Collapse 2040

Society Collapse 2040: The Year Your World Stops Working and Starts Dying

 

The Mathematical Warning That Refused to Fade

Fifty-four years ago, a team of researchers at MIT fed population data, resource consumption curves, and pollution metrics into a mainframe computer the size of a shipping container. The machine whirred through calculations and spat out a trajectory that ended in sharp decline. The 1972 Limits to Growth report predicted that without drastic course corrections, industrial civilization would hit terminal constraints by mid-century. At the time, critics dismissed the findings as Malthusian paranoia, pointing to the green revolution and technological optimism as proof that human ingenuity would always outpace scarcity. They were wrong. The variables aligned with terrifying precision.

A reassessment published by KPMG in January 2026 confirmed what the original MIT model suggested: we are not merely on track for the 2040 collapse—we are eighteen months ahead of the worst-case scenario. The report analyzed thirty key indicators including arable land depletion, aquifer drawdown, atmospheric carbon concentrations, and debt-to-GDP ratios across OECD nations. Twenty-seven of those indicators exceeded the 1972 projections. The remaining three—global shipping volume, semiconductor production, and satellite launches—mask underlying fragility by measuring activity rather than resilience. The study concluded that the “business as usual” trajectory now points to systemic rupture between 2032 and 2038, with cascading failures likely to begin manifesting visibly by late 2027.

The mathematics does not care about human optimism. Exponential curves have a way of appearing flat until they go vertical. The MIT model tracked five variables: population, food production, industrial output, pollution, and non-renewable resource depletion. In 2026, global population stands at 8.2 billion, having added the last billion in just twelve years. Food production plateaued in 2023 despite increased fertilizer application, indicating diminishing returns on agricultural intensification. Industrial output continues to rise, but energy return on investment—the amount of usable energy extracted versus the energy required to extract it—has fallen below the critical threshold of 15:1 for most fossil fuel sources. Pollution, measured in particulate matter, oceanic plastic density, and atmospheric methane, exceeds the model’s “pollution crisis” scenario by forty percent. The curves converge toward a singularity of scarcity and toxicity.

The Nine Fractures Already Spiderwebbing Through the Foundation

Economic architecture is not collapsing in a dramatic thunderclap. Instead, it is dissolving like limestone in acid rain—slowly, invisibly, until the cavern opens beneath your feet. Global debt reached $307 trillion in early 2026, representing 333% of global GDP. This is not a number that resolves through growth. It resolves through devaluation, default, or dissolution. Central banks in thirty-seven countries are currently piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), programmable money that carries expiration dates and usage restrictions. The Bank for International Settlements openly discusses “financial repression” as a necessary tool for managing sovereign debt loads. Translation: your savings will be harvested to keep institutions solvent, and you will have no recourse because the money will be code, not cash.

The banking crisis of 2023 never truly ended; it merely entered a chemically-induced coma. Regional banks in the United States continue to hemorrhage deposits as savers flee to money market funds and Treasury bills. Commercial real estate—office towers built in the 1980s and 1990s—trades at sixty percent below 2019 valuations. Pension funds that loaded up on these “stable” assets face insolvency by 2028. The derivatives market, that opaque web of interconnected obligations, now notionalizes at over one quadrillion dollars. When—not if—a major counterparty fails, the unwind will not be orderly. It will be a stampede toward exits that no longer exist.

Climate systems are not changing. They are destabilizing. The summer of 2026 broke records that had stood for mere months. Phoenix recorded thirty-one consecutive days above 115°F. The wet-bulb temperature in Mumbai exceeded 35°C for six hours on August 3rd, 2026, crossing the threshold for human survivability without air conditioning. The Arctic ice minimum this September will likely establish a new record low, with some models suggesting the first “blue ocean event”—ice-free Arctic waters—could occur as early as 2027, decades ahead of previous estimates. The permafrost in Siberia is not merely thawing; it is exploding. Methane craters half a kilometer wide now pockmark the Yamal Peninsula, releasing ancient greenhouse gases at rates that render human emission reductions irrelevant.

Water is not becoming scarce. It is being weaponized. The Colorado River, which irrigates fifteen percent of American agricultural output, has reached critically low levels that trigger mandatory cutbacks under the 2026 Compact renegotiations. Farmers in Arizona are already bulldozing orchards that took decades to establish. The Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies the American breadbasket, drops an average of two feet annually. It will not recharge within any human timescale. In India, the groundwater beneath the Punjab region—India’s wheat basket—will be economically inaccessible by 2028. Pakistan and India have exchanged fire across the Line of Control three times this year over water rights to the Indus River basin. The first water war of the 21st century is not coming. It is already here, dressed in the rhetoric of territorial sovereignty.

Migration patterns have shifted from streams to torrents. The UN estimates that 1.2 billion people currently live in regions that will become uninhabitable within two decades due to heat, drought, or sea level rise. In 2026 alone, 340,000 people crossed the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, heading north. These are not economic migrants seeking opportunity; they are climate refugees fleeing agricultural collapse. The Sahel region of Africa is emptying into Europe at rates that exceed the 2015 crisis by factors of three. Bangladesh, where 160 million people live on a delta that rises one centimeter annually while seas rise three times faster, is negotiating “managed retreat” agreements that will relocate twenty million citizens by 2030. Borders are hardening. Camps are swelling. The infrastructure of compassion is fracturing under the weight of mathematical impossibility.

Food systems operate on margins so thin they resemble tightropes. The world maintains approximately seventy days of grain reserves. When Ukraine’s exports were disrupted in 2022, wheat prices spiked forty percent. When the Mississippi River dropped to historic lows in 2023, barge traffic backed up for months. These were warnings, not aberrations. In 2026, rice prices hit fourteen-year highs due to El Niño-induced droughts across Southeast Asia. The “green revolution” that fed the population boom relied on fossil fuel inputs—natural gas for fertilizer, diesel for tractors, petroleum for pesticides. As energy costs rise, food costs follow with mathematical inevitability. The bread riots that began in Sri Lanka in 2022 and spread to Pakistan, Peru, and Kenya were previews, not finales.

