million

Growing and Raising1 (vulnerability varies - see Let’s Eat Cake! Part 3):

• A 2023 FAO report found that 857 million humans work in primary agricultural production.

• This report, citing a paper that I can find (Nagayets, O. (2005). Small farms: current status and key trends. Paper prepared for the Future of Small Farms Research Workshop. Wye College, June 26–29, 2005) says that 2 billion humans farm on less than 5 acre (which may or may not mean they’re subsistence farmers).

Consuming Someone Else’s Yields (most vulnerable):

• Well, as of 2024, 4.7 billion humans live in cities.

… This doesn’t add up to all 8.2 billion humans as of 2025. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Help me out in the comments!

📍USA 🇺🇸

Where is the USA’s crop land?

(Although, this is -ironically- a separate question from “Where is the USA’s fertile soil and groundwater?”)

What’s growing here?

by acreage:

by most valuable commodity:

Where are the USA’s HUMANS?

USA population = 340 million

USA carrying capacity =

• potentially a max of 807 million?! (according to this study)

• Pimentel estimated a max of 200 million2.

• Another study found that “Most areas of the country could feed between 80 percent and 100 percent of their populations with food grown or raised within 50 miles”… However, a 50-mile radius would restrict NYC to feeding only 5% of its population. Even if it could source food from a 100-mile radius, that would meet only 30% of its population’s needs.

Who’s performing the labor (and possesses the skills)?

Probably not your and your friends, Reader.

Humans whom our nation may or may not continue to admit. Machines that we won’t be able to continue powering.

Not represented in the chart above: Lots and lots of heavy machinery powered by energy slaves.

📍New York State 🗽🍦

Where is NY’s crop land?

What’s growing here?

Not my ideal allocation of resources.

We’re the #1 in the USA for beets though! (although another source says that California produces the most sugar beets-?)

NY population (2024) = 19.8 million … with 8.5 million in NYC, which means 11.3 million across the rest of the state

NY carrying capacity = 6.6 million … This 2009 study (here’s a one-pager) (here’s someone’s blog post about it) evaluated 42 diets and found that the most-bang-for-our-buck option would feed 34% of the population (which at the time was 19.5 million)

Tompkins County

Population = 105,6023

Community Supported Agriculture summer share counts:

• Full Plate: 800

• Sweet Land: 400

• West Haven: 250

• Nook & Cranny: 100

• Plus many more CSAs that supply our county (For this exercise, I wouldn’t count any from outside Tompkins)

These growers offer shares in the hundreds whereas our residents number in the tens of thousands. Furthermore, if you were to tally up the total calories in one weekly share, it surely doesn’t meet your weekly caloric needs. (Many of the items are tasty and micronutrient-dense, but not calorie-dense.)

Granted, a few of these farms grow yields beyond what they distribute as shares. They also supply wholesalers, local grocery stores and local restaurants. And within the County, 80,000 acres are actively farmed for some agricultural product. But still…

We might have the impression that we live in an agricultural paradise where local growers are feeding us, but much what the county consumes is likely “imported”.

The Reindeer of St. Matthew’s Island

The story of St. Matthew’s Island is often cited as a classic example of carrying capacity, population dynamics, overshoot and collapse.

• 1944 - During World War II, the US Coast Guard sets up a station on a remote island off the coast of Alaska. It’s 138 square miles. They release 29 reindeer onto it as a backup food source for the men working there… The men wrap up their work there and abandon the island, without hunting any reindeer. There are no predators on the island. Lichen (symbiotic fungi + algae) grew in “mats 4 inches thick”.

• 1957 - Dave Klein, working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, visits the island. There are now 1,350 reindeer, “most of which were fat and in excellent shape. Klein noticed that reindeer had trampled and overgrazed some lichen mats.”

• 1963 - 6,000 reindeer. “Klein noted the animals’ body size had decreased since his last visit, as had the ratio of yearling reindeer to adults.”

• 1964 - “A series of winter cyclones comparable in intensity to a Category 2 hurricane… brought much heavier than normal snowfall, stronger winds, and lower temperatures.” … But even if the storms hadn’t hit, the lichen had a set rate at which it could grow back, to continuously feed the deer.

• 1966 - 42 reindeer and lots of skeletons. 41 female, 1 male abnormal antlers, likely sterile.

The human population hinges upward slightly when Earth entered the Holocene, and dramatically as empires expanded into “virgin” land and discovered oil. As my previous post noted, we’re now losing all of those advantages.

The Fate(s) of Pickle Island

As I described in Part 1 of this series, my inspiration for this was the fairly widespread blindness to (what I anticipate will be) an end to this brief, strange period when some Homo sapiens could rely on complex coordination and long-distance supply chains to meet essential needs. In the future, communities will either accomplish this at a local or bioregional scale, or they wont meet those needs.

Here, I’ll present three versions of a fictional Pickle Island.

This following scenarios aren’t so far-fetched:

• In Alaska: A real place relies for supply deliveries on ice roads that are now melting. And will they really finish the all-weather roads that the article mentions? And as diesel becomes scarce, will any be allocated to the trucks that drive that route? (The article features a “Pickle Lake”, and given that “a pickle” is synonymous with a predicament and just sounds funny, I’m rolling with it.)

• In Bolivia: The country has been experiencing a diesel supply shortage since at least 2024. The fuel crunch stifled “everything from the operation of tractors to the sourcing of machinery parts” and “prevent[ed] farmers from getting their produce to distribution centers and markets”. Protesters marched, shouting “Everything is expensive!” and demanding a remedy. Their Economy Minister assured citizens that “Diesel sales are in the process of returning to normal” … By 2025, farmers were still hurting for diesel, and then leadership had scrapped fuel subsidies, which led diesel prices to more-than-double. Cue transportation strike.

• In Cuba: Provinces outside the capital have electricity for only 4 hours per day. “To buy gasoline, people have to use an app to sign up for an appointment... One resident of Havana … joined the queue three months ago, and is now No. 5,052 in line.” Due to fuel shortages, trash pick-up is sporadic, so rotting food is accumulating curbside,1 so mosquitos2 (and mosquito-borne disease) are spreading. For medications, if you don’t have contacts abroad, you can’t get any. Grocery items are too expensive to afford on a typical income. Cubans could stretch rations for only 5 days per week, and now, government ration stores rarely even have food.

Pickle Island | Version 1: Industrialism Forever!

We start with 10 Boomers and 20 Millennials. They move to an island. Food comes on a diesel-powered boat. Some academics and bloggers from the outside world warn of worsening resource decline and supply chain disruptions, but the Pickletons ignore this crazy talk. Dramatic things like that just don’t happen! They focus on their careers and pre-existing hobbies (cycling! photography! stand-up comedy!) and personal life goals, including parenting, which can be really time- and energy-consuming. The 20 Millennials couple up and each pair has 2 babies. Then the food deliveries get cut off. (So does internet too, let’s say, so they can’t look up foraging guides.) The Pickletons stare at their lawns and starve.

Final tally:

Demand = 10 + 20 + 20 = 50 humans (granted, some have temporarily lower calorie requirements)

Supply = 0 (I suppose the unit of measure here is “minimum continuous calorie supply to keep 1 human alive indefinitely”)

Pickle Island | Version 2: Low-Effort Collapse Model

Same 10 Boomers and 20 Millennials. This time, they’re thinking about collapse but working with a low-effort model.

Based on a recent post from The People’s Paper, “You’re Prepping for the Wrong Disaster”, these people are prepping for the right disaster. Many have attended Kollapscamp and are therefore extra confident about their answers to “What’s happening? Why? What lies ahead?”

They hold a weekly device-free potluck, swap thrifted clothes, learn carpentry, host repair cafés and mending circles, and frequently pause to reflect on their reverence for the more-than-human-world. In total, they conceive fewer babies, because they’re worried about the future and reject the pronatalist agenda of the baby-shower-industrial complex. A few garden, but they order seeds from catalogs instead of saving from their own yields, and therefore don’t think to strategize against inbreeding depression. Everyone keeps their homes stocked with several weeks’ worth of food in case of an emergency, because they’re smarter than those climate change-denying fools! Then, food deliveries stop.

Final tally:

Demand = 10 + 20 + 10 = 40.

Supply = 2. (Only cultivated food counts. The “imported” canned food isn’t a continuous food source. It’s a stock, not a flow.)

Pickle Island | Version 3: Deeply Collapse-Aware

One more time! 10 Boomers and 20 Millennials. They detect the signal through the noise, and they put practicality before ideology, cultural norms and unskillful attachments. They resolve the devote their time and energy strategically. They aren’t expert gardeners etc.3, so they can’t make a sudden flip to collective self-sufficiency. They continue to work their remote jobs and exchange their income for the food that comes on the boat, but they know they can’t trust it forever, so they don’t lean in too hard professionally. They set a boundary of 40 hours/week of work in the formal economy, even though it means that a mainland colleague gets the promotion instead – which brings feelings of disappointment and frustration, and maybe judgement from others. (“Everyone else out there is fulfilling their potential while I’m becoming a nobody!”) By ditching (or pausing) some activities that now feel less relevant, like finishing a giant jigsaw puzzle or planning a month-long trip to a distant destination, they carve out more time for skill-building. After everyone on the island discusses population dynamics’ impacts on all island inhabitants and the group reaches consensus, a few couples have kids. When the food deliveries stop, they’ve worked up to successfully farming multiple acres, although ongoing climate destabilization makes it more challenging.

Demand = 10 + 20 + 4 = 34.

Supply = 25…. or anything >0 and <33.

But at least, since they spent their spare bandwidth on learning to source food, the disparity is Demand 35 / Supply 15 … anything is better than Demand 40 / Supply 0.

Pickle Island: Remarks

Skilled Labor

The St. Matthew’s analogy isn’t a perfect parallel to the situation that civilization members face because, as I laid out in the post where I proposed this term, they rely on agriculture - on making food happen, rather than making do with what’s automatically there, as many animals do.

Deer have foraging skills. Aspiring crop-eaters would need gardening/farming skills. The unspoken assumption behind carrying capacity calculations is that the creature doing the eating possesses the relevant SKILLS, EQUIPMENT, SUPPLIES and SYSTEMS to make it happen.

“Relevant Radius”

Since this story involved an island, it was easy to determine the headcount and acreage that they had to work with, and what the resultant Demand and Supply were. I reality, things are fraying and flickering. We can know that everyone’s radius for sourcing food will be shrinking over time, but I like to use the phrase “relevant radius” as a placeholder for whatever it might be, precisely, in any give year.

Courage Doesn’t Always Get You A Lollipop

I hesitate to pitch collapse-awareness on the promise that it’s the ticket to okayness. That’s why, in Version 3 of Pickle Island, I still had Demand exceeding Supply. Face reality because you appreciate that maturity is its own reward.

Self-Sufficiency As Protection Against Exploitation

I could describe a fourth Pickle Island scenario where residents lose access to learning resources, deliveries decline and an outside entity offers, “Come work in our camps! Yes they suck but at least there’s someone to provide farming ‘instruction’!” If no one on Pickle Island has already started learning to meet essential needs (who can then also act as a teacher) or if the student:teacher ratio is 39:1, residents might feel more pressure to take that deal than if they were really getting a handle on it in advance. It isn’t necessarily life-or-death, but the difference between more or less misery.

Now we’ll look at how farming as doom-victim: How it’s being ended.

I’ll organize this according to farming’s fundamental requirements.

Living components (soil fertility+)

Importance

• perennials’ roots hold the soil in place

• fungi transmit messages among plants

• bacteria respond to plants’ signals for which kinds of nutrients they need

• pores hold air, water and nutrients for everybody down there

Rarity & Rate of depletion

• Topsoil can form as slowly as 0.1 mm/year in some areas, whereas agricultural erosion in the USA averages around 0.5 mm/year.

• In its State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture 2025, the FAO said, “the potential for [spatial] agricultural expansion is limited, as further land conversion to cropland would have impacts on other ecosystems and their services”

• 24-46% of the USA Corn Belt’s cultivated area is devoid of A-horizon soil (“The authors aren’t talking [merely] about reduced soil fertility or loss of mineral nutrients. They’re talking about the complete removal of the medium in which crops are grown.”)

• The claim that “we have 60 harvests left” is unsubstantiated. Someone was able to trace it back to a 2010 statement from Professor John Crawford at the University of Sydney. By 2014, Maria-Helena Semedo of the FAO had woven it into a speech. However, there’s no obvious data source for this. A 2020 assessment of soil lifespans worldwide (visualized here by Our World in Data) found that 66% of bare soils, 84% of conventionally-managed soils, 93% of conservationally-managed soils have over 100 years (and sometimes way more) before they lost 30 centimeters (the researchers’ definition of being thoroughly depleted).

Impacts

• As of 2025, Ukraine’s land is losing fertility and natural productivity. From 1991 to 2021, its soil’s organic matter had dropped by almost 9%.

• “Most conversations about food insecurity start at the grocery store. Prices go up. Access goes down. People talk about budgets, wages, supply chains and policy failures. But the real emergency begins long before any of that. It starts in the soil. More specifically, it starts when the soil can no longer feed the plants that feed us… Soil collapse isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t arrive the way storms or droughts do. It shows up as smaller harvests, weaker plants, fields that take more input every year to produce the same yield.”

• Produce is less nutritious: “From 1975 to 1997 … average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980… found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent.”

  • The rising atmospheric CO2 level is also reducing nutritiousness

Functional plant-bodies & food webs

It’s great that society is finally recognizing the role of subterranean life in crop performance. But we should probably expand that sense of the system to include the whole workforce of beings, striving to maintain synergy despite human agriculture:

• Within plants, even if we got everything else right: Microplastics are reducing wheat, rice and maize yields by up to 14%. “When taken up by plants, microplastics can block nutrient and water channels, induce unstable molecules that harm cells and release toxic chemicals, which can reduce the level of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll.”

• Among beings: Everything is interconnected. There could be dynamics that are vital to crop health, beyond our awareness. Consider this anecdote about vultures as key decomposition managers from Post #2.1. Is it not possible that something the Werld is doing could similarly “break” agriculture?

  1980s: India’s vulture population is 40,000,000

  1990s: India’s farms give diclofenac to livestock. This makes its way into vultures’ systems, causing lethal kidney failure. Without abundant vultures, garbage, excrement and carrion build up.

  2000-2005: The excrement and carrion that build up in the vultures’ absence are tied to 100,000 extra human deaths from disease. India’s feral dogs, who no longer have to compete with as many vultures, see their population increase by at least 5,000,000, leading to over 47,000 extra human deaths from rabies.

  2006: India bans diclofenac.

  2017: The vulture population is still only 19,000 (0.05% of what it had been).

Non-living components (Holocene climate, groundwater)

Importance

• Our crops evolved to expect fairly stable seasons and weather patterns. Daylight hours and temperature were reliable cues for seeds and dormant plants to become active. Precipitation was distributed over the year, which gave plants an opportunity to absorb an appropriate amount of water.

• Some perennials require a certain number of chill hours to produce a higher quantity and size of fruit.

• Winter cold interrupts our micro-competitors’ (i.e. pests’) reproductive cycles, keeping their populations low.

