Ed. note: Originally published in part in: S. Cottle, (2023). ‘Reporting civilizational collapse: Research notes from a world-in-crisis.’ Global Media and Communication, 19(2), 269-288. https://doi.org/10.1177/
Published in revised form by Resilience.org on October 16, 2023.
As evidence of probable civilizational collapse continues to grow, so the necessity to move beyond thinking about global crises as separate issues to a holistic view of today’s unprecedented and fast unravelling ‘world-in-crisis,’ becomes ever more apparent. Only then will we be able to grasp the enormity of the systemic, compounding and deepening existential threats now confronting human society and the biosphere, understand their complex underpinnings and conceive of socially just and ecologically sustainable ways to better align human existence inside the web of life. Whether we know it or not, we are all embarked on a race to global ecological consciousness. When viewed from the vantage point of today’s crises-strewn world the odds of winning, frankly, are not looking good.
The rapacious pursuit of economic growth, materialist ideas of progress, and presumptions of human exceptionalism founded in some religions and Enlightenment thinking, continue, it seems, to drive forward today’s globally dominating worldview. At root, then, it could be said that the problem of today’s world-in-crisis is fundamentally an axial crisis of perception. A crisis that revolves around how we apprehend the nature of our existence, our aspirations of the ‘good life’ and our enacted relationship to and responsibility for others – including all forms of life on planet Earth.
The recent proliferation of terms for our world (dis)order, speaks to the awakening need to better perceive, make sense of, and engage with the trajectories of collapse. Importantly, so too do they encourage us to rethink and reimagine a more socially just and ecologically sustainable world. Whether conceived in terms of a ‘world-in-crisis,’ ‘world risk society’ (Beck 2000), ‘planetary emergency’ (Club of Rome 2019), ‘civilisational collapse’ (Read and Alexander 2019), or ‘polycrisis’ (World Economic Forum 2023, Heinberg and Miller 2023); or whether termed as ‘the great unravelling’ (Macy 2021), ‘the great derangement’ (Ghosh 2014) or ‘the great dying’ (Hague 2021); or demarcated more epochally, as ’the new age of catastrophes’ (Callinicos 2023), ‘the age of anger’ (Mishra 2017), or ‘the age of resilience’ (Rifkin 2023), they all, amongst others, signal the historically unprecedented and catastrophic nature of our anthropogenically induced planetary demise.
Part 1 of this extended essay seeks to bring some clarity to these proliferating perspectives on today’s world-in-crisis after documenting evident trajectories of immanent breakdown and collapse. Here over-arching theoretical constructs of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Symbiocene prove both illuminating and productive. In such ways we can better discern how various intellectual, affective, and spiritual currents flow and form in today’s ‘great awakening’ to probable civilisational collapse as well as the necessity for a renewed ecological consciousness if humanity is to have a chance of survival in a sustainable, symbiotic world.
Based on this discussion of the trajectories of collapse and the axial crisis of perception, Part 2 of this extended essay will explore the performance of mainstream media in the reporting of our world-in-crisis. This will address the evident contribution of mainstream journalism to the ‘great derangement’ of our times, promulgating ‘business as normal’ and ‘life as usual’ amidst the accelerating crush of climatic catastrophes and ecological collapse. Part 2 concludes by re-imagining how journalism – notwithstanding known obstacles to change – can yet perform a vital part in processes of transition and societal transformation. But first, what is the basis for saying we are living in a world-in-crisis and experiencing the onset of possible civilisational collapse?
Waking up to a World-in-Crisis
The onward and accelerating crush of global crises and catastrophes can no longer be ignored or simply taken as the latest coincidence of randomly destructive events. These are neither accidents of nature nor society, nor the malevolent acts of someone’s preferred God. We are witnessing a world-in-crisis and its unfolding in real time. A world in which anthropogenic crises caused by the inexorable and ecologically destructive advance of human society and its predominant economic system, are finally reaching their nadir – or endgame.
