After the End of the World Morgan Heenan

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
– Robert Frost

These days, it has become almost mundane to pronounce an end, a moment of nearly unimaginable transformation of our lives in their totality. Once largely the territory of millenarian cults and counter-cultures, it’s now hardly-newsworthy for bodies such as the IPCC to speak of being “on track towards an unliveable world”, or for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to put their metaphorical ‘Doomsday Clock’ at ninety seconds to midnight, “the closest to catastrophe it has ever been.” Everywhere we look, we see the signals of global calamity: ecological meltdown, social unrest, ever-inflating financial bubbles, the accelerating threat of nuclear escalation, dramatic supply chain disruption, and an all-pervasive sense of precarity.

And yet, our society at large is unable to imagine with any clarity or nuance what any of this means. Our cultural imaginary is littered with images of desolation and cataclysm: biblical apocalypse, nuclear winter, Malthusian famine, human extinction, bands of roving cannibals, and Mad Max wastelands—in short, the end of the world. This foggy melodrama concocts a particular vision of the future, one of opaque terror easily co-optable by the darkest of human and political impulses. It is essential, then, for us to push aside these clumsy cliches and to begin to take the end of our lives as we know them seriously—to clarify the future in ways that allow us to meaningfully reckon with it and prepare. In part, this means examining what it means for some of our most fundamental and ubiquitous social realities to begin to atrophy, to disappear.

Like the allegorical fish who don’t know they are in water, it is rare to acknowledge the fundamental modes of a society. This was captured in Mark Fisher’s term capitalist realism—the cultural inability to imagine a reality outside of capitalism—but this narrowness of vision extends far further than that. Globalised trade, currency, nation states, industrial agriculture, or industrialisation entirely: there are a litany of social realities that could quite easily be rendered unreal. These things were not inevitable, nor will they be around forever. But, within the dominant culture, a world outside them is unthinkable.

One way this is often framed is as the ‘collapse of civilisation.’ Here too, instead of understanding ‘civilisation’ as a particular mode of social organisation—involving such qualities as a highly complexified division of labour, social stratification, sedentarization and urbanisation, and, crucially, states—it is assumed to be everything, the only way to live for ‘modern’ humanity. This is largely the legacy of colonisation and the Enlightenment, which together framed those outside the European empires as undeveloped and barbaric—that is, ‘uncivilised.’ The equation of this mode of living, civilisation, with ‘civility’ is perhaps part of the reason our culture finds it so difficult to imagine other modes of living. An end to this society is framed as a return to a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’, a “war of every man against every man”. In accepting this, we echo the colonial fallacy. It is of course a fallacy: it is this ‘civilisation’ which has proliferated harm on a once-unthinkable scale, and it is pre-colonial peoples who have lived sustainably for tens of thousands of years.

Yet the dominant culture imagines this way of living—capitalism, modernity, industrial society, however we might think about it—not only as necessary, but as stable. This was presumably an illusion shared by the Indus Valley civilisation, the Mesopotamians, the ancient Egyptians, the Olmec and Maya civilisations of Mesoamerica—there’s no shortage of once-prolific societies which are now almost forgotten. Sooner or later, they all transformed, not in some cataclysmic mass human-extinction-event, but through a fundamental shift into new social organisms. Such examples may seem distant to our own time, we who inhabit the ‘end of history’ as it was once termed. But the end of past civilisations provides valuable insight into our own. Perhaps the greatest is that the inconceivable is not just possible but inevitable, that nothing is permanent. Those of us who have inhabited the core regions of this civilization and their relative stability quickly came to believe that what is here today will be here tomorrow. Our day-to-day lives are so monotonously, reliably the same that we tend to extrapolate that sameness into the far-distant future. But this civilisation, like all political structures that have come before, remains a fragile experiment and, by many metrics, an unsuccessful one at that. Transformation is inevitable. It is not then a question of if, but when.

Let’s return, then, to the idea of collapse. What does it mean then for a ‘civilisation’ to ‘collapse’? Largely, it is a profound localisation of production and consumption, the gradual disappearance of a centralised state, and “a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”^[1] High sociopolitical complexity means the needs of those within the society are met through sprawling webs of economic relations, like the distant transportation of food and waste, highly specialised wage labour, and professional bureaucrats. Collapse therefore means “the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc.) can no longer be provided to a majority of the population by services under legal supervision”.^[2] Communities are forced to transition to meeting their needs without the vast structures of the society, and become geographically and socially localised.

