How will the world end? For much of human history, we found answers to this question in religion and myth. From the Great Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Armageddon of the Old Testament or the Ragnarok of Norse Mythology, the World has ended many times in our collective imagination.

In recent times, mythical stories of future doom have been mostly supplanted by scientifically grounded ones. Our fate is no longer in the hands of spiteful Gods. Instead, beginning in the 19th century, nature itself took control, with the natural sciences taking the place of theology in mapping out the many ways in which we our world might come to an end.

Take the so-called Heat Death of the Universe. The idea was built on the Second Law of Thermodynamics and was first proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1851 and further expanded by Hermann von Helmholtz. It is based on the notion that entropy tends to increase in an isolated system. From this, the hypothesis posits that the entire universe will ultimately evolve into a state of maximum entropy, where there will be no energy available to sustain any further thermodynamic processes. As thermodynamic processes are also vital to sustain all biological mechanisms, this would also mean the end of life itself.

Although the Heat Death predicts universal doom on a timeframe extending far beyond the scope of human existence – it’s expected to occur septillions of years from now – the idea has sometimes been taken as an argument for the world’s overall decay and against any evolution or progress. That misconception overlooks the basic fact that biological processes take place in open (non-isolated) systems, where thermodynamic processes are non-linear and chaotic in nature, having a whole range of properties (including self-organisation) that fall outside the scope of ‘classic’ (linear) closed-system thermodynamics. Yet it is an early case of end-of-the-world projections from natural science giving rise to more generalised narratives of collapse – nature supplanting myth as the primary source of doom.

More recently, especially since the second half of the 20th century, narratives of societal crisis and collapse have been increasingly informed by notions first arrived at in the natural sciences. Taken together, they tell us that our complex and interconnected world is a lot more vulnerable and sensitive to disturbances than we might previously have been aware of. It follows from this realisation that we cannot take any simple notions of historical or societal progress for granted.

At the front row of this transition sits the environmental sciences, which arose during the Cold War and carry some of the same appreciation of the dangers of impending collapse that was prominent in this period. In fact, the environmental turn might be a candidate for an appropriate term for this transition. At the heart of this thinking lies the ontological claim that organic systems – and by extension also social and technical ones – are complex, strongly interconnected, and interdependent, and so sensitive to disturbances that they might collapse under the wrong kind of pressure. Since the 1960’s this insight has captured the minds of a large portion of academic disciplines and now pervades the thinking in domains such as ecology, natural history, paleobiology, geography, archaeology, and science and technology studies.

In paleobiology, to take one standout example, these presumptions have facilitated an important interest in the dynamics of extinction. A key finding of these inquiries is that collapse seems to be an inherent part of organic nature. During the past 500 million years, life on Earth has gone through five major extinctions (so-called ‘mass extinctions’) where more than 75% of all species on the planet have been eradicated within a relatively short geological time span. The causes of these extinctions vary from extraterrestrial to ‘internally biological’ driven ecosystem collapse. The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs is a well-known example of the former. An example of the latter can be found in the late Devonian, when plants first migrated from water to land. As plants conquered the continents, the oceans were filled with their surplus organic matter – eventually resulting in widespread ocean anoxia and the destruction of marine ecosystems on an unprecedented scale.

Currently, biologists assess that we are in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. This time, it is caused by human activity, particularly the pressures put on natural habitation by the expansion of farming, industry, pollution and other human-induced ecosystem disruptions. As any civilization is dependent on the availability of natural resources, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of the dynamics of collapse has spread from the natural and environmental sciences to the social sciences and the humanities.

A classic example is Jared Diamonds’ Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Here, Diamond investigates historical and pre-historical instances of societal collapse, including the Rapa Nui of the Easter Islands, the Maya of Central America, the Norse settlers in Greenland, and the Anasazi in modern-day Montana. The environmental parameters Diamond identifies as important causes of societal collapse in the past include deforestation, habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting, the effects of introduced species on native species, overpopulation, and the increased per-capita impact of people. To modern-day problems, Diamond adds anthropogenic climate change, the build-up of toxins in the environment, energy shortage, and the full use of the Sun’s photosynthetic capacity by human farming at the expense of natural ecosystems.

Another case of spillovers from the natural to the social sciences and humanities is the so-called ‘broken world’ perspective that is currently informing certain approaches in archaeology and science and technology studies. It’s guided by the idea that the world has always been a place of decay and things falling apart – or at least that it has been falling apart since long before we got here. Contrary to what might be our intuition, it is order and stability that are ‘unnatural’ things. Our world requires constant maintenance and repair.

In order to appreciate and understand the consequences of this situation, broken world archaeology is concerned with the present and future consequences of past human interventions into natural ecosystems. As it turns out, many of the traces left by these interventions – this is especially the case when it comes to leftovers from industrial pollution – will linger far into the foreseeable future. The ecological impact of the British mining industry, for example, are still felt today, as more than 1,500 km (3%) of the rivers in England continue to be polluted by the discharges from abandoned mines. Likewise, the Arctic is now home to more than 17,000 containers of radioactive waste – leftovers from the Cold War which will remain a part of the local marine ecosystem for the foreseeable future.

Finally, there is also the ultimate ‘gloomy perspective’ currently emerging in the shadow of anthropogenic climate change: the field of so-called climate endgame studies. This area of inquiry aims to understand the preconditions for an eventual worst-case scenario (or perhaps a set of worst-case scenarios), where the effects of global warming facilitate worldwide societal collapse or even human extinction. Among the parameters investigated in this approach are tipping points and positive feedback mechanisms – such as the melting of Siberian permafrost or the polar icecaps – that may enhance global warming by several degrees, creating a ‘Hothouse Earth’ that could make the conditions for maintaining our technological civilization exceedingly difficult.

From a theoretical perspective, these notions of collapse find some of their analytical support within the domain of complexity theory. Here, nature is approachedrom the perspective of self-organising systems with non-linear and chaotic behaviour, which may change radically within a short period of time, or experience sudden breakdown. According to Thomas Homer-Dixon’s notion of synchronous failure, we are now at a junction where – for the first time in history – the everincreasing connectivity of globalised civilization has created a single tightly coupled social-ecological system on a planetary scale. An important corollary of this situation is that a breakdown in one subsystem may easily spread to other subsystems, causing a major crisis for the system as a whole. According to this analysis, the kind of widespread disruption that we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic was neither due to chance nor contingency. Instead, it was the expected outcome of a system that follows a causal trajectory of increasingly tightly coupled connectivity.

On a final note, it may be worth remembering that the Enlightenment visions of societal, technological and scientific progress which has informed contemporary civilization during the last two or three centuries is really just a bracket in history. In that sense, the understanding that is now emerging under the wake of the crisis narrative is a return to an earlier state of mind where it was known that the long-term stability of nature could neither be trusted nor controlled. As writer Samuel R. Delany once stated, the Apocalypse has come and gone. We’re just grubbing in the Ashes.

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