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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collapsology | 1/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapsology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:47:01.153500+00:00 | kb-cron |
The term collapsology or collapse studies are neologisms used to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization. It is concerned with the general collapse of societies induced by climate change, as well as "scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters." Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.
== Background == The word collapsology has been coined and publicized by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens in their essay: Comment tout peut s'effondrer. Petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (How everything can collapse: A manual for our times), published in 2015 in France. It also developed into a movement when Jared Diamond's text Collapse was published. Use of the term has spread, especially by journalists reporting on the deep adaptation writings by Jem Bendell. Collapsology is based on the idea that humans impact their environment in a sustained and negative way, and promotes the concept of an environmental emergency, linked in particular to global warming and the biodiversity loss. Collapsologists believe, however, that the collapse of industrial civilization could be the result of a combination of different crises: environmental, but also economic, geopolitical, democratic, and others. Recent literature reviews have shown the maturation of collapsology as an academic field. Archaeologist Guy Middleton argues that collapse studies have evolved into "a more nuanced, self-critical, and sophisticated field" that moves beyond environmental determinism and apocalyptic narratives. This evolution has led to applied collapsology, which draws from archaeology and ancient history to inform contemporary sustainability policies and climate change adaptation strategies, making collapse research increasingly relevant for resilience planning. Moreover, Brozović's comprehensive analysis of over 400 academic works identified five key scholarly conversations within collapse research: past collapses (historical and archaeological studies), general explanations of collapse (theoretical frameworks), alternatives to collapse (resilience and adaptation strategies), fictional collapses (speculative fiction and dystopian literature), and future climate change and societal collapse (predictive and scenario-based studies). Additionally, Shackelford and colleagues developed innovative methodologies for systematically reviewing the growing body of existential risk literature, including risks of human extinction and civilizational collapse, using crowdsourcing and machine learning techniques to handle the overwhelming volume of relevant research.
== Etymology == The word collapsology is a portmanteau derived from the Latin collapsus, 'to fall, to collapse' and from the suffix -logy, logos, 'study', which is intended to name an approach of scientific nature. Since 2015, several words have been proposed to describe the various approaches dealing with the issue of collapse: collapsosophy to designate the philosophical approach, collapsopraxis to designate the ideology inspired by this study, and collapsonauts to designate people living with this idea in mind.
== Distinction from eschatology ==
Unlike traditional eschatological thinking, collapsology is based on data and concepts from contemporary scientific research, primarily human understanding of climate change and ecological overshoot as caused by human economic and geopolitical systems. It is not in line with the idea of a cosmic, apocalyptic "end of the world", but makes the hypothesis of the end of the human current world, the "thermo-industrial civilization". This distinction is further stressed by historian Eric H. Cline by pointing out that while the whole world has obviously not ended, civilizations have collapsed over the course of history which makes the statement that "prophets have always predicted doom and been wrong" inapplicable to societal collapse.
== Scientific basis == As early as 1972, The Limits to Growth, a report produced by MIT researchers, warned of the risks of exponential demographic and economic growth on a planet with limited resources. As a systemic approach, collapsology is based on prospective studies such as The Limits of Growth, but also on the state of global and regional trends in the environmental, social and economic fields (such as the IPCC, IPBES or Global Environment Outlook (GE) reports periodically published by the Early Warning and Assessment Division of the UNEP, etc.) and numerous scientific works as well as various studies, such as "A safe operating space for humanity"; "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere", published in Nature in 2009 and 2012, "The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration", published in 2015 in The Anthropocene Review, and "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene", published in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. There is evidence to support the importance of collective processing of the emotional aspects of contemplating societal collapse, and the inherent adaptiveness of these emotional experiences.
== History ==
=== Precursors === Even if this neologism only appeared in 2015 and concerns the study of the collapse of industrial civilization, the study of the collapse of societies is older and is probably a concern of every civilization. Among the works on this theme (in a broad sense) one can mention those of Berossus (278 B.C.), Pliny the Younger (79 AD), Ibn Khaldun (1375), Montesquieu (1734), Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), Edward Gibbon (1776), Georges Cuvier, (1821), Élisée Reclus (1905), Oswald Spengler (1918), Arnold Toynbee (1939), Günther Anders (1956), Samuel Noah Kramer (1956), Leopold Kohr (1957), Rachel Carson (1962), Paul Ehrlich (1969), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows & Jørgen Randers (1972), René Dumont (1973), Hans Jonas (1979), Joseph Tainter (1988), Al Gore (1992), Hubert Reeves (2003), Richard Posner (2004), Jared Diamond (2005), Niall Ferguson (2013).
==== Arnold J. Toynbee ==== In his monumental (initially published in twelve volumes) and highly controversial work of contemporary historiography entitled A Study of History (1972), Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) deals with the genesis of civilizations (chapter 2), their growth (chapter 3), their decline (chapter 4), and their disintegration (chapter 5). According to him, the mortality of civilizations is trivial evidence for the historian, as is the fact that they follow one another over a long period of time.