What it all means.

Wasteland by Wednesday. What does that mean exactly? Well, for one, it’s where I think civilization is headed. A total societal collapse into an environment more suited to post-apocalyptic fiction than reality. 

            A wasteland for the decaying remains of a system that could no longer sustain itself through infinite growth in the face of dwindling resources. Now existing cratered with the damage caused by its people during the descent, and populated only by those lucky (or unlucky?) enough to survive the fall. As for Wednesday, I chose it to represent the fact that collapse will be happening much sooner than most others expect. And I also needed a catchy name for this website, so there it is.            

            Another prepper website, really? Well, kinda. While there will still be many elements of prepping to be found here, this website is not intended to be of the traditional prepper sort. Most traditional prepping tends to focus on getting ready for local, or even regional, disasters, as opposed to a real ‘End of the World’ type of scenario. Prepping for the most likely occurrences is a good thing, and there is already plenty of information about it out there to be found. The direction that I intend to take here is to expand upon that base and take it a step further. How much further? Well, all the way actually.

            The purpose here will be to inform others about the potential for a complete and catastrophic societal collapse on a global scale. Rapidly, and coming in the near term. And to help them prepare to try and survive it.

            Ambitious, right? And I am hardly an expert. In fact, it was my own searching for an expert that led me to create this site, as it would seem that no such expert exists. At least not in the form I was thinking.

            The issue is that most of the information out there seems to be divided into multiple camps and varying visions of how the world will face collapse and what it will look like. Slow and gradual, driven by a worsening climate crisis? Fast and violent, like a nuclear war? I will spare you the listings, but rarely do I find much information about how all the different possibilities could intersect and interact with one another. One of the challenges is squaring up the knowledge of both the long- and short-term effects of the climate crisis with the ever-present demands of daily life. Another is defining how effects from one event can ripple across the landscape of society and cause other events to unfold. Or, how humanity will react to the various changes that will happen in their lives as a result.

            We all know, to some degree or another, how disastrous the effects of climate change will be for the natural world. But what most of the scientific models fail to take into account is the correlation those changes will have that is reflected in the artificial world. Few indeed will confront what climate change means for our social, economic, and political systems, and for human interaction within those bounds. And, as of yet, I have seen none that go into detail about the irrational behaviors that many people tend to exhibit in reaction to any given crisis, or how we often respond to events not with practical plans for resolution, but with ones that are politically expedient or economically sound. At least, they seem so at the time.

            Just look at how well we did responding to the COVID-10 pandemic.

            In many circles confronting what climate change means for our economic, social, and political systems has taken on an increased sense of shared urgency.  Recent studies have shown that an increasing number of people view our climate-challenged future as so dark that it has become a major factor in their decision not to have children. They worry about the effects of climate change on their health, both mental and physical. They believe that climate change will hurt them personally in their lifetimes and, at the same time, they have little confidence that political efforts or technological solutions to prevent climate change will succeed, or even help at all.

            After many decades of leaders from around the world coming together to try and work out solutions for dealing with climate change, emissions are still rising, forests are still thinning out, and biodiversity is still disappearing. How’s that for inspiring confidence?

            In addition, while policymakers, climate scientists, and environmental groups have been engaged in a half-century or more of conversation about the future of our world, most people on the planet still do not see any emergency looming. The science of climate change has failed to a spectacular degree to emotionally connect with most of humanity, rendering leaders ineffective despite all the warnings of what is coming.

            That warning is basically that if we do not curtail the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it threatens the viability of modern civilization and just worsens a mass extinction event that is already in motion.

            Alas, this warning is not really connected to the complex human systems of society, such as finance, telecommunications, and transportation, not to mention the very basics of food and water supply. These systems are just left to continue to evolve and operate as if the threat of climate change does not even exist. Humans are wired to make the short-term a priority, and so concepts such as ‘tipping points’ are left on their own as distant and abstract to the technicalities of daily life.

            This failure to draw the right picture for everyone means that humanity has now entered into an uncertain future without even really being aware of it, and continues to spew out emissions many times faster than ever before.

            We all need to continue to improve our understanding of the science behind this potential catastrophe, sure, but what we really need now is to start looking at how our artificial systems of civilization are intertwined with the fate of the climate of this planet. The real story about our looming emergency must highlight how vulnerable society is to near-term climate disasters, and how we as people are going to react to the shocks of events as they unfold.

            Cascading failure. That is the monster lurking in the dark.

            Tipping points in our planet’s system – such as deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, and the melting of ice sheets – are certainly existential long-term threats. But we are already causing increasingly severe weather events that will soon become more extreme and frequent enough to trigger what is known as a “cascading failure” within our structure of global society.

            This is when multiple shocks across manmade systems lead to catastrophic disruptions in their functioning. These disruptions, given how much our global system is interconnected, can affect a single nation directly but also lead to the failure of global supply chains and financial systems across the world. The entire global economy could come apart. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us a preview of this in action.

            Our modern world is a very complex and interconnected one. It may not seem as such while we are busy going about our daily lives, but ours is a structure of interdependent systems, in which the failure of one part can easily trigger others, and those, in turn, affect more, until the entire thing collapses in a massive cascading failure event. Cascading failures occur when one part of a system fails, leaving other related parts to compensate for the failed component, or to “take up the slack.” This then brings these compensating pieces closer to overload and failure themselves, potentially causing them to break down as well, prompting a string of additional failures down the line, one after another.