Rarity & Rate of departure

Rarity: RARE AF

Rate of departure: LINE GOES STRAIGHT UP

Current impacts of climate change on agriculture

Just a taste:

• 2024 UK: facing food shortages and price rises after extreme weather

• 2025: Produce is ripening off-schedule

• 2025 USA: due to drought, farmers find it increasingly hard to grow feed for cows, and cattle numbers are lower than they’ve been in 70 years

• 2025 Europe: European farmers struggle through driest spring in a century

• 2025 Iraq: lost 70% of its livestock

• Pests threaten grain, tomatoes, olives, cocoa, oranges … Pests threaten California fruit and nuts … “Pests and diseases destroy about 40% of global crop production” (?!)

• a December 2025 Guardian piece gives an overview of impacts so far

• 2026 Florida USA freeze - temperatures dropped to 20F. To protect berry plants, farmers sprayed continuous overhead irrigation, “to create a … layer of ice that preserves the temperature of the plant and berry above freezing… unless the air gets too cold, and the heft of the ice breaks leaves and branches, or even topples over the entire plant” “Damage has not yet been quantified, but this latest cold snap could heavily jeopardize not only this year’s crop, but the overall health of thousands of planted acres in the region.” … An orange grower “believes many of the young trees he planted this winter won’t survive”… “AccuWeather projects that 8% to 10% of unharvested oranges may be ruined” “Thousands of seasonal workers could see their hours slashed or their jobs cut” One farmer “estimates blueberry crop losses to be around 70 to 80 percent in Florida” and “around half of the state’s strawberry crop has been destroyed for the next 30 days”

In Post #2.2, the “Climate impacts on agriculture” section has more links about current events.

Granted, as of 2025, Canada’s farmers are doing well despite new extremes.

It doesn’t help that we’re draining aquifers faster than precipitation replenishes them. See here for a global visual.

Future impacts of climate change on agriculture

Prognoses vary.1

A Guardian headline in 2024 read, “Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25 years”. The Global Commission on the Economics of Water report doesn’t say exactly that, but they provide some cool graphics here and directs you to this 2020 FAO report that says “Rainfed production dominates agriculture, covering about 80 percent of total cropland and accounting for more than half of the world’s food production.”

UNESCO’s UN World Water Development Report for 2025 stated that “2 billion people downstream [of mountain waterways] depend on these natural reservoirs for freshwater resources from melting glaciers.” (And glaciers are receding.) Here’s the Guardian story.

One study determined that, when we pass 2C, losses-to-pests will (might) increase by 46% for wheat, 19% for rice and 31% for maize.

“One paper in 2016 relied on computer simulations to model the effects of Dust Bowl conditions on modern agriculture. Corn and soy crop yields would decline by around 40 percent … and wheat yields would drop 30 percent. And every one degree Celsius (1.8 F) increase in temperature would cause the effects to worsen by 25 percent.” (In 2012, the USA had its driest summer since 2018 and corn yields dropped 26%.)

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries predicts the following, given +2.5C and AMOC collapse2:

A “breadbasket failure” is when a major producer of rice, maize, wheat or soybean produces <=75% of its typical yield. As the global temperature rises from +0.85 °C to +1.5 °C, the impact on yields will likely be greater compared to the +1.5°C to +2 °C stretch. For example, in the case of maize, which will probably get hit worst, the risk of multiple breadbasket failure was 6% to start, rises to 40% as we cross +1.5°C, and is 54% at +2 °C. (Nevertheless, the risk is higher and the risk of multiple simultaneous failures is higher.)

Insurer Lloyd’s estimates that between 2024 and 2054, there’s a 50% chance of a “major” food crisis, 28% chance of “severe”, 9% chance of “extreme” … (defined in financial terms)

This study predicts, based on RCP6.0 (i.e. as much as +3.7C by 2100) that the land area suitable for crops will decline by 2.3% (±6.1%) for staple tropical crops (cassava, rice, sweet potato, sorghum, taro, and yam) and 10.9% (±24.2%) for stable temperate crops (potato, soybean, wheat, and maize). They acknowledge that the study looks only at temperature and rainfall (i.e. forecasted annual averages?), and not at hydrology, soil depth, soil texture, soil organic matter, soil pH, nutrient availability, biotic symbionts, animal agriculture, pollinators, pests, and diseases.

This report is optimistic about future agriculture in Norway, whereas the 2024 Open Letter by Climate Scientists to the Nordic Council of Ministers is pretty grim on Norway.

A study found that, per degree-Centigrade of heating, annual global production declines by 5.5 × 10¹⁴ kcal … Math! If someone eats 2,000 calories per day (although humans can survive on less), that’s 730,000 per year. And the loss amounts to 7.5 million people’s-worth of calories. Which sounds like a lot but is <0.1% of the global human population.

A simulation found that, per degree-Centigrade of heating, year-to-year yield variance would be 7% (maize) to 19% (soy) … ‼️ I’m not sure how to interpret this. Like, if the baseline yield is 1,000 units of maize, what would we see at +1C, +2C, +3C?

Another simulation of North East China found that farmland relocation and/or expansion could increase yields … However, there are limits to how much you can relocate and/or expand before you encroach on another crop. For example, in the simulation, they got rice yields to increase +62% but at the cost of dropping maize by 32% and soybeans by 28%.

The UN notes that, above 25C, heat stress increases for livestock and mortality rates increase. Dairy cows produce less milk, and the milk has less fat and less protein. Pigs and chickens, because they can’t sweat, experience organ failure, digestive tract breakdown and cardiovascular shock. For crops, above 30C, plants’ cell walls weaken and they produce toxins. In some areas, maize yields have declined 10% and wheat has declined by almost 10% too..

Fossil Fuels

**This third set of factors renders inapplicable any of the high-tech so-called-solutions to the first two sets of issues. Renewables do not provide a loophole. I explain in these three posts how they and other alternative forms of industrialism further destroy Earth (making it less hospitable to farming and to life in general) and fail to preserve digital-industrial systems. If you’ve be operating under a different impression, that’s because -as I explore here- media consistently distort reality.

Importance

• as combustion FUEL

  • for the trucks that bring all the materials to the farms - e.g. .

    • many/most USA farms order seeds from suppliers who make sure to save seed from enough individuals to guard against the inbreeding depression that would affect smaller-scale operations (+see Reddit thread here) … GMO seed production is even more centralized

    • Farmers who raise livestock give them mineral supplements. Without this, they’ll have fewer and/or less-meaty animals.

  • for the heavy machines that mines phosphate and potash as fertilizers

  • for the heavy machinery that (in some/many cases) does the planting, spreads fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides and collects harvests

  • to flame-weed

  • to transport pollinators and pest-predators (e.g. a greenhouse might “hire” bumblebees to pollinate and lady beetles to hunt aphids)

  • for the trucks that transport the harvest to consumers

  • to manufacture and transport equipment, infrastructure and repair parts

• as ELECTRICITY generator (98% of US electricity)

  • to run irrigation

  • to refrigerate the food - at the farm, in transit, at destination … or else to preserve it in other ways (e.g. turn corn into a Dorito)

  • to heat/ventilate a greenhouse

  • to run the internet for the sake of coordination … digital systems that coordinate food distribution have also been subject to cyberattack

• as MATERIAL for synthetic products

  • for synthetic pesticides

  • for synthetic fertilizers (methane involved in Haber-Bosch process)

  • for containers of inputs (e.g. fish emulsion comes in a plastic jug, potting mix and dehydrated chicken manure come in plastic bags)

  • polyethylene for high tunnels / hoop houses

  • landscape fabric & plastic mulch & row cover & insect netting

  • drip tape & tile lines

  • seed-starting trays/flats

  • plastic bags/containers for final products - which sometimes help to retain freshness (at least for processed/packaged foods)

  • misc.: tires, trugs, string-trimmer string

  • *to make modern vaccines - because if you’re going to produce so much food and thereby produce so many humans, an overlooked but integral part of a system whose unspoken function is to drive up population density is a technology that suppresses illnesses in otherwise-very-contagion-favorable conditions

Rarity

Fossil fuel solids, liquids and gasses took millions of years to form and the geological conditions favorable for that may have been a one-time thing.

Rate of access loss

We’re now blowing through them in a few hundred years. In 2050 we might have about half the industrial oomph of 2025. See my Post #1.3 for more.

Headlines

• 2024 Bolivia: a diesel shortage paralyzed agricultural work. Their President promised that “things would get back to normal in ten days starting Wednesday” … 2025 a worsening fuel shortage is starting to hit farmers’ ability to harvest their crops

• 2025 Argentina: facing a diesel shortage, the gov has authorized the use of lower quality diesel, which has higher sulfur content

Final Remarks

“Artificial scarcity”?

I hear a lot from progressives, especially in the food space, that “We have plenty of food; we just need to distribute it better” and that any scarcity that experience is artificial, manufactured by capitalism.

Those might the conditions that more fortunate nations enjoy currently, but we’ll have to update those for the future: Fossil fuels yielded the temporary artificial abundance, and we’ll have neither the bounty not the means to distribute it well.

These statements ignore the species whose populations have taken a nosedive as humans expand their occupation zone. It was always a zero-sum game. We just haven’t been tracking whom we’ve been depriving of food and habitat as we increase our own access to it.

Mind the outflow!

This is related and I have not mentioned it much: We currently send a lot of our food scraps and feces to landfills, and we bury human corpses in graves or incinerate them. As the industrial era winds down, and we can no longer rely on running water or flush toilets or garbage trucks or excavators or furnaces - Where will it all go?

Mind the demand side!

There has arisen a food system in which food-demanders perform activity that some third party considers valuable, to qualify for a share of food-growers’ harvests. Many of those qualifying activities came into existence only because of our temporary access to electricity and abundant, dense liquid fuel. As the industrial era winds down, how many humans will retain the option of engaging in food-unrelated activities in exchange for getting fed?

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The American Farmland Trust’s bumper stickers are a bit misleading.

Life appeared on Earth at least 3,700,000,000 years ago …

Homo sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago …

But farms appeared only 12,000 years ago.

Clearly there has been food without farms. It’s just that we’ve become accustomed to a particular kind of food - that which is grown/raised en masse in a deliberate, controlled way.

Calories Harnessed Determines Headcount

“It’s where the atoms come from”

Some of the text on this infographic of “Population Growth versus Crop Production” reads “As the global population grows and countries become wealthier, crop production must keep pace.” The image is “presented by” BHP, which describes itself on its website as the “world’s largest mining company by market capitalization, lead producer of iron ore, copper and metallurgical coal [and soon potash]”.

The message there is that society increased food production in response to rising population. That’s incorrect; it’s the other way around. Food makes babies. Tom Murphy explores this in more length, but I think this one line is enough of a mic drop: “Humans are built out of the food we eat. It’s where the atoms come from.” You could test the inverse: Deny someone food for a year and see if they themselves survive, let alone reproduce. If anything, we could adjust it to this: Food makes babies possible, although maybe not guaranteed.

BHP’s (and many organizations’) sense of what’s-a-response-to-what is reversed.

Disincentivized Restraint (and if even ONE group indulges…)

Certain human societies had various ways of capping their populations. Consider the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island1. They’ve lived there for tens of thousands of years - since long before civilization(s) (or as I’ve been calling them/it, “the Werld”) started to appear. If you’re determined to remain on that island, you have to set a budget. And the way to stay within that budget is to keep your population low.

Farming creates the temptation to ditch a budget, in two ways:

1. Encouragement of undue confidence - You can get too cocky about your ability to manipulate the planet. If you manage to convert a whole acre to farmland and grow a ton of food, and the acres are stretching out in every direction, you feel limitless. Why not keep adding to the headcount? You can just keep expanding your harvest!

2. Discouragement of family planning advice - In some smaller groups of humans, a member’s decision to become a parent could be and often was everyone’s business. If your tribe/clan/band grows beyond 200 individuals, a self-reinforcing situation emerges. More people = lose influence over each other = more people = …

And give into temptation, we have …

It’s common to blame capitalism and debt for our ecological footprint’s growth.2

However, looking back further, Tom Murphy found that with agriculture alone (which began around 10,000 BCE whereas city-states emerged around 4000 BCE), the humans population was rising a 0.042%. At that rate, we would have reached 8 billion humans in 8800 CE. That’s later than 2022 CE, but not much later, especially on a geological timescale.

The fact that your group is exercising restraint and staying within budget (as the North Sentinelese are) doesn’t change the fact that another group somewhere else could decide to behave recklessly. And then eventually, everyone pays.

It would also follow from this that changing only our diets (going vegan) would initially free up all the land that the modern food system uses for feedstock/grazing. However, all else equal, our population would expand and reoccupy those acres.

No backing down

In “Civilized to Death”, Chris Ryan uses a story effectively to explain how (because food = individuals), once a group decided to adopt agriculture, it was hard to turn back.

Degrees of doom infliction

Disclaimers:

1. To my knowledge, I made this up.

2. I’m going to mainly focus on crops, not livestock - but you can imagine the parallels.

3. When I say “doom”, I mean bringing about the end of something. Because these practices are self-destructive, it’s hard to tease out doom-infliction from doom-victimhood (next week’s topic). Forgive me.

Level 0: Inhabitation without Occupation (Benign)

Definition: In this scenario, the rule is finders-keepers. Matter is up for grabs until you’re chewing it. When humans plant seeds, it’s in a way that reflects a perception of oneself as belonging to a greater whole, of one’s wellbeing as entangled with the integrity of that whole. It’s “self-interested” but with a broader concept of self. A departure from this wouldn’t be considered selfish - it’d be self-harm.

Example: If I were lazy, I’d just say “Like indigenous people in the Amazon!”3 What I’m finding is this 2012 study that found little evidence of heavy forest modification. And then this 2013 finding that 1% of the tree species present make up half of the tree population, a few of which humans very likely domesticated.

Anyway…

Other animals spread seeds too. My cursory check didn’t reveal any documentation intentional planting (please let me know if you find anything!) but their inadvertent gardening plays a crucial role that’s now missing. A 2022 study found that “60 percent of all plants [plant species, no individuals] globally are already having trouble keeping up with climate change as seed-spreading species face major drops in population numbers.”

Level 1: “Gentle” (hu)MANSPREAD

Definition: Humans convert a landscape that feeds a mix of species into one with plants that feed only humans - plants they can eat, like to eat, intend to eat. They may or may not use a physical barrier - a fence, row cover, traps…

Only “friendly” species are permitted. Pollinators are welcome. But any species who eats what was present before and not present after the conversion is out of luck. And the humans take measures against insects, mammals, birds or fungi who will compete with them for the same parts of the plants that they want - whether that’s the root, the shoots, the leaves or the fruit.

Ours.

I’m calling this (hu)manspread in reference to the phenomenon of men literally taking up space and thereby squeezing women out of it. What it “ends” is the buffet. We may feel like it’s not a big deal, but we might feel differently if another species were doing that to our farms.

I’m not sure if ant agriculture qualifies here. Is it as expansionary?

Level 2: (hu)MANSPREAD with Physical Shenanigans

Definition: This is “Rome-type farming”. Level 1 implements “eco-friendly” practices to build soil health (e.g. minimal tilling, composting, crop rotation, polycultures…), this skips those.

Deforestation (doom for forests)

• The Greek and Roman engaged in deforestation

• This contributes to climate change: During the 2010s, the conversion of Africa’s forests, grasslands and savanna to agricultural land has turned them from a carbon sink to a carbon emitter

• I have more deforestation data in my Post #2.1

Tilling + Annuals, especially monocrops of annuals (doom for soil)

• This destroys the soil’s integrity. There’s a whole biome in the soil, and when you repeatedly demolish it and deprive it of variety, the remaining live dies off. The nutrients wash away.

