Collapse
Description
Richard Hames:
" ‘Collapse’ is the process of the production of cascades of unmanageable complexity that exceeds the capacity of any historically feasible institutional composition, from the point of view of the path-dependent history of that composition, to manage it. It consists in the production of cascading complexities that are not recaptured by marketisation or effectively managed, however brutally, by state securitisation, but remain as costly externalities imposed, first of all, onto those most excluded from the wealth of capitalism and then eventually onto everyone."
(https://crudefutures.substack.com/p/our-theory-of-collapse)
Phases
Five Stages of Collapse
Dmytri Orlov:
"Stages of Collapse
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.' (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/02/five-stages-of-collapse.html)
Typology
| Type | What changes or fails | Why the distinction matters |
|---|---|---|
| Regime or ruling-order collapse | A ruler, dynasty, party, imperial center, or elite coalition loses authority. | The wider population may suffer, continue ordinary life, reorganize, or gain freedom from extraction. |
| State-capacity collapse | Taxation, law, administration, territorial control, public safety, or basic services cease to function reliably. | Loss of an unjust regime and loss of essential public capacity are not the same event. |
| Complexity or infrastructure contraction | Specialization, long-distance networks, recordkeeping, technology, cities, or maintenance systems shrink. | Simplification may reduce burdens in one setting but destroy indispensable capabilities in another. |
| Socioeconomic and social-reproduction collapse | Food, water, shelter, health, care, livelihoods, family continuity, or community safety fail at scale. | This directly measures human well-being rather than the survival of rulers or monuments. |
| Ecological collapse | An ecosystem crosses a threshold and loses structure, function, biodiversity, or regenerative capacity. | Political recovery cannot substitute for destroyed life-support systems or irreversible losses. |
| Global civilizational or existential catastrophe | Tightly connected global systems fail across regions, or human survival and long-term potential are permanently reduced. | Historical regional recoveries do not establish that a global nuclear, biological, ecological, or technological catastrophe would be recoverable. |
Source: The 10,000-Year Trap: The 20 Interacting Forces That Keep Turning Human Cooperation into Injustice, Catastrophe, and Civilizational Collapse. By Lawrence Wollersheim. Universe Institute, 2026.
Discussion
Dmytri Orlov:
"Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned. Rather, driving us all to Stage 5 will require that a concerted effort be made at each of the intervening stages. That all the players seem poised to make just such an effort may give this collapse the form a classical tragedy - a conscious but inexorable march to perdition - rather than a farce ("Oops! Ah, here we are, Stage 5." - "So, whom do we eat first?" - "Me! I am delicious!") Let us sketch out this process.
Financial collapse, as we are are currently observing it, consists of two parts. One is that a part of the general population is forced to move, no longer able to afford the house they bought based on inflated assessments, forged income numbers, and foolish expectations of endless asset inflation. Since, technically, they should never have been allowed to buy these houses, and were only able to do so because of financial and political malfeasance, this is actually a healthy development. The second part consists of men in expensive suits tossing bundles of suddenly worthless paper up in the air, ripping out their remaining hair, and (some of us might uncharitably hope) setting themselves on fire on the steps of the Federal Reserve. They, to express it in their own vernacular, "fucked up," and so this is also just as it should be.
The government response to this could be to offer some helpful homilies about "the wages of sin" and to open a few soup kitchens and flop houses in a variety of locations including Wall Street. The message would be: "You former debt addicts and gamblers, as you say, 'fucked up,' and so this will really hurt for a long time. We will never let you anywhere near big money again. Get yourselves over to the soup kitchen, and bring your own bowl, because we don't do dishes." This would result in a stable Stage 1 collapse - the Second Great Depression.
However, this is unlikely, because in the US the government happens to be debt addict and gambler number one. As individuals, we may have been as virtuous as we wished, but the government will have still run up exorbitant debts on our behalf. Every level of government, from local municipalities and authorities, which need the financial markets to finance their public works and public services, to the federal government, which relies on foreign investment to finance its endless wars, is addicted to public debt. They know they cannot stop borrowing, and so they will do anything they can to keep the game going for as long as possible.
