How Everything Can Collapse, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of How Everything Can Collapse by Pablo Servigne, Raphael Stevens. Available from Wiley here.

What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization.  Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment.

In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people’s ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives.  In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves.

Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.

How Everything Can Collapse, reviewed

Have we come to this? Post apocalyptic books describing how it will be in a future where everything has gone to hell and we, as a race, are forced to live in a ‘The Road’ like dystopia. This book was written pre-covid-19, but does very much sit easily with the negative consequences of what is now playing out. Early predictions of how long the pandemic will last, and how few people it will kill are repeatedly shown to be as wildly inacurrate and over-optimistic as we feared they might be.

All of this is red meat for the hypothesis of these authors, mainly that the good times are gone and it only gets worse from here on. Historically we have gone through periods of optimism and pessimism about what the future holds for us. This book feels very much like the wheel has turned from over happy techno solutionist predictions of the future offers us, and the needle is now firmly in the much bleaker 2000AD / Judge Dread, bleak scorched earth future dystopia.

Is this an accurate assessment of what lies in store for us? Hopefully not completely, but it would be fair to see this current global pandemic as a time to reboot the worst practices that we are currently conducting that damage our global home. If you want a tough love, no sugared pill projection of how it might play out then this may be the book for you.

About the authors

Pablo Servigne is an agronomist with a PhD in biology. He is a specialist in questions of collapse, transition, agro-ecology and mutual aid.

Raphaël Stevens is an eco-adviser. An expert in the resilience of socio-ecological systems, he is cofounder of the consultancy agency Greenloop.

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