Here’s an somewhat unprofessional but otherwise good video of how large-scale agriculture was the basis for malnourishment, disease and social stratification:

Here’s a study about how cattle “caused” measles, goats caused tuberculosis, camels caused smallpox, and pigs and ducks caused influenza. Livestock also caused leprosy, dysentery, plague, hepatitis…

Level 3: (hu)MANSPREAD with Physical and Chemical Shenanigans

Definition: This is the epitome of modern conventional agriculture.

I’ll mention, for those who haven’t pondered this much before, that these next factors are a package deal (great for corporations!). If you’re going to use heavy machinery, you have to plant a monoculture - because the machine can’t treat each row in a customized way; it does one thing at one height as you drive past). And if you plant a monoculture, you have to use pesticides because monocultures are super vulnerable to competitors (“pests”). Whereas Level 1 might electrocute or bludgeon “intruders” (Organic™ methods!), Level 3 goes for poison.

Emissions from fossil-fueled machinery

• Doom the atmosphere/climate (via destabilization) - see Post #2.1 for more details

• Doom the oceans (via acidification) - Post #2.1 again!

Groundwater depletion

• Doom for … hydration? e.g. in the USA and in Pakistan

Synthetic fertilizer and manure runoff

• Doom for marine life (via eutrophication) - Post #2.1 …

Pesticides & Forever chemicals

• Doom for insects and maybe many other species - see my recent posts about the current Mass Extinction and deeper look into Insect Die-Off

• Doom for humans - major seed companies coat seeds in glyphosate which washes off … In 2025, yet another study adds to evidence that glyphosate herbicide can cause cancer. Good ol’ Post #2.1 has more info about the impacts of forever chemicals on human health.

• As a result of feedlot waste runoff, Iowa “has more than 700 ‘impaired’ waterways that contain toxins at levels above federal safety thresholds, including drinking water supplies for major cities … and has the second-highest and fastest-rising cancer incidence among all US states”

Microplastics

• Doom for all life! Seriously, these cause ALL the health problems. Guess where you can find more info? Post #2.1

Pandemics + antibiotic-resistant pathogens

• I already mentioned livestock under Level 2 but will also note that modern farming, with its heavy use of antibiotics, encourages antibiotic-resistant pathogens to develop

The New Breatharians

I recently came across the website for a Germany-based event, Kollapscamp. As I examined the website more closely, I noticed signs of what I would consider a low-effort model of collapse.

🟢 I found the green parts promising.

🔴 However, I found the red parts disconcerting. The upper statement (which appears prominently on the website) seems to present fascism as THE driver (and/or also the manifestation-?) of collapse, whereas only a catastrophe might impact food and energy. They didn’t think to invite local CSA-based farms. (And even if CSA farmers had been there, it wouldn’t have challenged the idea that the food supply is the exclusive responsibility of a small % whom we’ve formally designated as Farmers.)

🟠 Also, I found it interesting (although not so surprising in a society that is so alienated from the material underpinnings of its existence) that they chose to identify people more by which macro causes they cared about, instead of by what practical hands-on skills they had to offer (with the exception -maybe- of “hackers” and those from the “renewable energy scene”).

Similarly, the substack “Terrenity” recently advised that people respond to the breakdown of industrialism and our planet by merging Netflix subscriptions, sharing a ladder and buying food in bulk. Supposedly, “We can do much better than just returning to subsistence living.” But if we aren’t attending to the fundamentals, even subsistence living won’t be an option. Many Americans (the author is in the USA) are food recipients, reliant on the digital-industrial system to stay fed, and this system is being eroded. (Our stable climate and biosphere are, of course, also in jeopardy - Don’t worry, I’ll address this in the next few posts!)

This all reminded me of Marie Antoinette’s alleged statement1 in response to news of her citizens suffering for lack of bread: “Then let them eat cake!” Even if she didn’t say it, the point of this story was to illustrate that the nobility were out-of-touch. Now, we’re the out-of-touch ones, figuring that despite collapse (whatever Kollapscamp organizers envision it to be-?) there will at least be plenty of cake.

Or perhaps they’re like the Breatharian movement, convinced that humans can get by without any food at all.

Easily Squishable

We human members of complex civilization forget that we, like many other organisms, are collections of tubes and membranes that take in gasses, liquids and solids, and release those gasses, liquids and solids. That’s a big part of what it is to be alive, and is required to stay alive. We’re so in-our-heads that it doesn’t even occur to us to consider how those flows are not only threatened but bound to diminish.

In “Death as a Nothing-Burger”, Tom Murphy lists “conditions that end an individual life (sticking to human terms for the sake of familiarity)”:

“If one cuts a body in two, it fails to go on living due to rapid blood loss. The French of the 18th Century demonstrated repeatedly that just severing the head works every time (separating a vital part from the whole destroys the vitality of the whole). For that matter, removal of any (non-redundant) major organ usually is unsurvivable. A single bullet into the brain usually ends life, and quickly. Being suspended by a loop around the neck spells the end. A plastic bag or soft pillow held over the head (or really just mouth and nose) has a predictable result. Despite having water-based bodies, submersion in water for a minute or two is all it takes for termination. Exposure to 99.99999999999999999% of the universe (space) results in a quick death... Various poisons—even a single drop—can finish us off. More slowly, if we fail to import water, we are gone in a few days. Failure to ingest food likewise brings us to a protracted end within a few weeks. Cutting off the supply of essential nutrients (atoms) will lead to deterioration and death. We can die of exposure to excessive heat or (more commonly) cold... Tiny viruses or microbes can takes us down. Our own cells, when going off-script can become cancerous and kill us by interfering with normal function.

Reclaiming Agency

Humans who’ve grown up within complex civilization are as naïve as species born and raised in a zoo. A low-effort understanding of collapse ( / polycrisis / metacrisis) gives them an excuse to shrink away from the challenge of being directly responsible their essential survival needs. (Yes, it will be a communal effort, but this will nevertheless involve most individuals pitching it on many basic tasks.) When civilization’s members hear that their equivalent of a zoo is collapsing, they default to familiar roles that require minimal skill development beyond their comfort zone: analyst, coordinator…

I really like how Chris Ellis framed it in a talk, as a matter of agency. Civilization’s complex systems made me pathetically incompetent compared to the butterflies, bluebirds and bunnies outside my window. This is a nudge to try to redevelop some of that (hyperlocal or bioregional) “self”-sufficiency. Daniel Quinn would approve of Ellis’s framing. In “My Ishmael”, he suggests that the best way to get someone to re-embrace something is to get them to see that it used to be theirs and was taken from them.

100% chance of death

When Dougald Hine was asked to give the opening lecture of the year at Uppsala’s University’s Centre for Environment and Development Studies, he wondered “what I could say that might be some help as they grapple with the knowledge that is coming their way.” As his first slide, he shared his one prediction, one that we can’t do anything about: “WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.”

If you’re in the USA, here’s how you might’ve died if not for collapse:

What will be different in the future, as a result of malfunctioning systems, will be the timing and method of our deaths (…as well as our lived experience up until then).

For Your Convenience: Ways to Suffer and Die

Below, I’ve listed potential causes of suffering and/or death. This isn’t merely an exercise in morbidity. I can see two useful applications for it:

1. To plan your resilience efforts. In fact, after this five-part series on food, I’ll publish a “Living with Collapse” series that aims to helps readers plan how they’ll allocate attention and effort over the coming years, and it will refer back to this list. I find it helpful to think of resilience as steps that I’m taking to DELAY (inevitable) death and REDUCE (inevitable) suffering.

2. To know which bases you yourself don’t and probably won’t have covered. Advance awareness can help you connect with others whose strengths complement your weaknesses. And you could also work toward accepting, “Okay, this might be something I experience and even how my life ends.”

Death and some degree of suffering are guaranteed. But if you take responsibility and develop greater competence (like a normal animal), the future situations in which you find yourself and your ability to respond to them might at least be less embarrassing.

1. Thermo-(dis)-regulation

This can kill you in a matter of HOURS. Most of us rely on modern technology to avoid heat stroke and (more often) hypothermia. Modern tech is going away.

2. Thirst

This can kill you in DAYS. Most of us rely on modern technology to sake our thirst. This century, humans will experience the failure of modern plumbing (and irrigation) along with increasingly erratic rainfall.

3. Hunger

This can kill you in WEEKS. (Granted, even during a famine, people often have access to some calories, so the starvation process is more drawn-out.) Meeting our need for food will get harder for many reasons, which I’ll explore during the rest of this series.

4. Illness

Mainly, these travel by mucus, in water or by blood. Think malaria (and all the other mosquito-borne pathogens), Lyme (and other tick-borne pathogens), rabies, tetanus, botulism, hantavirus, bird flu(?), HIV…

The charts below demonstrate civilization’s fight against the illnesses that it brought into existence in the first place. It’s been successful so far, but we’re approaching a moment when modern pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, wastewater treatment and funeral/burial industry fade into history. Add to that the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

5. Disease & Injuries

This category spans a lot:

• Minor conditions like a sunburn or poison ivy rash

• Injuries from animal attacks (including humans)

• Injuries for accidents

• Autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases (including dementia)

• Mental disorders

• Diseases that arise from lifestyle factors and from inorganic pollutants in the air, water and soil - lung cancer, skin cancer, colon cancer, liver disease, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, kidney stones, and whatever microplastics and PFAs are doing to us

• Maladies from nutrient deficiency (arguably, this could go under #3 Hunger), e.g. beriberi, pellagra

Plus, over the course of this century, we’ll be losing access to modern cures and treatments for these - because those interventions require functional supply chains, widespread reliable electricity, trained staff and general stability.

6. Mental / Emotional / Social

Loneliness (exacerbated by being the only one who realizes that civilization is a cult) and stress (exacerbated by anticipation of future turmoil and everything I just listed - Oops, sorry!) can make you miserable, weaken your immune system and shorten you life.

I. Good Collapsology = Inter-Realm Dynamics

I keep harping on this idea that appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics” is the foundation for a serious, thorough, profound understanding of collapse.

For any other science, its fine to isolate certain factors. Red paint plus blue paint makes purple, never mind what’s happening beyond the art studio. But collapsology and predictions about the Werld’s future, to be valid, must consider everything - especially now that we’re at the point in the timeline where we’re devastating the entire planet. To circle back to the example from my first post in this series: A Doctor knows which are the more reliable ways to tell if a Patient is going to have a baby, in a narrow sense. But on top of that, to answer the question with even more accuracy, the Doctor would have to consider everything about the Patient’s life. That’s not how we approach the matter in practice. The factors would be too numerous to analyze. But what if the Doctor were, somehow, able to know that the Patient was going to take a flight that was going to crash? We have this information about the Werld. And it’s already at maximum altitude, hitting turbulence and running low on fuel.

II. A Ptolemaic Approach to Reality

Ever since Werld-humans started engaging in science, it has dealt blow after blow to their egos. First, evidence favored a heliocentric model of our solar system instead of a geocentric one. Ptolemy resisted reality and kept trying to hang onto the model that he had decided prematurely must be more accurate. As data poured in that contradicted his geocentrism, Ptolemy made his model more and more complicated, insisting that the other planets must orbit in “epicycles” as well as orbiting Earth.

Then, there was just too much darn proof that Homo sapiens evolved from apes and weren’t placed here in their final form.

The implicit lesson in both of these, and what made them hard to swallow, was that humans aren’t the center of the universe. We’re unique -as is every species- but we’re also ordinary.

Now Werld-humans are on the verge of another lesson about how un-special they are: Ecologically, we’ve made our bed and now we must lie in it. Our actions have consequences, and beyond a certain point, we can no longer offload the doom onto other species; it reaches us. We are not divine. This message comes in the form of, for example, the Limits to Growth study - plus a multitude of other reports.

But whereas the switch away from geocentrism and Creationism didn’t have any dire implications for daily life, the fact that the Werld is entering the downslope at the very end of its reign-of-terror on Earth… does. Therefore, many figures are scrambling for reasons to believe it isn’t so. But they aren’t really even bothering to “add epicycles to their models”. Their impressions are more detached from reality than ever, and they just allow the gap to exist (unaddressed or poorly addressed) as they insist on sticking with the belief that they grew up assuming was true.

III. The Pseudo-Collapsology Mill

I noted at the beginning of this series that an “apocalypse”, whose roots are ἀπό (“off,” “away from”) and καλύπτω (“to cover,” “to conceal”), in an opportunity for truths to be revealed. However, as Werld-humans subconsciously sense that things are wrong, there are a slew of figures ready to gain fame by providing only a peak at reality. They use words like “collapse” and “doom” but the information that they convey about our present situation, how we got here and what it means for our future is incomplete in a way that also makes it inaccurate.

Rather than consulting the laws that are already established and the data that already exist, they start from scratch and devise a new science - how thrilling yet subject to distortion! This is like a doctor refusing to scan the lab results that have come in, and instead constructing a custom Magic Eight Ball.

What these new pseudo-sciences do is focus almost excessively on the Werld (the Technosphere, Domestosphere and Spectrasphere): authoritarianism, polarization, conniving billionaires, xenophobia, civil war, World War III and nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and economic recession/depression. And maybe a nod to pandemics and extreme weather events.

Meanwhile, they skip over the other realms (the Lithosphere, Abiosphere and Biosphere) which include such issues as biodiversity loss, microplastics, forever chemicals, fuel depletion, power outages, crop failures … and they sure don’t get too deep into the interplay between Earth’s and the Werld’s realms.

By focusing almost exclusively on Werld Studies, they implicitly assign strong “predictive weight” to those findings, and zero relevance to data coming from outside our bubble. (I discuss “predictive weight” in Part 1 of this series.) I came across the material that I’ve linked in my core essays and Bibliography without even really trying.1 These influencers need to be doing some deliberately blinkered, seriously biased “research about the future” to miss it.

We’re mired in a contest of who can cater more to what people want to hear, churning out the most content so that it seems like they must be covering all their basis, conjuring an illusion of omniscience, and keeping this up until someone gets exhausted. Because these pseudo-collapsologists’ are some combination of more numerous and more vociferous and more popular, they get to set the terms of debate and genuine collapse scholars end up having to respond to what the others are already babbling about.

IV. Confounding Shallow “Doomerism” with Deep Critique

In my previous post, I outlined the distinctions between Shallow and Deep Critique. Those who engage in a Deep Critique have developed a solid appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics”, have considered all the counter-arguments (and found them lacking) and have thereby determined that the Werld (and the human domination of Earth that it supports) is nearing its end. But if you’ve spent your whole life immersed in the dominant culture’s Progress Myth and toxic positivity, anyone who proclaims anything negative about the Werld will be interchangeable. It’s all “Doomerism”.

To someone who, based on their neglect of inter-realm dynamics (🕳️ = the hole where that knowledge could be), is able to believe that the Werld can persist much longer (🌈), the “doom outlook” (💀) people will appear the same. Likewise, collapse-expecting person whose stance is not founded on thorough research (💀 🕳️) might identify with the other collapse-expecting person. However, the collapse scholar (💀 📚) can see that the other two are most alike as forecasters, insofar as they both lack the robust data that leads one to know that and understand why the Werld’s time is almost up.

I’ve asked myself whether I’m gatekeeping, but I think it’s as fair to require that folks invest in thorough study because declaring that they really “get” collapse as it is to require that a doctor take foundational biology curriculum.

With whom does pseudo-collapsology fly?

