Collapse: A Framework for Understanding and Navigating the Decline of Industrial Civilisation

Global industrial civilisation is collapsing and there is nothing we can do to prevent it.

This is not a call to despair, but an invitation to understand the forces driving the process of collapse, and to explore how we might navigate the descent with integrity, purpose, and care for the living world.

The starting point for understanding collapse is to recognise that human civilisation is not exempt from the laws of physics and ecology. At its core, industrial civilisation is a dissipative structure subject to thermodynamics. It is a complex, ordered system that survives by consuming concentrated energy and materials, then releasing them in degraded form. This is as true for a rainforest or a coral reef as it is for a globalised industrial economy. The difference is that the latter has been able to grow far beyond local ecological limits by tapping into fossil fuels: dense, portable, and (importantly) finite stores of ancient sunlight.

This article lays out a framework for understanding collapse through six interconnected domains: the biophysical limits of energy and complexity; the structural condition of ecological overshoot; energy and complexity in practice; the growth imperative of political economy; the cultural and epistemic crises shaping our responses; and the possibilities for renewal within limits.

My thesis is simple: industrial civilisation is a thermodynamically constrained, overshoot-driven system. Its collapse is not a question of prevention, but of navigating a descent already well underway. We can achieve this by grounding our future in ways of living that align with the biophysical realities of the Earth, even as we accept that humanity itself may not endure within them.

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Domain 1: Energy, Complexity, and Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics provides the physical foundation for understanding collapse. The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. The second law states that in every transformation, some energy becomes unavailable for useful work, increasing disorder (entropy) in the system.

Consider a car with an internal combustion engine. It burns petrol (a store of ancient sunlight) to propel itself forward. Only a fraction of the chemical energy in the fuel is converted into motion; the rest is lost as waste heat, sound, vibration, and exhaust gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. These losses are not the result of poor engineering, but of fundamental physical laws.

Civilisations operate in exactly the same way: they take in concentrated energy and materials, convert them into work to maintain and expand their structures, and inevitably produce degraded outputs, like heat, pollution, and waste. Over time, the available surplus energy declines, entropy rises, and the system’s ability to maintain its complexity diminishes.

As Joseph Tainter’s research on historical civilisations shows, increasing complexity yields diminishing marginal returns: each new layer of administration, infrastructure, or technology demands ever-greater energy and material inputs for proportionally smaller benefits. When the energy surplus required to sustain this complexity falls below a critical threshold, societies become vulnerable to rapid simplification or collapse.

Vaclav Smil has shown that the growth of societies, from small agrarian communities to modern industrial nations, is tightly coupled to increases in per-capita energy use.¹ William Catton called this temporary expansion “phantom carrying capacity”: the illusion that the Earth can support many more people than it actually can because we are drawing down stocks of oil, gas, coal, topsoil, forests, and fresh water faster than they can regenerate. In environmental terms, we spend the interest first, then the capital, and ultimately erode the very capacity to generate interest at all.²

Carrying capacity refers to the maximum population size of a species that an environment can sustain indefinitely, without degrading the resource base it depends on. Industrial civilisation has inflated human carrying capacity far beyond its long-term baseline. Collapse can be understood as the unavoidable return from this overshoot back to, and then below, that baseline.

The biophysical foundation is clear: when surplus energy declines, complexity contracts. Civilisation is no exception.

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Domain 2: Ecological Overshoot

Ecological overshoot is the defining condition of our time – the meta-predicament subsuming all other crises within its paradigm. Overshoot occurs when a population’s demand on its environment exceeds that environment’s capacity to regenerate resources and absorb wastes. In human terms, we are running the Earth’s life-support systems faster than they can replenish themselves.

Globally, humanity now consumes resources equivalent to 1.7 Earths each year³, and has altered more than 75% of the planet’s ice-free land surface⁴. Wild mammals have been reduced to just 4% of total mammalian biomass, the other 96% being humans and the animals we raise to feed ourselves⁵. Net Primary Production, the annual capture of solar energy by photosynthesis that powers nearly all life, has already declined by roughly 10% due to human appropriation⁶. Each of these figures represents a breach of the planet’s biophysical boundaries, shrinking the ecological space in which complex life can thrive.

Figure 1 shows humanity’s ecological footprint - the amount of land and water needed to provide what we use and absorb the waste we create - exceeding the Earth’s biocapacity in the early 1970s and continuing to widen since, marking the onset and deepening of global overshoot.

