The history of civilization is also a story of collapses. By tending to growth and are based on the unsustainable use of resources, all civilizations are doomed to eventual collapse. Many past civilizations have been felled for ecological disasters, whether natural, self-inflicted or a combination of both.
The Hittite Empire and Egypt of the Pharaohs fell after a period of intense droughts exacerbated by climate change, while the empire civilization that was formed on Easter Island saw its end after consuming the resources they depend to survive. Although they are destined to collapse, civilizations can extend their lifespan by two ways.
The first is through the expansion. If a civilization is killing the resources it needs to maintain, it can expand and find more resources to explore. Many European countries would have collapsed long ago if they had not looted the Americas, Asia and Africa.
This need for expansion says a lot about the true nature of civilization. Between a civilized society and the resources it needs to stay are the people living in the regions where such resources, many of which are communities traditional living off the land (though these people are increasingly rare). Obviously, any population will leave the area it inhabits, let contaminate and destroy the area or that excess extract the resources on which it depends to live, and very few people living off the land are willing to sell it.
This means that the continuity of civilization implies the destruction of entire cultures, the killing of those who fight to defend their lands and the destruction of the environment for resource extraction. In other words the continuity of civilization also implies a process of genocide, ethnocide and ecocide.
Furthermore, however great the ability of a civilization to expand and gain access to new resources, we live on a finite planet, and an hour there is no where to expand.
The second form of a civilization prolong their lifespan is technological innovation. New inventions can increase food production and the efficiency with which resources are used. Moreover, it was the technology that allowed civilization to become a global network of domination and extraction, production and distribution. Nevertheless, these advantages also bring a lot of problems.
The first is that these increases in efficiency tend to be denied due to a phenomenon first observed in the 19th century by the English economist William Jevons, who noticed that when a technology becomes more efficient, the cost tends to decrease and its use to increase, making also increase their impact on the environment. Furthermore, if a technology depends on nonrenewable resources, any increase in its efficiency only prolongs the inevitable.
There is also the issue of energy. Every society needs energy to function, and when it can no longer supply the energy to start a process of collapse. The simplest societies use primarily the stored energy in the human body in the form of calories and the energy released by burning organic matter (fire). In the context of these societies, the collection and use of these forms of energy can be easily done in a sustainable manner and within the closed loops of the bio-region that these societies inhabit, in which all resources are re-used by nature without waste.
While more complex a society becomes, the more complex becomes the energy issue. A society that depends on the industrial technology can only meet its short-term energy and under a human and environmental cost trembling. Today our society is extremely dependent on oil, which is a non-renewable resource and with devastating effects on the environment.
Although other forms of energy are being increasingly used is the oil that moves more than 90% of our transportation. In a world where we consume products from all over the planet, it is not to say that the lack of oil would cause disastrous effects. Moreover, much of the food we eat today are produced by industrial agriculture, which is also dependent on oil.
Even if its use were not extremely detrimental to the environment, besides being one of the main engines of global warming, oil production is about to reach its peak at any time. After reaching this point, it will decline to finally cease altogether.
Of course there are many other forms of energy, but none is remotely sustainable. Even the "green energy" are unsustainable and have a tremendous environmental impact. solar panels and wind turbines for example, depend on the unsustainable mining to be produced, not to mention that oil is used in its production and transportation.
Nuclear power depends on the unsustainable mining of uranium, and produces nuclear waste. geothermal, hydroelectric, bio-fuels and all other solutions presented also run into insurmountable barriers.
Moreover, even if we could find a solution, we would have to implement it. This implementation is not only a real logistical nightmare, but also touches on various social obstacles, economic and political. On top of this transition would take a long time we have not, as we will see more ahead.
We can then conclude that the global industrial civilization is almost certainly destined to collapse. But what are the implications of this collapse? First we must emphasize that the collapse is not an event but a process that unfolds over years, decades or even centuries.
The end of this process means the extinction of a civilization, its absorption by another civilization (which is not a possibility in this case) or its transformation into one or a series of simpler societies. This means that the collapse does not necessarily imply the extinction of industrial civilization across the world (unfortunately), but it will almost certainly be drastically reduced. It is not for me to make predictions about the effects of the collapse in the long run society due to the complexity of the issue and human incompetence in making this type of prediction. Nevertheless, later I try to address some future perspectives front to collapse under the view of an anarchist.