Chapter One: Prelude: on Collapse, Hope, and Joy (DRAFT, incomplete)
David R. Weiss – November 29, 2024

[NOTE: This is one piece of a much larger project. If you’re new to my work, you can go here to learn more about the whole project and where this piece fits: www.davidrweiss.com/collapsing-with-care/.]

I ended the last chapter by explaining my goal in writing this book: to preserve our humanity by reinforcing our capacity for making meaning and offering care as the world unravels. In this chapter, still a sort of prelude to my project, I begin with a consideration of three words: Collapse, Hope, and Joy.

I’ve bandied about this word Collapse a fair bit now. From its prominent place in the title to claiming the very first footnote, it may seem like Collapse is the main character in this book, but while Collapse is the context, the main character is us: you and I are the protagonists here. Collapse is the canvas on which we move. It is a billowing canvas, dynamic in itself. But my work is about us.

Still, I need you to understand from the very start what I mean by Collapse. Once we’re clear on that, it’ll become evident why a few words about Hope are in order—and why aiming for Joy in the final chapter might seem at once impossible and essential.

When I speak of Collapse, I fear it’s likely that you’ve underestimated my meaning. I say that because I underestimated my meaning for years before it settled in. These next few pages are going to be unsettling. ALTOGETHER GRIM. Bear with me; I am going to get us to Joy. But that Joy lies on the far side of grappling with Collapse, and it will be indelibly shaped by the grappling itself.

And first, I am going to break your heart. I am sorry for this. I do not write these words lightly. But I am committed to the truth. And the truth is not always hopeful. But the telling of it is. Because in speaking truth deliberately and tenderly to one another, we make authentic human community possible. And nothing less than authentic human community will allow us to collapse with care.

So, we begin with some hard truth. When I speak of Collapse, this is what I mean …

Sometime in the next several decades—that is, NOT in some distant future but within the lifetimes of at least some persons already alive today, maybe me, maybe you—the multiple pillars on which our natural and social worlds sit, are going to collapse one after another. Which domino drops first doesn’t matter all that much, because they’re all interconnected, and whichever one is first to fall will simply pull the others along in its wake. In the first few chapters I’ll discuss how and why this is. Here, I simply want to emphasize, I am not using Collapse to describe a passing period of immense difficulty. I am using it to name the unremitting unraveling of the world as we know it until our ecological, economic, social, political, and cultural systems are in tatters.

That unraveling will be uneven across continents, social classes, ecosystems, and more. And unpredictable (at least in specifics) because so many factors are at play across so many interconnected systems. And unstoppable. This last one is perhaps hardest to contemplate. We tend to presume agency at the heart of our identity; in particular, in our relationship to the natural and social worlds. How can we not “fix” that which we turned awry? The shortest answer to that is math. Every pillar that will topple will fall because we have crossed a threshold that puts an unbearable burden on it. Perhaps there is magic afoot in the world in subjective ways, but objectively, finitude rules the roost. And finitude plays by math. And when burdens become mathematically unbearable, there is no pillar that is “too big to fail.” They will fail. One after another.

From the depths of the ocean to the heights of the atmosphere—and everything in between (which includes the banking systems, political arrangements, agricultural practices, and supply chains, etc.)—there are boundaries of stress beyond which systems buckle. On a map of global risks, that’s the red dot that says, “You are here”: the point where buckling begins. Unstoppable.

Call them pillars, dominoes, or systems, here are some of the buckle points.

We currently live on the cusp of two geologic epochs: the Holocene and the Anthropocene. The Holocene provided the 12,000 years of relative climate stability that allowed human civilization to appear and prosper. Our history and much of our future expectations have been shaped by the Holocene. But long before 2100, the climate of the Holocene will be utterly broken. Our present is colliding with, and our future is already being claimed by the Anthropocene—so-named because in this new geologic epoch (often dated from around 1960) human industrial activity has become the driving force impacting other planetary systems.[1]

In truth, however, the effect of that industrial activity has not simply been to “impact” other planetary systems; it’s been to disrupt and damage them. And these are the very planetary systems, Earth’s deep impulses that have, for millennia, conspired to support human flourishing. So, this is some fantastically fierce irony: while the Anthropocene is named for the industrial human activity that ushered it in, it will also be the epoch in which human industrial activity dramatically wanes—and may well be altogether extinguished. By 2100, with the Anthropocene Epoch still in its infancy, humanity will once again be fully at the mercy of a planet we thought (foolishly) was ours to master. That’s what I mean by Collapse.