About the only thing the government currently seems it fit to do is extend further credit to those in trouble, by setting interest rates at far below inflation, by accepting worthless bits of paper as collateral and by pumping money into insolvent financial institutions. This has the effect of diluting the dollar, further undermining its value, and will, in due course, lead to hyperinflation, which is bad enough in any economy, but is especially serious for one dominated by imports. As imports dry up and the associated parts of the economy shut down, we pass Stage 2: Commercial Collapse.
As businesses shut down, storefronts are boarded up and the population is left largely penniless and dependent on FEMA and charity for survival, the government may consider what to do next. It could, for example, repatriate all foreign troops and set them to work on public works projects designed to directly help the population. It could promote local economic self-sufficiency, by establishing community-supported agriculture programs, erecting renewable energy systems, and organizing and training local self-defence forces to maintain law and order. The Army Corps of Engineers could be ordered to bulldoze buildings erected on former farmland around city centers, return the land to cultivation, and to construct high-density solar-heated housing in urban centers to resettle those who are displaced. In the interim, it could reduce homelessness by imposing a steep tax on vacant residential properties and funneling the proceeds into rent subsidies for the indigent. With plenty of luck, such measures may be able to reverse the trend, eventually providing for a restoration of pre-Stage 2 conditions.
This may or may not be a good plan, but in any case it is rather unrealistic, because the United States, being so deeply in debt, will be forced to accede to the wishes of its foreign creditors, who own a lot of national assets (land, buildings, and businesses) and who would rather see a dependent American population slaving away working off their debt than a self-sufficient one, conveniently forgetting that they have mortgaged their children's futures to pay for military fiascos, big houses, big cars, and flat-screen television sets. Thus, a much more likely scenario is that the federal government (knowing who butters their bread) will remain subservient to foreign financial interests. It will impose austerity conditions, maintain law and order through draconian means, and aide in the construction of foreign-owned factory towns and plantations. As people start to think that having a government may not be such a good idea, conditions become ripe for Stage 3.
If Stage 1 collapse can be observed by watching television, observing Stage 2 might require a hike or a bicycle ride to the nearest population center, while Stage 3 collapse is more than likely to be visible directly through one's own living-room window, which may or may not still have glass in it. After a significant amount of bloodletting, much of the country becomes a no-go zone for the remaining authorities. Foreign creditors decide that their debts might not be repaid after all, cut their losses and depart in haste. The rest of the world decides to act as if there is no such place as The United States - because "nobody goes there any more." So as not to lose out on the entertainment value, the foreign press still prints sporadic fables about Americans who eat their young, much as they did about Russia following the Soviet collapse. A few brave American expatriates who still come back to visit bring back amazing stories of a different kind, but everyone considers them eccentric and perhaps a little bit crazy.
Stage 3 collapse can sometimes be avoided by the timely introduction of international peacekeepers and through the efforts of international humanitarian NGOs. In the aftermath of a Stage 2 collapse, domestic authorities are highly unlikely to have either the resources or the legitimacy, or even the will, to arrest the collapse dynamic and reconstitute themselves in a way that the population would accept.
As stage 3 collapse runs its course, the power vacuum left by the now defunct federal, state and local government is filled by a variety of new power structures. Remnants of former law enforcement and military, urban gangs, ethnic mafias, religious cults and wealthy property owners all attempt to build their little empires on the ruins of the big one, fighting each other over territory and access to resources. This is the age of Big Men: charismatic leaders, rabble-rousers, ruthless Macchiavelian princes and war lords. In the luckier places, they find it to their common advantage to pool their resources and amalgamate into some sort of legitimate local government, while in the rest their jostling for power leads to a spiral of conflict and open war.
Stage 4 collapse occurs when society becomes so disordered and impoverished that it can no longer support the Big Men, who become smaller and smaller, and eventually fade from view. Society fragments into extended families and small tribes of a dozen or so families, who find it advantageous to band together for mutual support and defense. This is the form of society that has existed over some 98.5% of humanity's existence as a biological species, and can be said to be the bedrock of human existence. Humans can exist at this level of organization for thousands, perhaps millions of years. Most mammalian species go extinct after just a few million years, but, for all we know, Homo Sapiens still have a million or two left.