I wouldn’t trust a doctor who refuses to look at the x-rays of what seems to be a giant tumor (That’s scary!) and instead tells me he’s working on a new diagnostic test that will tell the “big picture” of my health based just on what kind of hair brush I use. Who would sign up for this?

1. People whose culture has sheltered them from knowing that oncology is a well-established field. (See previous section about “Doomers.”)

2. People whose culture has encouraged them to idolize hair-based diagnostics and treatment as something that always works to our advantage. (See: our techno-fetishizing Conquest Culture)

3. People who want to feel like they’re being responsible about their health without actually doing the work that might reveal anything unpalatable.

4. People who have so much access to information (especially true in the Internet Era) that they face temptation to dive into whichever path-of-inquiry appears first, rather than assessing all the options. (I discuss “Step Zero” in Part 1 of this series)

What pseudo-collapsology does and doesn’t do

It DOES…

• Indulge your dopamine craving – It’s an excuse to keep your eyes glued to the screen because you’re collecting data - the more the better! Since collapse may or may not be “on”, you’re in a constant stay of suspense and have an excuse to monitor micro-developments

• Allow you to tell yourself that you’re putting in effort to be informed while shielding you from the full, scarier picture

It’s the best of all worlds! If gathering intelligence were purely about entertainment, that’d be fine. (And for many centuries or even millennia, while we could simply dodge the consequences of our behavior, scientific inquiry could be about mere entertainment - inquiry into whatever’s likely to yield something intriguing, advantageous, confidence-boosting) … However …

It DOESN’T…

• Reliably PREDICT - It might get some things right, but the major factors that it overlooks will eventually override the ones that it allows itself to consider. I’m quite confident that, without attending to the content in my 18 core essays (never mind if you’re actively avoiding thinking about those factors), you couldn’t possibly guess what 2040 is going to look like.

• Reliably PRESCRIBE - Take the example of the potentially-pregnant person. They need to know whether they’re actually pregnant or not, so that they can (depending on what they want) avoid alcohol or get an abortion. Even if that person is in the crashing airplane, knowing what’s going to happen to them provides an opportunity to tell their loved ones how much they cherish them and to reflect on everything that they have to be grateful for in their life. Consider what opposite, uninformed behavior would look like in all these scenarios.

Opportunity cost

Let’s run with the “pregnant person on a crashing plane” scenario. The lesson here is that facing reality opens up possibilities that you miss out on if you’re closed off to it. And (as far as we’re capable of experiencing) once time passes, you can’t get it back. So there’s always an opportunity cost. If you spend today doing this, you can’t do that. If the flyer spends their final hour playing Sudoku, they aren’t spending it sending those final “I love you” texts.

Moreover, it’s possible that we aren’t aboard the Challenger, but rather the Titanic. It’s difficult to know for sure, but there’s a chance. And we may as well spend the time that we have building rafts and learning to swim. I’m fairly certain that I (a financially secure person in New York, USA) will have solid internet access through 2030, but after that, it’s a toss-up. I know that YouTube and the book publishing/shipping industry have no future, but I can’t be sure exactly when in the 2030s they’ll fade. So I think of 2025-2030 as my only guaranteed window for taking advantage of all the learning resources available to me.

Unethical

A 2025 Guardian piece about “lefty preppers” features, among others, Alex Steffen, “a 56-year-old author, speaker, podcaster and ‘foresight consultant’” based in the Bay Area. Here’s some of his supposed foresight:

“The vast majority, Steffen believes, would be safer in urban settings – especially cities that are taking the threats seriously and developing resilience plans. “You are better off choosing to move towards systems that are used by a lot of people,” he told us. He admitted the idea may sound counterintuitive; a steady diet of zombie movies have taught many of us to associate proximity to other people with increased peril. ‘But the more people who are using the same set of infrastructure, the more money you have to keep those things well repaired and the more easily you can devote resources to it.’”

Compare this to what we can know will happen as our fossil-fueled “MechaFauna” decline and what it will mean for the possibility of survival in cities.

By broadcasting his advice, Steffen is turning own ignorance -which could’ve just remained a delusion that steers him wrong- into bad advice that (if anyone takes it) is going to cause suffering for many more people besides him.

Dodo birds weren’t stupid. They encountered something unfamiliar, something omnicidal: humans. Now something unfamiliar is looming over humans. Are we even detecting it? Are we not wandering right up to it like dodos wandered up to humans?

Natural Selection

I recently listened to Ed Yong’s “An Immense World.” It describes how various animals form their unique umwelten. The stimuli coming at you are infinite and to attend to all of them would be overwhelming, so a creatures sensory organs evolved to filter out much of the “noise” that would be counterproductive to navigating their surroundings and meeting their essential needs. That which a creature does perceive amounts to its personal umwelt.

A well-calibrated umwelt does not guarantee that your family line will continue for hundreds of thousands of years. But a creature who constructs an umwelt by packing it full of “noise” and blocking out the “signal”, is one whose internal processing is maladaptive, disadvantageous. It will neither gather relevant intelligence nor behave intelligently. Such an animal (and its descendants, because - can it raise beings significantly different from itself?) definitely won’t last many generations on any planet. By 2100 forward, the protective bubble that has allowed us to get lost in fantasy without this tendency having consequences for us, will have been popped.

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If you haven’t thoroughly understood the answers to “What’s happening?” and “Why?” (which I cover briefly here and at length in the essays on my main page), you’ll have flawed thoughts on “What lies ahead?” and on what kinds of outcomes we might expect from various efforts.

(And yes, there are parallels below to narrow-boundary versus wide-boundary analysis, and to Bright Green versus Deep Green environmentalism.)

Cause of “doom”

LOW EFFORT:

Bad guys are ruining everything! Republicans, capitalism and fossil fuels are the roots of our problems. Evil people are driving our bus toward a cliff, and if we just take control of the steering wheel and convert the bus to run on electricity, and fix a few other things, then we’ll all be okay.

DILIGENT:

Hanlon’s Razor sums up the reality: “Never attribute to [individual] malice that which can be adequately explained by [collective] stupidity.”

Civilizations have two features that both distinguish them and spell their demise: “no-chill agriculture” + infrastructure made from inorganic materials. With no-chill agriculture, humans collectively claim more and more of Earth’s finite surface area, thereby consuming more calories over time, which boosts their population (and other “beneficiaries’” populations) and erases wild species and less belligerent human cultures. Meanwhile, material extraction for infrastructure creation and maintenance requires ongoing habitat destruction. All this activity also generates a lot of toxins as a byproduct. Millennia of campaigns (to “civilize”, to “develop”, to “pursue progress”) have essentially been about converting a finite amount of molecules. Our kind have been taking living things and non-living matter that were not-us and not-ours, and turning them into humans and human-serving beings and structures. Nothing has gone wrong; It’s because civilization has (especially recently) executed on its malignant function so well that we face today’s crises. It isn’t bug; it’s a feature. The defining activity of humans-as-civilization (in contrast to human societies whose material demands and impact are closer to that of other species) is murder-suicide.

Seizing power from leaders might temporarily improve some issues from some humans. But few activists are talking about dismantling civilization (agriculture and infrastructure), and as long as humans-as-civilization operate, we’ll continue to harm the planet and see many “symptoms” worsen. No strategy can possibly preserve our modern complex systems or infrastructure or population level.

What’s a “normal” way for molecules to flow, and for transformation to occur?

LOW EFFORT: The human Economy. Flows of goods and services. Feats of engineering! Part of what we’re fighting to preserve and afraid to lose is the foundations of industrialized, digitized society.

DILIGENT: Gaseous, liquid and solid molecules move as water changes phases and wears away at stone, as plants photosynthesize and respire, as animals and fungi ingest others’ bodies, and as beings form ultra-basic shelters. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles aren’t “hardcore”. It’s “civilized” humans’ material “requirements” that are the outlier.

Assuredness of consequences

LOW EFFORT: Some kind of collapse is a possibility contingent on which party takes office, which economic model is implemented, and which power source we use. Things could turn around!

DILIGENT: Many endings are already locked-in. Earth was never going to allow humans to hold onto this exceptional sort of existence. We can’t cure the Werld through rehabilitation, but we can try to help it deteriorate less painfully.

Depth of deterioration/impermanence

LOW EFFORT: “Collapse” refers to government corruption and mismanagement. Being kinder and more connected as neighbors will be enough to secure our survival.

DILIGENT: The whole Technosphere will be powering-down over the next few decades and crumbling over the next few centuries. The systems that meet our essential needs will be malfunctioning. Human Supremacy -this blip in Earth’s history when some humans’ existence has looked distinct from other creatures’ lifestyles and we’ve believed ourselves to be running the show- is coming to an end.

Personal ability to remain relatively unaffected

LOW EFFORT: Even as things fall apart, surely, I will always be able to serve as an Employee and that role will continue to keep me safe. Specialized, professional experts will continue to ensure that my basic survival needs (food, water and temperature regulation) are met. There are steps I can take to “be okay” through all this. I just need to move somewhere climate-safe and fascism-safe, find a secure career path, move my investments, stock up on basic emergency supplies … and maybe get a gun.

DILIGENT: We can’t escape supply chain breakdown, fraying food webs, PFAs in the rain and microplastics accumulating in bodies. Every individual will be responsible for contributing to local, collective endeavors to meet basic survival needs (food, water and temperature regulation). My town’s/neighborhood’s aggregate capacity to step up will determine the extent to which we meet those needs.

Onset & speed

LOW EFFORT: Collapse will look like a single sudden disaster and/or won’t get serious until the after 2050, closer to 2100.

DILIGENT: As I described in my earlier writings, multiple “realms” are now all in flux and countless things are reaching their end. It’s unlikely that all those endings will be synchronized and coincide in a single, clearly identifiable year! Collapse is like aging: At what moment are you old? Your first wrinkle, first grey hair, need for reading glasses, onset of menopause, arthritic knees-? Nevertheless, when you look back, there’s no denying that you’re different. You can’t perfectly foresee the sequence and timing of the changes, and an improvement in some category doesn’t mean you aren’t inching toward death… But also - the Limits to Growth model indicates that agricultural output, industrial output and the human population will all have begun to decline before 2050. A lot of issue-specific reporting seems to support this.1

Examples

A classic example of this would be Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. He’s very vocal about how the status quo is suboptimal. But he never digs deeper into fundamental dynamics or puts everything together (as I do in the essays on my homepage): Everything is impermanent and the agro-industrial-digital system inherently situates itself on a rather brief boom-bust timeline.

Or, check out the post below from December 15, 2025 from a redditor Spain. (Refresher: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout - Wikipedia, BBC)

🟢 He identifies a LOT of threats!

🔴 But he lacks the underlying framework (available through my core 18 essays) for understanding that we aren’t just in a fragile situation where things could get worse; we’re in a temporary situation that is bound to unravel. Hence his distinction between “plausible infrastructure failures” and “extreme scenarios”. The rest of this century is going to be one big extreme scenario.

🟠 Interesting observations about behavior. In my Post #3.3 I write about how stressors can cause both cooperation and conflict. I’d seen accounts of how nice it was to be forced to unplug. The other side of the story is the emergencies described at the Wikipedia and BBC links above, at this redditor’s take.

Similarly, check out this post and the different assessments in the comments:

From my perspective, the assessment in purple, despite its passion, comes up short. By their assessment, The Rich engineer/orchestrate collapse, so if we (we who?) “push back against them [The Rich] by every means at hand” (what does this mean exactly?) then most of what OP mentions will resolve itself and we can go back to being pampered by the industrial-digital system. Not so. Sure, our society could be more egalitarian. But big-picture comprehension of collapse means appreciating that the industrial-digital system will be fading. Eliminating capitalism and the wealth gap won’t preserve it because nothing can.

One more example.

“Whatever it is” probably won’t take out this person quickly. Look at the experiences that I describe in Post #2.3. Conditions can get really miserable without actually killing you.

+ Additional Insights

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes that those who don’t realize that modernity (civilization) never could’ve kept the promises that it made will continue to demonstrate flawed thought patterns and reproduce destructive behaviors.

A platform like Ground News, despite priding itself on being balanced, features mostly (exclusively?) stories from a “Low Effort” perspective - because most civilization members are usually entirely oblivious to, or else unjustifiably dismissive of, the ideas that I present here.

There’s a strong inclination toward Stockholm Syndrome with all this. It’s a mindf*ck to break free and realize how much this phenomenon that we’ve been raised to identify-with and cheer-for is screwing us and the entire planet over. It takes determination -courage and discipline- to engage in Diligent Evaluation.

My Posts #5.1, #5.2 and #5.3 explain why most civilization inhabitants aren’t aware that the Diligent Evaluation exists and, if they encounter it, struggle to process it. Why are there some exceptions? Tom Murphy has analyzed how certain Myers-Briggs Types tend to be more interested in his work. (I tested as an ESTJ in 2012 and an ENFJ in 2023, and don’t find this angle too compelling.) The best write-up I’ve seen is one from r/collapse. Many of the characteristics align with personal details that I’ve shared in my About section and that probably come through in my writing - namely the “low denial tolerance.” 😅

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“It’s hard to imagine being so dim as to be caught off guard by the inevitable.”

-Fallout s2e1

I’ve written my own critique of people who insist that things could turn out okay for the Werld1:

Jason Bradford has “A Species-level Taxonomic Treatment of the Phalse Prophets with Hypotheses on their Origin and Evolution”.

Now I’d like to examine some more figures who’ve received received attention for acknowledging that something is collapsing, but don’t convey a comprehensive enough message about what this will entail.

The more our material digital-industrial-agricultural system destroys and gets destroyed, the more civilization’s humans are looking inward at the human-centric and (seemingly) less-material for explanations, predictions and guidance.

I. Jiang Xueqin (“Prof. Jiang”)

Jiang’s YouTube Channel (and substack), Predictive History, is described as:

In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov proposed that the science of “psycho-history” will help humanity understand its past, predict its future, and control its present. This channel is dedicated to exploring if “psycho-history” is indeed possible. This channel seeks to answer the following three questions:
1. What models, theories, and paradigms help us best understand world history?
2. What does history teach us about our current predicament?
3. How much of the future can be predicted?

Note that he has 915K subscribers, and the video below has 889K views. In it, Jiang presents a “comprehensive, holistic, broad theory of why societies rise and fall.” I appreciate that he admits, “The problem with theories is that they are simplistic and inaccurate and imprecise … This theory has limitations.” I’ve summarized the video below.

Signs & Causes

Jiang starts by having his (Werld-bubble-dweller) students name signs of collapse. It suppose that it’s implicit that Jiang is asking about civilization collapse - he’s teaching a (human) history class. He then takes a step back to present three theories as to the causes of what students observed.

He notes these three stages:

Jiang’s Predictions for 2025-2045

1. Democracy and freedom decline, which cause a lack of motivation/productivity, which causes…

2. Economic decline, which brings…

3. Immigration (i.e workers willing to work for lower pay / in worse conditions) which causes …

4. Civil War, and to district citizens from this, nations send them off to …

5. International Wars

My Critique

I think that it’s fine to study historical patterns in combination with the information that my writing covers. But our circumstances this time are so unprecedented that history’s lessons can only be a minor source of clues. Data about pollution and resource depletion, and the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and ecology, make better guides.

The exclusive use of Jiang’s lens could lead to the following misconceptions:

1. You might believe incorrectly that by addressing the “causes”, you can address the “effects”. It might improve the effects that the students listed but it wouldn’t preserve our current population numbers or civilization’s complexity.