Disease is evolving faster than our defenses. Antibiotic resistance now kills 1.27 million people annually, a figure projected to reach ten million by 2035. Gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and staphylococcus infections are emerging that respond to no known pharmaceutical treatment. The post-antibiotic era means surgery returns to being a life-threatening gamble, childbirth becomes dangerous, and minor wounds can kill. Meanwhile, viral zoonotic spillover events have increased threefold since 2010. The H5N1 avian influenza has achieved mammal-to-mammal transmission in cattle populations across the American Midwest. Virologists give it a forty percent probability of achieving efficient human-to-human transmission within eighteen months. When—not if—it does, mortality rates could exceed those of the 1918 Spanish Flu.

Demographics are inverting with terrifying speed. The global fertility rate has fallen to 2.3 children per woman, barely above replacement level. In South Korea, it is 0.72. In Italy, 1.24. In China, 1.09. The inverted age pyramid—few young supporting many old—creates fiscal impossibilities. Japan is currently spending forty percent of its budget on elderly care and debt service. By 2030, that figure reaches sixty percent. Pension systems are not underfunded; they are unfundable. Simultaneously, youth unemployment in the developing world has reached forty percent in regions where seventy percent of the population is under thirty. The combination of idle young men and resource scarcity produces the historical precursor conditions for war.

Social cohesion is unraveling into constituent threads. Political polarization has reached levels where seventy percent of Americans view members of the opposing party as existential threats. Trust in institutions—media, government, academia, medicine—has fallen below twenty percent across Western democracies. Conspiracy theories move faster than facts because they offer narrative coherence in a world of chaotic complexity. When the official story loses credibility, people construct their own realities. The result is a population that cannot agree on basic facts, rendering collective problem-solving impossible. The public sphere has become a battlefield of competing hallucinations.

The Cascade Mechanics Nobody Modeled Correctly

These nine factors do not operate in isolation. They are coupled oscillators, feeding energy into each other with terrifying efficiency. Climate stress triggers migration. Migration triggers political backlash and border militarization. Resource nationalism disrupts trade. Trade disruption causes economic shock. Economic shock triggers currency crises. Currency crises prevent importation of food and energy. Food and energy shortages trigger social unrest. Social unrest disrupts supply chains further. The feedback loops are not linear; they are exponential.

The 2022 energy crisis in Europe demonstrated this coupling. Sanctions on Russian natural gas triggered price spikes. Price spikes forced industrial shutdowns. Shutdowns reduced fertilizer production. Reduced fertilizer production lowered grain yields. Lower yields increased food prices. High food prices triggered protests in developing nations that imported European wheat. The disruption traveled from pipelines to plazas in six months. Now imagine this cascade occurring simultaneously across water, food, energy, and financial systems. The models suggest that once three critical systems fail, the remaining seven follow within months, not years.

The concept of “resilience” has been strip-mined by corporate consultants who use it to sell software solutions. True resilience is biological, not digital. It is the redundancy of multiple seed varieties, not data backups. It is the muscle memory of manual labor, not cloud storage. It is the trust between neighbors, not blockchain verification. Industrial civilization has optimized for efficiency at the expense of redundancy, creating systems that are “lean” in the same way a razor blade is lean—sharp, but prone to snapping under pressure.

What the Breaking Point Actually Looks Like

The collapse will not announce itself with cinematic flair. There will be no single day when the president declares martial law over a montage of burning cities. Instead, the degradation will be granular, personal, and unevenly distributed. It will arrive as the day your debit card stops working at the grocery store, not because you lack funds, but because the payment processor is down. It will arrive as the week the pharmacy cannot refill your prescription because the supply chain fractured somewhere in a factory district you have never heard of. It will arrive as the month when the water coming from your tap runs brown, then stops running entirely.

Infrastructure does not fail catastrophically at first. It fails in brownouts. The electrical grid, that marvel of twentieth-century engineering, currently operates with less than three percent spare capacity in most developed nations. During the August 2026 heat dome, rolling blackouts affected forty million Americans. Hospitals ran on backup generators. Traffic lights went dark. Refrigerators warmed. The meat in freezers spoiled. These were not third-world conditions; they were suburbs of Dallas and Sacramento. When the grid finally fails completely—and physicists give it a sixty percent chance of major continental failure by 2030—it will not return quickly. Transformers take eighteen months to manufacture. High-voltage cables require specialized ships to lay. The knowledge to repair these systems resides in aging engineers who are not being replaced.

Water scarcity does not mean the taps run dry everywhere at once. It means the price triples. It means the municipal supply is restricted to four hours daily. It means those with private wells become targets. It means the wealthy install reverse-osmosis systems while the poor queue at distribution points with plastic jugs. It means hospitals cancel surgeries because they cannot sterilize instruments. It means the sewage system backs up because there is insufficient water pressure to maintain flow. It means cholera and typhoid return to cities that have not seen them in a century.

Food shortages do not manifest as empty shelves immediately. They manifest as the substitution of fresh produce with processed carbohydrates. They manifest as “meatless Mondays” becoming meatless weeks. They manifest as portion sizes shrinking while prices remain static. They manifest as the disappearance of imported goods—coffee, chocolate, bananas—replaced by local substitutes that taste like memory. They manifest as weight loss that doctors attribute to diet trends rather than caloric deficit. They manifest as the reappearance of “victory gardens” in suburban yards, not as hobbies, but as necessities.

Crime does not explode into Mad Max theatrics. It metastasizes. Petty theft becomes normalized because the police no longer respond to non-violent calls. Home invasions increase because desperation outpaces deterrence. Organized looting of cargo trains and delivery trucks becomes so common that insurance companies stop covering transported goods. Vigilante patrols form in neighborhoods that previously considered themselves progressive. The law does not disappear; it fragments into private security, gang justice, and mob violence. The state retains the capacity for overwhelming force but loses the capacity for consistent order.

Disease spreads not as plague pits but as chronic burden. Hospitals operate at 140% capacity year-round. Elective surgeries are canceled indefinitely. Cancer treatments are rationed by age. Antibiotics are reserved for the wealthy who can pay black market prices. Routine infections kill because the drugs no longer work. Mental health crises spike as anxiety becomes the baseline emotional state. The medical system does not collapse in a day; it erodes like coastal cliffs, losing a meter of capacity annually until the foundation undermines the structure.

