Pi’s tiger and the Anthropocene

Science studies scholar Bruno Latour is fond of the film “Life of Pi” for the metaphor it provides for our current predicament. The main character of the film, Pi, ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger, and not a friendly one. Though Pi builds a raft to give himself distance from the tiger, he […]

“There Is A Dark Side To Our Species” This Is What People Fear The Most In A Societal Collapse…

There are a lot of reasons why people prep for disasters, but there’s one reason that’s far more popular than the others. What people fear most when they think about what would happen if society collapsed, isn’t hunger, disease, or exposure. They fear what other people might do to them when the chips are down. […]

Maya Theater States

“What generally occurs when a civilization over-extends is not a complete disappearance but a rapid decline in complexity.“ Detroit: Theater Ruins  The collapse of the Classic Maya period, around 900 CE, is an active academic field, with many conflicting theories and a mountain of literature. While traveling in the Yucatán we are reading Arthur Demarest’s Ancient […]

The “Seneca Cliff”, how the concept evolved

  An image taken at a recent meeting in Barcelona. You can see the evolution of the concept of “collapse”, from Malthus to Forrester. The latter can be seen as the true originator of the concept that I call the “Seneca Cliff” or the “Seneca Effect”  Malthus (1766 – 1834) is supposed to be the […]

Nuclear War Is Inevitable Unless Cooler Heads Prevail

As the Syrian and Russian governments accuse the United States of trying to invent reasons to launch an attack in the Middle East, an international group of former military and diplomatic leaders is warning of an “unacceptably high” risk of global nuclear war if cooler heads don’t prevail. In an 11-page report from the Nuclear Crisis Group (NCG) — a subcommittee of Global Zero, […]

The Next Financial Crisis Is Not Far Away

Recently, a Spanish group called “Ecologist in Action” asked me to give them a presentation on what kind of financial crisis we should expect. They wanted to know when it would be and how it would take place. The answer I had for the group is that we should expect financial collapse quite soon–perhaps as […]

The Ragweed Tribe

We are at the gatehouse to The Farm, the Welcome Center we set up for greeting guests as they arrive. This day they are coming for the annual homecoming celebration we call Ragweed Days. Our job is not unlike the door greeters’ at WalMart, without the blue vests. We have a tie-dye pouch to hold […]

After Peak Oil, Are We Heading Toward Social Collapse?

Several years ago, Glen Sweetnam, director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy (DOE), announced that worldwide oil availability had reached a “plateau.” However, his statement was not made known through a major US mainstream media outlet. Instead, it was covered in France’s Le […]

Coming to America

Nearly 150 million people — or 4% of the world’s adult population — would move to the U.S. if they could. That figure is larger than the next four most popular destinations combined. If everyone who wanted to move to the U.S. had their way, the country’s total population would increase by almost 50%. Top […]

The Problematic Assumption In The UN’s 9.8 Billion People Projection

The United Nations has a report out today looking at predictions for the size of the human population off into the future. They say that there’s likely to be 9.8 billion by 2050 and then 11.2 billion by 2100. It should be said that the earlier number looks valid as pretty much all of the […]

Energy And Civilization: a Review

If you were to find yourself huddled with a small group of people in a post-crash, post-internet world, hoping to recreate some of the comforts of civilization, you’d do well to have saved a printed copy of Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization: A History. Smil’s new 550-page magnum opus would help you understand why for […]

The Twilight of Anthropolatry

During the last three months, while on hiatus from blogging, I’ve looked back over the eleven-year run of The Archdruid Report. As my regular readers know, the point of that prolonged experiment in online prose was my attempt to explore the primary historical fact of our time—the accelerating decline and impending fall of industrial civilization—from […]

The Future Monetary Ecosystem

Over the next generation or two, there will be increasingly visible turf wars between money-suppliers with four very different motivations. It’s not really a fair fight, but it isn’t as one-sided as it used to be. Follow @GrahamJBarnes The spoils The general term for the benefit associated with the issuance of a currency is seigniorage. […]

The Fall of the Western Empire: Collapse is Not a Bug, It is a Feature

Esset aliquod inbecillitatis nostrae solacium rerumque nostrarum si tam tarde perirent cuncta quam fiunt: nunc incrementa lente exeunt, festinatur in damnum.”  Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE)   In my book “The Seneca Effect”, the first chapter is titled “Collapse is not a bug, it is a feature“. The idea is that the evolution of […]

Albert Bates: The Way

“Patterns of regenerative thinking augur regenerative patterns of living and the reverse is also true.| “   Ten years ago, Brian Eno suggested a word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. The word he came up with is “scenius.” Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene […]

Heinberg: Juggling Live Hand Grenades

Here are a few useful recent contributions to the global sustainability conversation, with relevant comments interspersed. Toward the end of this essay I offer some general thoughts about converging challenges to the civilizational system. “Oil Extraction, Economic Growth, and Oil Price Dynamics,” by Aude Illig and Ian Schiller. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, March 2017, […]

Atlantic Crossing by Albert Bates

“There are some black swans in aviation’s future that could tip its economic balance. The three biggies are peak oil, climate weirding and cyberwarfare.“ We are in London this week and on our trip across the pond we could not help but think how much more we would much prefer to have gotten here by […]

What Happened to Peak Oil?