2. You might incorrectly interpret a vibe shift toward openness, consent and unity as a sign that the crisis has been averted. Nope. The end of civilization can’t be averted. (Jiang is correct to mention that collapse is inevitable - but he doesn’t give the best explanation for why. Nor does he seem to grasp that this is probably the final collapse.)

3. I agree that internal decline is why external shocks can trigger a more sudden collapse. However, even if everything is fine internally, the Werld’s external consequences will eventually be enough to bring it down.

4. Because of the restrictions on the data that Jiang allows himself to consider, he misses some major events in his predictions. Here are a few things that come to mind when I think about 2025-2045: Global industrial activity will have shrunken to about half of its current level. A water crisis will be jeopardizing half of today’s global food production. Humans will have become almost entirely infertile. (The last one is a wild card. I discuss the studies in the footnote of Post #2.1)

Similarly, Politico recently published these “15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026”. They’re overwhelmingly comprised by events in the Noosphere, Domestosphere and Abiosphere - as if nothing noteworthy is occurring within the Lithosphere, Biosphere or Technosphere. When deterioration in these realms impacts humans’ lives, they’ll be blindsided. (If those terms are unfamiliar - I introduce them here and explain their interrelatedness here.)

I could say the same of Hank Green’s 2026 predictions. Noosphere tunnel vision.

II. Luke Kemp

Kemp has been promoting his book, “Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse”. I’ve listened to him on this Planet: Critical episode and read this review in the Guardian.

Criticism 1: Kemp asserts that “enriched, status-obsessed elites” who display the Dark Triad of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism lead civilizations to collapse. Granted, friendly leaders could smooth our the Werld’s internal turmoil, but it wouldn’t make the Werld’s relationship with Earth not harmful or protect the Werld from its own temporariness. We’re all complicit. Everything that we enjoy about civilization and all of its destructiveness are two sides of the same coin. (See Tom Murphy’s “Ditch the Bad?”)

Criticism 2: Kemp notes that past civilization collapses improved life for the 99%. (To be fair, he acknowledges that modern society is much different.) We can’t assume that the same would apply to us. Those 99% found themselves in much more favorable circumstances, in terms of resource access and skills.

Criticism 3: Kemp suggests that if we follow his advice - “Don’t be a dick”, establish “genuinely democratic societies” and end inequality, civilization doesn’t have to collapse. False. Unavoidable.

I see Kemp’s thinking echoed in reasoning like this: Current suboptimal conditions are just the tough part that we have to get through. On the other side -and during our lifetimes- something wonderful has yet to emerge! Humans just need to tweak their attitudes and policies.

I don’t see a way forward that could possibly be unambiguously pleasant for members of civilization:

• As long as the machines are still running, even if all the humans “improve” and “make peace”, the planetary situation will get worse.

• When the machines stop running, humans might also make the planetary situation worse.

• When the machine activity ramps-down, machine-dependent humans (i.e. most of us in “developed” countries) will face an entirely unprecedented onslaught of challenges.

III. Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” describes cases where people came together: the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco; the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia; the 1985 Mexico City earthquake; 9/11; and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

I don’t expect that everyone will turn on each other in the future, but I also don’t think these examples can serve as models from what to expect. They’re all one-off disasters, whereas what we’re headed into (to use Kunstler’s term) is a Long Emergency. This will be like the difference between sudden bursts of adrenaline versus the cortisol of constant stress. And humans’ behavior won’t come down to whether they’re GOOD, deep down. A better question to ask is “Have we already set ourselves up to inevitably experience certain consequences?” and maybe “What might desperation drive an organism to (understandably) do?”

Here are a few cause-effect relationships and trends that I keep in mind. For more, see my Post #2.3 and Post #3.3.

Heat impacts

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.

Mortality-reminder impacts

Prompts to be more aware of mortality exacerbate tribalism.

News about water

2024 conflicts over water are increasing

News about food

2024 Namibia & Zimbabwe: droughts are ruining crops and will likely lead to many wildlife deaths, so governments are “culling” the wild animals and feeding them to hungry human citizens - in Namibia, 700 land mammals; in Zimbabwe, 200 elephants

2025 Nigeria: a conflict between cattle herders and farmers has killed 1,043 people between May 2023 and May 2025

News about fuel

2024 Mali: “Activists plant trees but residents strip them for firewood, saying there’s no choice”

increasing urbanization + weak waste management (abundant trash) + shortages of firewood and coal = it’s becoming common to burn plastic as a fuel for cooking and heating homes (e.g. 13% of Nigerian households). The airborne toxins can cause health problems such as lung disease.

Indonesia: tofu companies use plastic as fuel because fossil fuels and wood are more expensive, whereas Indonesia receives other countries’ plastic trash for free. Microplastics contaminate the tofu (consumed only domestically, allegedly) and makes its way into nearby chickens and their eggs. One egg has almost 100x the safe amount of dioxin, which can cause cancer, and reproductive and developmental problems.

Final remarks about Solnit

As the Werld’s inhabitant face contracting resource access and rising pollution, the factors will be too complicated for us to predict behavior. I don’t think it will be easy, during the rest of this century, to categorize actions as clearly good or bad. And I would refrain from pleasant-washing this as a broadly unifying moment.

IV. Jeremy Lent

Lent recently appeared on an Accidental Gods episode to promote his upcoming book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works. Here’s some of their illogical babbling.

Host Manda Scott says:

“And I loved in your book someone suggesting that collapsology, probably don’t say it quite like, but the study of collapse should be a scientific pursuit. But it’s also very hard, I think the cognitive neuroscience of telling everybody we’re all doomed and not giving anyone anything other than basically your options are learn to farm and die with grace. It’s not going to help anyone.”

Are we talking about what’s true (and a BEST case scenario, btw) or catering to what coddled readers are eager to hear?

Scotts describes Lent’s book in contrast to Jem Bendell’s work:

“Whereas what you’ve got is transformation of ‘This is the moment. This is the bottleneck. And with all the epistemic humility we can muster, we don’t know where we’re going. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but we can shape a future that might actually flourish.’”

Yes and no. The Limits to Growth offered us “options” in 1972. And even back then, we insisted that “Well, hopefully, of course, it won’t be allowed to happen.” But then for the next 50+ years, civilization embraced the route that delivers the soonest, most dramatic collapse. At this point, the material constraints are set. Where the options and alternatives exist, is in perceiving the “farm and die with grace” as the flourishing.

Instead of providing any sound arguments for why ecology wouldn’t apply to humans as much as to all other creatures, she just implies that “epistemic humility” requires that one be open to the possibility that the Werld is an exception to the ecological rules that govern all other life on Earth

Lent goes on to explain that we need to replace consumerism with feeling loved and valued by our communities. Sure, but that won’t preserve the Werld. It’ll sell books, though!

I noticed a similar pleasant-washing, hardship-denying thought pattern from Katherine Collins2 when Tyson Yunkaporta quoted her in his Right Story Wrong Story3:

“Profit - you can get there by pillaging or you can get there by creating, and there is nothing on a spreadsheet to tell you which it is. Degrowth needs a new brand. My question is: growth of what? You can easily have an economy growing in a less stuff-intensive way, but increasing in value in terms of health, joy, etcetera; or you can have an economy that is growing while everything is being destroyed. So the growth versus degrowth debate is grounded in the wrong question.'”

Industrialism👏 is 👏 expiring👏. Tell me your plan for how to make that not-horrific for the humans who currently depend on it for their essential needs, and then I’ll be open to your promotional messaging about humans (this century??) experiencing augmented health and joy.

V. What “we” “deserve” -?

This is not financial accounting, where we can pick what does and doesn’t get “recognized”.

This is not St. Peter’s Gate or Santa’s Workshop or even a courtroom where your fate depends on whether you’ve been naughty or nice within the boundaries of your individual life.

It’s Planet Earth. All of the Werld’s activity has had consequences, and those consequences are now just starting to reach us. Our state of dominance and exemption from basic mammalian concerns is simply impossible to maintain.

For keener insight, I’ll direct you to Rocko -

P.S. … Except that recycling is a scam and the Ozone Hole is still an issue.

This series looks at the distortion of collapse discourse toward acknowledgement that things are bad and could get worse, but without a grasp on what I would consider true collapsology - they don’t have a solid appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics and what they imply for the Werld”.

In my previous post, I wrote about the importance of determining which questions will provide the most relevant information, because (as far as forecasting goes) those data with the most “predictive weight” will provide a more accurate image of the future.

Here I’ll look at some examples of questions that might contribute some clues to our future - but people are interpreting them as being more meaningful than they are.

How Supposed Precedents Aren’t Really Parallels to Our Predicament

Examples from the past and from fiction can only tell us so much.

Previous civilizations’ collapses

1. Inputs are much more depleted - Past societies, once they had stripped their surroundings of valuable material, could relocate to other regions. Now domesticated humans have spread across the global. There is no New World left undiscovered. We’ve degraded the soil in which we grow crop-plants for ourselves and for our livestock. We’ve devastated the populations of wild mammals and birds. As for fish, the “Will the oceans be empty by 2048?” section of this page explains that fishstock depletion could be worse - but I would venture that we won’t retain the technology to catch, preserve and distribute them at the current scale.

2. The pollution load is much heavier – Although previous civilizations destabilized their climates and released a slew of toxins, they hadn’t emitted as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as we have, or poisoned their water and soil with plastics, PFAs, nitrogen fertilizer run-off and pharmaceuticals, which (besides harming our own bodies) also disrupt other organisms’ biology/fertility and lead to antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

3. Operation Civilization’s participants are now more numerous - It’s not just that resource supply is much more depleted than before, but also that demand is and will be higher, at least for a while. This is a much greater altitude from which to fall.

   

4. Previous civilization members were more competent - At least 80% of earlier civilizations members farmed. In 1862, 90% of Americans were farmers. They were probably decent at foraging and hunting, too. Today, less than 2% of the USA’s population are officially farmers. The percent of Americans who grow (a least some) food has risen from 35% in 2013 to 43% in 2024. But will they be able to grow for subsistence?

Previous indigenous communities’ world-endings

Speaking of competence - I’m definitely not as competent as the earlier human inhabitants of this continent. At the end of episode 115 of the Post Carbon Institute’s Crazy Town podcast, Alex Leff asserts that although “civilization as we know it … may be fundamentally unsustainable”, “humanity is not”. (I’m with him so far. I think a good portion of the 10 million humans who today live as hunter-gatherers have a decent shot.) He then suggests “Humans have lived without this high-energy lifestyle for a very long time; we can live without it again.” I wouldn’t assume that this “we”. includes someone like me or my neighbors or my would-be descendants. The fact that canine history involves 10 wolves in an intact forest does not prove that 8,000 poodles in a half-burnt forest will be okay.

In the Post-Carbon Institute’s Holding the Fire podcast, “Award-winning journalist and author Dahr Jamail hosts in-depth interviews with leaders from around the world to uncover Indigenous ways of reckoning with environmental and societal breakdown.” However, those instances were cases of the Werld’s assault on Earth (and on Earth-humans). There was a clear perpetrator. This time, it’s something that we’re doing to ourselves. The threat is us and how we’ve become accustomed to (shortsightedly) meeting our survival needs. It’s as inappropriate as Don’t Look Up’s comet metaphor. The better analogy would be cyanobacteria gassing everyone and itself.

Furthermore, many indigenous people didn’t survive their “apocalypse”. Hearing from descendants of survivors might be a case of Survivorship Bias. It would be at least as relevant to examine the experiences of those whom Europe’s invasion killed, and use this as a basis for our expectations.

Previous fossil fuel cut-offs

When in the 2000s, Americans started worrying about Peak Oil, they pointed to how Cubans pulled together in the 1990s. There’s even a documentary about it, The Power of Community.

Fast forward to 2025, and this glimpse of contemporary life in Cuba notes that “seven in 10 Cubans have skipped breakfast, lunch, or dinner due to lack of money or food shortages, while nearly 89% of the population currently lives in extreme poverty.” Where are the community gardens, saving the day? Something has changed. And if 1990s-Cuba isn’t a perfect predictor of 2020s-Cuba, we can’t assume that it reveals what 2030s-USA looks like.

Nations that have faced a downturn

A common refrain in the collapse-aware community is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” a sarcastic take on science fiction author William Gibson’s observation about technology. But it would be a mistake to take countries like Venezuela as an example of where collapse will stop. Venezuela may be farther along than other countries in its collapse but it isn’t done. There inevitably lies ahead a future when all of the Werld is complete gone and Earth is fully rewilded. Therefore, as long as any Werld remains, the other shoe has yet to drop.1

Fiction

One big way in which many post-apocalyptic scenes are misleading is they feature very few human survivors. For the next few decades, there will be plenty of other humans around you, experiencing the same infrastructure breakdown, product shortages, disease, conflict and existential crisis.

Furthermore, science fiction is by definition high-tech whereas our future will be low-tech. This would change a lot about the plot.

Fiction is free to omit many details and not be held accountable. Tom Murphy has written about how our acceptance of video game “fizix” now influences what we believe is possible in real life.

Previous fights for better conditions

In Abolishing Fossil Fuels, Kevin Yong points to winning strategies in “four classic victories”: the abolition of slavery, battles for workers’ rights in the 1930s, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the fight for clean air.

Granted, some Werld-humans now enjoy better circumstances and we don’t emit certain gasses as much. But in all four cases, the Werld continued to wage its war on Earth. Targeting fossil fuels is a very different battle because it really does threaten the Werld’s core operative.

Previous natural disasters

I’m referring to Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell” … and I’ll cover this in my next post.

Technology adoption trends

One thing that we might be getting wrong is our assumption that the “S-curve” of tech adoption applies to how “clean” energy will proliferate. (I can’t find my source for this idea, but it was a guest on The Great Simplification podcast. Male, not American, probably in 2023-?) “Clean” energy uptake is more accurately considered infrastructure, with the familiar setbacks and delays that “development” faces.

People also refer to Everett Rogers’ “diffusion of innovation model” when speaking about resilience behaviors. However, I’d argue that a flashy new trend faces fewer psychological barriers to adoption than does the dread-inducing realities that motivate someone to invest in resilience. So the distribution across time might not look as it is typically portrayed.

Other Data That Can’t Serve as Strong Clues

These are questions that I’ve noticed people investing in, as if they can serve as guides to bigger-picture questions of “What’s happening? Why? What will happen?”

I’ve actually introduced some myself, in past posts. For example, the answer to “Is Earth experiencing a major mass extinction?” -whether it’s yes or no- hardly provides information about what your lived experience will be over the next few years and decades - if that’s what you’re interested in knowing. And I think that is what most people are actually wondering. Regardless of extinction rates, planetary events could still dramatically alter your lifestyle. Similarly, when we talk about humans going extinct, we create two false extremes: totally eradicated or totally fine. This overlooks, for example, a realistic scenario where our population falls from 8+ billion in 2025 to less than 1 billion in 2100, which would be pretty disruptive to our routines.

Is electricity getting cheaper?

I explain in my Post #5.3:

Prices are another distraction from the bigger picture of “humans exploiting the planet at a rate that will be impossible to maintain (and wreaking havoc on all other lifeforms in the process)”.

We’re building “green” infrastructure from materials that exist in finite supply, so the overall trajectory is toward reduced availability. If I have a pile of 10 rocks, and on Monday I offer you 1 rock, and on Tuesday I offer you 3, then you might celebrate the rock supply’s expansion and its impact on the market: lower prices! You won’t pay attention to the depletion of rocks-yet-to-be-accessed, from 10 to 9 to 6… Headlines about falling solar panel prices create the same temporary illusion.