Economic collapse does not look like hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, with wheelbarrows of cash. It looks like the cashless society the technocrats dreamed of, but as a prison rather than a convenience. CBDCs arrive as “financial inclusion” and become social control. Your money expires if not spent within thirty days. Your purchases are restricted based on carbon scores. Your accounts are frozen if you violate speech codes or exceed travel allowances. The wealthy move assets into land, precious metals, and cryptocurrency, leaving the masses holding programmable tokens that lose value algorithmically. The stock market does not crash; it is suspended “temporarily” to prevent panic selling, then reopened under capital controls.

The Survival Imperative Beyond Stockpiling

Preparation is not paranoia when the threat is mathematical. However, the survivalist aesthetic of canned goods and bunker construction misses the point. Three months of stored food will not carry you through a decade of decline. The lone wolf dies; the pack survives. The critical resource is not ammunition or freeze-dried rations; it is social capital. Trust is the currency that retains value when fiat fails. Skills are the assets that appreciate when markets crash.

Water security means more than bottled reserves. It means knowing how to purify rainfall, how to access aquifers, how to build solar stills. It means understanding your local watershed, the sources upstream, the contaminants likely downstream. It means community-level infrastructure—cisterns, filtration, distribution networks—that functions when municipal systems fail.

Food security means regenerative agriculture, not industrial agriculture. It means learning to grow calories, not Instagram aesthetics. It means heritage seeds that reproduce true, not hybrids that require annual purchase. It means composting, foraging, preserving, fermenting. It means small livestock—rabbits, chickens, goats—that convert inedible biomass into protein. It means knowing your neighbors’ skills and bartering labor for produce.

Energy security means redundancy. Solar panels with battery backup for when the grid falters. Wood stoves for when the gas lines freeze. Hand tools for when the power tools have no electrons to consume. The ability to repair rather than replace. The knowledge to maintain engines, to wire circuits, to improvise solutions from salvaged materials.

Medical security means primitive skills. Knowing how to set bones, suture wounds, identify medicinal plants. Stockpiling antibiotics while they still work, learning to use veterinary equivalents when human grades become unavailable. Understanding sanitation—proper latrine construction, water purification, waste disposal—to prevent disease rather than merely treat it.

Security means community defense, not individual armament. A fortress mentality invites siege. Mutual aid pacts, neighborhood watches, communication networks that function when cell towers fail. The ability to de-escalate conflict because every bullet fired invites retaliation. The wisdom to share surplus because hoarding invites theft.

Psychological resilience may prove the rarest commodity. The ability to adapt to lower standards of living without despair. The capacity to find meaning outside of consumption and status. The mental flexibility to abandon plans when circumstances change. The emotional stability to witness suffering without becoming numb or broken. The spiritual fortitude to maintain ethics when systems of enforcement dissolve.

The Horizon We Are Actually Walking Toward

The 2040 prediction was not wrong; it was conservative. The KPMG reassessment suggests we are witnessing not a sudden cliff but a steepening slope that began around 2020 and accelerates annually. The collapse is not an event in the future. It is a process we are currently inhabiting. The question is not whether you will live to see societal collapse. You are already living within it. The question is where on the curve you will find yourself when your personal trajectory intersects with the systemic breakdown.

The Roman Empire did not fall in a day. It experienced centuries of decline during which life continued, markets operated, and culture flourished—until they didn’t. The Mayans did not vanish; they abandoned their cities when the agricultural basis could no longer support the population density. The Bronze Age collapse of 1177 BCE saw multiple interconnected civilizations fail within decades due to climate change, seismic disruptions, and invasion. The survivors were those who decentralized, who maintained oral traditions when writing disappeared, who shifted from complexity to resilience.

We face a similar inflection. The next fifteen years will not resemble the last fifteen. The assumptions of perpetual progress, of technological salvation, of infinite growth on a finite planet, are being ground against the whetstone of physical reality. The pain will be unevenly distributed, as it always is. The wealthy will buy islands, citizenships, and security details. The poor will suffer first and most. The middle class will discover that their credentials and retirement accounts are abstractions that dissolve when the infrastructure supporting them fails.

But within this darkness, there is a strange liberation. When the impossible burden of maintaining industrial civilization is lifted by its own weight, space opens for other ways of being. Not utopia, certainly. Hardship, definitely. But also proximity, skill, meaning, and connection that the digital age promised but failed to deliver. The future is not uniformly bleak; it is textured, varied, and still undetermined.

The MIT model offered a choice in 1972. We made it, collectively, through action and inaction. Now we navigate the consequences. The 2040 horizon approaches not as prophecy, but as physics. Those who see it coming, who prepare bodies and minds and communities, will not escape the storm. But they might build boats sturdy enough to reach the other side of it.

Radagast: Agricultural Collapse

Overly simplistic models obscure the risk of agricultural collapse. Rintrah by Radagast. August 5, 2026.

please see his post at the link above to see the charts and access hyperlinks in the article

There’s a big dispute in climatology, in regards to equilibrium climate sensitivity: How much does the Earth warm up, when you double CO2 in the air?

The IPCC maintains an estimate of 3 degree Celsius per doubling. Some, like James Hansen, think the number is much higher. He thinks it’s 4.8 per doubling, but many of the climate models the IPCC uses sit even higher, above 5 degree. The general idea is that these models “must be wrong”, so they’re not given the same weight when it comes to making predictions for how much warming we will get in the future as models that predict less dramatic warming get.

The main argument given to dispute the credibility of these models, is that they don’t properly reproduce the warming we have seen so far.

The dispute between models mostly comes down to differences in how the clouds are expected to respond. The “hot models” predict that the warming we experience from more CO2 results in a reduction in clouds that reflect sunlight. Thus these models are said to have “positive cloud feedback”.

But not everyone believes these models get it right of course, that’s why there is a scientific dispute. If these “apocalypse predicting” hot models were right, the Earth should be warmer than it actually is right now, that’s the idea upheld by those who are not convinced the hot models get it right.

The counter-argument to this idea, is that the hot models predict greater warming than we have seen so far, because there is other stuff we’re doing that is still keeping temperatures down.

So what are those things? One of them is the temperature reducing effect of air pollution, an effect known as global dimming.