Fig 1: World biocapacity and ecological footprint (1960-2012) (Source: WWF 2016)

The trajectory of overshoot follows the logic of exponential functions: change appears slow at first, almost imperceptible, then accelerates with startling speed as growth compounds. Human population has more than doubled in just over 50 years, from 3.7 billion in 1970 to over 8 billion today⁷. Each additional billion people magnifies demand for food, water, energy, and materials, drawing ever more heavily on finite reserves of fossil fuels, topsoil, and fresh water.

Figure 2 illustrates the exponential growth of the human population since the industrial revolution.

Fig 2: World Population – (Source: Our World in Data)

Jason Hickel reminds us that overshoot is not simply a matter of “too many people consuming too much.” It is a structural feature of an economic system designed for perpetual growth, rooted in centuries of colonial extraction from the Global South to the Global North⁸. Overshoot is therefore both an ecological and political reality: it is as much about the unequal distribution of consumption as the aggregate scale of it. As a result, collapse will not arrive everywhere at the same time, but will unfold along different timescales across the world.

Overshoot makes collapse not a hypothetical risk, but an active process of rebalancing already underway. As ecosystems degrade and resource flows contract, human systems will be pulled, willingly or otherwise, back toward the planet’s long-term carrying capacity.

As this ecological space contracts, the notion that we can continue expanding the economy while reducing total environmental impact (so-called “decoupling”) runs directly into the hard limits imposed by physics and resource depletion.

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Domain 3: Energy and Complexity in Practice

Industrial civilisation is built on a simple but unforgiving equation: energy and material throughput make complexity possible. As I describe in domain 1, every act of production and consumption requires physical inputs and produces degraded matter and waste heat.

The dominant policy narrative suggests that we can “decouple” economic growth from this physical throughput. In other words, grow GDP while reducing total environmental impact. While relative decoupling is possible (less impact per unit of GDP through efficiency), the idea of absolute decoupling at the global scale defies the laws of thermodynamics. You cannot produce goods and services without transforming energy and matter.

For example, you cannot build an electric vehicle without steel, aluminium, copper, plastic, glass, lithium, cobalt, and the labour of workers - each of which requires mining, processing, transport, and manufacturing, all powered by energy and embedded in global supply chains.

Likewise, you cannot enjoy a meal out without a vast web of material and energetic inputs: industrially produced food grown with fertilisers and machinery, transport fuel to move ingredients, electricity and gas to cook them, labour from cooks and servers, the physical building in which the meal is served, and the infrastructure to dispose of the waste. These inputs are often invisible to the end user, but they are inescapably material.

Claims of successful decoupling often rest on territorial accounting tricks. High-income countries appear to reduce emissions or material use while GDP grows, but much of the apparent reduction is the result of offshoring (shifting resource-intensive production to other countries). The UK, for example, reports a 40% fall in territorial CO₂ emissions since 1990, yet consumption-based emissions, which count the embedded carbon in imports, have barely fallen at all⁹. Globally, both material extraction and energy use have continued to rise in near-lockstep with GDP¹⁰.

Figure 3 shows that global GDP, population, and material use have risen together, with no evidence of sustained absolute decoupling between economic growth and resource consumption.

Fig 3: Population and material footprint and GDP Growth Index (Source: United Nations Statistics)

Even where efficiency gains occur, they are undermined by rebound effects (Jevons paradox): energy saved in one area is reallocated to expand activity elsewhere, driving up total use. The result is that global material extraction has quadrupled since 1970¹¹, and energy demand continues to grow despite decades of efficiency improvements.

Figure 4 demonstrates the near-total dependence of global energy supply on fossil fuels, underscoring the tight link between economic activity and carbon-intensive energy sources.

Fig 4: Fuelling the World (Source: Nature)

In reality, there is no historical precedent for sustained, absolute global decoupling. The growth-driven economic model requires ever-increasing energy and material flows, and those flows remain overwhelmingly fossil-fuelled. As these fuels deplete, whether through deliberate phase-out or, more likely, geological decline, the complexity they support will contract.

This relentless physical throughput is not incidental; it is hard-wired into the political and economic structures of industrial civilisation, which compel continual expansion regardless of ecological cost.

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Domain 4: The Growth Imperative of Political Economy

Capitalism emerged within, and accelerated, the thermodynamic pattern of civilisation as a dissipative structure. Like any such structure, it must consume energy and materials to maintain itself, and it tends towards expansion as long as resources are available. In Tainter’s terms, the political economy of industrial civilisation has locked itself into a high-cost complexity trap: maintaining and expanding complexity requires ever-greater inputs, but the returns on that complexity are shrinking, pushing the system toward instability¹².