Are electric vehicles environmentally-friendlier than internal combustion engines?

This is one of 50 questions that Hannah Ritchie (to whom -according to her book cover- Bill Gates turns when feeling overwhelmed) addresses in her 2026 book, “Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change in 50 Questions and Answers”. I think this is besides the point. I’d ask, “As diesel is goes into decline, will society be manufacturing cars of either kind? Is that even the most pressing issue under those circumstances?”

Can we stay below 1.5C?

This is important information for Earth, but the Werld is a lost cause (as I’ve explained before) regardless of the temperature. There is no “window of opportunity” for the Werld to secure eternal reign. From the moment the Werld emerged, it was always “too late” to avoid its eventual end.

Does capitalism bring out the worst in us?

Sure. The mere sight of money can make us antisocial.

Better question: When the circus goes away, will the abandoned bear who spent his whole life riding a bike know how to forage as his new normal? When there’s no diesel to bring you food, will you know how to feed yourself?

Is enshittification avoidable, theoretically?

(Cory Doctorow appeared on the Team Human podcast to discuss this.) Sure, but will you even be able to power factories? In Post #2.2, I’ve documented several cases where Earth has forced shutdowns and she’s just getting started.

Could organic feed as many as conventional, theoretically?

This study found that organic farming practices can produce 81.6% as much food as conventional methods. More importantly, beyond the vacuum of hypotheticals - How many people will be putting in the labor to make this happen? How far will we be able to transport the food from where it grows?

How much meat is “sustainable”, theoretically?

I think a better way to anticipate future meat availability is to consider the ways in which we’re currently keeping the supply artificially high. For example, we pump loads of antibiotics into livestock in Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations and stave off the spread of flesh-eating screwworm by breeding sterile mates and releasing them from airplanes. Will we be able to keep up those measures and many others? Drought cost Iraq 70% of its livestock last year.

Did Gavi and UNICEF secure a deal to cut the price of the R21 malaria vaccine by 25%? Did Brazil launch a new Tropical Forest Forever Fund? Did a team of humans reintroduce a few hundred of Europe’s heretofore-extirpated keystone vulture species who “stabilises food webs, limits disease and signals the revival of functioning ecosystems”?

Yes, yes and yes. AND the industrial-digital system that meets our essential needs is expiring, inevitably. AND, the longer the industrial-digital system operates, the more it spews greenhouse gas emissions that disrupt our climate and toxic chemicals that cause cancer and infertility, rendering narrow biodiversity efforts ineffective.

(Inspired by the “Fix the News” substack - “fix” in the sense of “manipulate”, maybe.)

Beyond cities, does one find fewer jobs, shoddier public transportation, and diminished access to culture and essential services?

Yes, yes and yes. AND the industrial-digital system that meets our essential needs is expiring, and will therefore making survival in concrete jungles very difficult.

(Inspired by a post from the “Terrenity” substack. Also, I can’t help but notice the ironic tension between her title “Build the Village, Starve the Empire” and the depiction of urban gardening. In which direction must material resources flow for urban gardens to expand? Who’s imperializing, then?)

Could we theoretically have non-industrial medicine?

Sure, if everything else were going pretty splendidly. But I don’t currently see this emerging in countries where breakdown is farther along (an overview is in Post #2.3). The belief that “we” (clearly they aren’t pulling it off so … “we” = more “developed” nations?) could make this work seems to be based on the assumption that we’ll be able to handle climate chaos, toxins and energy/supply shortages better than others are. Are we really wiser, more skilled, more resilient? Or are we fighting over novelty Starbucks paraphernalia?

Are people in Silicon Valley meditating more?

On an episode of Accidental Gods, host Manda Scott shares:

“I was listening to Nate Hagens relatively recently and he was talking to someone in the AI world, tech world, tech bro world, who said that five years ago if he’d gone to a dinner party and told people that he meditated, they would all looked at him like he had horns. And now if he went to the same dinner party and told people that he didn’t meditate, they would look at him like he had horns. And so something is shifting and and we are all aware that simply sitting on a cushion observing your breath does not necessarily turn you into a decent human being. And there’s a lot of other inner work to be done, but at least it’s a step on the way. And it seems to me that there’s an accelerating pace of change.”

Sure, and it’s possible -nay, probable- that Werld-humans will struggle to adapt to fossil fuel decline and climate weirding, and suffer immensely.

Do you have kids?

Sarah Wilson had as a guest on her podcast, Wild (a podcast that openly discusses civilization collapse), “Rich from Ohh That’s RICH”.

“…but I also have two young children and so I have to believe that this country has a future that’s not going to be dystopian and I choose to believe that because I personally refuse to have it any other way and I’ll do whatever I can to protect it”

The Werld has been imposing dystopia on all other Life. As the human supremacist reign comes to an end, circumstances are going to be pretty harsh on Rich (and on his kids) regardless of whether he refuses to have it that way.

Do we understand better than ever what’s causing this?

I’ve noticed many nature documentaries end this way.

But, technically, few humans do truly understand what’s causing this - in the sense that they fail to understand that there is no loophole for civilization.

And even if we did understand, awareness doesn’t guarantee wise action. In my Post #3.2, I look at how society at-large is fairly locked into doing the stupid thing.

Is “collapse” going mainstream?

During this conversation in April 2025, “Acceptance and Agency at the End of Modernity”, Vanessa Andreotti notes that…

“Before January, many people would ask me ‘What’s the evidence that modernity is dying?’ or sometimes ‘What’s the evidence that it’s violent?’ … But I have not been asking this question since January.

Granted, she does then admit that liberals (progressives) want to keep modernity on life support.

Nevertheless, I don’t think the fact that Werld-humans are feeling as if their world is ending (or that the Guardian ran “The Armageddon complex” series) is equivalent to anyone understanding that the Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and therefore a necessarily short tenure.

This series looks at the distortion of collapse discourse - at the acknowledgement that things are bad and could get worse, but without a grasp on what I would consider true collapsology. These messengers lack a solid appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics and what they imply for the Werld” (the predestined fate of the industrial-digital system and potentially even agriculture).

The roots of the word “apocalypse” are ἀπό (“off,” “away from”) and καλύπτω (“to cover,” “to conceal”). It’s an unveiling. But I notice many individuals who warn of an apocalypse yet view the past, present and future through an obscuring veil.

I. Intelligence

When I imagine a creature whom I would describe as intelligent, they’re one who tends to:

• gather information - and maybe I should specify here, valuable information

• integrate that information into their decision-making and behavior

A creature who gathers mainly the wrong kind of information or who doesn’t allow that information to influence their actions is one who walks off a cliff or into a predator’s mouth.

Every day, you wake up and -consciously or not, and based on information that may or may not be accurate- decide how to spend your day, your week, and the next several years.

Simply put:

• I feel hunger and I’m fairly confident that my fridge contains food and I expect that eating the food will quell my hunger, so I walk to the fridge …

• Our culture says that a career is a reliable way to meet your essential needs and find personal fulfillment and earn respect from others, so you pursue one that you have reason to believe will check all three boxes or at least the first.

When I speak with people, I’m keenly aware of when they make statements that assume certain intelligence (information) about the future - For example, whenever someone replies to a statement like “I’ll be due for a hip replacement in 30 years” with “Oh, by then, the technology will have improved!” … Will it?

II. Broad questions for intelligence about the future

When I’ve sought to learn about what I should expect in the coming years and decades (and when any creature tries to anticipate), the investigation comes down to these questions:

• DESCRIPTION: What’s happening? What underlying forces are driving these trends? … This has the potential to be the least subjective.

• PREDICTION: What do those forces mean for future circumstances? … This could get more subjective.

• PRESCRIPTION: What should I be doing? … This must be subjective, because part of it is always based on what you care about. When a doctor says “You should quit smoking”, she’s taking something that’s true (“If you quit smoking, you’ll probably have fewer health problems”) and combining it with the assumption that you want to leverage the cause-effect relationship. Maybe you don’t.

III. Specific questions

This is where I get to the “integrity” part of the title.

We understand, for example, that if a woman wants to know whether she’s going to have a baby, the better ways to look into it are:

• Did I have PIV sex? And were both parties fertile? Or - Did I get IVF?

• When was my last period?

• Urine test

• Ultrasound

She could ask other questions, but you can see how these would be silly:

• When I’ve felt nauseous before, how did it turn out?

• When I’ve gained weight before, what caused it?

• What do storks’ recent flight patterns look like? (There’s a high correlation between storks and human births, but as How to Lie with Statistics points out: Storks like to nest at the tops of chimneys, and larger houses tend to have both more chimneys and more children.)

• Does my house have a spare bedroom?

• Am I friendly? Do I deserve to be pregnant? (You’ll see the relevance in a future post…)

These might give her a correct answer, but it would be due more to luck or to coincidence than to true understanding.

IV. Step Zero: Exposure

Responsible inquiry means first surveying all the possible questions you could ask and determining which are the most relevant to hone in on.

For the potentially-pregnant woman wondering about her future, this would lead her to the first set of questions instead of the second.

Then again, if that same woman were on a plane falling from the sky, the even more relevant questions for future-anticipation would be: Are we over water or land? Am I able to get my oxygen mask and vest on? etc.

I think of this concept as “predictive weight”. There’s probably an official term.

I notice that when people catch wind of how much trouble we’re in, they rush immediately to the questions that promise to remedy some aspect of our predicament. If you were looking into these so-called solutions merely for fun and for narrow expertise, their haphazard approach works fine. But it would be unjustified to expect that their prescriptions would deliver the desired big-picture results, without first examining the larger context in which people would be deploying (or trying to deploy) so-called solutions.

V. “Good News”?

As I say at the beginning of my Video #3 - Those who’ve concluded that the Werld is expiring understand fully well that certain small improvements are surfacing, trumpeted by Reasons to be Cheerful and Fix the News and all kinds of misleading headlines and graphs. But when analysts refrain from considering the unpleasant news, they are unfairly assigning a predictive weight of 0 to that whole category of data. An appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics” reveals that those reports don’t change the fact that the physical Technosphere (as well as the Biosphere and Abiosphere) on which many humans rely for essential needs is inevitably deteriorating and running low on juice. The overwhelming trend (so far) is one of ecological devastation and (looking ahead) will be that of industrialism’s and complex civilization’s decline.

Our hypothetical, potentially-pregnant woman may have asked the more-relevant questions instead of the relevant ones. And she may have recently experienced all kinds of positive turnarounds in her life - a commitment to healthier habits, a promotion. But at the intersection of intelligence and integrity, to sense her future, it’s imperative that she tune in to the turbulence and change in cabin pressure.

I. Insect die-offs are impacting crop yields

First: Liebig’s Law of the Minimum. The barrel’s shortest slat will set its capacity. If you need 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1 cup of flour to make 1 cupcake (I don’t bake…), and you have 1 tablespoon of sugar and 2 cups of flour, you can still make only 1 cupcake.

For crops, the relevant inputs include nutrients, water - and pollen. “Pollinator limitation” is when the pollinator population is the thing that’s holding back all the other inputs from adding up to more yields.

“Crop Production in the USA Is Frequently Limited by a Lack of Pollinators.”

Here’s the 2020 study. They visited “131 locations situated across major crop-producing areas of the USA [and parts of Canada].” The crops consisted of highbush blueberry, apple, sweet cherry, tart cherry, almond, watermelon and pumpkin. Of those seven, five showed evidence of pollinator limitation. (The way to test is if introducing more pollinators raises yields.)

“Insufficient Pollinator Visitation Often Limits Yield in Crop Systems Worldwide”

Here’s the 2024 study. They assessed 120 systems, representing 32 crop species, and found that “28–61% of global crop systems are pollinator limited” and that it “most frequently occurs in blueberry, coffee and apple crops.”

Statistic: In the USA, the “pollination service industry” trucks 2.6M honeybee colonies around the country

The USA uses Apis mellifera, the European honeybee. It’s a nasty existence for them, and they don’t measure up to wild insects:

• They tend not to leave the hive during the kind of inclement weather that is normal in springtime when perennials bloom

• They often focus on one plant at a time, which is ineffective in self-sterile plants and leads to inbreeding depression in self-fertile ones

• Where humans have not annihilated wild insects, these agents do a superior job. For example, they deposit up to twice as much pollen per visit and bumblebees can sonicate whereas honeybees are incapable of buzz-pollinating the crops that require it

• While Apis mellifera congregate around trees with dense blooms, wild bees visit the whole orchard. Due to these patterns, fruit-set and seeds-per-fruit are much more closely correlated with wild bee numbers than with the honeybee population (source, source)

• Moreover,honeybees make obnoxious tourists. Diseases intensify in their densely-populated hives and then spill back into native species

• In the Mountain West’s public lands, where the wild bee population is still high enough that they require all available nectar and pollen to maintain their robust presence, the Apis mellifera summer stopover in these sanctuaries precludes wild bees’ access to sustenance, suppressing their numbers

Anecdote: China’s humans are hand-pollinating orchards

Here’s a piece about it. Here’s another.

The pesticides wiped out the insects, and we throw in our own species - never mind what the chemicals will do to them. But job creation, right?

II. But crops aren’t more strongly affected because…

Most crop acreage is planted with wind-pollinated species

Crop plants differ in terms of their reliance on animals for pollination. Some can count on the breeze to carry sperm from anther to stigma.

Only 35% (by weight) of the crops that we harvest are from the lower tiers of the table above. You’ll notice among them the crop types that the 2020 USA study tested.

Even if we grew exclusively crops from the top tiers of the pollinator-dependency table, we’d run into problems. (I’ll cover that in a future post.)

Maybe also - there were “more than enough” insects before

As of 2018, total terrestrial Arthropod mass was 0.2 Gigatons (Gt). Plants were at 450 Gt. Maybe, back when there were 0.4 Gt of insects, that was “more than enough” to help plants reproduce-? So Earth could “afford to lose” some-?

The visual says “Surprisingly, humans contribute a relatively small mass when compared to the rest of the Animal kingdom” - but when you consider that humans are one species and the other block clusters represent entire phyla, it IS a lot of human mass! (“Livestock” is the other non-phylum block cluster there.)

I also just learned from Figure 2 of this study that most Life exists on land -as plants- but most Animals exist underwater! Go figure!

III. Shoutout to insects’ other roles

It’s worth mentioning that insects also perform important roles as…

Pollinators of plants that humans aren’t intentionally growing as crops

Predators of crop pests (e.g. lady beetles eat aphids)

Prey for other animals - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. If insects go down, they go down.

Decomposers - for example, dung beetles:

“In cattle pastures, they’ve been known to bury more than 80 percent of the dung pats. At the same time, they loosen and nourish the soil, improve its ability to hold water, prevent the plants under the cow pies from dying, and keep the fly population down, all of which keep pastures and cattle healthy and growing. They keep air pollution down, as well – researchers have found that some dung beetles reduce the methane emitted by cow pies by 40 percent.

Scientists are finding that many species of dung beetle are endangered. In Colombian cattle pastures they are slowing their soil-enriching activities because, as tree cover has disappeared, they must avoid dehydration in the relentless sun.

I’m recording these comments and questions here (a) so that y’all can be clued into my ongoing thought process and (b) because I think all this content I’m about to dump works better in Substack than in an email. He can reply through whatever medium he prefers (or not at all!) i.e. y’all might not necessarily see. Deal with it.

