From “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart” by Brian D. McLaren
That diagnosis leads us to a disturbing prognosis: Our future will likely follow one of the following four scenarios, which will feature prominently through the rest of the book. (I suggest a few imaginative depictions of each scenario in book or film at the end of each description.)
- Scenario1: Our current civilization will continue to destabilize the Earth’s life support systems, and failing life support systems will continue to destabilize civilization, creating a downward spiral in both the environment and in civilization. As we face this dangerous reality, enough of our citizens and institutional leaders will wake up and respond with sufficient urgency, unity, and wisdom to transform our civilization and learn to live within environmental limits, and thus avoid collapse. However, because the needed transformation process will be long, difficult, and messy, we will face many turbulent decades or even centuries before we reach a new, sustainable normal. We will call scenario 1 the Collapse Avoidance scenario. (This scenario is fictionalized in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 and Ministry for the Future.)
- Scenario 2: Our civilization will not respond with sufficient urgency, unity, and wisdom to restabilize our environment and to live within environmental limits. Nor will our institutions be able to deal with the cascading effects of social turbulence and decline. As a result, our current global civilization will decline toward collapse, perhaps suddenly, but more likely gradually, like falling down a long stairway, one flight at a time. In the aftermath, some number of people – whether 50 or 10 or 2 percent of our population – will be able to regroup in a severely destabilized global ecosystem and rebuild new communities in various locations, retaining some elements of our current civilization. However, unless surviving communities learn what needs to be learned from our current civilization’s multifaceted failure, in the longer term they will repeat our current civilization’s trajectory of overshoot and collapse. If they gain needed wisdom from our collapse, they will rebuild with a new consciousness, spirituality, or value system that will begin a new chapter in the story of our species. We’ll call scenario 2 the Collapse/Rebirth scenario. (Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games unfold in this scenario.)
- Scenario 3: Our global civilization will collapse and humans who survive will face a tenuous future on a decimated Earth. Many or most of the cultural and technological advancements of our current civilization will be lost, and many of the ugliest elements of our history – widespread violence, domination, desperation, brutality – will make a comeback. Survivors will live in post-industrial, post-capitalist ways of life that resemble pre-industrial, pre-modern ways of life, but under far harsher environmental and cultural conditions. They will loo upon the ruins of our current civilization and experience shock at how much humanity squandered. We’ll call scenario 3 the Collapse/Survival scenario. (This is the setting of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.)
- Scenario 4: As Earth’s environment continues to deteriorate, human civilization will descend into a highly destructive collapse process. During this collapse, desperate nations, likely led by desperate authoritarians, will race to exploit remaining resources and eliminate their competitors, speeding up environmental destruction with war, perhaps, including nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare. This catastrophic, mutually assured self-destruction of civilization will not only result in total or near-total extinction of humans, but it will also drive a significant percentage of land and sea life into extinction. We’ll call scenario 4 the Collapse/Extinction scenario. (Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up and Alan Weisman’s imaginative nonfiction book The World Without Us are portrayals of this scenario.)
Feel free to align yourself with one of these scenarios for the moment, but I encourage you to hold your current position lightly for now. You may wonder where I would place myself. For now, that’s not important. (I’ll tell you in the next chapter.) What is important now is to understand the key reason many people are moving up the scenarios. They are moving from assessing Collapse Avoidance (scenario 1) or Collapse/Rebirth (scenario 2) as our most likely future toward assessing Collapse/Survival (scenario 3) or Collapse/Extinction (scenario 4) as most likely.