Download or read book The Collapse of Western Civilization written by Naomi Oreskes and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and—finally—the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment—the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies—failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization. In this haunting, provocative work of science-based fiction, Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway imagine a world devastated by climate change. Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called "carbon combustion complex" that have turned the practice of science into political fodder. Based on sound scholarship and yet unafraid to speak boldly, this book provides a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate change literature.
Download or read book Sacred Demise written by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-02-23 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of industrial civilization is rapidly unfolding and offers us an opportunity far beyond mere survival, even as it renders absurd any attempts to “fix” or prevent the end of the world as we have known it. Sacred Demise is about the transformation of human consciousness and the emergence of a new paradigm as a result discovering our purpose in the collapse process, thereby coming home to our ultimate place in the universe. Our willingness to consciously embark on the journey with openness and uncertainty may be advantageous for engendering a quantum evolutionary leap for our species and for the earth community. "We face an awesome internal transition that will take us into very unfamiliar territory and will call upon our deeper resources. Carolyn Baker's Sacred Demise is a courageous, wise, and compassionate guide for us all through this inner journey." Michael Brownlee, Co-founder, Transition Boulder County "Carolyn speaks with a confidence that never flinches from entering into the hardest truths of our times, or from the most difficult truths about the culture we are immersed in, so that we might emerge from the chrysalis of global crisis with open hearts and a renewed way of living on Earth together."--Juan Santos, Fourth World Blogspot
Download or read book The Collapse of Industrial Civilization written by Lauren Mattina and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Collapse written by Jared Diamond and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times
Download or read book The Collapse of Western Civilization written by Naomi Oreskes and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 2393, and a senior scholar of the Second People's Republic of China presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment, the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies, entered into a Penumbral period in the early decades of the twenty-first century, a time when sound science and rational discourse about global change were prohibited and clear warnings of climate catastrophe were ignored. What ensues when soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, drought, and mass migrations disrupt the global governmental and economic regimes? The Great Collapse of 2093. This work is an important title that will change how readers look at the world. Dramatizing climate change in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, this inventive, at times humorous work reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called Òcarbon industrial complexÓ that have turned the practice of sound science into political fodder. The authors conclude with a critique of the philosophical frameworks, most notably neo-liberalism, that do their part to hasten civilizationÕs demise. Based on sound scholarship yet unafraid to tilt at sacred cows in both science and policy, this book provides a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate change literature. It includes a lexicon of historical and scientific terms that enriches the narrative and an interview with the authors.
Download or read book The Collapse of Complex Societies written by Joseph Tainter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.
Download or read book Dark Age America written by John Michael Greer and published by New Society Publisher. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forget the comfortable platitudes-this is our most likely future. Forget the comfortable platitudes-this is our most likely future. After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion. What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways. Dark Age America , then, seeks to map out in advance the history of collapse, giving us an idea of what the next 500 years or so might look like as globalization ends and North American civilization reaches the end of its lifecycle and enters the stages of decline and fall. In many ways, this is John Michael Greer's most uncompromising work, though by no means without hope to offer. Knowing where we're headed collectively is a crucial step in responding constructively to the challenges of the future and doing what we can now to help our descendants make the most of the world we're leaving them.
Download or read book Understanding Collapse written by Guy D. Middleton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.
Download or read book Collapse written by Chaitanya Davé and published by Publishamerica Incorporated. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient civilizations of the Mayas, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, and the Mesa Verdeans: all of them, after rising to their zenith, finally collapsed as they had devastated their environments. Surprisingly, current industrial civilization shows a striking resemblance to these ancient civilizations, albeit in much larger scale.With keen analysis, Chaitanya DavAA(c) shows that we are already in the first phase of collapse evidenced by the breaking down of planetary ecosystems, climate change, decline in per capita global grain production, depletion of energy resources, cascading extinction of species, highly polluted environments, melting glaciers, increasing global water scarcities, and higher frequencies of storms and floods. Humanity can either control population and consumption or nature will.Time is running out. Unless we decisively act now, major catastrophe awaits us: unstoppable climate change that could engulf all living species on the planet, with the ultimate extinction of all.