I refer to “Titanic” scenarios that appear in a post that I’ve scheduled for March. Deal with it.

Quick(?) questions

You mentioned (I believe) that people are more likely to embrace a message if you give them purpose. Prof. Jiang (e.g. in this clip) seems to deliver a fairly grim message to his young students. What dynamic is at play in his classroom❓ Does he, at some point, provide advice/purpose❓

The host of Breaking Down: Collapse (the podcast that made everything click for me in 2022) recently posted this reflection on his first-ever episode, aired in October 2020. From an epistemological angle, what do you make of the strengths and weaknesses that he identifies in his communication strategy❓ Do you have terms/concepts for them❓

Edit: Better question - What do you think of how this episode of Human Nature Odyssey tries to communicate a vision of the future that balances realism and a best case scenario❓

You’ve written about how Hank Green is good at epistemological humility. “If” (when) we find ourselves in a Titanic-B/C/D scenario, do you think that Hank will be able to pivot❓(Is this even a useful question❓) It would mean acknowledging, e.g., that his Foundation to Decrease World Suck-funded projects (which depend largely on a functional industrial-digital order) will fizzle out.

Quick(?) comments

You mentioned that our peers seem down-in-the-dumps. I wonder if you’ll find this quote from Hospicing Modernity1 about expiring stories to be apt:

You might find this piece interesting, by Jem Bendell for the UN’s official magazine: “A New Role For The UN In An Age Of Collapse.”

I mentioned The Light Pirate as a story of deterioration that boosts morale as much as possible without being unrealistic. Here’s a redditor’s summary.

I’m wondering if you’re familiar with Douglas Rushkoff and his Guardian piece (and book) about billionaires’ bunkers. You asked what investors could do with their wealth that would also benefit “my cause”. The article mentions a JC Cole who runs American Heritage Farms. His idea is that people who feel inclined to buy a bunker could also fund the establishment of relatively supply-chain-independent farms in their area, to keep local residents fed and preempt the need for a bunker.

Sprint and/or Marathon?

You noted that we have distinct views of the timeline and asked if my cluster has a term for the transition period between now and some end state. I’m realizing now that we refer to a “Long Emergency” (taken from John Michael Greer’s book), but it lasts the whole century.

You and I both anticipate a near-term sudden shift. However, Rationalists’ “supernova” sounds like bedlam2 whereas our “Bend-Not-Break” refers to top-down decisions from those who hold the power to enforce new policies and programs. Nate Hagens discusses it in this talk at 28:10 (or go back to 20:55 for more context).

So maybe the bet that I mentioned shouldn’t be on whether, between now and 2040, the Titanic sinks further or bobs up.

Instead, the bet might be about whether the major disastrous thing that Rationalists fear will occur by 2030 comes to pass. If it doesn’t, they might want to brace for a more extended decline. Adrenaline can only power you for so long.

And I wonder whether our peers who already feel dead inside can just remain in that state for years or whether, as circumstances continue to get nastier but nothing actually kills them immediately, they’ll start seeking to replace it.

Behavioral Burst

Could you explain the concept of a supernova a bit more❓Who would the participants be❓

I keep an eye on unrest around the globe. There’s definitely crime, conflict and suffering. But I don’t see anything really blowing up and leaving a vacuum.

For example:

• Take these photos and statements from the Philippines. I think that, even though they express hope that conditions improve, they understand that they won’t. It’s just that they can’t say in an interview, “It’s all downhill from here.”

• Take the Gen Z rebellion in Nepal. People always organize to restore some order after the chaos, I think.

• Take this description of life in Afghanistan:

In Kabul, Afghanistan, “some households spend up to 30% of their income on water, with over two-thirds incurring water-related debt.” … Kabul might become the first capital city in modern history to run dry. “Up to 80% of Kabul’s groundwater is contaminated … a consequence of widespread pit latrine use and industrial waste pollution. 'Diarrhea and vomiting are ‘problems people experience all the time in the city’”

I do worry about humans “going supernova” against Earth3.

The following examples are drawn from my post Rx #1: Inner Work for Your Apocalypse. There, I also include arguments for why humans in some regions might lack the perfect storm of incentive, opportunity and skill to decimate their surroundings.

Hungry humans hunting wildlife to extinction

In 2024, in response to drought and food insecurity, Namibia culled 700 wild animals for meat, including elephants, hippos, buffalo, impala, blue wildebeest and zebras. Granted, 700 isn’t actually that many, but given how dramatically human mammals collectively outweigh wild mammals (see the bottommost bar’s blue and teal segments in the chart below - and presumably we’d have already exhausted the livestock option), one might imagine that humans would eliminate the small remaining population of land mammals, plus many birds.

Desperate humans chopping down all the trees as fuel

In 2024, in Mali, people desperate for firewood chopped down trees that activists has planted. During war-induced fuel shortages in Syria, residents removed 20% of its forests in 10 years.

Desperate humans burning (toxic) synthetic material as fuel

As of 2025, it’s becoming common to burn plastic as a fuel for cooking and heating homes (e.g. 13% of Nigerian households). In Indonesia, tofu companies use plastic as fuel because fossil fuels and wood are more expensive. The fumes cause lung disease, cancer, and reproductive and developmental problems.

Sub-Topic: “Do You Want People to Know?”

Maybe we should be asking: Know what? I think that the two extremes of paralyzing depression (which you’re observing) or panic (which you’re imagining in the next few years) are what you get when you leave people to their own imaginations, which are “trained on” Hollywood and video game content. The “marathon, not a sprint” framing (/reality) might not produce the same results. I feel depressed and panicked, too, but maybe just not as debilitatingly.

If in 2020, people had a preexisting model from a trusted figure, saying that “Lockdown is actually going to be pretty boring. You’ll be wishing for an excuse to step outside your house” (+ they now have that model through their own experience), they could’ve either skipped the panic shopping or stocked up in advance, calmly and gradually. I think the reason they didn’t stay calm is because horror/action movies were their main basis for setting expectations, and so you get the toilet paper rush.

Some other reasons that I’m not too worried about helping people become more informed:

• By making information (about the industrial-digital era’s expiration over the next few decades) available to the wider public and trusting them to engage with it when they’re ready, you empower would-be wise actors to make informed choices. It’s common (and granted these people are self-selected) to see people on collapse-related platforms say that they’re glad to be aware. … It seems silly/wrong to keep those people -ones who would act more wisely if they knew- in the dark.

• In the short term, we might see demand exceed supply for certain items that will soften the transition to post-industrial living. But industries could, in time, redirect productive capacity.

• And “leaders” (governments? corporations?) would be positioned to discuss critical issues like spent nuclear fuel in a way that we can’t while pretending that industrialism will continue. Max Wilbert has a good summary of this issue.

• It feels a bit icky and mansplain-y, like “People couldn’t possibly handle what I know.” My cluster is guilty of this.4

Amp Them Up Before You Bum Them Out

That’s my twist on your insight: People have to want to live before they care about dying.

I think that when it comes to boosting morale…

Offering “hope”: If you gloss over the coming ugliness5, and people don’t experience the future that you promised, you lose their trust. Within/adjacent to my cluster, I sense this about Rob Hopkins’ How to Fall in Love with the Future and Jeremy Lent’s concept of an eco-civilization. I’ve been calling this pleasant-washing.

Seeking “hope”: If you pick a morale source that doesn’t accommodate all the coming ugliness, and reality doesn’t match what you’ve been envisioning, you’ll face disappointment and discouragement.

Reality isn’t going to conform to your “existential comfort requirements” but you can adapt your comfort strategy to what reality can offer. I think that’s a fair version of “hope”.

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Definitions

What is…

Extirpation❓ when a specific species (is that redundant?) is erased from some area. Humans extirpated the American bumblebee from at least eight states. However, the American honeybee still exists in some places. However, its population dropped 80% from 2001 to 2021.

Background extinction rate ❓ the steady rate at which Earth’s species tend to go extinct. It’s about 10-100 species per year.

Major mass extinction❓a period during which Earth loses >75% of species over a “geologically short time” (like, under 2.8 million years).

Minor mass extinction❓a period during which species disappear at above the background rate, but you don’t lose 75% of them.

Deep Time Perspective

How long Earth existed❓4.5 billion years

How long has Life existed on Earth❓at least 4.1 billion years

How much longer could Life exist on Earth❓maybe 1.5 billion years

How much longer could Earth exist❓+/- 6 billion years

Previous mass extinctions

When did they occur❓Here, have some charts!

Note the Y axes. This one’s Y axis is families lost, and it’s a plain number, but you can see species-as-a-percent (the official definition of extinction) in the data labels.

This next one is also worth noting. Its Y axis is based on genuses, and they’re taken as a percent. I like this one because the Cambrian Extinctions are apparent. Clearly, lots of creatures died. But it doesn’t show up on the first graph because Earth’s animals weren’t that diverse to begin with. If your whole planet is inhabited exclusively by giraffes and scorpions, and all the giraffes die, you’ve lost 50% of your species but “the extinction referees” don’t consider that a significant loss.

The past two times Life wiped out Life

Is Homo sapiens the first creature to cause elevated extinction rates❓ Nope!

Around 2.7 billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved. The could photosynthesize! Earth’s atmosphere back then was mostly carbon dioxide and methane, without today’s oxygen and nitrogen. So that’s what Earth’s earliest organisms developed to breathe: carbon dioxide and methane. But as cyanobacteria photosynthesized, they combined CO₂ and H₂O, producing (among other things) O₂. The cyanobacteria were very successful and generated so much O₂ that nobody could breathe. Oops! Biosphere Reset! Voila, Great Oxidation Event. All that O₂ probably also caused Earth’s first ice age and led to Ozone Layer formation.

The other creature-caused reset was the Devonian mass extinction. Around 372 million years ago, photosynthesizers were at it again! Plants and fungi had made their way onto land and were zealously metabolizing minerals. Those minerals ran off into the oceans. Cue giant algae blooms, anaerobic microorganisms digesting those swathes of dead plant matter, and everybody suffocating again, this time on CO₂. (Volcanic eruptions also played a role.)

In a way, these would have been a more appropriate metaphor to serve as the premise of Don’t Look Up, rather than a comet hitting Earth. Pixar movie?

Life bounces back

How long does life typically take to re-diversify after a major mass extinction❓ maybe 10 million years

I recommend reading this Guardian article about “a climate of unparalleled malevolence” at the end of the Permian Era. Terrestrial Life has been through some sh*t.

And yet, today Earth has a new full cast of characters! Including juicy fruit! (That came after a later extinction.)

Current situation

Is the current extinction rate above the baseline❓Yep, elevated and rising. (Remember, the “normal” Y value here would be 10-100.)

🆘 Tom Murphy’s data above show an increase between 1840 and 1960 (in the “Ecological Impacts” section here, he mentions getting them from Our World In Data). Meanwhile, this meta study found that diversity loss isn’t as intense now as it was in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Does that mean his curve be more parabolic than exponential?

Erasure of Abundance (as opposed to Diversity)

So far, this has all be about diversity. Diversity is important to a functional ecosystem, but it isn’t the only thing to be watching.

So, what about abundance❓Yeah, about that…

• From 1970 to 2020, overall wildlife abundance dropped to 69% (measured by headcount)

• From pre-industrial times to today, large predatory fish abundance dropped by 90% (measured by mass)

• From +/- 1990 to 2020, insects saw their average total abundance (headcount) drop by 58.4% (see Table 2) … The ones we tend not to like (crop pests, mosquitos, ticks) are increasing in number, but on net there’s a decline … Also, DRAMA:

  • In 2019, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys published “Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna: A Review of Its Drivers.” Here’s the Guardian story in normal-people language.

  • Then, Saunders et al. came out with “Moving On from the Insect Apocalypse Narrative: Engaging with Evidence-Based Insect Conservation.” They called the global media coverage of the original study “exaggerated” and “confusing and inaccurate science communication”, and insisted that “a limited number of studies that are restricted geographically … and taxonomically” and “biases in sampling and analytical methods” rendered Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys’ findings invalid.

  • So Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys were like “f*ck you guys” and came out with “Further evidence for a global decline of the entomofauna.”

• At the current rate that the Werld is exterminating wild land mammals, there will be NONE by 2050 (which isn’t to say that the Werld will fully succeed). See curve below.

Over half of Earth’s species belong to phylum Arthropoda! 🕷️🦀🦂 A subset of it, class Insecta, has the most members of any class. 🪲🐞🦋🐜🪰🐝

Main causes

What’s causing this, primarily❓

When is comes to amphibians, birds and mammals, agriculture is tied for first with “resource use”. (If someone wants to look into what “resource use” means, be my guest.)

For insects, the top cause is agriculture (again). The first figure below is directly from Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys. In the next one, someone merged some categories thematically.

I haven’t looked into sponges, cnidarians, worms and nematodes, mollusks, echinoderms, or arthropods besides insects. So…

Oh! Here: Since 1980 we’ve lost 48% of hard coral and “The UN’s climate panel has previously reported that at 1.5C of warming, coral reefs would decline by between 70% and 90%, and at 2C would be almost completely lost.”

etc. etc…

Notably, climate change is not yet a dominant factor, at least not for these phyla. This means that even if climate change stopped being an issue tomorrow, we’d still find ourselves in an elevated-extinction era.

Nevertheless, climate change is beginning to take its toll…

And we’re turning up the instability too quickly for adaptation to occur.

THE ANSWER

So will this turn out to be a major mass extinction or not ❓I don’t know. As I’ve demonstrated before, I’m not averse to giving a grim prognosis. But in this case, it’s just too complex, and I’d be lying if I made a call either way.

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A solid appreciation for the dynamics among all six “realms” pictured below is the basis for genuine “collapse-awareness”.

Using the terms and distinctions from my previous post for greater clarity, I’ll walk through how I arrived at the realization that the Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and therefore a necessarily short tenure.

This is something I come back to, after interacting with “normies” so often that I doubt myself - Am *I* crazy? (No, they’re the cult members.)

Yes, I renamed the Spectrosphere the Noösphere! A friend clued me in that there’s already a name for the concept. Refer back to my previous post for “realm descriptions”.

The images above are stills. If we could “hit PLAY” on them, they would reveal certain physical and chemical interactions, some supportive, some hostile. We can also “play the tape forward” (a phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous, meaning anticipating where actions lead) to understand what drive these events and what kinds of results these interactions have over time.

Causes

It starts with what I’ll call Plunder.

🥊 The Werld seizes land from the Biosphere, for its Domestophere, increasing the Domestisphere’s available calories. This allows for population increase, and the Domestiphere makes manifest that possibility. This population boost inspires the Werld to claim even more planetary surface area from the Biosphere. This amounts to an amplifying feedback loop. (Counterarguments that involve technological solutions fall under the next glove-bullet.)

🥊 The Werld seizes material from the Biosphere and Lithosphere to produce (and in the modern era, power) its Technosphere.

🥊 Even the Werld’s sounds, scents, light and electromagnetic waves are a continuous, deadly disturbance.1

🥊 Later, as Werld converts the materials that it seized from Earth into more of the Domestosphere and Technosphere, some materials gets sloughed off (e.g. manufacturing byproducts, emissions from combustion). This poisons Earth’s land, water and air.

Effects

Next, Earth strikes back - but only in the sense that a rake “strikes back” if you step on it. The following phenomena are the natural consequences of the Werld’s activity.