Understanding it to be a process is important. Collapse is not really an event, nor a ‘crisis’. It is not something that can be captured in a two-hour film. It is also not really an ‘end’ at all, but a slow transformation that occurs over large temporal and geographic scales. Because it occurs unevenly, different positions within a society feel its brunt at different times. Those at the imperial core of an economic system may continue living relatively comfortably within it for decades after those at the margins have adjusted to new (or old) ways of living. We can see this happening right now; there are already places and people for whom global capitalism is no longer meeting their basic needs, frequently divided down lines of class, nationality, and race. As they say, “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

An end in sight

Our civilisation will fundamentally transform on a planetary scale at some point; that much is inevitable. Things get more contentious if we imagine it will soon begin, or already has. There’s good reason to be sceptical—forecasts about the future are unreliable by nature. But it’s clear that change is underway.

The most obvious argument is probably our increasingly inhospitable biosphere, to humans and to many other life forms. Global warming receives the vast majority of our attention, and is ostensibly being mitigated through a litany of ‘pledges’ towards emissions reduction, all the while the UNEP writes that there is “no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place” and that current policies look set to create 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century. “Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster”, they write.^[3] But our global political-economic system remains gridlocked, unable to be reformed.

What seems probable then is that we are approaching a regime shift in the earth system,^[4] ending the Holocene and likely returning us to the climatic unpredictability of earlier epochs. Homo sapiens lived for around 300,000 years before the Holocene through varied and harsh climatic conditions. But it was only when we exited the last glacial period, a little over 10,000 years ago, that agriculture on a wide-scale emerged, supported by the rare stability and hospitality of the Holocene. Human history since then has been perched atop a brief, fragile climatic regime which is seemingly now ending. It is not clear then that the warming we will see in this century, let alone in the coming ones, is at all compatible with the kinds of social organisation we currently take as a given.^[5]

But climatic shifts are only part of the changes underway in our Earth system. Biodiversity collapse and the disintegration of biospheric integrity are equally transformative prospects. The diversity of life on this planet has been utterly decimated in a few short decades, and there is no reason to think it is slowing down. And what we know of co-extinction—the way in which the loss of one species cascades through ecosystems taking others with it—increasingly points to just how vulnerable interconnected systems are to collapse. That is, to mass-extinction.^[6] This is not even to mention at least seven other known planetary boundaries which similarly threaten to disrupt the existing ecology and climate of our world.^[7]

Ecological factors are not the only drivers of collapse either. Social crises, particularly the failure of governments to appropriately manage societies and economies could be similarly powerful drivers of political-economic collapse, as they seem to have been historically.^[8] The global civilisation we live within today is highly complex, its productive systems and structures more layered and enmeshed, and therefore more fragile, than any in human history. The global market, for instance, is built on fundamental connections between innumerable actors globally. The interconnectedness of the global financial network means that problems, even small ones, can rapidly spread and expand through the entire network. Recall how a US subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 triggered a global economic crisis that impoverished people across the globe.

Even simple foodstuffs move through inter-continental supply chains, dependent on petroleum-derived agricultural inputs in similarly long, geopolitically-tense supply chains. For an example of just how convoluted they are, think about how easily they can be incapacitated. A report prepared by the American Trucking Associations for instance argues that within days of a large-scale truck stoppage in the US, there would be shortages of food, medical supplies, cash, and vehicle fuel. Within a fortnight, municipal water services would begin to run out of water-treatment chemicals.^[9]

And of course, there is the issue of resources. This society has been built by certain one-off deals: a limited supply of fossil hydrocarbons like coal and petroleum that have been used as fuel to build an industrial society on an unimaginable scale.^[10] The nature of this fuel in that regard is simply not replicable; non-fossil fuels, while useful, will provide neither the qualities nor quantities of the energy of fossil hydrocarbons.^[11] Existing systems are therefore dependent on a vast web of infrastructure that is increasingly difficult to maintain, built on an energetic basis which will soon become untenable.

These are only some of the possible drivers of a coming metamorphosis. The real transformative power is in their combination, and the reinforcing feedback loops between them. A given ‘natural disaster’ for instance may in itself be manageable, but what if it is preceded by an economic downturn which causes the reduction of emergency services? What if, owing to the increasing costs of complexity, infrastructure has become unmaintained, exacerbated by the diminishing reserves of resources like petroleum and minerals? What if necessary supply chains for dealing with this crisis have been disrupted by geopolitical conflicts, themselves exacerbated by reduced crop yields from increased temperatures and shrinking natural gas availability? What if simmering cold wars turn hot, and the ensuing conflict inevitably requires an ungodly amount of fossil fuels? What if this all occurs during a global pandemic?

This is what is meant these days by ‘polycrisis’. It’s not just that these things are occurring simultaneously, it’s that they actively exacerbate each other, and that attempting to fix one problem can easily make another worse. Our political and economic system has not even begun to meaningfully address these problems. It’s not clear it’s able to.

