Saying civilisation is doomed is true. Another way to say it is that we're an endangered species. We need to add humans to the list.

A symposium on species extinction I helped organize 12 years ago came to that conclusion. Stuart Pimm of Duke, Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange, Thom Hartmann, Jerry Mander, Eric Chivian of Harvard, Healy Hamilton of Cal's Academy of Science and now of NatureServe, and George Lakoff were all there.

Tough weekend that was.

I should note that while I agree with his bleak assessment, I feel it is only one of two possible outcomes: either civilization will break down, or we will adapt. Humans are nothing if not adaptable. That's the one thing we are good at. For Hillman it necessarily goes from Ryanair weekends in Ibiza to the full global Mad Max experience. My take is that if the environmental changes are gradual enough humanity will change over 10-15 generations without the necessity of global catastrophe. The end point will look rather similar, but we won't be able to go and point out the exact date and day of the end of the world.

That's my take on it, too, although I think it will a combination of both breakdown and adaptation. I seriously doubt humans will go extinct; our one superpower is adaptability. But that doesn't mean that there won't be a huge die-off or that large swaths of the remaining humanity won't drop back several centuries as far as general lifestyle is concerned.

I doubt that a lot of our gains, such as the germ theory of disease, understanding of genetic inheritance, basic metallurgy, astronomy, undergraduate physics, agricultural land management, etc. will be lost. Given 17th century resources and 21st century knowledge, I think humanity will still do ok, at least in pockets around the globe.

When you say huge die-off, how smooth and reliable a process do you expect that to be? I'm not aware of any examples in history of large groups of people starving gracefully.

I think it's very likely that we destroy our remaining capacity to produce food while fighting for control over that dwindling capacity. IMO the nail in the coffin is that by the time the signs of environmental collapse are inescapable, most of the worlds food supply will be corporately-owned. This will put humanity's survive-or-perish decisions into the hands of the most unintelligent and destructive lifeforms to ever walk the Earth, shareholders.

I don't think it will be smooth, on the nation-state level, but globally, I don't think everything will fail simultaneously. I suspect there will be famine wars and nations will crumble as resources dwindle, but I don't think there will be total global anarchy or that the planet will be so ravaged as to no longer be able to support human culture. After all, destroying the resources you are trying to capture kind of defeats the point. How far will the human population drop, 30%, 50% 80%? I don't know, but I would be surprised to see it drop below the hundreds of millions mark. Not that I'll be one of those to survive. As I said, I think what's left of the most advanced civilizations will be in pockets around the globe. Perhaps from that point, we will learn to properly manage our own re-growth.

I could certainly be wrong. I'm no Hari Seldon.

If that happens, humanity won't learn from our mistakes because by the time we get to pockets of civilization, the causes of the situation will have been forgotten.

Or deliberately replaced with propaganda to prop up the new warlords.

I think in the later stages of the process very few things will happen gradually or predictably.

In the specific case of agriculture our ability to react to crises will diminish (reduced biodiversity, concentrated ownership of resources, increased profit potential of international food monopolies, increased politicization of environmental issues, etc.) while the incidence and severity of crises increases (bigger/more frequent storms, changing/interrupted growing seasons, reduction of arable land, etc.).

During all of this the various insect, animal and microbial pests that plague current agriculture will persist, and in the microbial pests, new forms will continue to emerge while all our eggs come to rest in fewer baskets.

Meanwhile most of the decisions needed to manage this increasingly fragile endeavour will be made by fewer and fewer CEOs, all of them solely motivated by their responsibility to protect stock prices and the desire to protect their bonuses.

I think without rapid and widespread changes at a societal level (which I sadly agree with the article we just aren't capable of) the potential for an "oops, turns out we can't feed 2 billion people this year" moment will increase decade by decade.

I also think we are perfectly capable of destroying the village to save the village. We have done so in the past over political objectives and valuable commodities. In a literal fight-or-everyone-you-know-starves-to-death kind of war it's difficult to say how far we might take things, but I am confident that it can be summed up with "further than before".

FWIW you've explained your thoughts very clearly and obviously I would rather try living through your predictions than mine. But I think numerous somebodies up top better be planning for my predictions, and worse.

I think the difference between our views is that you think that the worst will happen everywhere, and I think that the worst will happen a lot, and perhaps in most places, but not everywhere. I think it'll be bad, pretty much everywhere, but not the worst. Nobody's going to get through this without taking a beating.

I suspect that if it happens within my lifetime, the next 30 years or so, I will not survive it.

Or who knows? Maybe the AI techno utopia singularity will explode before then and save us all!

Either way, it's supposed to be beautiful this weekend, and I plan on planting scarlet runner beans and nasturtiums around the utility poles in my front yard, and broadcast spreading wildflower seeds in my front and back meadow.

To be fair, I do acknowledge that you prefixed your statements on an "if", but do you think we have 10-15 generations to adapt? I'll be surprised if our corporate owners can't manage to crash the world food supply and critically exhaust major freshwater aquifers in less than 3-5 generations.

These are a few years old, but not everyone is in denial, even within the US government.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/heres-how-nasa-thinks-society-will-collapse/441375/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615

Thanks for posting, I was going to post this. This is a weirdly fascinating idea: what do the politics of collapse look like? As a pushing 50 chap with no kids I don't really have a horse in the future race so maybe that gives me a little room to ponder this without having an overly visceral reaction. What if the consensus view over the next decade is, "We're pretty much fucked" and it turns out to be right? Seriously, what if hope is removed form the equation?

Can we expect decline, or can we expect groups at the most risk to simply throw off the bounds of national or international 'normal' behaviour and run wild? If the billions of relatively poor folk along the Ganges and Yangtze read the tea leaves and realise they are fucked but that they have nuclear weapons...then what? I don't think this will play out in a simple, linear fashion.

Many of my friends are a bit younger than me and have small children. They have spent years being 'right on' about all manner of eco issues, but they have three to four kids each. When, after a few drinks, I let them know that my car with a large engine capacity is much less an issue than their third child or their air con there are scowls and recriminations. It's hard to point to the gorgeous toddler and say 'That's actually the problem", but it is. Even more so when they fly in for the party I get drunk at and tell them their kids are actually the problem.

When groups see no frontier to exploit they will look for the weak and take from them. I do not think being from the left or right will change this much.

It's all quite bleak, but also pretty interesting.