This is the same effect that led some scientists to predict “global cooling” in the past, but as we succeeded at cleaning up a lot of this pollution, it became obvious we would find ourselves faced with rapid global warming in the future instead.

Estimates of how much global dimming we’re causing right now still vary quite a lot from one study to another.

How much it keeps temperatures down matters a lot, because this air pollution is something we will eventually stop dumping into the air: It kills millions of people by damaging our lungs and it acidifies the soil.

So far so good, anyone who has looked into climate change is probably familiar with what I have explained so far.

There is however another important thing we’re doing that helps keep our temperatures down, especially during summer. When you realise what it is, it feels pretty obvious, but it also confronts you with a massive looming problem.

As the author of one study puts it:

“In summary, we showed that irrigation expansion has regionally masked the historical warming of hot extremes from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and all other climate drivers combined,”

And as the authors of a different study put it:

Given our results for California and the global importance of irrigated agriculture, past expansion of irrigated land has likely affected observations of surface temperature, potentially masking the full warming signal caused by greenhouse gas increases.

We irrigate about 17% of the world’s land, to produce 40% of the world’s food. This land has its surface temperature reduced by about 5 to 7 degree Celsius, because the land cools as the water evaporates. This is not all positive, as the resulting higher humidity makes it harder for humans and other animals to sweat, but it does bring temperatures down.

More importantly however, when the water evaporates, it increases the formation of clouds. With satellites you can see that irrigated land has an average cloud cover of 40% during the day, versus 25% for non-irrigated land. These clouds peak between 2 and 4 PM, which is also when the heat influx into the environment from the sun is most intense. These clouds reduce temperature stress for the crops and reduce their water demand. In addition, photosynthesis tends to benefit from how these clouds turn direct sunlight into diffuse sunlight.

In large parts of the world, the water that is evaporated from irrigation, leads to an increase in rainfall, often up to hundreds of kilometers downwind. As a good example, the irrigation in the central valley of California increases water availability by 28% in the Colorado river basin.

Irrigation causes significant cooling of global average surface temperatures, primarily over land. The authors estimate 0.07 degree Celsius reduction in global temperature for the Earth as a whole, or 0.17 degree specifically on land.

A lot of people have been wondering, why India is lagging behind in global warming, compared to the rest of the world. Over the past 40 years, India has only warmed by 0.09 degree Celsius per decade, versus the global average of 0.30C per decade, and below the 0.23C recorded for regions at similar latitudes.

How did that happen? Well we know the answer. They began ramping up their irrigation:


Right now, it’s estimated that around 1 degree of global warming is suppressed over India, thanks to irrigation, both from the direct effect and the indirect effect (enhanced cloud formation):


The effect is strongest, in India’s agricultural powerhouse, the Northwest:


In Northern Italy, studies find that irrigation reduces the peak of a heatwave, by 6.6 degree Celsius. Humidity in the air does increase, but the wind blows that humid air away, so you’re still much better off, thanks to the irrigation.

But here’s the thing. Around the world, a lot of the water we use to irrigate our crops is groundwater, 43%. That groundwater, is generally being depleted faster than natural processes can refill the aquifer. In other parts of the world, we’re getting the water for irrigation from rivers that are supposed to be feeding lakes. The great salt lake is dying, because 62% of the river water that used to feed the lake, is now used for irrigation. Most irrigation as currently practiced by humans is unsustainable.

Farmers and governments know this. So how do they respond? Well, one solution is drip irrigation. Instead of just spraying a lot of water on your land, you slowly drip water on your crops. This causes less water to be lost through evaporation. This is great for the farmer and for the local aquifer, but think about the consequences.

Less water is used for irrigation. This means less water now evaporates. This mean you get less cloud formation, less reduction in temperatures over the land, less rain further downwind. All the positive externalities from irrigation are basically eliminated, when the farmers switch to drip irrigation. The farmers however, don’t have much of a choice. A lot of these farmers can’t just keep using the large amount of water they’re using right now.


The Water Situation in the Indian Subcontinent

After a terrorist attack, the government of India suspended the Indus water treaty, which requires India to share water with Pakistan. The Indian minister of water declared that not a drop of water will flow into Pakistan. India doesn’t have the infrastructure yet, to follow up on that threat. They’re now working on building the infrastructure, to deny Pakistan any water.

First they started dredging their dams. They have also now started planning the construction of new dams. They’re also building new canals, where the water can be used. They’re also diverting water to the northern Indian states, with a new tunnel that is supposed to be operational by 2029.

So, what happens to Pakistan? Well for starters, the Pakistani government is not happy. Their climate change minister has threatened to “chop off the hand” that tries to control its water. Pakistan was supposed to receive 80% of water from the Indus, under the Indus water treaty.

Pakistan has two main sources of water: They have the water from the Indus river system and they have groundwater from their aquifers. I can’t really find consistent reliable estimates on what percentage they derive from the Indus river system and what percentage they derive from their aquifers. Pakistan’s minister says half the population depends on the Indus river system. Some sources say 90% of agriculture in Pakistan depends on the Indus river system.

Other sources say that more than half of Pakistan’s water use in agriculture, comes from groundwater. The problem however, is that they’re using their groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it. Most cities in Pakistan have rapidly declining groundwater tables. A study recently estimated when groundwater extraction will peak in Pakistan. They arrived at 2040 as the most likely year when groundwater extraction from the Indus aquifer would peak. But that was before India suspended the Indus water treaty.

So, why is India doing this? The official reason is because of the terrorist attack. In reality however, they simply need the water themselves. Estimates are that by 2030, 40% of India’s population will have no access to drinking water. Estimates are that lack of water will reduce cropping intensity in India by 20%, with a reduction of 68% in the most water-scarce regions.

When an aquifer is depleted, the grains of sand that used to leave room for water are gradually compacted by the pressure from the soil above. As a result, after depleting an aquifer, it tends to be unable to properly recharge, even once you stop using the aquifer.

India’s recent heatwave was much worse than anything we faced in Europe. During these heatwaves, if you live in a city like New Delhi, there is just not any water coming out of the tap. Drinking water has to be driven into the city, by a “water mafia”, that bores illegal well holes. Then the population has to stand in a cue, to buy water from these tankers.