The gargantuan progenies running amok in the world garden have been set loose by human parentage. They are born from and borne along by human history’s most globally rapacious, economically extractive, and ecologically devastating system of production and consumption, and reinforced through a normative worldview wedded to ideas of incessant growth, material progress and human exceptionalism. Climate change straddles the Earth as the most precipitous threat to humanity, but it is dangerously inept to think that this is the only existential catastrophe now bearing down on life on planet earth. Pandemics, bio-diversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, energy, water and food insecurity, soil degradation and toxic pollution, and weapons of mass annihilation, all now pose further threats to existence. Entangled within and precipitating many of them are global financial crashes and deepening inequality, increased political polarisation and instability, failing supply chains, world population growth and mass population movements and, inevitably, increased humanitarian disasters. The latter, moreover, are no longer spatially confined ‘over there’ in the global South but take root ‘at home’ in the global North and temporally threaten to become permanent emergencies everywhere. It is imperative that we recognise the increasingly entangled and compounding nature of global crises today and address these holistically as endemic to a world-in-crisis.
The existential threats to life on planet earth, then, are not unfortunately confined to self-contained ‘issues,’ whether climate change, global pandemics, or food precarity. They are expressive of and entangled in today’s unfolding planetary emergency that now threatens both civilizational and ecological collapse. This trajectory is only set to worsen in the years and decades ahead. The dark telos of civilizational and biosphere degradation and collapse should also not be dismissed as alarmist, as simply catastrophist thinking, or, more simplistically, as ‘doomerism’ though it proves psychologically comforting for some to do so. The accumulating weight of evidence including scientific and expert projections can no longer by denied, diluted or ignored.
Trajectories of civilizational collapse
The mapping and prognoses of the growing catalogue of scientific reports and scholarly research should stop us all in our tracks. The International Panel on Climate Change Report is unequivocal: ‘Pathways reflecting current nationally stated mitigation ambitions as submitted under the Paris Agreement would not limit global warming to 1.5°C, even if supplemented by very challenging increases in the scale and ambition of emissions reductions after 2030’ (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2022). Between 2010 and 2019 the world experienced the highest levels of emissions in human history and the upward curve continues (United Nations Environmental Programme UNEP [UNEP,], 2023). The consequences of exceeding 1.5°C global warming as predicted will be catastrophic for millions around the planet. And we are already witnessing the devasting impacts of climate change on millions of people (and other species) through extreme weather events and collapsing environments. And this notwithstanding the urgent clarion calls from scientists to the world’s politicians decades earlier. If global warming continues beyond 2.0°C to 3.0°C or even 4.0°C, as many now foresee on current trends, vast swathes of the planet will become uninhabitable in decades, not centuries, billions of people are likely to die, and human civilization as we know it will collapse (Bendell and Read, 2021; Heinberg and Miller 2023; Hickel, 2021; IPCC, 2022; Read and Alexander, 2019; Servigne and Stevens, 2020; Servigne et al., 2021; Wallace-Wells, 2019).
Since 1970, more than two-thirds of the world’s population sizes of all mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have been lost (WWF, 2022). Invertebrates haven’t escaped the destruction. A scientific consensus displayed each summer on car windscreens, tells us that an ‘insect apocalypse’ has been under way for some time, including pollinators so central to plant propagation, food production and biodiversity (Goulson, 2021; Millman, 2022). Not only are species population sizes plummeting, but species are also increasingly becoming extinct at an historically unprecedented rate. We are living in the era of the sixth mass extinction, this time human induced (Cowie et al., 2022; Kolbert, 2014; Erlich, 2017).
A recent study has calculated that ‘by 2070 soil erosion will increase significantly, by 30 per cent to 66 per cent’ (Borrelli et al., 2020). Intensive agriculture, including the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and increasing water run-off due to climate change, threaten to massively reduce agricultural yields and generate world food shortages as well as undermine waterways and aquatic ecosystems (UNEP, 2019).
The World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations and WWF International, along with the world’s leading virologists, have argued in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic that new zoonotic diseases will evolve in the years ahead due to the destructive impacts of human societies on nature and the climate. This includes deforestation, monocultural agriculture, biodiversity loss, trade in wildlife and human encroachment upon natural environments, all of which exacerbate the rise of potentially deadly diseases and their communication across species. (Lawler et al., 2021; Vidal 2023). COVID-19 has caused between 15 million (WHO, 2022) and 18 million (Wang et al., 2022) excess mortality deaths to date.
