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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collapsology | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapsology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:47:01.153500+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== Joseph Tainter ==== In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter (born 1949) studies the collapse of various civilizations, including that of the Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory. For Tainter, an increasingly complex society eventually collapses because of the ever-increasing difficulty in solving its problems.
==== Jared Diamond ==== The American geographer, evolutionary biologist and physiologist Jared Diamond (born 1937) already evoked the theme of civilizational collapse in his book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005. By relying on historical cases, notably the Rapa Nui civilization, the Vikings and the Maya civilization, Diamond argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, many of the same issues as these civilizations did, with possibly catastrophic near-future consequences to many of the world's populations. This book has had a resonance beyond the United States, despite some criticism. Proponents of catastrophism who identify themselves as "enlightened catastrophists" draw from Diamond's work, helping build the expansion of the relational ecology network, whose members believe that man is heading toward disaster. Diamond's Collapse approached civilizational collapse from archaeological, ecological, and biogeographical perspectives on ancient civilizations.
=== Modern collapsologists === Since the invention of the term collapsology, many French personalities gravitate in or around the collapsologists' sphere. Not all have the same vision of civilizational collapse, some even reject the term "collapsologist", but all agree that contemporary industrial civilization, and the biosphere as a whole, are on the verge of a global crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to them, the process is already under way, and it is now only possible to try to reduce its devastating effects in the near future. The leaders of the movement are Yves Cochet and Agnès Sinaï of the Momentum Institute (a think tank exploring the causes of environmental and societal risks of collapse of the thermo-industrial civilization and possible actions to adapt to it), and Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens who wrote the essay How everything can collapse: A manual for our times. Beyond the French collapsologists mentioned above, one can mention: Aurélien Barrau (astrophysicist), Philippe Bihouix (engineer, low-tech developer), Dominique Bourg (philosopher), Valérie Cabanes (lawyer, seeking recognition of the crime of ecocide by the international criminal court), Jean-Marc Jancovici (energy-climate specialist), and Paul Jorion (anthropologist, sociologist). In 2020 the French humanities and social science website Cairn.info published a dossier on collapsology titled The Age of Catastrophe, with contributions from historian François Hartog, economist Emmanuel Hache, philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, art historian Romain Noël, geoscientist Gabriele Salerno, and American philosopher Eugene Thacker. Even if the term remains rather unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, many publications deal with the same topic (for example the 2017 David Wallace-Wells article "The Uninhabitable Earth" and 2019 bestselling book of the same name, probably a mass-market collapsology work without using the term). It is now gradually spreading on general and scientific English speaking social networks. In his book Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Ted Kaczynski also warned of the threat of catastrophic societal collapse.
== See also == Climate change and civilizational collapse Counter-Enlightenment Degeneration theory Dysgenics Historic recurrence Social cycle theory
== References ==