If pre-collapse society is too atomized, alienated and individualistic to form cohesive extended families and tribes, or if its physical environment becomes so disordered and impoverished that hunger and starvation become widespread, then Stage 5 collapse becomes likely. At this stage, a simpler biological imperative takes over, to preserve the life of the breeding couples. Families disband, the old are abandoned to their own devices, and children are only cared for up to age 3. All social unity is destroyed, and even the couples may disband for a time, preferring to forage on their own and refusing to share food. This is the state of society described by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his book The Mountain People. If society prior to Stage 5 collapse can be said to be the historical norm for humans, Stage 5 collapse brings humanity to the verge of physical extinction.
As we can easily imagine, the default is cascaded failure: each stage of collapse can easily lead to the next, perhaps even overlapping it. In Russia, the process was arrested just past Stage 3: there was considerable trouble with ethnic mafias and even some warlordism, but government authority won out in the end. In my other writings, I go into a lot of detail in describing the exact conditions that inadvertently made Russian society relatively collapse-proof. Here, I will simply say that these ingredients are not currently present in the United States.
While attempting to arrest collapse at Stage 1 and Stage 2 would probably be a dangerous waste of energy, it is probably worth everyone's while to dig in their heels at Stage 3, definitely at Stage 4, and it is quite simply a matter of physical survival to avoid Stage 5. In certain localities - those with high population densities, as well as those that contain dangerous nuclear and industrial installations - avoiding Stage 3 collapse is rather important, to the point of inviting foreign troops and governments in to maintain order and avoid disasters. Other localities may be able to prosper indefinitely at Stage 3, and even the most impoverished environments may be able to support a sparse population subsisting indefinitely at Stage 4.
Although it is possible to prepare directly for surviving Stage 5, this seems like an altogether demoralizing thing to attempt. Preparing to survive Stages 3 and 4 may seem somewhat more reasonable, while explicitly aiming for Stage 3 may be reasonable if you plan to become one of the Big Men. Be that as it may, I must leave such preparations as an exercise for the reader. My hope is that these definitions of specific stages of collapse will enable a more specific and fruitful discussion than the one currently dominated by such vague and ultimately nonsensical terms as "the collapse of Western civilization."
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/02/five-stages-of-collapse.html)
A DeepSeek Interpretation of the Collapse Scenarios
Collated by Jan Andrew Bloxham:
Biosphere Collapse: We Are in a Terminal Phase
"The Sixth Mass Extinction is not a future risk—it is happening now, and human activity is the sole cause.
Extinction Rates: Current rates are 100–1,000 times higher than the “background” rate of the Cenozoic era. While the oft-cited “250–300 species per day” figure is debated (due to undercounting invertebrates and microbes), conservative estimates still suggest ~150 species lost daily. For context, the Permian-Triassic extinction (“The Great Dying”) wiped out 90% of species over 60,000 years. We’re matching that pace in decades.
Habitat Destruction: 75% of Earth’s land surface is degraded by human activity. Forests (critical carbon sinks) are vanishing at 10 million hectares/year. Oceanic dead zones (hypoxic regions) have quadrupled since 1950.
Food Web Collapse: Phytoplankton (the base of marine food chains) have declined 40% since 1950. Insect biomass is dropping 2.5% annually, threatening pollination and soil health.
Conclusion: The biosphere is unravelling faster than evolution can adapt. Humans are not exempt—we are apex predators in a collapsing food web.
Climate Feedback Loops: No Return
The 2°C “guardrail” is a political fiction. We are locked into 3–4°C of warming by 2100 even if emissions stopped tomorrow, due to:
Arctic Amplification: Summer sea ice will vanish by 2030–2040, reducing albedo and adding 0.6°C to global temps.
Permafrost Melt: 1,600 gigatons of carbon (twice atmospheric CO₂) are thawing, releasing methane (CH₄) at rates 5–10× faster than models predicted.
Amazon Dieback: The rainforest now emits more CO₂ than it absorbs due to deforestation and drought. Tipping into savanna is irreversible.
Clathrate Gun Hypothesis: Methane plumes erupting from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf suggest subsea permafrost is destabilizing. If 10% of oceanic hydrates are released, it adds 5°C to warming.
