Recommended

The Great Simplification (2022)

Nate Hagens’ short-form documentary describes the backdrop for The Great Simplification – an economic/cultural transition beginning in the not-too-distant future. It describes, how our species got to this point, the role of energy in our economies, and how global human society is (currently) akin to a metabolic heat engine. It follows with how we look at the future through different lenses, but when wearing a ‘systems’ lens, it becomes clear that a Great Simplification is soon approaching.

Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario (2019)

Arthur Keller is a French speaker on topics related to energy, climate and ecological transition. This is the introduction to [NEXT], a web documentary series about our near future and the risks of collapse of our civilization. In this video, Keller gives a powerful overview of the popular paradigms related to our collective future and the underlying dynamics of energy and sustainability.

How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times

by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens (2015)

What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment.

In this book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people’s ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.