The Science of Collapse

[rich]

this has much resonance for Pynchon readers I think

*https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/
<https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/>*

*Collapsologie*—or, as Servigne and Stevens define it, the “applied and
transdisciplinary science of collapse”—proposes to free environmentalist
thought from the linear or progressive understanding of history implicit in
such faiths as “sustainable development,” “green growth,” or the energy
“transition.” The story of human societies, which Servigne and Stevens
suggest is ultimately the story of their interactions with their natural
environments, is circular. The pendulum of human history swings between
moments of our being harmoniously embedded within natural processes and
periods of population concentration, political centralization, and an urge
to transcend the earth’s resource constraints. We develop economies of
scale, agglomerate extractive industry on a grand scale, but ultimately
overexploit our natural foundations.

“We must prepare small-scale, resilient bio-regions,” Cochet told me, on
the scale of only a few thousand inhabitants. Economic circuits must be
scaled to local ecosystems and resources, eschewing global supply chains.
Visions of the good life that are predicated on unlimited mobility and
expanding human wants must be replaced by an ethics of rootedness, the joy
of living and working in a defined space. Our assumption of history as an
unending process of centralization and unification—toward the universal
state—is running up against an ecological wall