The idea of an impending American collapse is enjoying a better class of friends these days. Long relegated to the low-income housing of blogs like The Daily Impact and The Doomstead Diner and the like, consideration of collapse is appearing with ever more frequency in respectable publications and websites, places people don’t mind admitting that they read. Just today two major works in two highfalutin’ places have come to my attention. I think it’s a trend, frankly.
First James Fallows, a writer and thinker I much admire, has a piece in The Atlantic titled “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad: Maybe the end of the American one won’t be either.” Now this is a notch above the typical whistling-past-the-graveyard pieces that the shills for infinite growth forever and ever have been putting out since it became obvious to the enlightened — that would be us — who saw that the end was clearly near.
But only a notch. Mr. Fallows would have us take comfort from the fact that the collapse of the Roman Empire did not much matter to, or affect, those who were not actually Romans. When the last emperor was gone from Rome, and the heavy hand of centralized control was lifted from the denizens of the defunct and far flung empire, there was, Fallows writes, a renaissance of freedom, creativity and prosperity — a little known era called Late Antiquity. The piece is learned and richly sourced and I would not dare to quibble with the main premise. But I have serious reservations about the secondary assertion — that maybe our collapse won’t be so bad either.
When their central government vanished, the citizens of the Roman Empire were not left at the mercy of vicious climate change, brought on by themselves, bringing drought and floods and storms and death on a scale never seen before. They were not having also to deal with the fact that the basis of everything they had been doing for centuries, every activity — namely cheap, abundant energy — was running out. Their agricultural lands were not poisoned and eroding, nor their waterways polluted, by their agricultural activities. The seas were still brimming with fish. Mr. Fallows makes no mention of these factors.
I’m sure that the idea of American exceptionalism giving way to American collapse is relatively new to him, he has eloquently over the years expressed faith in American resilience, and I look forward to reading him as he wrestles with the idea. Now that he’s actually said it, confronted it, I believe the idea of collapse will take hold of him, and he will soon be saying with the rest of us outliers (often a.k.a. out-liars) that not only the American Empire, but the entire Western industrial civilization is not only going to collapse, but is doing so now.
That is the premise of another major piece I came across today –a trilogy by the Sri Lankan writer Indi Samarajiva in the relatively new, but very credentialed and tony website Medium. (You can read the three pieces for free before you hit the paywall.) His first piece, “I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There,” seems to tamp down the severity of its declaration that America is now collapsing, with anecdotal evidence that one can carry on with a normal life through collapse, as he did when Sri Lanka was crashing and burning in its great civil war.
But continue reading his parts two (“Collapse Takes a Lifetime: America is Just Getting Started”) and three (“The Sadness of American Collapse”) and any idea that he is making light of the experience is dispelled. He is a terrific writer, and a perceptive observer and a compassionate person. As with Fallows, I find his focus on American collapse a bit narrow. It’s not just about us, it’s the entire industrialized world that is coming down around our ears.
It’s embarrassing to catch yourself enjoying predictions of great calamity and suffering, and I apologize when it happens. But when you have been writing about the gathering storm for decades to the massive indifference of your fellow humans, finally seeing your hard won and fiercely held ideas taking hold among a better class of people and publications is, well, enjoyable.
In a severely perverted kind of way, of course. Thanks for understanding.
Don’t apologize! I get it! It’s extremely emotionally difficult being a Cassandra so when the world around you starts to wake up to the things you’ve been thinking and talking about for a long time, it’s a relief even though the topic is dire and we wish it weren’t true. Thanks again for your writing.
Good topic today. I appreciate the reference to Medium, where a lot of good opinion is being published these days, also including Umair Haque’s.
Please consider reading my ‘Inter States’ trilogy where I experiment with the political thriller as a spec fic approach to US decline, set in 2040, with falling EROEI and climate change along with persistent oligarchy as common threads pervading shaky US institutions.
Third and final book will be out in early 2022.
See: https://www.foundershousepublishing.com/2015/07/new-release-inter-states-fossil-nation.html and https://www.foundershousepublishing.com/2016/06/inter-states-emergent-disorder.html
Your writings have had a profound influence on more people than you can imagine. Most do not leave comments here. We have been ready for “Collapse” or what we call in our household “the Change” for a decade now – our efforts driven by information accessed from numerous resources including yours. Your book Tribulation – in addition to being a good read – is an excellent road map. Thank you for what you do and keep doing it. People are listening.