After the end

Mainstream ‘environmental’ politics is fundamentally short-sighted; it is unwilling or unable to imagine fundamental transformations to our social-ecological world, and so its prescriptions are invariably concerned with merely maintaining things as they are. Yes, mitigation of ecological harm is necessary, but so is recognising that profound shifts in the earth system are already occurring and more are inevitable. The ways we live our lives are changing, and will continue to change, whether we want them to or not.

In one sense, it will likely force us into ways of living that we should have already been engaged in (and, until very recently, we were): community networks of cooperation and organisation replacing top-down governance, localised food production, non-reliance on large, petrochemical-dependent supply chains, an end to over-consumption, and, hopefully, a far healthier set of values and beliefs. A cursory look at history suggests that the most durable, sustainable human societies have not been state-administered civilisations, but instead non-stratified, ecological societies deeply enmeshed in landscapes—Indigenous Australians, for instance. As anthropologists such as Pierre Clastres, or more recently David Graeber, have argued, it wasn’t that people living in such societies simply weren’t ‘advanced enough’ to create certain aspects of this current society, as the colonial mentality presumed. Rather, people made conscious decisions about how they lived, including actively resisting certain social and ecological structures. It is crucial then that we recognise that our current way of life is neither inevitable nor inescapable.^[12]

There are positive visions of worlds after this society. The danger is in how much human and non-human suffering arises from dependence on a collapsing system, and how much more damage to the biosphere it does in its death throes.

Mitigation of both is possible. If these transformations are now inevitable, the best way to minimise suffering and preserve the habitability of the biosphere is to start pre-emptively moving towards those post-collapse ways of life as communities. And if socio-ecological catastrophe isn’t already locked in, that’s probably the best chance of avoiding it.^[13] This is what’s meant by ‘collapse now and avoid the rush.’^[14] A degree of suffering is inevitable—though suffering is nothing new under global capitalism. And as William Catton wrote, “the less hopeful we assume human prospects to be, the more likely we are to act in ways that will minimize the hardships ahead for our species.”^[15] Humans can survive and flourish within at least some of the potential ecological trajectories ahead of us, but only if we develop a very different relationship to the world and our lives.^[16]

Again, collapse is not binary. We may well be able to look around at the end of the century and note that our world has transformed almost unrecognisably. But there won’t have been a day or perhaps even a year where it happened. That’s because there is no ‘it’ at all, really. Part of the danger in the dominant images of ecological and social crisis is that it is implicitly seen as a catastrophe, an end point. All of us are guilty of all-or-nothing thinking—it is often hard not to see our ecological calamity as the loss of our future. It is certainly the loss of certain futures, of certain lives we might have lived, and it is certainly an ungraspably-large act of violence against lives, human and not. At the same time, to imagine it as only as a process of endings is to fall into the modern illusion that ‘there is no alternative’ to the way we live now. Instead, we must remember the ways in which the years to come will not exclusively be a period of negation, but instead re-creation. Moving beyond this binary image of collapse is empowering; it allows us to leave behind fatalism. There is immense suffering, and, simultaneously, there is immense possibility, and there is always room to fight—always ground to hold or advance upon. There will never be a point in our lives where things couldn’t be both better and worse. In many ways, the post-Holocene world will likely be bleak and difficult, as, for so many, was the Holocene world. But at no point will the fight for justice be unnecessary, or ‘too late.’ We will forever be beset by crisis, and we will forever struggle to move closer to the world we want to live in.

Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988. ↑
Yves Cochet, quoted in Pablo Servigne & Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, 2015. ↑
UN Environment Program, Emissions Gap Report 2022, Key Messages, 2022. ↑
Barnosky et al., Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature, 2012. ↑
John Gowdy, Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization. Futures, 2020. https://theconversation.com/the-pre-holocene-climate-is-returning-and-it-wont-be-fun-27742 Banosky et al., Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature, 2012 ↑
See Giovanni Strona & Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change. Nature, 2018. ↑
First suggested in Rockström et al., Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society, 2009. Developed in many papers since. ↑
Joseph Tainter, Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse. Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006. ↑
American Trucking Associations, When Trucks Stop, America Stops, 2015. See also Alan McKinnon, Life without trucks: the impact of a temporary disruption of road freight transport on a national economy. Journal of Business Logistics, 2006. ↑
See William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. ↑
See work on energy descent, eg., Richard Heinberg & David Fridley, Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, 2016. ↑
An argument made quite compellingly in David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. ↑
See Samuel Alexander & Brendan Gleeson, Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary, 2019. ↑
A term coined by John Michael Greer. ↑
William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change ↑
For example, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013. ↑

Morgan Heenan wants to live in a culture of social-ecological flourishing. He is engaged in building and supporting practices of interconnected well-being and mutual aid, justice, and ecocentrism.