Thermodynamic Inertia: CO₂ lasts centuries in the atmosphere. Even if we halted emissions today, warming would continue for 50+ years due to ocean heat lag.
Energy and Resource Depletion: Civilization’s Achilles’ Heel
Energy Return on Investment (EROI): Fossil fuels built modernity with EROIs of 30:1 (oil) to 80:1 (coal). Renewables (solar: 10:1, wind: 18:1) cannot sustain industrial complexity7. Post-carbon societies will face energy austerity.
Mineral Bottlenecks: A single wind turbine requires 4.7 tons of copper; global copper demand will exceed supply by 2030. Lithium, cobalt, and rare earths face similar crunches.
Peak Everything: Oil peaked in 2018, phosphorus (critical for fertilizers) by 2030, fresh water by 2040. The era of cheap resources is over.
Collapse of Global Supply Chains: Without fossil fuels, we lose the ability to mine, transport, and manufacture at scale. No renewable infrastructure can be built without the fossil-fueled systems it aims to replace.
Pollution: The Silent Extinction Driver
Plastics: 14 million tons of microplastics reside on the ocean floor, entering food chains and disrupting endocrine systems.
PFAS “Forever Chemicals”: Found in 98% of human blood samples, linked to cancer, infertility, and immune dysfunction.
Nitrogen Cycle Disruption: Industrial fertilizers have quadrupled reactive nitrogen in ecosystems, causing algal blooms, ocean dead zones, and soil sterility.
Synergistic Toxicity: Pollutants interact multiplicatively. For example, microplastics adsorb heavy metals and pesticides, creating “toxic cocktails” that devastate biodiversity.
Human Systems: Accelerating the Crash
Economic Growth: A 3% GDP growth mandate requires doubling resource use every 24 years. Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide.
Overshoot: Humanity consumes 175% of Earth’s regenerative capacity. We need 1.75 Earths to sustain current consumption.
Delusional Narratives: Green growth, Net Zero, and sustainable development are oxymorons. They ignore entropy, ecological limits, and Jevons Paradox (efficiency increases consumption).
Human Extinction: A Thermodynamic Certainty?
If we define “habitat” as the stable Holocene conditions that enabled agriculture and complex societies, then yes—we are losing our habitat.
3°C World: By 2100, large regions (South Asia, Middle East, Amazonia) will surpass wet-bulb 35°C (human survivability limit). Starvation, migration, and conflict will escalate.
4°C World: Crop failures become systemic. Oceans lose 80% of oxygen, killing fisheries. Ice-free Arctic summers accelerate methane releases.
Nuclear Risk: Collapse increases the likelihood of nuclear war over resources. Even a “limited” India-Pakistan war could cause nuclear winter, dropping temps 2–5°C and ending agriculture.
Extinction Pathways:
Thermal Maximum: Runaway feedbacks push Earth into a hothouse state (+5–6°C), akin to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which wiped out 50% of deep-sea life. Humans, reliant on hyper-specialized ecosystems, cannot adapt.
Societal Collapse: Energy/resource depletion triggers a systems failure cascade (food, medicine, security). Post-collapse populations lack the knowledge/energy to rebuild.
Nuclear/Geoengineering Catastrophe: Desperation leads to a terminal error (e.g., aerosol overcompensation, AI miscalculation)."
(https://gnug315.substack.com/p/deepseek-says-civilisation-is-doomed)
A Critique of Traditional Collapsology
Richard Hames:
"Traditional Collapsology
A discipline for studying the rapid and severe decomposition of social structure already exists. Although the term is usually reserved for the French school, for simplicity we can call this whole field ‘collapsology’. Dominant schools of thought in this space can be broadly categorised according to energetic and complexity theories (such as those offered by Joseph Tainter), moral theories (such as Edward Gibbon), environmental theories (Jared Diamond), conflict theories (Graham Allison), and structural-demographic theories (Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin), although many voices resist strict partition into a singular domain.
However, the prevailing literature on collapse, to date, while providing much useful insight, does not sufficiently grasp the stakes, dynamics, and scale of the current planetary crisis. ‘Traditional collapsology’ has substantial weaknesses that we aim to overcome with a new paradigm in collapsology that we call ‘critical collapsology’.