In Bangladesh, it’s the same problem. They just declared 5,000 villages as “water-stressed areas”, meaning the people are just not allowed to use the ground water to irrigate their crops anymore, they can only use the water to drink it themselves. In 1950, Bangladesh had 40 million people. Today, Bangladesh has 178 million people.

In Bangladesh, you have 20 million people living in the capital city, Dhaka. In Dhaka, the groundwater table is declining by 2 meters per year. By 2030, they’re looking at the groundwater table declining by 4 meters per year. As you have to delve deeper, there’s more arsenic and other pollutants in there. But eventually, it just gets so deep that it costs you too much energy to get the water up.

In other parts of the country, their problem is that when they use up the water beneath their feet, salty seawater infiltrates the groundwater. Salt water infiltration is threatening drinking water and water for agriculture, for more than 20 million people in Bangladesh. That’s more people than live in the entire Netherlands.

So, is there a technofix? Could India’s government just deliver desalinated water to Northern India instead? No, the math doesn’t math. Desalinated water would be about three times more expensive than the wheat it produces, so your food would become four times as expensive.

This is just the cost of desalinating the water at the coast. To transport all the water inland all the way from the coast to Northern India would roughly equal the cost of desalinating the water. In other words, your bread would be seven times as expensive as it is today.


The Water Situation In California

California produces huge amounts of food, the valley is said to produce a quarter of all food in the United States. The problem is, they depend on an aquifer that’s being depleted to produce that food, but the ground has now compacted, so that it has become physically impossible for the aquifer to be refilled by nature.

In parts of California, the situation with the aquifer is so bad, that the government has simply instructed farmers to stop using groundwater like the government did in Bangladesh, so the farmers are just leaving their land dry.

So with these new rules that means California is going to struggle to produce as much food from now on, as it did in the past. But think about all the feedback effects we now start to get as a result:

• Local temperatures get higher
• Less clouds are being generated
• The rest of the United States now gets less rainfall

The people in Arizona know very well how dependent they are, on water from the Colorado river. Well, that water is declining. And the summer flow of the Colorado river is increased by 28%, by Californian farmers irrigating their crops.

Through irrigation we’re both increasing rainfall when it is most needed and reducing the amount of water our plants need, by reducing peak heatwave temperatures.

If you take this into consideration, you’ll realize that when we have to stop irrigating our crops, we’ve got one hell of a feedback coming.

One study looked at what we can actually expect, in regards to groundwater depletion. They looked at 235 groundwater basins and found that total global human groundwater extraction will peak at 625 km3 yr−1 around mid-century, followed by a decline through 2100.

The peak and decline occur in about one-third (82) of basins, including 21 that may have already peaked. This will result in exposing about half (44%) of the global population to groundwater stress. The countries that are worst affected, are the United States, Mexico, Pakistan, India, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

There are also places, where groundwater use just doesn’t really seem to be an issue. Global warming is an easier environmental problem to understand, we’re all suffering from the pollution of the global commons. But groundwater is a stranger one: There are places that have already exhausted their groundwater, there are places busy exhausting it and there are other places where the groundwater reserve is actually increasing.

Soil erosion is a similar problem, there are places where we’re losing our fertile soil to erosion and there are other places where this is just not a serious problem.

Add the whole picture together however, and you see the problem: There are parts of the world where we’re running out of the soil our crops need, there are parts of the world where we’re running out of the water our crops need and there are parts of the world where the temperatures are simply getting too hot to properly grow crops.

Finally, there are places where the soil is good, the water we need is available and the temperatures are acceptable, but we’re running out of people who can grow the crops! Japan is a good example of this. They’re shrinking their farmland from 4.2 million hectare in 2020 to just 2.7 million by 2050. Their caloric self-sufficiency, will decline from 37% in 2020, to just 29% by 2050. The reason is because their farmers are old and they have nobody to inherit the farm.

Russia is another example. You have all these climate models, that predict that although food production will decrease as a result of climate change in countries near the equator, it’s no big deal because food production will increase in Russia and that will compensate on a global level. Here’s an example of what I mean:


This is what the World Bank published, back in 2010. Most of the world sees yields go down by 2050, but don’t worry, because Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Scandinavia will bail the rest of us out!

Well, that’s not going to happen, because the Russian government has been stupid enough to spend the past few years invading Ukraine. By now, a fifth of Russian farmers face bankruptcy. They don’t have the diesel they need. Russia is not going to increase its food production, they’re struggling to hold onto what they have.

Nobody seems to bother accurately modeling the situation that lies ahead of us, by incorporating all variables. Example, there’s much ado now, about a study that claims 1 degree of global warming reduces rice yields by 8.1%, rather than 3.8%.

But read the study and they admit:

Our estimates should be interpreted within the context of physiological effects. The temperature-yield relationships are derived from single-factor warming experiments, which allow us to isolate high-temperature effects from confounding water and nutrient stresses. However, these experimental conditions may differ from farmer-managed fields, where yield outcomes also depend on complex interactions among temperature, water availability, crop physiology, and canopy energy balance.

They’re looking at one variable in isolation. Globally, 75% of rice agriculture is irrigated. If you can’t irrigate your rice anymore, yields don’t drop 8.1%, they collapse.

But let’s take a look again, at the study that predicts what’s going to happen to our groundwater. At the end they write:

Our model does not include an explicit physical representation of processes such as recharge, capture or lateral flows. However, these dynamics are embedded in the historical depletion datasets we use to calibrate our model, and alternative depletion limits (described above) allow us to capture a range of plausible future groundwater availabilities resulting from changing human-induced or naturally varying fluxes.

Alright, so you’re not properly modeling how the aquifer recharges. Well that’s a problem, because the recharging of our aquifers changes too. As our climate changes, what happens is that you get longer periods of drought, followed by an increase in rain that falls all at once.

That’s a problem. Dried up land, struggles to absorb water. What is now happening in practice all across the world, is that we get a bunch of rain all simultaneously on dried land, that ends up in the rivers and is eventually dumped into the ocean. It no longer recharges our aquifers!

So again, when they say we will hit peak groundwater around 2050, that fails to take into consideration that our aquifers are no longer getting properly recharged.