Currently nine countries in the world possess roughly 12,700 nuclear warheads, the majority owned by Russia and the United States (Federation of American Scientist FAS [FAS], 2022). A single Trident missile submarine can carry 100 hydrogen bombs with the explosive power of 1000 Hiroshima bombs (Toon, 2018). Survivors of a nuclear war who manage to escape death from incineration, shock waves and radiation fallout will venture out into a nuclear winter blanketing out the sun and extinguishing photosynthesis and, thereafter, the remnants of human society as we know it. In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and warned the world that he had put his nuclear forces on a ‘special regime of combat duty’, or high alert. One minute to mid-night has moved considerably closer and upended international stability and nuclear arms control.
Published scientific and expert reports on these and other planetary threats, then, make for discomforting reading and underpin projections of a world of worsening catastrophism and, if unabated, probable civilizational collapse. This dark telos is immanent to a world fundamentally premised on relentless economic growth and the overshooting of sustainable ecological limits. Adaptation, resilience and mitigation have become the lingua franca of living in a world accelerating along existential tracks, and pathways of transition and societal transformation are increasingly demanded if we are to have a chance of denting or slowing the juggernaut of civilizational collapse (Bendell and Read, 2021; Berners-Lee, 2021; IPCC, 2022; Read and Alexander, 2019; Servigne and Stevens, 2020; Servigne et al., 2021; Wallace-Wells, 2019; WWF, 2022).
Such global crises are now endemic to our contemporary world-in-crisis. For the most part they are globally encompassing (which is not to say they are experienced equally around the globe and issues of inequality and injustice are implicated in them all). Importantly, they are also complexly entangled with each other and manifest in and through geopolitical inequalities and structures of power – though too often this is insufficiently recognized and understood. For example, COVID-19, climate change, conflicts (including Ukraine) and rising fertilizer and food costs are all implicated in the world’s latest ‘seismic hunger crisis’, with 811 million people in the world going to bed hungry and 44 million people in 38 countries ‘teetering on the edge of famine’ (World Food Programme, 2022).
There is a tendency, based in institutional arrangements, academic disciplines and the constructs of mind and pragmatics of action, to cognitively discriminate between global problems or issues and place them into separate categories and arenas of specialist attention (see, e.g. the United Nations website on ‘Global Issues’ (United Nations [UN], 2022). We fail as a result to see them in holistic, joined-up terms, as both immanent and an integral expression of an economically overdetermined world that now poses a threat to the very fundaments of life (Foster, 2022; Saito, 2022). The dark telos of today’s unravelling world and its systemic, compounding crises amounts to more than the sum of multiple, contiguous crises and is quite different to earlier historical and localized forms of societal collapse (Diamond, 2011).
Theorizing beyond the Anthropocene
According to Amitav Ghosh, we are living in ‘The Great Derangement’ (Ghosh, 2016), a time of widespread denial, political disavowal and collective insanity as the world continues its ‘business as usual’ and ‘life as normal’ path. This notwithstanding the growing scientific consensus that we are living in the Anthropocene, an era that has brought the 12,000 years or so of the Holocene to a humanly induced close. Such is the extent and depth of the recent impacts of human civilization on earth systems and biocene. Though the exact periodization of the Anthropocene is still disputed along with the extent to which earth systems are not simply reactive but constitutive in respect of human impacts (Clark, 2014; Ghosh, 2022), and continue to exert ‘more than human’ agency (Haraway, 2016; Tsing et al., 2022), most generally agree that the evidence of the ‘great acceleration’ of human society’s footprint on earth systems and the biosphere since the Industrial Revolution is undeniable, and has proved ecologically devastating (Lewis and Maslin, 2018; Steffen et al., 2015).
The biologist E.O. Wilson, in recognition of this, coined the term ‘the Eremocene’ to signal the impending Age of Loneliness that will follow the Anthropocene following the mass extinctions of other species wrought by human civilization (Wilson, 2013). And Paul Erlich, one of the first biologists to draw attention to human society’s culpability in processes of extinction, including its own (Erlich, 2017; Erlich and Erlich, 1988), remains in no doubt that collapse ‘is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems’ (Erlich, 2018).