Our criticisms of traditional collapsology are several. We argue that it lacks a usefully political concept of collapse, lacks a clear concept of why it is societies stick together in the first place, is inapplicable to the dynamics of our present society – in particular to capitalism’s ability to thrive because of crises – and is blind to what we call ‘applied collapsology’, or the dark tradition of deliberate social destruction and violence as a form of governance that gave rise to our present. Finally, the field as a whole lacks a normative framework for ethical action in the face of collapse. What should we do now? Traditional collapsologists have only ad hoc answers, or answers that are built around the preservation of current society.
Before we lay out our stall, we must address one immediate objection. This is the problem of crankiness. Talk of the end of the world has a hackneyed quality. Historically, at least for the last 120 years, many of the voices claiming that the end is nigh have existed on the periphery, at odds with the dominant paradigm of knowledge production of the time. This situation is now reversed. Today, a major part of the dominant paradigm of knowledge production is empirical science. One of its crowning achievements is climate science, particularly the international collaboration of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For several decades, the loudest voices calling attention to a planet in crisis have been the many thousands of scientists studying the complex systems that sustain life on Earth. Those who are not alarmed, today, are the ones who are at odds with the empirical paradigm, clinging to old beliefs, and engaged in magical thinking.
This invocation of magical thinking is not meant to assert that our adversaries are mired in delusion, and that we happy few see clearly. It is – as voices from inside the discipline have sometimes said – not obvious what our methodology should be. It is certainly not clear that the physical sciences alone suffice for understanding our predicament. Instead, with an object as large and complex as a collapse, we face a problem of methodological indeterminacy: what to include, what to reject, and how to synthesise a picture of the world, of its possible future dynamics, and our necessary actions within it.
Collapse, then is not merely an epistemic question, but also a political and even existential one: collapse, both as a future danger and as something that might actually come to pass, affects us deeply, and reveals a deep crisis of meaning-making that subtends the material crises of our moment. This is what we call the crisis of orientation. Critical collapsology sets out to solve both these problems – the problem of indeterminacy and the crisis of orientation – together. What is society, such that it might collapse, and what should we therefore do? How it does so will emerge from our critique of the construction of the existing discipline.
‘Traditional collapsology’, across its many different theories, solves the epistemic problem of determination by identifying a ‘collapse process’, often with relatively set parameters. A few key tendencies are used to explain collapse as a general phenomenon underpinning multivarious historical examples, from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to The Western Roman Empire. Distinctions between societies are diminished in favour of the sense of a well-worn story, albeit one that has surprising twists and turns in each instance. This is an absolutely necessary stage in the development of any science, and many of the stories here, particularly Joseph Tainter’s and Peter Turchin’s, are highly convincing.
However, when applied to our present predicament, this preemptive determination, this closure of the set of salient parameters, downplays the extraordinary dynamism of capitalism as a social process, obscures those dimensions of the present from which new forms of agency can be sprung, and turns the analyst into a passive witness of a process whose ending can appear inevitable. This, in turn, makes analyses susceptible to moral interpretations leveraged by reactionary politics, such as the aforementioned Spenglerian story, or various forms of Malthusianism.
Without wishing to deny the importance of many of the causal drivers that ‘traditional collapsology’ treats as explanatory, from energy to conflict, complexity and demographic questions, we argue that, as complex systems, that the potential collapse of our society cannot be so quickly or comprehensively explained by a handful of factors. Efforts to transpose lessons from historical, anthropological instances of localised societal collapses onto the contemporary moment are ultimately of limited utility for evaluating the current crisis. Just as each of today's dominant global trends, when treated in isolation, seems to splinter into many different directions, so too do the explanations given from traditional collapsology create a fragmented understanding of the structure of our society and the risks to that structure. This fragmentation shows up in the official reports of bodies from the World Economic Forum to the World Bank and the various national security assessments, which treat each tendency discussed above as separate but interlinked problems, with their own distinct processes of management.
We must instead thread the needle of systemic analysis: understanding at once the diversity of the present and grasping its unifying structure. To do this, we need an account of how capitalism produces the complex social form we see all around us: a unified form of disparity.