But the Anthropocene is proving deadly for the rest of our planetary family as well. We may have uniquely flourished during the Holocene, but every expression of flora, fauna, and fungi that keeps our company today has made itself home here, too. And today all of them are reeling from a climate changing far faster than they can adapt. Coming out of the last ice age, our planet warmed about 4^oC over a 5000-year period to reach the fairly stable temperature of the last 10,000 years. We’ll MATCH that 4^oC rise in temperature in just 100 years (from 2000 to 2100) as a result of human industrial activity; very few species can adapt to that frenetic pace of warming. Fair to say that our life choices have rendered most of our planetary family bereft: homeless as the Holocene fades away.

And yet family ties run deep. While we have tended to think of “nature” as “out there”—decidedly not us—from habitat destruction and ecosystem pollution to the resulting biodiversity loss, there is no wound to the natural world that does not also wound us. In the coming decades we will learn this lesson again and again and again as the web of life around us (in which we, too, are held) weakens and tears. For instance, habitat loss and industrial livestock practices are already actively creating the conditions for the next pandemics (plural), at least one of which will dwarf Covid in spread and mortality. Between pandemics and other modern maladies, the result of the toxins we are relentlessly loading into the environment, we will not be able to outrun the assaults on our health—or our healthcare systems. Both will buckle. That’s what I mean by Collapse.

This is hard truth to tell and to receive. Pause and remember, I am going to end with Joy …

By mid-century (just 20-25 years from now—how old will YOU be then? I’ll be as old as my dad is today), the Anthropocene will be furiously rewriting the Holocene’s climate according to a fossil-fueled atmosphere. As a result, some presently populous areas on Earth will be made wholly uninhabitable whether by rising heat or diminishing coastlines. Shifting and increasingly volatile weather patterns will cause crop failures (and crippling famine) that will ripple around the globe producing hunger, starvation, international conflict, and civil unrest. Extreme weather events will dislocate whole communities. There will be millions upon millions of climate refugees—persons for whom national boundaries become meaningless as they search for survival and safety. Meaningless, at least until wealthier countries make their borders the frontlines of climate migration wars. That’s what I mean by Collapse.

Right alongside this unfolding climate chaos, the worlds of financial speculation, banking, and the economy as whole will teeter—until they, too, topple. Our globally interconnected economy demands growth as the condition for its stability. But growth requires new debt, which drives ever-rising cycles of production and consumption, obscene wealth and grinding poverty, all the while overstressing the environment. In other words, we’ve built an economic system that is only stable insofar as it creates instability on a finite planet and in real human communities. Before long, either our financial system or our planet will go bankrupt. Likely both. And when that happens, the repercussions will threaten the civility that is foundational in our personal, public, and political lives. That’s what I mean by Collapse.

All these cascading stresses—climate and weather, food production and finance, dislocation and migration, and others—will amplify the destabilizing power of fear and anxiety in our personal and communal lives. This, in turn, will feed social friction, scapegoating, cultural distraction, and the lure of authoritarian politics. Unable to catch a break—precisely because we have broken the natural systems that have done their best to support us, human society will fray from edge to center and from center to edge.International conflicts, domestic conflicts, social division, and internal trauma will all increase—dramatically. That’s what I mean by Collapse.

Finally, the unimaginable scale of heat, hunger, war, disease, civil unrest and personal despair will take an equally unimaginable toll on human population. We’ve just crested 8 billion persons on the planet. The U.N. projects human population will surpass 9 billion by 2050 and level out around 10 billion by 2080. But we’re in Collapse, and that means population projections based on Holocene conditions are woefully naïve. According to some climate scientists (those willing to connect the dots and go on record), between 2050 and 2100 we’ll live through the greatest decades of dying in human history.

They suggest that the best-case scenario on such a badly wounded planet is a human population that will have fallen—precipitously—to not much more than ONE billion by 2100. Can you imagine?! We lost 7 million people to Covid worldwide (those are “confirmed” deaths; some estimates list 25-30 million excess deaths likely “attributable to Covid” from 2019-2024). But a population drop from 9 billion to 1 billion in the last half of this century? That works out to 160 million excess deaths per year—every year, for fifty straight years. Deaths due to heat, hunger, war, disease, civil unrest and personal despair beyond anything that we experience today. Death on a scale the human psyche is not meant to endure. Death as the result of social and planetary stresses that neither the planet nor human societies were meant to endure. Indeed, there are others—sober climate scientists—who put the human population at 2100 at just 500 million or less. Or zero.

That’s what I mean by Collapse. And I don’t blame you if it feels like too much. It is too much.

So, again, pause, breathe, and remember I am going to end this chapter and this book with Joy …

Honestly, if you’re not in disbelief by now, I have to wonder if you’ve been reading the same words I’ve been writing. (This grim assessment is why I spent the introduction working to build your trust.) As I said above, I wrestled against writing these words for several years. Even though I am determined to get us to Joy in the final chapter, we begin here. Collapse is NOT the focus of my work; but it is the context for it. In the next few chapters, I’ll explain why I’m persuaded that this stark reality is our predicament. And I’ll share some thoughts on why many of you are just now encountering this for the first time. For now, it’s sufficient that you realize what I mean by Collapse.

