People have pointed out that I haven’t written much about the concept of collapse, despite how often I refer to it in my writing. Collapse will increasingly impact us all. I haven’t written much about it because I thought it had been obvious for years that collapse has spread far and wide.
I’m reminded of one of the things Ronnie James, who I worked with at Des Moines Mutual Aid, taught me. When I asked him why people have such difficulty seeing the evils of capitalism, he said it was because they hadn’t experienced those harms themselves, yet. For Native peoples the collapse began with the arrival of the European colonists.
Many of those who had been that fortunate, no longer are. And are now seeing the injustices of capitalism for themselves.
A society is collapsing when the systems it depends on for its basic needs can no longer deliver them reliably, and the institutions that would ordinarily repair those systems can no longer do it.
Recent years of accelerating global economic, political and environmental chaos make the case that we are in the midst of deepening collapse now.
Seven systems, and why they fail together
A single failing system is not collapse — countries run on failing systems for decades. The claim is that these hold each other up, so the failures do not add. They multiply.
This interactive web application explores these concepts of collapse. The short video below demonstrates how to use the application.
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