James Lovelock’s planetary thesis of ‘Gaia’ had earlier positioned recent human impact on earth systems as unsustainable, given the planet’s delicate equilibrium of life and non-life systems (Latour, 2017; Lovelock, 2015, 2021). It took time for the scientific community to catch up with Lovelock’s novel planetary conceptualization of interacting earth systems and their import for the precariousness of life on Planet Earth, first set out in the 1970s. A similar response, it seems, greeted the Club of Rome’s publication of Limits to Growth in 1972, which, based on early computing simulation power, extrapolated world population growth and economic trends to argue that planetary limits would soon be breached with catastrophic human and environmental costs (Meadows et al., 1972). When revisited 40 years later, Graham Turner essentially reaffirmed the study’s predictions of planetary overshooting and the validity of projections of collapse (Turner, 2014), as did the Club of Rome’s own revisiting 50 years later and its declaration of a ‘planetary emergency’ in 2019 (Club of Rome, 2019). Herbert Giradet, member of Club of Rome, writes more recently on the historical rise of the technosphere and its continuing devastating impacts on the biosphere, that now threatens our future existence (Giradet 2022).
Ideas of planetary boundaries (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2015) and overshooting have now informed major challenges to orthodox (ecologically myopic) economics, including influential formulations of doughnut economics (Raworth, 2017), steady-state economics (Daly, 1991), circular economies and regenerative culture and agriculture (Wahl, 2016) as well as ideas of post-growth (Jackson, 2021), degrowth (Hickel, 2021), sacred economics (Eisenstein, 2018) and ecological civilization (Eisenstein, 2021; Korton, 2021; Lent, 2021; Mathews 2023).
When approached through a lens of critical political economy, the Anthropocene, it is argued, can be better conceived as the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015; Patel and Moore, 2018). In contrast to factually based descriptions and generalized claims of ‘human society’, the Capitalocene invites a more historically nuanced explanation for the ecological devastation wrought by successive waves of capitalism and its colonizing and commodification of nature. ‘The crisis today’, argues Moore in his treatise on world ecology, ‘is not multiple but singular and manifold. It is not a crisis of capitalism and nature but of modernity-in-nature’ (Moore, 2015: 4). Immanuel Wallerstein’s influential ‘world-systems’ theory had earlier projected the ‘end phase’ of world capitalism characterized by a period of deepening and terminal crisis (Wallerstein, 2004), with no clear successor system in sight. And Kohei Saito (2022) and John Bellamy Foster (2022), in their respective exegeses of Marx’s writings, find, contrary to established Promethean interpretations, evidence for Marx’s early ecological thinking in his conceptualization of ‘metabolic rifts’ and their devastating consequences under the inexorable economic trajectory of capitalism. A trajectory culminating today in ‘cannibal capitalism’ that now threatens to devour our entire planet (Frazer, 2022).
Voices outside the traditional academy are also heard referring to the ‘Great Unravelling’ (Macy, 2021), the ‘Great Turning’ (Kelly and Macy, 2021), the ‘Great Dying’ (Haque, 2021) and, as we have heard, the ‘Great Derangement’ (Ghosh, 2016). Pantheistic ideas of spirituality, Buddhism and Taoism have also coloured the so-called ‘Great Awakening’ to not only the immanent forces of collapse inherent to the world system but also to the demand and desire for a more earth-centred and symbiotic way of life based on increased recognition of our ecological interdependency and (inter)being (Hanh, 2021; Lent, 2021; Loy, 2019; Macy, 2021). Importantly, this ‘awakening’ recognizes not only psychological feelings of eco-grief, of anger and despair, of disempowerment and mortality (Gillespie, 2020), but also the ‘gift’ to re-vision our sense of self and relationship to others and the natural world (Macy, 2021), and thereby to engage in practices of active hope (Macy and Johnstone, 2022).
A powerful intellectual bridge, built on a recent paradigm shift in the Western philosophy of science, has further considerably eased the way for such disparate outlooks and philosophies to coalesce under a more encompassing and ecologically centred view of the web of life. The new philosophy of science, better attuned to complex systems that are holistic, open, emergent, interdependent and autopoietic and therefore less than predictable or certain, challenges the hold of traditional Western science and Enlightenment rationality with its linear, closed, mechanistic, atomistic and reductionist approach to inquiry and laws of causality (Capra and Luisi, 2014; McGilchrist, 2021, Rifkin 2023, Theise 2023). It is from here as well as from the legacy of Romanticism (Sayre and Lowry, 2021), deep ecology (Naess, 2021) and traditional indigenous wisdom (Kimmerer, 2013, 2022; Pascoe, 2016; Yunkaporta, 2020) that ideas of ‘ecological civilization,’ and the ‘Symbiocene’ (Lent, 2021) are now posited as a necessary antidote to the unsustainable ecological and human degradations wrought by the planetary-encompassing Anthropocene and Capitalocene.