Some folks have questioned why I use a word so dire as Collapse. Wouldn’t something a bit “gentler” bring more people along? Perhaps. But I don’t want anyone to feel like I’ve pulled a “bait and switch” later on when I relate the whole picture. And, since you now know where we’re headed, ask yourself, is any word less dire than Collapse really accurate or honest?

The word as I’m using it originates in ecology. When a species (any species) oversteps its place in an ecosystem, it creates a situation of overshoot, gobbling up resources all out of proportion with what the ecosystem can sustain. Overshoot ultimately—and always—ends in that species’ collapse as it dies back. Usually that die back isn’t permanent or total, just until the ecosystem rebalances itself. Ecologists call that population plummet a “collapse.” As I will explain, human beings are such a species right now. Deeply in overshoot. An ecologist would call what’s coming our way a collapse. And, if only to heighten the truth that we are not above nature but within nature, fully interwoven in the web of life, I will use the ecological term for our Collapse.

It’s true, as well, that when scholars study past civilizations—their rise, development, and eventual fall—they also use the term collapse. Every past civilization and empire has collapsed. I imagine every one of them assumed at their peak, that they would be the exception to the rule; that they would somehow endure to the end of the world itself. And yet every single one of them ended in collapse. We make the same assumption ourselves: collapse is for losers; we’re here to stay.

But only two things make our civilization an exception to the rule. (1) We managed to access fossil fuel, allowing us to create the illusion of dodging collapse for a good while. (2) We managed to become a global civilization. “Empire” would seem like an anachronistic term, but it would also be a somber reminder that our civilization, no less than past empires, has expanded and “prospered” only by successive waves of exploitation of peoples and resources. Those two exceptions won’t prevent Collapse. They’ll simply mean that this time the collapse of an empire won’t be a regional experience but a global one. This Collapse will tear asunder both human society and the natural world around the globe.

I’ll be honest, this is grim work. Collapse—as the slow-moving but all-encompassing breakdown of the ecological and social systems that frame (and cradle!) our lives—is not an uplifting idea. It does not lend itself to cheery conversation or wistful daydreams. Unfortunately, Collapse is the inescapable inheritance of the global system of industrial capitalism that has “blessed” us with all the “conveniences” of modern life … while relentlessly torturing the planet (and countless people and other beings) for “our benefit” behind closed doors.

You can quibble all you like about the cost-benefit analysis between contact lenses, laptops, cell phones, hybrid vehicles, and medical breakthroughs (to name just a few of modernity’s blessings that are benefitting me as I type these words) on the one hand and a potentially desolate planet for the next several millennia (at least until the end of the Anthropocene—how quaint). Was it worth it? Maybe. But I’m not so sure. Plus, that future desolation is going to be preceded by a generation or three of suffering and death on a scale unknown to humanity in its 200,000 years on the planet. Billions of dead. And each of those dead … dies. Each will have a name. Some of the names you and I might know. Some of them might be us.

I’m not arguing in favor of the Stone Age. But I think it’s uncomfortably fair to say that as the bill for what we’ve done on the planet in the tiniest blink of a geologic eye comes due, it’s coming due with a vengeance. It’s not going to be pretty. And it’s going to cost most dearly several generations of people who were born too late to enjoy the party much at all.

Grim work.

Which is as good a segue as any into a brief reflection on Hope.

I remain convinced that despite the grim truth of Collapse it remains possible for humans to live with meaning and purpose, compassion and care, community and art, celebration and joy. And my goal in this book is to provide a vision of the internal work we can do to make this possible. I’m simply not sure that Hope is part of that work. Here’s why.

[To be fleshed out further next month …]

I don’t want people to live in despair. But we fool ourselves if we think there are only two options: hope or despair. Can we still “hope” to avert Collapse? I say, no. And I say that honestly acknowledging this is fundamental for choosing a path forward other than despair. If we hold on to hope until it cannot help but disappoint us (because math and physics and chemistry don’t do hope), we will have nothing left but despair. But if we release hope now, we may have the energy to invest in other choices.

We have some time, though not much. (Although for some in other places time has already run out.) Which is why we must begin in earnest now. Setting aside Hope and choosing to build the skills that will allow us to preserve our humanity by reinforcing our capacity for making meaning and offering care as the world unravels

[To be continued next month … a much fuller discussion of the ambiguity of Hope in this work and a concluding reflection on why I believe it is still possible to find Joy amid Collapse.]

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

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[1] In 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences rejected a proposal to place the Anthropocene Epoch in the “official” Geologic Time Scale. There remains a lively debate around this—questioning the choice of term and the dating—but no one questions the underlying rationale: that human industrial activity is now a defining feature of planetary dynamics.