Re: Nafeez nm Archived Message Posted by Ian M on December 22, 2019, 5:27 pm, in reply to "Nafeez nm" Good to see Nafeez taking on this subject with his usual courage and thoroughness. Critiques of Bendell and Tainter will be worth looking into (happy to see the latter getting a mention!) and always interesting to check out Ugo Bardi's thinking. Funny that it's all about climate change in this article, plus a little bit about the ecological/extinction crisis. Nobody seems to be factoring Peak Oil into their calculations these days. Most of the analysts I followed 10-15 years ago took it for granted that it would be a combination of climate, biodiversity and oil depletion that would bring on a global civilisational collapse, eg: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-thirty-theses Not so much lately... A brief reminder that we shouldn't get caught up in narratives conflating the end of civilisation with the end of humanity. Humans have lived in non-civilised ways for the majority of our species' history and will so again once Leviathan finally succumbs to its internal contradictions. In the meantime we shouldn't take the death-moans of the political culture (which most certainly will die off with collapse) as our own, and look to other ways of living without those parasites. cheers, I 'When civilizations collapse, its not like the people just disappear. As mentioned above, the Maya continued to build (smaller) cities after the collapse. In fact, the last one, Noj Peten, wouldn’t fall to the Spanish until 1697, after the Salem Witch Trials. The collapse of the Mississippian city of Cahokia (modern day St. Louis) would lead to a reemergence of the culture in the US Southeast, which would itself collapse centuries later due to a swine flu outbreak introduced by the conquistador Hernando de Soto. The collapse of Bronze Age Greece was a bad time, but Greek culture didn’t just go away. In time, they would form new cities and rebuild old ones. Collapses typically involve the breakup of large political systems, long distance trade networks, and a depopulation of existing urban areas. The people don’t just disappear though, they usually form smaller, local political and economic systems. Quite often, in the event a large political entity breaks up, you’ll see an escalation of small-scale warfare and people will start shifting their settlements towards fortified defensible positions. You see this in Europe, following the breakup of the Roman Empire, and in Central Mexico after Teotihuacan fell. People also don’t typically lose technologies when civilizations collapse. Extremely specialized technologies may be lost if the resources to produce them become unfeasible, but widely used technologies remain. That may sound like a good thing, but in our case I’m not sure it is. I can’t think of a worse-case scenario than global civilization collapsing, and people continue burning fossil fuels anyways.' https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/br0vtq/a_historical_perspective_on_collapse/ Message Thread: Nazeez Ahmed - The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun - johnhol December 22, 2019, 2:50 pm Nafeez nm - johnhol December 22, 2019, 3:41 pm Re: Nafeez nm - Ian M December 22, 2019, 5:27 pm They won't keep burning fossil hydrocarbons if they just can't get at them. A lot of what's still - RhG December 22, 2019, 8:19 pm Re: They won't keep burning fossil hydrocarbons if they just can't get at them. A lot of what's still - Ian M December 24, 2019, 11:35 am   Searching