Download or read book The Limits to Growth written by Donella H. Meadows and published by Universe Pub. This book was released on 1972 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the factors which limit human economic and population growth and outlines the steps necessary for achieving a balance between population and production. Bibliogs
Download or read book The Green New Deal written by Jeremy Rifkin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent plan to confront climate change, transform the American economy, and create a green post-fossil fuel culture. A new vision for America’s future is quickly gaining momentum. Facing a global emergency, a younger generation is spearheading a national conversation around a Green New Deal and setting the agenda for a bold political movement with the potential to revolutionize society. Millennials, the largest voting bloc in the country, are now leading on the issue of climate change. While the Green New Deal has become a lightning rod in the political sphere, there is a parallel movement emerging within the business community that will shake the very foundation of the global economy in coming years. Key sectors of the economy are fast-decoupling from fossil fuels in favor of ever cheaper solar and wind energies and the new business opportunities and employment that accompany them. New studies are sounding the alarm that trillions of dollars in stranded fossil fuel assets could create a carbon bubble likely to burst by 2028, causing the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization. The marketplace is speaking, and governments will need to adapt if they are to survive and prosper. In The Green New Deal, New York Times bestselling author and renowned economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative and economic plan for the Green New Deal that we need at this critical moment in history. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green political vision opens up the possibility of a massive shift to a post-carbon ecological era, in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the edge into runaway climate change. With twenty-five years of experience implementing Green New Deal–style transitions for both the European Union and the People’s Republic of China, Rifkin offers his vision for how to transform the global economy and save life on Earth.
Download or read book Ignorance Explosion written by Julius Lukasiewicz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1994 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marshall McLuhan once noted that We do not know who discovered water, (but) it was almost certainly not a fish. Anybody's total surround, or environment, creates a condition of non-perception. This statement has become a metaphor for what has happened in Western societies, caught as they are between states of civilization created by the industrial revolution and emerging post-industrial technology. This unveiling of our cultural condition and the seeming inability of our social sciences to recognize or influence current or future trends, presents forceful challenges to those who believe they are planning for the future of humanity. Lukasiewicz proposes that there are limits beyond which the human mind cannot comprehend its increasingly artificial, unnatural, and, in the end, dehumanized environment. Despite the grim probabilities he sees in the future, Lukasiewicz's work is, nonetheless, undergirded by a sense of optimism, and good humor informs this evocative analysis of our time.A readable, comprehensive and stimulating examination of the changing dilemmas of the human condition. Zbigniew Brzezinski Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs, 1977-1981.
Download or read book Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush written by John Michael Greer and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2006, author John Michael Greer has been sharing his perspectives on the fate of industrial civilization and more on his weekly blog, The Archdruid Report. His writing, both highly engaging and rooted in a depth of broad scholarship, has earned him thousands of readers who want to understand the trajectory our world has taken.Topics like energy, resource depletion, and the ideas behind some of our culture's cherished beliefs have been explored.Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush offers a selection of Greer's best essays.
Download or read book How Everything Can Collapse written by Pablo Servigne and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment. In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people’s ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.
Download or read book Capitalism and Environmental Collapse written by Luiz Marques and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book intends to be an alert to the fact that the curve measuring environmental costs against the economic benefits of capitalism has irreversibly entered into a negative phase. The prospect of an environmental collapse has been evidenced by the sciences and the humanities since the 1960s. Today, it imposes its urgency. This collapse differs from past civilizations in that it is neither local nor just civilizational. It is global and occurs at the broadest level of the biosphere, accelerated by the convergence of different socio-environmental crises, such as: Earth energy imbalance, climate change and global warming Sea-level rise Decrease and degradation of forests Collapse of terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity Floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme weather events Degradation of soils and water resources Increase in pollution caused by fossil fuels and coal Increase in waste production and industrial intoxication The book is divided in two parts. In the first part it presents a comprehensive review of scientific data to show the already visible effects of each of the different environmental crises and its consequences to human life on Earth. In the second part, Luiz Marques critically discusses what he calls the three concentric illusions that prevent us from realizing the gravity of the current socio-environmental crises: the illusion of a sustainable capitalism, the illusion that economic growth is still capable of providing more well-being and the anthropocentric illusion. Finally, Marques argues that "fitting" back into the biosphere will only be possible if we dismantle the expansive socioeconomic gear that has shaped our societies since the 16th century by moving from a Social Contract to a Natural Contract, which takes into account the whole biosphere. According to him, the future society will be post-capitalist or it will not be a complex society, and even perhaps, we must fear, no society at all. “This book is backed up with the latest and best science and has made the complexities understandable for the average reader, all in a context of hope for the future.” - William J. Ripple, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Ecology, Director of the Alliance of World Scientists, Oregon State University
Download or read book The Archdruid Report The Ecology of Collapse Collected Essays Volume II 2008 written by John Michael Greer and published by Founders House Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During its eleven-year run, 'The Archdruid Report' was one of the most controversial and widely cited blogs on the future of industrial society. This second volume of the collected essays from 'The Archdruid Report' covers the years 2008. These essays examine the accelerating decline of industrial civilization through an ecological lens, exploring collapse as an ecological process -- and beginning to make sense of the unfamiliar world on the far side of industrialism.
Download or read book Austerity Ecology the Collapse Porn Addicts written by Leigh Phillips and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic. Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance. In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway. We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.
