The Beginning of the End of the World
Why We Have to Take the Idea of Civilizational Collapse Seriously, and What it Really Looks Like
Here’s a tiny question. In your darker moments — do you wonder if, well, in some elemental sense, the world around us is ending? That things have changed? Doesn’t something deep down in your gut whisper that to you? Mine does.
Hold on. Am I serious? How am I not? A relatively mild pandemic brought our civilization to its knees. We couldn’t even vaccinate the world to end it. The world is already resorting to resource wars in anticipation of climate change. And we’re our climate inaction is causing levels of warming faster and worse than scientists predicted.
So let’s talk about what I mean by “the world ending.” What does that strange phrase really mean? We have to step far — far — outside ourselves to really understand it. Because I don’t mean a meteor. I don’t even mean runaway climate change causing catastrophe after catastrophe. It just means more…of this. Now. What we’re already living in. A kind of bizarre, gruesome, hellish dystopia. The end of the world feels like now for a very good reason. A species (that’s us) fighting each other desperately for life — on a dying planet.
