How do we equip ourselves for a Global Collapse?
“Global collapse”: does that sound alarmist, extreme or hysterical to you?
Perhaps it is, but possibly not. This paper attempts to widen our debate beyond today’s focus on Climate Emergency. Even though that is a big problem, we need to consider still more. In what follows I will take some things as read.
- We live in VUCA world where unpredictability is already present and probably increasing
- We live in a world that recognises “tipping points” and “black swan” events and is aware that small changes can precipitate large-scale shifts
- We are already aware that there are many high-risk areas such as ecological breakdown, climate emergency, political volatility, water availability, food production failures and economic breakdown, all hovering on the edge of such tipping points
- We may disagree about the level or nature of each risk. Some of us may not be at all aware of some of them, but none of us is completely blind and most of us have sufficient systemic awareness to know that they can impact and compound each other.
If you accept that these statements are true, I suggest that the following is increasingly likely – bordering on probable:-
We do not know where it will begin or when and we do not know how it will unfold, but we should anticipate a collapse as highly-probable and expect its effects to be global.
We should consider that it may happen soon and know that we will not in a specific way see “it” coming. We already know that humanity cannot solve its problems using the levels of thinking that created them. In addition we should recognise that having failed to solve them it also cannot deal with the consequences using those ways of thinking. That means we are collectively not yet equipped.