The social theorist Ulrich Beck notably had also positioned ecology at the heart of his formulations of world risk society (Beck, 2000, 2009). And this carried through to his final reflections published posthumously in The Metamorphosis of the World (2016). ‘Global risk comes as a threat’, says Beck, but it also ‘brings hope’. Here ideas of ‘emancipatory catastrophism’ reverse his earlier focus on the societal production of ecological ‘bads’, seen as the unintended side-effects of producing commodified ‘goods’, to a new focus on the unintended common ‘goods’ of manufactured catastrophic ‘bads’. In the context of climate change, for example, the growing ‘anticipation of global catastrophe violates’, he says, ‘sacred (unwritten) norms of human existence and civilization’, and feelings of ‘anthropological shock’ can produce wide-ranging processes of ‘social catharsis’. In such circumstances, argues Beck, ‘new normative horizons as a frame of social and political action and a cosmopolitized field of activities emerge’ (Beck, 2016: 117–118). Though this may be true, unfortunately an increasingly crisis destabilised political field can also generate reactionary beliefs and populist appeals couched in terms of elite conspiracy theory and consumer sovereignty and thereby promote resistance to processes of adaptation and mitigation – worrying trends that are only likely to deepen as complex systems unravel.
While the writing of Joanna Macy and others encourage a personal inward journey of hope in the face of ecological and societal collapse, Beck’s hope for today’s ‘civilizational community of fate’ is encountered in the sociological consequences of ecological catastrophe and the collective responses to shattered norms and expectations. The progressive as well as repressive potentiality of disasters, especially when staged in the cultural eye of the media, has also been noted by others (Alexander and Jacobs, 1998; Cottle, 2014; Klein, 2007). When reported on the media stage, disasters, conflicts and catastrophes can become ‘global focussing events’ with cultural affect and political charge that reverberate around the world (Cottle, 2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2019).
Resources for Resilience
These disparate theoretical perspectives on today’s world-in-crisis and impending civilizational collapse, then, open-up a multi-faceted appreciation of the dark telos of world system breakdown and immanent collapse. But they also cohere together in their shared recognition of: (1) the historically unprecedented and accelerating anthropogenic impacts of human society on earth systems; (2) that these are rooted in the predominant form of economic system and its insatiable pursuit of economic growth; (3) that the planet has finite boundaries or limits which are being dangerously and unsustainably overshot; and (4) this has set the human and ecological world on a historical trajectory of immanent and probable imminent collapse. Embedded within the analysis of civilizational collapse however is also, (5) the ‘gift’ of an enhanced recognition of the symbiotic dependence of humanity on nature and the planet’s biosphere (that, for some, challenges the duality of human separateness and presumption of human exceptionalism); and (6) prompts the revisioning of humanity in closer, symbiotic and sustainable relation to the natural world and with each other in the web-of-life.
Resilience here, then, is not the naïve faith in riding the storm and putting the world back together more or less as it was, issue by issue, but recognising the necessity to fundamentally reorganise and reorient human society in ways that can allow human flourishing and ecological sustainability in symbiotic and mutually supportive relations of reciprocity and regeneration – and in a multiplicity of ways.
The powerful currents of ideas, affect and spirituality reviewed above are now infusing an awakening ecological sensibility and consciousness and do so in a world-in-crisis that is experiencing the onset events of destabilisation, breakdown and collapse (Heinberg and Miller 2023). For some indigenous cultures and eco-philosophical outlooks these are not so much, of course, new ideas or an awakening, but a continuation of traditional belief systems and practiced ways of reciprocal and relational living. Together, nonetheless, they form the baseline for programmes for change and pathways of transition, pointing to the absolute necessity to find ways of life, ways of being that are both ethically relational and ecologically respectful of our shared, and increasingly precarious, existence on planet Earth. To what extent and how soon this pluriverse of ideas and sentiments, of traditions and intellectual perspectives, of hopes and aspirations can coalesce into an encompassing and multi-threaded ecological zeitgeist for our time of planetary emergency and possible emergence, remains to be seen – and struggled for.
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