The Collapse of Civilization is Ongoing. There's a Lot to Like About That.
22 reflections, resources, and readings
Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.
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Many people, especially in Western wealthy nations, talk about collapse as a future situation that they are seeking to avoid. I think of it as something that is ongoing and has been happening for centuries. What was the invasion of North America and the subsequent death of some 130 million people if not a major collapse?
The term “collapse” encompasses some changes which are morally wrong, and should be if possible avoided or otherwise mitigated — think the aforementioned genocide, breakdown of societal norms, food shortages, ecological breakdown, etc. But there are other sides to collapse — especially the collapse of modern industrial capitalism — which are right, and should be actively accelerated. This includes trends such as relocalization, reduction in materials and energy use, breakdown of large-scale authoritarian structures, decline in the ability to project military power, etc.
This newsletter, one of my semi-regular round-up posts, focuses broadly on the topic of collapse.
Thoughts, Reads, and Projects
What might the collapse of civilization look like? This article from
gives an overview that more or less aligns with my thinking. We’re in for some major changes in coming decades.What can we do about? We can resist the destruction of the planet, the trampling of human rights, and the rise of totalitarianism, and we can build resilient alternatives. This piece, co-written with my good friend Will Falk, outlines our work at
focused on this topic.We can also proactively assist in the collapse of industrial civilization. My friend
has been doing some excellent writing at on this topic, which has been a focus of my work for going on two decades.On the topic of collapse, I had a good dialogue with the friends of mine who run the website PostDoom.com, formerly hosted by a wonderful man named Michael Dowd, after I published “Are We Doomed?” in February. I recommend checking out that site if you’re interested in an action-oriented doomer perspective, something that I find highly honorable. My perspective is somewhat different from the NTHE crowd, but I could be wrong.
Trump is coming for Oregon’s lithium. At a site just north of Thacker Pass, across the state line, a new lithium project is being fast-tracked. Thacker Pass, which was permitted in less than a year, was just the dress rehersal. The president has directed federal agencies to permit this project in less than 30 days.
I’m hosting a new podcast called Truth and Reckoning with
. The first episode explored the New York Rights of Nature bill. The second explores greenwashing and habitat destruction at a critical nesting site for Diamondback Terrapins in the southern Chesapeake Bay area. Find the show here, or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. I’ll be republishing episodes on The Green Flame.The U.S. is rapidly accelerating deeper into fascism, with undocumented people being disappeared to foreign concentration camps, pro-Palestine activists arrested under dubious charges, universities bullied (it didn’t take much) into crackdowns on free speech, breakdown of basic democratic principles like division of powers, and more. All this has roots which go back generations, and Trump is working to ensure he or his chosen successors will never be voted out. This is how dictatorships are born.
On that note, here’s a new interview I did with folks with a project called Parallel Polis 2030, essentially a call for building dual power as the old institutions become increasingly authoritarian, but also in some ways fragile and politically irrelevant.
- wrote another brilliant piece, this one on how out-of-touch most of the top quintile of wealthiest Americans really are.
The legal defense fund for Luigi Mangione has brought in nearly $1 million, the vast majority from small donations in a powerful showing of populist anger at the corporate medical-industrial complex As my Uncle’s bumper-sticker reads, “Robin Hood was right.”
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How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse by John Michael Greer expands on the topic of collapse, presenting an extended perspective. Worth the read.
“Tainter (1988) proposed a general theory of collapse, in which complex societies break down when increasing complexity results in negative marginal returns, so that a decrease in sociopolitical complexity yields net benefits to people in the society... Tainter defines collapse as a process of marked sociopolitical simplification unfolding on a timescale of “no more than a few decades”, replacing an unsustainably high level of complexity with a lower, more sustainable level.
Many of the examples he cites, however, fail to fit this description, but occurred over a period of centuries rather than decades and involved an extended process of progressive disintegration rather than a rapid shift from an unsustainable state to a sustainable one. An alternative model based on perspectives from human ecology offers a more effective way to understand the collapse process. This conceptual model, the theory of catabolic collapse, explains the breakdown of complex societies as the result of a self-reinforcing cycle of decline driven by interactions among resources, capital, production, and waste.”
My piece “Tesla is Killing the Planet—and 50k People per Year,” originally published here, was included in this list of resources for people organizing opposition to the far-right authoritarian Elon Musk and his techno-dystopian projects.
- is a brilliant reflection on the increasingly interconnected, privacy-destroying nature of modern technology.
In addition to destroying the planet, stealing and monetizing the accumulated written knowledge of humankind, and enabling the spread of even more misinformation and bullshit, AI is making us stupid through “cognitive atrophy.” No big surprise there; this sort of thing creates a multiplier effect on collapse.
Here’s a great video on the importance of living, not dying, for a cause.
The Swinomish Tribe is opposing the installation of jumbo-jet sized turbines in the Salish Sea near Seattle to generate electricity, a project which would have unknown effects on Orcas and other whales as well as salmon and other life forms. I look at much renewable energy as an attempt to maintain industrial civilization and avoid collapse in the face of peak oil - a fools errand in my book.
The Northwest Forest Plan, which came into effect following a mass uprising by Cascadian forest defenders, is under assault — not just from Trump’s executive orders calling for more logging, but from changes to the plan proposed under Biden. Andy Kerr lays out a strategy to resist this here, and it’s almost certain that direct action will be needed to protect these forests again, just as it was three decades ago. If they can be protected now, while diesel is still available to run the chainsaws, they might make it through what’s coming.
The Legacy Forest Defense Coalition is organizing opposition to the destruction of maturing, near-old-growth forests in Washington State. They’re raising funds and rallying supporters to defend these groves. If these trees are cut now, they’re not likely to effectively regrow in the warming world.
I’ve just finished a lengthy essay for inclusion in a forthcoming French-language collection on the topic of NGOs and their impact of real resistance. It focuses in large part on The Nature Conservancy and other big greens as a form of counterinsurgency. I’ll publish that piece here when it’s ready for you.
In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in elephant country in southeast Asia, this beautiful story from
illustrates the boons and banes.My friends at Roam Free Nation continue to advocate for the last herd of truly wild, free-roaming buffalo in the country, and the threats they face everyday. Please support their work, and get in touch with them if you’re visiting the Yellowstone Area. They’re always in need of support.
The newly-proposed Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, if passed, would be the most significany wildlands protection law in U.S. history. I don’t focus on legislative change, but these type of efforts matter, even if they’re only defensive efforts over the long term.
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