At the rate we're going, collapse of our modern industrial society appears all but inevitable. But what might that look like? How soon will it happen, and how will it affect you and me?
Modern overdeveloped societies in the West are already in a severe crisis, something that will eventually turn into a long global emergency in the years and decades ahead.
A five centuries long era of economic growth — ushered in by colonization and leading to the plundering of natural, mineral, and most of all fossil fuel resources — is about to come to its logical endpoint. And while it’s impossible to tell precisely how and according to what timetable the decline of modern civilization will unfold, one thing is for sure: it will look nothing like what you see in Hollywood movies.
Although we are highly resourceful, especially when it comes to increasing profits, we have foolishly sacrificed long-term results for short-term gains. We ended up overplaying our hand, despite strong evidence that this could not possibly end well.
If you don’t belong to the top 0.1%, you can kiss goodbye to holidays abroad, a new computer, or even a new toaster. Electricity will become intermittent, and rolling blackouts will become the standard measure to cope with shortfalls in generation and maintenance. Healthcare services and medicine might also become unavailable to the rank and file public, leading to a fall in life expectancy and an increase in mortality across all age groups (except for the well to do with their private healthcare facilities).
Beset by an ever worsening economic outlook, an ageing population, shortages and wars, a fall in birth-rates (due to soaring costs of living and to infertility attributable to chemical pollution), ageing, wars, a rise in infectious diseases and ‘deaths of despair’, world population could easily decline by as much as 2–5% per year. At such a rate our numbers would be halved every two to three decades, reducing world population to well under a billion by the end of this century. No novel viruses, mass starvation, or global wars required. Just good old civilizational decline, and a corresponding rise in excess deaths.
This decline is perfectly normal, a logical conclusion to billions of people living well beyond their environment’s — and ultimately the planet’s — carrying capacity for centuries.