And in fact, aquifers that now look sustainable to these scientists, that look like they are not being overexploited, may turn out to be overexploited after all, because the rain will stop refilling these aquifers for us, because it all falls simultaneously on dried-out soil that can’t absorb the water!

This is just lack of water that I’ve talked about. Your crops will get the opposite side of the coin too: Too much water, all at once. When your farmland is flooded for an extended period of time, your crop yields drop to zero, because the plants die and rot.

You can look at what happened to Pakistan’s rice production in 2022, when the country suffered severe flooding. They lost a third of their rice output that year.

And then there are the dense plumes of wildfire smoke, which can be enough to wipe out your harvest in their own way. If your crops don’t get sunlight, they don’t grow.

Our entire system of food production, depends on cereal grains. Two thirds of all the calories we consume, directly or through the animals we eat, come from grasses.

And when you understand that, you understand our problem. Grass ecosystems on this planet, are new.

The first true grass biomes (grasslands) did not form until the Miocene epoch, roughly 20 to 30 million years ago. Although individual grass species and tiny plants evolved over 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, they only grew as rare forest-edge or moist patches.

Why is that? You’re finding out as we speak. A forest is good at generating its own rain, because it releases water during periods of drought and absorbs massive amounts of water during periods of heavy rainfall.

Grassy ecosystems, which our entire system of food production depends on, can’t do that.

The last time CO2 concentrations in the air were as high as they are now, was between 14-16 million years ago.

The tropical grassy biomes only developed into expansive, dominant regional biomes roughly 8 to 3 million years ago. Today they support a fifth of the world’s human population.

With the climate trajectory we are on, there is essentially no guarantee, that the Earth will be capable of sustaining grassland ecosystems, including the artificial ones we depend on for our food.

If we stopped our greenhouse gas emissions today, you would be left with the kind of climatic circumstances, where grasses as we know them today, were minor plants on the outskirts of our forests.

Back then, the grasslands that now cover 27% of the Earth’s surface and 70% of our agricultural area, did not exist.

Under the climate we’re now creating, grasses could not survive, except as a kind of pioneer species that lived on the outskirts of forests.

The atmosphere can hold 8% more moisture with every degree of warming, so during summer the air now ruthlessly sucks up all the water out of the soil until the grasses start dying, then in autumn when it cools down, this massive amount of water is dumped onto these poor grasses with tiny roots that struggle to let all the rain flush down into the soil.

You can see this happening in England today. England has recorded its driest July on record, in a series since 1836, with just 6.5mm of rainfall recorded – just 10% of its long-term meteorological average for the month, and less than half of the previous record of 13.4mm set in 1911. That’s why England now looks like this:


Our animals are not safe either. A healthy young adult can survive a wet-bulb temperature of about 31 °C for a few hours in the shade. Cattle standing in an open pasture, with no shade and no relief overnight, start dying around 26 °C. They just don’t have bodies that can sweat as effectively as ours.

These conditions we are now dealing with, are not conditions under which we can sustain agriculture.

This only becomes obvious, once you start to look at multiple interacting variables. If you just look at heatwaves, rice yield goes down by 8.1% per degree of warming. If you actually take into consideration that rice dies when exposed to too little or too much water, you realize 1 degree of warming leads to a collapse in agriculture.

And then we haven’t even looked at what happens to your crops because of pest species yet. In India, they lose a fifth of their crop to rats. In other parts of the world, you lose your crop to insects. Plant defenses against insects are shut down, when CO2 concentrations in the air are increased. The plants you eat, can no longer defend themselves against insects. And because the winters get warmer, those insects no longer die off during winter.

What we also haven’t looked at yet, are the dust storms. Climate change causes dust storms to increase, but what’s particularly worrisome, is when you have arid soils that you can no longer use for agriculture, because once you abandon those soils, it takes years before nature can stabilize them for you. That’s the risk they now face in Arizona for example.

When you have dust storms, the leaves of your young plants are damaged by the dust. This can dramatically reduce yields. In other cases, your soil is damaged by large amounts of salt deposited by the dust storms. Again, nobody really tries to put a proper number on this.

So, could we just block the sun instead? Would that bail us out? I wouldn’t count on it. There are numerous studies that take a look at what happens when you block the sun. When you start blocking the sun, you start changing everything. How much rain falls, where the rain falls, where the wind blows, all this stuff starts changing.

And to make matters worse, we don’t even known if blocking the sun would even work to reduce warming. When you spray these sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere, they can react with ammonia in the atmosphere to form ice-nucleating particles such as ammonium sulfate. Those particles then give rise to cirrus clouds, which have the effect of causing further global warming.

And keep in mind, the effect of these aerosols in the stratosphere that block the sun is not symmetrically opposed to the greenhouse effect. You will reduce warming more during summer than during winter, you reduce warming more during the day than the night, you reduce it more near the equator than near the poles. This is all opposite of how the greenhouse gasses affect the climate, so when you try to compensate for it by blocking the sun, you still just create a whole new global climate. There’s no real guarantee it will work.

The most likely outcome of what we are doing, is that we simply end up with a climate in which agriculture just no longer works. The methods we’ve so far used to mask the damage we’ve caused to our climate, the unsustainable use of irrigation, the blocking of the sun through air pollution, are falling away. The ecosystems we depend on for our food today simply did not exist, in the climatic circumstances we are now creating.

Collapse [soon] and avoid the rush

Collapse now and avoid the rush. Rintrah by Radagast. July 3, 2026.

A lot of people on Reddit tend to get really upset, when I show them this:

I’ve seen all sorts of attempts at denying the obvious: Maybe that number on the left is for the entire airplane! Maybe it’s actually misogyny of me to point out that you shouldn’t be spending your twenties traveling around the world!

No, I’m sorry. The corporations and the media deceived you into thinking that something is normal, that is in fact not normal. Every year we’re using an amount of fossil fuels that took many thousands of years to come into existence and we’re using the atmosphere as the place where we dump our waste after we burned those fossil fuels. That’s just not a normal way to live. It’s not a way of living that will remain available to humans for very long.

The reality is as following: Every time you take an intercontinental flight, more carbon dioxide has to be released into the air through combustion, than an entire African village home to dozens of people releases into the air in a single year. Unfortunately, as they tend to grow their own food, such a village also houses the people who are most directly affected by the global warming your flight causes.