Thank you Anne. The days get dark and long sometimes, and one wonders what is the point, and then someone like you checks in and the sun comes out again. Thank you.
Tom, I’d like to order your book (to read during the next lockdown). I’ve sent an email.
Hear hear.
To us 1970s greensters, it seemed obvious that resource depletion and societal dissipation would follow close on the heels of environmental degradation. Gas lines, ozone layer destruction, species extinctions and acid rain were just a few of the harbingers of things to come. The challenge was clear, and Presidents Nixon thru Carter backed meaningful environmental protection measures in response….Then came Ronald Reagan, and a decade-plus of environmental denialism. We had won the theatrical ‘Cold War’ against the Red Menace, but lost the battle for the planet.
In the 1990s concern for the environment re-emerged with the Peak Oil school of thought. Lengthy and well-honed polemics were published by such scholars as Richard Heinberg, Matthew Simmons and James Howard Kunstler (to name a few) and hit Americans right where it hurt – in the gas tank! But while the Peak Oil theory was technically correct – we were indeed running out of oil – the projected time table had failed to take into account technological innovations aimed at squeezing from Mother Earth every last drop of her precious blood. With fresh petro supplied from fracking operations, Americans fell back into their delusional slumber.
So here we stir like the residents of ancient Babel – confused, contentious, unable to arrive at a coherent consensus, and actively experiencing a state of what J. M. Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’. The ancients were lucky though; they were able to scatter about the globe and settle in virgin realms…We have no such option.
Exactly.
I’ve said on my blog that one has to be either brain dead or in deep denial not to recognize by now looming collapse. And as you point out, it won’t be merely financial or industrial; it will be (already is, frankly) ecological. So we’re facing loss of human habitat, which now covers the globe and similarly dooms most other species we rely upon for existence. Sophisticated writers just now waking up the giant, existential dilemma we created for ourselves, perhaps unwittingly at first but then perpetuated knowingly, do us no favors by being halfway convinced, thus still fundamentally in denial.
Even with that assessment, though, I still wonder just how wise it is to seek to wake up others fully to the trap we have sprung on ourselves. We don’t disturb children with the foreknowledge of death. Indeed, as a civilization, we are still children (maybe adolescents) in how we apprehend reality and organize our societies. We won’t make it to adulthood.
I have never been one to advocate ignorance. My mantra has been that while we cannot save everyone, we can save anyone. I still believe that anyone who wats to make the effort can ride this beast to the other side. Thing is, it is one hell of an effort, and denial is so pleasant…
I’m not advocating for ignorance, either. The information is out there for anyone with the ethical fortitude to gather, synthesize, and draw conclusions. My point is that that approach describes only a few of us thus far. Forcing this knowledge on others more satisfied with varying levels of denial might be downright cruel. Solutions to that dilemma elude me, too.
As I get ready to go to work, I’m musing how different this information/realization must feel to those under 30. My daughter is 25, about the same age I was when I first heard of the “greenhouse effect.” People her age have grown up with varying degrees of information about global warming and largely accept that it is happening now and will affect THEM. (And frankly, admitting the problem is half the battle.) As they hit adulthood, they start to feel “we should do something.”
Whereas anyone old enough to remember the Arab oil embargo knows how difficult life gets when fuel is expensive or unavailable. We have seen numerous proposals fail. We know international cooperation will never happen if we can’t get our own house in order. We know how ingrained the resistance to change is, and how TPTB will never give up profits for the good of Mother Earth. So the only thing to do is prepare, deny, or say “Who cares? I’ve already lived a good life. I recycled, drove small cars, and wrote letters to the editor, so I have a pretty clean conscience.”
It takes a lot to kill the optimism of youth, and most young people still have it. (Think Extinction Rebellion.) I’m on their side, but I have to bite my tongue when I hear the sentiment that we still have time to turn things around.
Well said.
ditto.
If the nation of Japan had not flopped trips on the river* in March of 2011 it would no longer exist.
What we do know about the “Incident at Fukushima” is that Japan’s then PM Naoto Kan was within 48 hours of issuing the order for the abandonment of central-Honshu and with it Greater Tokyo. What we don’t know, is what were the plans to keep the lights on – and the spent fuel pools cool – at the dozen or more nuclear power plants that would have been within the official Honshu Evacuation Zone.
Would they too have been abandoned? Or would skilled teams of insanely brave workers have been choppered in and out the wastelands to keep the situation at the totally isolated power plants “under control,” and for generations to come?
