Collapse is the economic, political, societal, technological contraction, simplification, disassembly and fragmentation of a more complex society. I am not aware of this ever having occurred voluntarily. Much pain, and often widespread death leading to population collapse, is involved.
Why will this happen this century, the 21st century? Like many nations, empires, societies before ours - and our is now a global society - we are about to exhaust our primary resource bases: fossil fuels, fertile soil, clean water. Complicating this is the phenomena of global warming, sometimes called global climate change.
The net result - though we are only in the beginning stages: a radically changed planet, disappearance of a third to a half of all species, a collapse of the human population. Whether we survive appears in 2014 as debatable. The real question right now is: What are we willing to do to make life a bit easier for our descendants? How can we make the coming dark age less dark? How can we preserve some of the positive elements of our so-called modern societies that will be beneficial to our survivors?
How does collapse actually happen? Does it start in our financial sectors, which are quite corrupt? Does a new pandemic breakout? A new war that greatly reduces our energy supplies? Will there be a simultaneous global collapse in the industrial nations, or will it simply spread from regions already sinking into desperate poverty? I tend to believe that the second possibility, the spreading inkblot model, is more likely. Why? Because the more prosperous regions will try their best to isolate themselves from the spreading chaos and maintain their lifestyles for as long as possible. But how long can they do this? Don't they need food from "the hinterlands"? Don't they need electric power and fuels from great distances? Doesn't the delivery of this energy require protecting the power lines, pipelines, fuel sources? Does it require spare parts from great distances? Don't they need a stable climate? Yes to all of those. So the question becomes: How long can the remaining "modern" industrial areas hold out? How will they defend themselves against "new barbarians" - people who are the former citizens of once functioning societies?
What will our modern societies be collapsing to, and how will we get there? Many possibilities exist, ranging from the slow descent down a gradual slope, to a series of stair step drops where each step down provides a temporary landing point of stability, to a relatively rapid drop "all the way down". The end destination in all these possibilities is the same - it's the pathway and thus the timing that's different.
What's that destination? From the vantage point of 2014, it's not possible to tell. It's going to depend on where the climate finally reaches some kind of longer term equilibrium pattern. In the best possible case, that's no more than 2 degrees C above a pre-industrial value. In the worst case, it could be 4 - 10 degrees C, levels that will make human survival almost impossible, if not impossible.
And it's going to depend on where the human population level settles. Two centuries ago, there were about a billion people on earth. That's when the climate was far better than now or what we're approaching. So in a much worse climate with severe habitat destruction, a world of well under one billion humans may be where we're headed. Will it drop to under 100 million? 10 million? Those numbers all seem possible.
That would make this century, "The Century of Malthus". How does the human population crash in the presence of growing resource exhaustion? Pandemics, civil violence, wars over remaining resources, widespread famine, pestilence, loss of potable water supplies, disappearance of basic (much less advanced) medical care, lack of fuels to heat dwellings in winter months, lack of reliable transportation, deterioration of infrastructure (roads, power lines, sewage facilities, water purification facilities, lack of knowledge of food preservation techniques). Which will be the most important in reducing the size of the human population? My guess: famine and disease, including exposure to the elements.
What level of technology to we drop to? Where do we end up? Will it be like the 1910s, a hundred years ago, with modest amounts of electricity and the very basics of modern medical care? Will we get to "keep" some more modern inventions? Antibiotics (if they still work)? Radio? Refrigeration? Or will we end up closer to the middle of the nineteenth century? Or the seventeenth century, or the Middle Ages, or all the way down to the neolithic? Or will we be really lucky and only fall back about half a century, at least for a while? It all depends on the climate and the population level.
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