Nobody claims that flying is the main cause of climate change. The problem is that it’s much easier for people to stop flying, than it is to stop growing rice. Some greenhouse gas emissions are just unavoidable with the technology we have available right now. And considering that the airline industry is one of the main industries that is constantly growing its carbon footprint, whereas most other industries at least try to reduce their impact, by 2050 the airline industry will in fact be one of the main remaining causes of further global warming, unless we now wake up and collectively start changing the way we live.

I’m pretty sure you might be wondering: “What’s in it for me?” Well the thing is, as with collapse in general, that if you make the lifestyle changes today that are going to be necessary, then you won’t have to experience the discomfort of having them forcibly shoved down your throat tomorrow, which I promise you, is where this will be headed eventually.

Today you might say to me: “Well, I had to travel to the other side of the world, to visit my grandmother’s funeral.” I’m not here to judge you. What I’m here to tell you is: “By the time your mother leaves this world behind, your government may not allow you to visit the funeral. Consider moving to live near your family, while you still have the freedom to make that decision yourself.”

You’ve seen how this went with COVID. The media, the experts, the governments, all stuck their heads in the sand, until at some point in March 2020, by which time it was already impossible to stop this virus from spreading, they all simultaneously implemented lockdown measures. Humans tend to stick their heads in the sand, until eventually they all panic simultaneously.

Well, climate I’m telling you, is not going to be any different. The American oil companies were all warned about this problem, in the 1950’s. By the late 1970’s, they had an accurate picture of what was going to happen. If at any point they chose to warn us, we would have had plenty of time, to figure out an alternative way to live without using any more fossil fuels. They did not warn us, Hansen warned us, in 1988.

If we had taken Hansen’s warning seriously, we would still have had some time to figure out a way to stop using fossil fuels. Hansen’s warning was not taken very seriously. In fact, when Hansen warns us we need to reduce carbon dioxide back below 350 parts per million to stabilize the climate, nobody really listens to him unfortunately. Hansen did not plan for climate change to become a kind of grand existential conflict for humanity. Hansen had hoped we would implement a carbon tax and start building nuclear reactors.

That did not happen. We’re happily continuing the march towards oblivion. So, what you can reasonably expect to happen at some point, is a climate event that is so massive, that we can not choose to ignore it. We will get an event that is so massive, that we end up getting the kind of mass panic we had in March 2020, when we suddenly had tens of thousands of police on the streets of Paris, announcing to people that they had to stay inside.

What would that look like? Well, for that, we have to talk about wet bulb temperatures. When you wrap a thermometer in a water-moistened cloth, it will behave differently. The water will evaporate, depending on the humidity of the air and you will be able to measure a wet bulb temperature.

As humans, we are guaranteed to die when the wet bulb temperature reaches 35 degree Celsius for at least six hours. Our bodies are not able to use sweating to cool down at that temperature anymore. It doesn’t matter if you sit in the shade, you just die at this temperature. Until we started changing the climate, such wet bulb temperatures occurred nowhere on Earth: No part of the Earth reached temperatures too hot for human survival.

The first time we ever saw a wet bulb temperature above 35 degrees on Earth, was in 1987, in Pakistan. By now, these temperatures are emerging in Iran, in Saudi Arabia and in other parts of the Middle East too. ...

Europe is warming twice as fast, as the world as a whole. One of the consequences is that during heat waves, we now see the sort of temperatures in parts of Europe that you would normally only see in the Middle East.

It gets worse, because 35°C was always the generous theoretical ceiling. It was the point past which we were certain nobody survives. But in a recent study on healthy young adults, it was found that none of them were actually able to cool down at that temperature. Their bodies started getting in trouble much earlier, at a wet bulb temperature of around 30.5 degree Celsius. And for elderly, it’s even harder than for young people to cool down.

Heat stress conditions beyond the limit of human survivability are already a regular thing now on Earth. And due to arctic amplification, the fact that we actually see more rapid global warming in parts of the world that lie further north, there is not really any major part of the world anymore where we are safe from these heat waves.

Now combine this realization, with another problem we face: The heat dome. Because we have changed our climate, the weather has started behaving differently. It’s not just a fact that the Earth in general has warmed, but heat waves now behave differently. We now increasingly get heat domes, which are large parts of the world where the heat is simply trapped and the weather becomes stationary.

One such climate change-linked heat dome, happened in 2021 in Canada and the United States, on the Pacific coast. A study estimated that it was almost certainly caused by climate change, which had made it an estimated 150 times more likely for it to happen.

So what happened during the heat dome? For starters, 1400 people are thought to have died in it.

On June 27, Lytton a village of 250 people in Canada, recorded the highest temperature the town had ever seen: 46.6 °Celsius. But the heat was stuck. There was no wind, the heat was not moving, the soil was drying out and the heat just kept building up. The next day, the town reached an even higher temperature: 47.9 °Celsius. Two consecutive record-breaking days.

But the record would be beaten again, the next day. Finally, on June 29, the temperature in Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6 °C (121.3 °F), the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. The next day, a forest fire swept into the city and everyone had to flee, as the town was destroyed. In British Columbia, 815 people suddenly died during the heatwave. Of those, 570 were deemed heat-related. Of those 570, 21% were younger than 65.

The elderly are more vulnerable, but our planet can now reach temperatures hot enough to kill children and healthy young adults too. As I just showed you, our planet can now reach such temperatures, not just in the Middle East, but even in Canada.

So, please allow me, based on what we’ve learned, to offer you a prediction:

At some point, something big is going to happen. Something so horrifying, that many people will not be able to mentally cope with it. And people are going to freak out. They’re going to freak out, like you’ve never seen before. All these realizations people have been suppressing for years, are going to be released in a tidal wave of emotions, all at once. And governments are going to find themselves panicking too, like they did in March 2020.

As I have explained before, the electric grid in Europe is just not equipped to have us all use air conditioning. Only 20% of Europeans have air conditioning. This does not stop people right now however, from buying air conditioning. If everyone used air conditioning, our evening demand peak would be 50% higher than it is right now, enough to crash the grid. Also, please keep in mind, that our cities suffer a massive heat island effect. Cities can be up to ten degree Celsius hotter than the neighboring countryside.