The growth imperative is not an accident of capitalism but its organising principle. Investment demands returns, which require more production, which in turn requires more energy and resources. In a finite system, this locks civilisation into an unavoidable conflict with ecological limits. The Western Roman Empire, after cutting down its forests, debasing its currency, and overextending itself militarily, saw its economic and political structures unravel. It collapsed – and the dark ages followed.

As William Ophuls argues, industrial civilisation is inherently expansionary¹³. It cannot simply “stabilise” at a sustainable level. In thermodynamic terms, it has no steady-state setting. Collapse is the inevitable outcome of a system whose survival depends on growth beyond the planet’s capacity to support it.

But collapse is not only driven by physical constraints, it is also shaped by the cultural and cognitive frameworks through which we interpret the world.

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Domain 5: Cultural and Epistemic Crises

Collapse is not only a material process - it is also an epistemic one. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Modernity has privileged a narrow, reductionist frame: knowledge is constructed, detached, quantifiable, and dominated by economic metrics. This has produced immense technical power, but also a profound blindness to the relational and ecological dimensions of reality¹⁴.

Joanna Macy describes this as part of the “Great Unravelling” - the breakdown not just of systems, but of the stories and assumptions that hold them together¹⁵. Our cultural narratives of human exceptionalism, perpetual progress, and control over nature are disintegrating in the face of biophysical reality. This disorientation leaves many unable to respond coherently to collapse, clinging to false hopes of salvation through technology or policy reform.

Without a shift in how we perceive and value the world, any technical or political “solution” will remain trapped in the same paradigm that created overshoot. How we think shapes how we act. Without epistemic renewal, technical and political interventions will remain trapped in the logic of overshoot.

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Domain 6: Renewal Within Limits

If collapse is inevitable, then the work that remains is not to prevent it, but to shape what follows. This begins with accepting that the Earth is finite, that its capacity to support human life is constrained, and that any future worth living must be grounded in reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. This is not an abstract moral stance, it is an ecological necessity.

The health of soils, watersheds, forests, and seas is the foundation of any possible human future. Industrial civilisation has eroded that foundation by treating ecosystems as warehouses for extraction and sewers for waste. Renewal within limits means reversing that relationship: meeting human needs in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken, the ecological systems we depend on. In practice, this demands a shift from the industrial growth economy to what Joanna Macy calls a “life-sustaining society.” It is a cultural, political, and ecological pivot: from growth to sufficiency, from extraction to kinship, from centralised control to distributed resilience.

This is not about retreating into nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. It is about designing ways of living that work with nature’s patterns, regenerate the commons, and can be sustained within Earth’s long-term carrying capacity. For me, permaculture is one pathway into this work. It offers a design framework rooted in the ethics of Earth care, people care, and fair shares - ethics that stand in direct opposition to the logics of overshoot. It is about more than food production; it is about re-embedding human systems within the cycles and limits of the biosphere, creating landscapes and communities, human and otherwise, that are resilient by design.

The Great Turning that Macy describes will not arrive as a single, coordinated revolution. It will be local, fragmented, and adaptive, small communities woven into the fabric of the ecosystems they depend on. In the absence of central planning, these efforts will be messy and incomplete. But they will also be experiments in survival.

Whether humans are part of those futures is not guaranteed, and on our current trajectory, may well be unlikely. All species eventually go extinct; none are a permanent feature of the record. The work of renewal is worth doing, with integrity, purpose, and care. Every act that restores ecosystems and rekindles our ecological identity matters. Even if humans are not part of what comes next.

This essay is part of a series on collapse awareness, acceptance, and responses. Next, I’ll be exploring Collapse and the Consensus Trance - why most people can’t see collapse even as it unfolds. Subscribe if you’d like to read it when it drops.

References

1. Smil, Vaclav. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press, 2017.

2. Catton, William R. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press, 1980.

3. Global Footprint Network. National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts 2023.

4. IPBES. Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. 2019.

5. Bar-On, Yinon M., Phillips, Rob, Milo, Ron. “The biomass distribution on Earth.” PNAS 115(25): 6506–6511, 2018.

6. Haberl, Helmut et al. “Human appropriation of net primary production.” Science, 2007.

7. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Population Prospects 2022.

8. Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin, 2020.

9. UK Government. Final UK greenhouse gas emissions national statistics: 1990 to 2022.

10. Wiedmann, Thomas et al. “The material footprint of nations.” PNAS, 2015.

11. UN International Resource Panel. Global Resources Outlook 2019.

12. Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

13. Ophuls, William. Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail. CreateSpace, 2012.

14. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press, 1981.

15. Macy, Joanna, and Johnstone, Chris. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy. New World Library, 2012.