“Under control” … aka, make a desperate commitment to stave off the possible destruction of more than just one nation. I will say it again (and for the one thousandth time), “our” atmosphere is only as good as “our” Ozone Layer, and that Layer Of Life is comprised solely of the absurdly delicate O3 molecule (falls apart in high winds), and is the only reason Earth is a friendly blue marble, and it would not have interacted well with the thousands of tons of radionuclides that would have been aerosoled at Fukushima – if we hadn’t ALL got lucky, nor will “our” LOL react positively to the hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive material that WILL BE RELEASED directly into it should the collapse of modern industrial civilization pass beyond a certain threshold.
The Romans had lead lined aqueducts and the gladius. Today’s humans have open-air radiological waste pools and thousands of weapons of war with nuclear throw weights (killing power) measured in the tens of megatons. Any theoretical possibility of a collapse and revival, a relatively benign tale (and meaningless intellectual exercise) where modern civilization falls, only to morph into equivalent of a livable “Late Antiquity (and with it the retention of fine dining!),” went out the window the moment humans split the atom.
The situation at hand for human’s is simple. They must immediately begin to micro-manage every aspect of their collapse. Human ingenuity and grit will play a part, of course, but more importantly, humans will need to co-operate on planet-wide scale like they were a tight knit hunter-gatherer society, and together-as-one, design somehow a survivable crash-landing for themselves on the other end, or they will go extinct.
(And THEY WILL drag all other life forms into extinction with them, including thermophiles. Do hear me thermophilers? You drive me crazy, you really do. You too, lovers of the nanobe. I don’t care how small or resilient you are, you’re a dead life-form walking if the celestial body you are traveling on gets stripped of its atmosphere).
Of course, humans must first accept that collapse has not only arrived, but is rapidly nearing the end of its very final phase. That would be a big first step.
So with that, thanks for your work Tom. If I ever had a minor quibble with your viewpoint, as I know it, though I have always found you as hard as they come on the subject of collapse, I do a times find you a tad some soft on topic of extinction.
*Hurray for miracles or random odds. Take your pick. Yeah, water flowing “just long enough” from a broken pipe in a damaged building adjacent to the one housing the spent fuel pool, provided enough cooling element to the pool to prevent the fuel from cooking off.
Otherwise, at minimum, modern Japan is no more. Better than catching trips really. More like a forth ace.
Thank you for all your articles. You might be interested in the book: The Fall of the Roman Empire, by Bryan Ward-Perkins.Oxford Press 2005. The book is a well reasoned response to the academic trend currently in vogue that posits that the Roman collapse was a happy time for all. Per the book the archeological and historical record indicates it was not.
I got the title wrong it is: The Fall of Rome and The End of Civilization.
Thanks
The writers that you hold in such high esteem are undeserving since they are merely reacting (belatedly) to what has already happened and is continuing to happen all around them.
On the other hand, you and I have prescience and the ability to extrapolate along a rational line to an unpalatable likelihood and on arrival we do not let denial detract from the conclusion and we remain unabashed.
Kudos to you. Let us enjoy our front row seats and bask in “we were right” and the light of our infinite wisdom.
You had me right up to “infinite wisdom.”
Levity.
Are we the literary Barbarians At The Gate? If seems knowledge and acceptance there of can only come from outside the city walls.
From where I sit in my little neck of the woods I keep looking for counter currents to the collapse. The pandemic has started to bring those into relief. Kind of like the beginning of Game Of Thrones as a metaphor.
The troubling thing is that, whereas the sobering reality of the impending collapse of modern industrial ‘civilization’ seems to have finally dawned in the minds of the people of the West, here in Asia people still seem quite benighted regarding this concern. What we have experienced so far this year are apparently viewed as temporary hiccups in the operations of the modern industrial system, to which we in Asia have remained as firmly committed as ever. Certainly I don’t remember coming across any TV program, Youtube video or journal/newspaper/online article of Asian origin which seriously discusses the possibility that the said system could be coming to an end. (We’re aware of the issue of climate change, but AFAIK it’s never occurred to any of us that climate change will not go away as long as we remain committed to the said system.)
I’m almost ashamed of being Asian.
Just a question to a group of people that write on Toms blog and of course to the host himself, do any of you follow “Artic news” by Sam Carra, and do you see that site as being truthful or just really hyped up facts and figures that have little truth to them. Artic news uses tipping points to take the current spirling climate from A to Z really quick and all of you who follow Toms blog are my only truth meters. So what do you think? Thanks and thank you Tom for continuing your posts.