💥 The depleted Lithosphere and Biosphere instate an ever-shrinking budget for the materials that they can offer to the Technosphere, making it impossible to keep up with maintenance, let alone expansion. Metals, minerals and coal/methane/oil become more difficult to access and lower-grade. The Werld gradually becomes unable to produce and transport goods or provide services for its Domestosphere.

💥 The depleted Biosphere “walks out”. Without Earth’s complex cast of pollinators, prey and predators, and decomposers, the Domestisphere’s plants struggle and “waste” (e.g. feces and mortal remains) accumulates, leads to a rise in disease.

💥 The Abiosphere turns toxic and unstable. Uncooperative weather (even just slightly unusual temperatures or precipitation patterns) prevents Domestophere plants from thriving. It also expedites the breakdown of the Technosphere, which Werld-humans are already struggling to keep running. Chemicals like antibiotics, plastics and PFAs lead to a rise in superbugs, cancer, endocrine disruption and infertility.

I provide real-life evidence of these Effects here:

Because of the damage that they inflicted on the Lithosphere, Abiosphere and Biosphere, Werld-humans become unable to meet their basic survival needs: thermoregulation, water and food. They also become more exposed to toxins and pathogens.

Evidence that this is beginning is here:

Pictured below: the Werld engaging in further Plunder to “save” … Earth? the Werld?

What if the Werld suddenly stopped the Plunder?

Ground rules: Assume no further Plunder and no further activities that release pollution into the air, soil and water. (This is tricky. I’ll probably have to make some exceptions.) This includes -but isn’t limited to- a ban on seizing materials from the Lithosphere (coal, methane, oil) and burning any more of what is already in possession.

USA-Werld’s “powered-Technosphere”(the machinery that needs to be “animated” in some way to service its purpose, whereas an asphalt road doesn’t require fuel combustion or electricity to serve its purpose) would be cut to 2% functionality.2 No Werld-nation would get anywhere near even 20%.3 And without being allowed to Plunder for more metals and minerals or burn our oil inventory, no one would be able to produce more “clean” infrastructure.

Meanwhile, whereas the Biosphere is regenerative (replaces itself on its own), the Technosphere is degenerative.4 No Plunder means very limited maintenance (try restoring a city of crumbling high-rises with manpower alone), and the Technosphere will start to deteriorate. This includes the asphalt roads that were able to serve their purpose without being “animated” as well at the “clean” infrastructure that was keeping 2% of powered-Technosphere online.

Furthermore, if Werld stops occupying land, reserving it for Werld-plants and preventing most Biosphere creatures from living and eating there, its Domestiphere would have far less to eat. Or even if it simply held onto some portion of what it’s currently guarding, maintaining such a high Domestisphere population without Werld-medicine (which it wouldn’t be manufacturing or transporting…) and without functional Werld-plumbing (much of which we wouldn’t be powering) would lead to widespread disease and die-off.

Without a Technosphere and Domestisphere, there can be no Noösphere. Biosphere members have culture (taught behavior patterns, some practical and some for sheer enjoyment) but it isn’t exactly like the Noösphere.

Harmonious cells?

I recently came across the screenshot below, accompanying a substack post that conjectures:

Unlike genes, there is no objective, neutral way to observe the ideas in people’s minds & their evolution. This project is impossible to pull off without reshaping human civilization. But this is a feature, not a bug: it has the potential to steer the collectives who participate. Towards the best possible future, and away from collapse.

Who gets to steer humanity? It’s the same answer to: “which cell in the human body gets to steer it?” - it’s all of them, all of us.

The bigger issue (beyond the isolated one of inter-human cooperation) are the facts about how Werld-humans are interacting with the whole of the Lithosphere, Abiosphere and Biosphere - all of which represent cells in Earth’s body. This is the third time in Earth’s history that some organisms have kicked their collective metabolism into high gear. (The previous two instances were The Great Dying and the Late Devonian mass extinction - the subtopics of next week’s post!). The Werld-human collective (in collaboration with is Technosphere and inspired by its Sprectrasphere) is replacing everything with *itself* and refashioning the entire planet/host. That’s how cancer cells behave, hence the name of Tom Murphy’s series of 18 videos/essays, Metastatic Modernity.

Key Insights

✔️ Plunder inevitably entails Causes.

✔️ Those Causes inevitably have Effects.

✔️ An end to Plunder means an end to the Werld. The Werld, recognizing this and not wanting to bring about own end via cessation-of-action, keeps up the Plunder.

✔️ Werld is seeking loopholes: “be World without Plunder”, “Plunder without Effects”, “incur Effects but only ever for Earth and without harm to Werld”. Laws of physics, chemistry and biology dictate that none of these are possible.5 … Or we could just go with: Werld isn’t implementing these loopholes at a fast enough rate to offset rapidly mounting Effects. (Acceptance of the unbolded part makes the difference between grasping that the Werld was a dead-end endeavor all along and holding onto the conviction that it could’ve been perfected and lasted longer.)

✔️ There will come a point when the Effects prevent Plunder. An end to Plunder means an end to the Werld.

That’s how I determined that the Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and a necessarily short tenure.

Maybe those who disagree understand that the Werld wasn’t going to be permanent, and instead the disagreement is about severity and timing. In that case, I would point them to my posts linked above.

Other Noteworthy Implications

1. Despite the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’s spiffy report imagery, the Werld can’t “find a balance” with Earth. Matter can exist as Lithosphere/Biosphere or Technosphere/Domestosphere, and the Werld’s own “[short-term] survival imperative” dictates that it behave like a black hole, converting matter from the former to the latter.

2. What occurs between the Werld and Earth is the main action. It has the ultimate power to determine what occurs within the Werld, positive or negative, and it does so every day. We could solve all of the Werld’s internal problems, and the external ones would remain, irreconcilable with the Werld’s operations.

Generally, Werld-humans are raised in a (somewhat literal) bubble and fed censored messages about what the Werld is up to. Many of them inhabit spaces that already got converted from Earth to Werld, so it feels “normal”. And there’s plenty happening within the Werld to distract them. They can go their entire lives without thinking much about Earth, let alone understanding it; without realizing that the war-of-conversion is ongoing at the “frontlines”; and without understanding what it means for Werld’s fate.

Recap

Why is the Werld in crisis? Because its emergence and persistence inevitably entails crisis.

If Werld succeeds in its war against Earth, it faces oblivion. If Werld fails in its war against Earth, it faces oblivion.

Not tomorrow. But, for example, John Gowdy figures that possibly by 2100 CE and definitely by 2200 CE, large-scale grain agriculture (a prerequisite to complex civilizations) will have become impossible. [HOWEVER, please note of the counterarguments that offers in the comments below.] Taking 10,000 BCE as the start of Werld-humans’ systematic takeover, this means that you and I are alive during the omnicidal campaign’s final 0.02%.

The Lithosphere, Abiosphere and even (somewhat later) the Biosphere existed long before the Werld showed up. They’ve undergone transformation before and will persist (definitely true of the Lithosphere and Abiosphere, and I’d bet true of the Biosphere) for a few billion more years until the Sun consumes them. It’s the Werld that showed up recently, doesn’t play nice and therefore can’t last long.

I was going to start this post by complaining that others are misusing the word “world”, but it turns out I was. Its roots in Old English are “wer” (man) and “eald” (age). So when the Post Carbon Institute’s website says that they’re “leading the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world”, they’re at least justified in identifying the wer-eald as the thing that’s facing sustainability issues. And Vaclav Smil’s book, Feeding the World, is indeed concerned only with feeding domesticated, agriculture-reliant humans.

Where we go awry, however, is in using this term interchangeably with “all that is”. There’s much more beyond mankind and man-space.

Eileen Crist says the same of the term “oecumene”, calling its emergence “a significant sign of the lodging of anthropocentrism into language and thereby into broadly shared patterns of thought.” Oecumene means “the inhabited world”, as if spaces devoid of humans (particular kinds of humans) are uninhabited. She points out that by ignoring what civilizations erase as they spread and highlighting what moves in to occupy, it functions as an imperialist euphemism.

If we consider that there’s something beyond our Werld (I’m inventing this term because it’s going to come in handy…), we’ll be in a much better position to understand what’s happening to us and what will (or could) (and couldn’t/won’t) happen to us.

Behold, the WORLD! Like, ALL of it!

The following are some terms that I’ll use in my next post, which will seek to answer “Why is the world in crisis?” with some statements that someone who is not entirely sold on the inevitability of the Werld’s impermanence can test.

Lithosphere - Earth’s crust. Minerals, metals, and coal/oil/methane. These last ones formed about 300 million years ago, over millions of years, from decomposing vegetation.

Abiosphere (I made this up. Formally, it’s the atmosphere + hydrosphere.) - Abiotic factors. The parts of “nature” that “aren’t alive”. Sunshine, clouds, temperature, wind, precipitation and bodies of water, fire. This site lets you explore how it has changed over time!

Biosphere - The parts of “nature” that “are alive”. For the sake of my categories, this includes only “wild” species of plants, fungi, animals and other kingdoms - those who know how to meet their essential survival needs in the absence of agriculture and the Technosphere.

I’m going to refer to these three realms as Earth.

The remaining realms belong to the Werld.

Technosphere - The infrastructure that Werld-humans create to facilitate the production and exchange of “goods and services”. (Earth’s organisms also trade molecules and provide each other with support, but it doesn’t look quite like The Economy.) Some parts are made of biomass (i.e. wood) but much of it comes from the Lithosphere.

• Infrastructure includes: roads, bridges, tunnels, aqueducts, pipes, dams, solar panels, wind turbines, data centers, cables and wires, trains, planes, all wheeled vehicles, excavators and other heavy machinery, buildings

• Goods that, through the Technosphere, come into existence and are transported: books, personal protective equipment, chemotherapy drugs, insulin, vaccines, condoms, surgical tools, hip/knee replacements, bicycles, orchestra and band instruments, eyeglasses and contact lenses, toothpaste, sunscreen, appliances, devices

Domestosphere (I made this up.) - Creatures that inhabit the Technosphere and depend on it as an intermediary for meeting their basic survival needs: thermoregulation, water, food. Their requirements are the same as the Biosphere members’, but Domestosphere beings don’t know how to meet those needs directly on Earth. These include humans (but not all of them), and species whom those humans keep as crops, livestock and pets.

Noösphere - The “official” definition of the Noösphere, according to my Google search, is “the ‘sphere of human thought’ … [a] layer of consciousness, intellect, and technology, where human minds and their creations (like the internet, art, science) profoundly influence the planet, making humanity a geological force. Developed by Yernadsky, de Chardin, and Le. Roy…” … I’d like to make some tweaks to the official definition - Noösphere^AP?

1. Noösphere^AP isn’t necessarily global. It also existed in 10,000 BC on a small scale. Maybe that’s a proto-Noösphere. I’m more concerned about material reality in this substack anyway so not worth fussing over.

2. Noösphere^AP isn’t human-exceptionalist or teleological. I get a liiiiiittle bit of a sense that the term’s originators think humans are the only species who think and that Werld-humans have some special status/destiny, as if we’re Earth’s favorites. I’m not promoting any of this “thought integrates with nature, evolving into a new state of global functioning” stuff.

3. Noösphere^AP is heavily influenced by the anthropological theory of cultural materialism which says that in the pyramid below, the influence is primarily bottom-up. I reference it in Post #5.1. The Noösphere that I’m writing about encompasses the Superstructure and Structure tiers.

This realm isn’t material in the way the others are. These are really descriptions of patterns and modes in which the Technosphere and Domestosphere can function. Biosphere creatures can approximate them, but these look very different without the Technosphere and without the way that Werld-membership conditions Domestosphere creatures to design them.

• Examples: weekends, grocery trips, Rights and Freedoms, Mergers and Acquisitions, Progress, Democracy, Healthcare, Education, Journalism, Data Analysis, Money / Banking / Investments, the Cloud, Status, Cuisine, Entertainment, TikTok trends

Disclaimers

Yeah yeah, separability is an illusion and everything is alive. For my intents and purposes in this post and the next, my categories are useful/relevant.

It’s possible that an organism is capable of meeting some of its survival needs without the Technosphere. I’d rather keep these categories as they’re defined and allow for describing that creature as having split membership.

Can a human stop playing civilization?

tweeted in August 2024 (as shown in this post), “this whole civilization thing is just a game where anyone is allowed to make up new rules and you can stop playing whenever”. The post itself didn’t define civilization or playing/quitting - but the statement was enough for me to examine through the lens of these realms.

There’s definitely evidence of Domestosphere members successfully “onboarding” (to use Defender’s term) Biosphere members - in “residential schools” that sought to “Kill The Indian, Save The Man”. Later, industries emerged and forced humans who were already members of the Domestosphere to adopt ever-more-advanced technology, such that they abandoned the teaching/learning of lower-tech methods of meeting survival needs and became even more reliant on infrastructure.

photo source & source

Has it ever worked in reverse? Granted, when Europeans arrived in “America”, it was common for Werld-humans to defect, join Earth-humans and resist “rescue” attempts. But what about without the Werld-human being able to join an experienced tribe of Earth-humans? I foresee some barriers:

1. If you’re born and raised in the Domestophere, your community would not have immersed you in those daily survival routines since birth, as is the case for Earth’s humans. You would first have to reach an age where you’re capable of realizing that it would be wise or at least desirable to know how to meet your survival needs continuously out on Earth. You would have to invest a lot of time to develop the knowledge and skills.

2. You’d be foraging and hunting, which means you need access several acres where wild plants, fungi and animals live. Unfortunately, the Werld made up a rule where you have to provide goods and services in the name of the Werld, to earn tokens, which you can eventually exchange for the permission to consider a parcel of land “yours”. If you seek calories there without dibs, Enforcers of the fake rules will force you to pay tokens or else go to prison.

3. Even if you get the land, you still need to adhere to another of Werld’s made-up rules and pay tokens annually for the Technosphere and Noösphere that you’re trying to escape. To earn those tokens, you need a “job”, which tends to require adherence to certain standards about your appearance, so you’ll find yourself engaging with the Technosphere again.

4. Final twist!: Even if you did successfully cut ties with the Werld, it tends to eliminate Biosphere members, whether by slaughtering them, starving them or absorbing them (as is the case with “successful” attempts to “civilize” and “domesticate”). Tom Murphy explains in “The Ride of Our Lives” that societies didn’t really have a choice to not join the self-destruction.

Suffice to say, it’s definitely not easy to quit.

At the Werld’s Mercy

If the only way you know how to pursue thermoregulation, water and food is through the phenomena that Werld happens to offer, their you’re stuck accepting whatever deal Werld extends in exchange for keeping you alive.

For some Werld-humans, that (for now) means something called “employment”, which is rewarded with “income”, which can be traded for food at places like grocery stores and farmers’ markets, or maybe even through some kind of subscription service. Neat-o! But that’s not the case for all Werld-humans everywhere and across all time.

If (when) your particular arrangement changes, and you will have to accept it because you don’t have the skills or land to meet your survival needs in any other way. If there were (when there is) no arrangement of any kind available, you’d be relatively helpless.

The impetus for this shift doesn’t even need to come from actors within the Werld. Earth can make it so, regardless of what Werld leaders want.

The 18 “core essays” on my main page explore the PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE, as well as what our culture’s dominant narrative gets wrong.

If you’re low on time and energy, here’s a rough equivalent in video format. The full playlist duration is about 4 hours. For greater detail and source citations, you’ll have to consult my essays!