            Civilization functions as a diverse infrastructure of systems, all coupled together and dependent on each other for functioning. Due to this coupling, interdependent networks are extremely sensitive to random failures, and even more so to targeted attacks. The failure of a small number of parts in one system can trigger a cascade of failures throughout the entire network and bring it all to a screeching halt.

            In a healthy and well-managed system, the complex interdependence provides a benefit that allows for all the conveniences of our daily lifestyle to function. The problem is that this complex system of “just-in-time” logistics chains, and everything being maintained for “instant access” and “on-demand” has been designed around the assumptions of a stable world in which everything moves smoothly from actions to predictable outcomes. But it has been built on top of a hugely unstable and complex platform, which is our increasingly climate-disrupted planet.

            So what happens if the system begins to become unhealthy, unbalanced from the effects of this unstable platform? If it is also perhaps mismanaged, or stressed by outside forces? It can still function, for a time, but is slowly begins overloading, and when operating at the capacity redline, well, it is only going to take a single significant event to start the cascading failure across the board.

            We have already seen the beginnings of this. Our system was humming along just fine, at least so it seemed and for the most part. Much of the mismanagement was kept from being apparent to the general public, and the real climate effects are just beginning to have an impact. But then along came COVID-19 and the pandemic. Very quickly, this event began to expose the weak points in our systems and has slowly ramped us up to that redline. Parts of it are now very close to collapsing individually, and other parts are already taking up the slack for the failing ones. There is precious little reserve capacity left. As it sits now, it would only require a single trigger event of a sufficient magnitude to cause the whole thing to come apart around us.

            What could that trigger event be? Well, due to the state of the world and our current global instability, there is a myriad of possibilities. War in eastern Europe or southeast Asia? A terrorist attack with a bioweapon? The “Big One” finally hitting the U.S. Westcoast? A new viral pandemic or the emergence of bacterial resistance to antibiotics?

            It is a long list. And it grows longer every day, it seems.

            There are a great many studies about the looming specter of climate collapse. And most of them, while quite accurate, were done pre-covid. Few, if any of them, really take much more than a passing swipe at factoring in the “human nature” element. As all of these horrible climate-related disasters begin to take effect and pile up around us, how are people going to react? Individuals, political leaders, whole segments of the population. How are they going to handle the changes? Will they just sit back and let those long-term scenarios play out according to the scientific models? You really only have to look at how we have all handled the pandemic to see that the general answer to how we will handle it all is “not well.”

            In the near future, the food crisis is likely to get much worse. The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is becoming significant, and it only goes up as we hit the threshold of global warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius – something that could happen as early as 2030 should emissions continue unabated. Skyrocketing food prices, leading to civil unrest, mass starvation, and death.

            One of the most worrying things about all of this is that compared to the long-term climate studies and models, we don’t really know a whole lot about just how fragile the various parts of our clockwork global systems are in the short term. We just don’t understand as much as we should about how our manmade systems will respond to these events, and other occurrences, which will only be happening with greater frequency as the climate destabilizes further. How are these things going to trickle down the line, and what about the effects on the most vulnerable and politically unstable nations? Finally, given the general tendencies of human nature, how are the people affected going to react as things get worse? What kind of human feedback loops might emerge that can cause totally unforeseen events of their own, things not predicted by any models due to their sheer irrationality?

            These are not really the distant existential threats raised by our current and abstract models of the ongoing climate crisis. They are urgent questions that people have avoided for a long time, and they need answers.

            And so. It is this conjunction between climate change effects and our human reaction to it that is my focus. The issues of droughts, famine, migratory climate refugees, extreme weather disasters. All of these and more are things I plan to spread information about on this site. It will be a journey of learning for all of us since I myself still have so much more to understand. As for my own posts, those will primarily be about how we as individuals and groups can deal with, and prepare for, these events, and my perspective is a very unconventional one compared to the traditional “prepper” type. That is where my own somewhat rare mindset comes into play. I most certainly do not think within any box.

            The guiding principle of this website’s philosophy is that societal collapse is inevitable and that it will happen sooner rather than later. It will not be the slow, gradual decline of the Roman Empire, but a more rapid and violent descent into chaos the likes of which the world has not yet seen. Never before has a society existed that was as complex and interdependent as ours is now, and its fall will be a unique event to this planet. As for all the scientific models, I don’t believe they are entirely predictive. Strictly from a scientific standpoint, sure. They all do quite a good job at detailing what awaits us in a climate-challenged world. But the models do not account for the reality that people will probably react irrationally to escalating crises and mounting disasters as they begin to pile up. And many of the processes of advanced civilization will simply not allow themselves to be interfered with, as has been demonstrated by the decisions of political and business leaders for quite some time now. Business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.

            Such a rapid collapse has never been the most likely scenario, but I would argue that it has never been more likely than it is today, and the chances of it happening are increasing. The reality of the situation is that not everyone will survive. Not everyone can survive. But those who are ready for it will have a better chance than those who neglect to prepare at all, and preparing for the worst has never been a bad idea in any case.