About a decade ago, the peak oil concept was very popular. The argument went that oil was a finite resource and that the peak output level and decline was shortly to arrive as demand exceeded supply. A number of people even expanded on this basically accusing the Saudis of ‘lying’ about their reserves and painting […]

Confounding Collapse

“As brilliant as your conceptual breakthrough may be, there is no escaping your cultural milieu.” The Paris Agreement calls for deep decarbonization by 2050 (net neutrality) and drawdown of all the legacy carbon thereafter, returning humans to the comfortable Holocene from which we evolved. A recent study by Energy Innovation Reform Project (a pro-nuclear, pro-coal […]

Third of world population WIPED OUT even in SMALL nuclear war

Scientist Paul Doherty says simulations suggest a hundred multimegaton bombs would be exchanged if war broke out between smaller nuclear-armed countries.That is enough – at even conservative estimates – to wipe out a third of the world’s population. It would have a lasting impact, even for people living on the other side of the globe […]

Make the Anthill Great Again! The Ant Colony and the Human Ones

Imagine yourself as an ant. What would be your perception of the world? Mainly, it is other ants from the same colony. As an ant, you are nearly blind but you have an excellent sense of smell and most of you sensorial inputs are the pheromones you receive from your sister ants that then you transmit […]

Chris Martenson: The Way To Save Ourselves

It’s time to be blunt: Humans are headed towards disaster.  Most of us already know this.  Some consciously, others unconsciously. Those aware to the many predicaments we face may understand them intellectually, such as through the data provided in The Crash Course. Or they may sense them intuitively as a feeling in their gut that […]

Corruption, Terrorism, And Mafia: The Global Black Market For Oil

The value of the crude oil production alone is worth a staggering $1.7 trillion each year. Add downstream fuels and other services to that, and oil is a money-making machine. As VisualCapitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, both companies and governments take advantage of this resource wealth. More of the world’s largest companies work in the oil […]

Kunstler: Blood Sports

What you’re seeing in the political miasma of “RussiaGate” is an exercise in nostalgia. Apart from the symbolic feat of getting a “black” president freely elected in 2008 (remember, Mr. Obama is also half-white), the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed a political triumph in half a century to match the Watergate extravaganza of 1972-74, which ended […]

How Western Civilization Could Collapse

Collapsist stories in the media are pretty rare these days (even the tide of stories about authoritarian dystopias has receded since its peak after Donald Trump’s election) – however the BBC has kept the meme going with this uplifting tale – . The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable […]

The art confronting a global crisis with reality and hope

EXIT puts the displacement of peoples, and Australia’s own refugee policies, into a daunting global context. But the installation’s ‘thunderous’ data on loss and climate is empowering. By Andrew Trounson, University of Melbourne In a darkened room surrounded by a high-tech 360-degree projection, your ears filled with a whirring and staccato ticking that almost drowns […]

Heinberg: Think Resilience Chapter 4 Depletion

  Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg sat down to deliver a 22-chapter lecture series entitled “Think Resilience: Preparing Communities for the Rest of the 21st Century,” which explores how communities can build resilience in the face of our intertwined sustainability crises. The series is intended for students and concerned individuals of all ages. […]

DEEP STATE to wipe out 90% of the world’s population? 6.5 BILLION lives targeted for extinction

In the Bible, Revelation 18:21 reads, “Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said: ‘With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again.’” Astonishingly, the map shown below may in fact be predicting […]

Heinberg: Juggling Live Hand Grenades

Here are a few useful recent contributions to the global sustainability conversation, with relevant comments interspersed. Toward the end of this essay I offer some general thoughts about converging challenges to the civilizational system.  “Oil Extraction, Economic Growth, and Oil Price Dynamics,” by Aude Illig and Ian Schiller. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, March 2017, […]

Resilience Bridge: A new course with Carolyn Baker and Dean Walker

We are living in a time like no other in human history. We are living in a Post-Truth world in which telling the truth is an unsafe act. Our individual and collective Shadows are wreaking havoc in our lives and running our world. The cornerstones of our Earth and human systems are collapsing. How we’ve […]

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