None of this is to say that nothing can be drawn from the study of past societies: our society formed itself as much through a long process of suppression of alternative social forms as it did through an internal process of self-construction. The answers to our most essential diagnostic questions – “How did we arrive at this point? What has produced our vulnerable world?” – cannot be simplistically stated. Instead, as we have already intimated, the answer requires a reading of history and confrontation with the multiple scales – from the psychological fibres of everyday life to the planet-consuming processes of modern industry – that compose our present. This is not to surrender to a mere grab-bag methodology of different factors being present at different times. It requires, instead, a historical reading of the specific institutions and norms that compose societies – and the specific institutional forms to which each society gives rise."
(https://crudefutures.substack.com/p/our-theory-of-collapse)
More information
* Article: Collapse, adaptation, or prosperity in the age of climate change. Emmanuel Hache. Revue internationale et stratégique Volume 109, Issue 1, 2018
URL = https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-revue-internationale-et-strategique-2019-3-page-127.htm
* Article: Societal Collapse: A literature review. By Danilo Brozović. Futures, Volume 145, January 2023.
URL = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722001768
"Consolidation and synthesis of multidisciplinary research on societal collapse: "Because of concerns that ongoing climate change could lead to a possible collapse of human civilization, the topic of societal (civilization) collapse has emerged as especially relevant, not least for the futures-oriented studies. While this has led to extensive research on societal collapse, there is a lack of consolidation and synthesis of the research. The purpose of this article is thus to systematize the extant research on societal collapse and suggest future research directions. This article offers a systematic multidisciplinary review of the existing literature (361 articles and 73 books) and identifies five scholarly conversations: past collapses, general explanations of collapse, alternatives to collapse, fictional collapses, and future climate change and societal collapse. The review builds the foundation for a critical discussion of each line of inquiry by focusing on theoretical tensions and themes within each scholarly conversation, ending with a discussion of how these conversations inform futures research."
Review of Collapse Literature
Bibliographic Review
"An ever-growing collection of books warn us of the possibility of a “collapse” brought about by climate change. In the Revue internationale et stratégique, the economist and futurologist Emmanuel Hache takes the publication of seven new works on this subject as an opportunity to explore the history of this narrative and its current forms. The pioneer of this “genre of fear” was, of course, Thomas Malthus. In France, we are less familiar with the names of William Stanley Jevons, who in 1865 published a book declaring (erroneously) the imminent exhaustion of coal reserves, or Fairfield Osborn, whose seminal Our Plundered Planet appeared in 1948. However, “the real catalyst for this dawning global environmental awareness” remains the 1972 Club of Rome Report, The Limits to Growth. The word “collapse” entered the lexicon through another work, little known in France: Joseph A. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. However, it was Jared Diamond’s international bestseller, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), that caught the attention of the world’s media. Catastrophist treaties produced by scientists have snowballed since the start of the 1990s. Hache recalls the work of René Passet, “one of the forefathers of French ecological thought” and the author of L’économique et le vivant, published in 1979.
In a book entitled How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), Pablo Servigne (who describes himself as an “in-terre-dependent researcher”) and Raphaël Stevens quote Yves Cochet, who defines collapse as “the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc.) can no longer be provided [at a reasonable cost] to a majority of the population by services under legal supervision.” To summarize the current period, in which the ways of man have ridden roughshod over the ways of nature, the historian Armel Campagne prefers the term “Capitalocene” to “Anthropocene,” emphasizing the role of capitalism in today’s environmental predicaments (Le capitalocène: aux racines du dérèglement climatique, Paris: Éditions Divergences, 2017). Alternatively, the sociologist Baptiste Monsaingeon refers to the poubellocène (“Wasteocene”) in his work Homo detritus. Critique de la société du déchet (Paris: Seuil, 2017). His young Swiss colleague, Romain Felli, outlines a dynamic where capitalism actually finds it advantageous to adapt to environmental degradation. Hache concludes the discussion on a more upbeat note, citing Gaston Berger, a French futurologist now somewhat overlooked: “Tomorrow will not be like yesterday. It will be something new and will depend on us. It is more a question of inventing it than discovering it.”