So, what is going to happen? Well, I expect that at some point, we’re going get a heat dome, over a developed country that people think fondly of. It could be Canada, it could be the United States, it could be Japan, it could be a European country. A place that people associate in their mind with happiness and carefreeness, a place they may have visited as tourists, not a place where people expect misery to happen. South Sudan already has two million climate refugees, but nobody cares. No, for panic to emerge, it needs to go seriously wrong in a Western country.

...

That heat dome, is going to stay stuck. People will turn on their air conditioning. The electrical grid will not be able to handle the demand. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people, will then suffer a blackout. They will rapidly notice the heat becoming unbearable. People will try to flee, but it will be difficult to flee, as it is often difficult to evacuate an entire town at once.

You will turn on your evening news and you will see video footage, of an entire town just annihilated in a heatwave. If I had to pick my best guess, I would guess Phoenix, Arizona, but as the Pacific heatdome illustrated, it can literally happen to Canada. And this time, the news won’t hold back. They’ll show you what actually happened. They will show you what it actually means, to die like this.

You will see houses with dead grandparents in them, who never left their couch, with their dead dog right next to them. You will see cars stuck in a traffic jam, with Sally Soccermom, Joe Sixpack and their little children in the back of the car, all dead. Not people in Uganda, not people in Sudan, but people who look like you, who look like they could be your colleagues or neighbors, dead.

A kind of climate 9/11, if you will. I honestly don’t expect it will take more than a decade, before we have a climate 9/11. The conspiracy theorists will immediately jump on the opportunity for another explanation: Space weapons! Ionosphere heaters! Weather manipulation! Occult Satanic ritual human sacrifice! It was all predicted in an episode of the Simpsons!

But it’s not going to work, because those same people were saying twenty years ago that it’s all a hoax and that the Earth had not warmed since 1998. People are going to panic, people are going to freak out. Government departments are composed of average human beings and they are going to freak out too. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

There will be people going crazy. Young women removing all their holiday pictures from Instagram at 3AM. Married middle-class men with children who work at oil companies quitting their job overnight. People who will commit actual sacrifices, in an attempt to appease nature. Psychologists won’t be able to cope with the demand from people having mental breakdowns. The reason it will be such complete insanity is because people already know all of this, but they still suppress it. But at some point, everyone will almost simultaneously become unable to suppress it. What you are living in now, is the quiet before the storm.

And then within a few days, you find yourself waking up in a whole new world. A world where you have to request permission if you want to travel somewhere by airplane. A world where the tires of your SUV are slashed at night and your neighbors pretend not to see you when you walk past them. A world where a handful of people hoard all the beef in your local supermarket and then there is just never any new beef available anymore and you never quite figure out why.

A world where posh people just sit in the dark in the evening, because they don’t want their neighbors to see them using electricity when their solar panels don’t work. This is your worst nightmare, isn’t it? Your Klaus Schwab WEF globalist horror scenario? Well, that’s why I’m telling you: Prepare for it. It’s going to happen. Nature is done with our bullshit and people are going to figure that out the hard way.

So, what I’m telling you, is to collapse now and avoid the rush. Move to live closer to your family and friends now, don’t sit as an “expat” in some city with a bunch of roommates you don’t really like. Stop flying now, because they’re no longer going to let you fly, unless your life depends on it.

Stop eating beef now, because you’ll crave it and the local supermarket won’t have it for you. Sell your car now and buy a bicycle, because your car will one day be a badge of shame, especially if it is big or expensive. Stop having children now, because it’s going to get ugly.

There will be a before and after to all of this. Not because the climate itself will suddenly shift dramatically one day, but because this is just how human psychology works. Negative emotions and realizations tend to be suppressed, until we can’t suppress them. And then when we look around us and see that others can’t suppress them anymore, we find ourselves able to let go too.

So what I’m asking you, is to just prepare for it. Make the changes that are going to be necessary to your life now, rather than being part of the big crowd of people who will try to exit the theater all at once when someone yells fire. Help make this a somewhat orderly and dignified transition.

The Collapse is Coming

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? Peter Watts, The MIT Press Reader.
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.


I’ve known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet of over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left academia in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic — admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding — I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the U.S. Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel “Echopraxia” is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other — and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect. What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of “A Darwinian Survival Guide.”


The following conversation was recorded in March 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.

In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

“Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work.”

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive? A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine? In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —

Daniel Brooks: No.

Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

Peter Watts: Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

Daniel Brooks: That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Peter Watts: Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Daniel Brooks: Right, right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: Now, this is an argument that some might say is invasible by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Daniel Brooks: Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

“We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.”

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

Peter Watts: What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious — although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one— the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness” — that you need variation to cope with future change.

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

Daniel Brooks: A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

Peter Watts: And that might be one of the more essential values of this book — that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book, democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit — and this is a quote: “Our governance systems, long ago coopted as instruments for amplified personal power, have become nearly useless, at all levels from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of wellbeing, or conflict resolution in mind.” So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Daniel Brooks: Yes.

Peter Watts: And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

Daniel Brooks: That’s right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

Daniel Brooks: That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.” And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Peter Watts: Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

Daniel Brooks: I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed — at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

“Local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble, and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now.”

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

Peter Watts: That’s an interesting question.

Daniel Brooks: That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control. And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

Peter Watts: Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Daniel Brooks: Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Peter Watts: Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: “This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Daniel Brooks: Nobody’s running to the cities.

Peter Watts: “Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life —

Daniel Brooks: Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half —

Peter Watts: And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment — in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

Daniel Brooks: No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

Peter Watts: I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on —

Daniel Brooks: That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Peter Watts: Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it — or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a —

Daniel Brooks: But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush — Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

“This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.”

Peter Watts: Absolutely.

Daniel Brooks: And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

Peter Watts: I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse —

Daniel Brooks: Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Peter Watts: Exactly.

Daniel Brooks: Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Peter Watts: Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen —

Daniel Brooks: So?

Peter Watts: — and I would argue that most people — I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

Daniel Brooks: This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within — you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we — you know, some form of humanity — may be part of that, or may not. But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We know now enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that? So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years — you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.