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By Samuel Alexander, originally published by Resilience.org

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In 2013 Samuel Alexander published his work of eco-fiction, Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation. It is a story that gives account of a sufficiency-based community that emerged after the collapse of industrial civilisation. Interestingly – and rather ominously – the collapse-scenario Alexander presented as the catalyst for the breakdown of civilisation was based on oil supply being disrupted due to bombing around key choke points in the Middle East in 2027. As the current situation (March 2026) around the Strait of Hormuz continues to destabilise the global economy, it is timely to return to Alexander’s analysis outlining ‘the Disintegration of Empire’ (being Chapter Two of Entropia). For those wanting to read about the simpler way society that emerged after the collapse, paperbacks of Entropia are available here and pdfs available here. The following is written from the perspective of the year 2099.

The Disintegration of Empire

The picture of Entropia that I will endeavour to paint in this book does not begin with a blank canvas. Our community was, and is, a creature of its time, and our way of life on the Isle can only be understood in relation to the collapse of industrial civilisation out of which it emerged. Accordingly, I feel the nature of that collapse must be described, or at least outlined, in order to make clear why our society took the form it did.

Before sketching that history of collapse, however, it is worth acknowledging that no matter how well our economy and broader society may be functioning today, we have not been able to escape – nor did we ever think we could escape – those darker, painful elements in life that are built into the human condition. I feel this is an important acknowledgement to make, because I do not wish to give the impression, or give rise to the expectation, that our way of life on the Isle is or has been free from difficulty, grief, and strife. I assure you, Entropia is no utopia! We are human! And that means we are as susceptible to suffering as any other community. I will not dwell on these grim themes for long, but to give some tonal balance to the picture this book will paint, some darker shades must be introduced from the outset, at least around these foundational edges.

Let me begin by stating the obvious: the Great Disruption was by far and away the most destabilising and traumatic series of events our community has ever had to endure. While I was not alive during this tumultuous period, and so cannot speak from experience, it is an historical era that is given prolonged attention in our schools and the Academy, so all of us are very familiar with it, even though we now only have the distanced perspective of historical scholarship. My understanding of this period is also enriched by the many stories my grandparents used to tell me when they were still alive. My grandmother, in particular, was an engaging storyteller, and her soft-spoken but vivid anecdotes about the Great Disruption taught me that human suffering is always personal, always specific, no matter how broadly it is shared. It hurt here, she would explain, and it felt like this. She would speak not so much of hunger in the abstract, as of the time the bean crop failed; not of loss, but of her own shattered dreams of security; not of pain, but of grandfather’s arthritis, which he endured silently as he worked in the vineyards and orchards in the hope of feeding the community he loved. She would speak of how the sparkle in a friend’s eyes forever disappeared as a result of spiralling despair, and of the quiet sadness she could see in the eyes of every parent who could not assure their children that the future would be kind and safe. Most striking of all was my grandmother’s account of the Isle’s only suicide – the melancholy story of a young Tibetan woman called Nishka, for whom the Great Disruption was too much to bear. A genuine prodigy of the violin, and blessed with a face of penetrating beauty, Nishka seemingly could not find solace even in our warm community, choosing instead to take her own life in a warm bath – violin in hand. On the wooden stool next to the bath she left a composition, entitled ‘Avoiding the Rush’, to which even today only the brave-hearted dare to listen. The melody too easily evokes the harrowing image of a girl playing her own requiem in a bath, with bloodied wrists. Naturally, such events shook the community to the core, but the gut-wrenching images and emotions they evoke help to humanise an era that otherwise might be too easily intellectualised by those of us who came later.

The first issue to highlight, then, is that the Great Disruption brought with it widespread anxiety, fear, and often tremendous suffering – like any radical discontinuity in social and economic life would be expected to do. Although we had been transitioning for many years toward self-sufficiency, our way of life at the time remained highly dependent on imports of industrially produced food and materials. What is more, despite the fact that ‘building resilience’ was high on our list of stated priorities, when the cargo ships suddenly stopped arriving, the social and economic shocks we faced were by no means painlessly absorbed. We may have been better placed than most of humankind, but as the Great Disruption shook the world and isolated us permanently from the rest of civilisation, we found ourselves grossly underprepared, both mentally and in terms of our social and economic systems. In retrospect we see that many of our attempts to build resilience were really little more than pleasant, well-intentioned games, which did little to absorb the shocks that were eventually delivered upon us. At the same time, perhaps some things just cannot be prepared for, however diligently a community might try.

In the face of civilisational collapse, the internal or psychological shocks typically hit first. Human beings are creatures of habit and custom, and we have an overwhelming tendency to assume tomorrow will be similar to today. Even when we see our world falling down around us, calling for an urgent and sustained response, we divert our gaze in an attempt to distance ourselves from the radical changes that are announcing themselves on the horizon. But wilful blindness in the face of civilisational deterioration is at best a short-sighted strategy, one that ultimately leads to the crash just hitting harder and louder, and with the distressing element of surprise. It is like watching a balloon being blown up, breath by breath, and assuming that since no breath so far has burst the balloon, adding more air should not produce any great changes. And so we go about our days, business as usual. When we wake to our new circumstances, however – as the balloon bursts violently – we find that the world we knew has been shattered, and our insides begin to twist with the angst of terrifying uncertainty. We complain that nobody warned us; that we could not possibly have known. But we were warned, we did know, and now our inaction looks not just foolish but shameful.

Coming to terms, psychologically, with the Great Disruption was challenging enough. It was as if our parent civilisation had committed suicide, tragically leaving our community orphaned and alone. Cut off from the Old World, our universe suddenly seemed a whole lot smaller and our minds had to adjust to this new cosmology. But soon the sheer physical reality hit home, which is to say, the fear of being hungry gave way to the physical experience of hunger itself. A collapsing civilisation does not wait for people to adjust mentally to the new circumstances. While everything was breaking down in chaos, testing people to the limits of their mental fortitude, it was precisely then when the physical dimensions of collapse became dominant, compounding our challenges. By this stage there was no time to sit around adjusting mentally to the new situation. Instead, urgent, practical questions had to be faced about how to secure the provision of basic material needs, especially food. Suddenly everyone was a farmer, a scavenger, a jack-of-all-trades, and an inventor.

Fortunately, as noted earlier, we had quite well-developed systems of local food production on the Isle, so nobody faced starvation, as such. Nevertheless, for some time, while we desperately expanded those systems after the crash, our diets were significantly tightened. Instead of three meals a day, we had one or two. The variety of food was also limited to the most productive and nutritious crops, such as beans, potatoes, and lentils, although people did not lament the lack of variety, for they were grateful simply to have enough food to survive. Most people began to look worryingly thin, and they carried the mental and physical strain of the circumstances in their eyes.

Innumerable things our community once took for granted – conveniences and comforts that we once considered necessities – were no longer available. Everything, it seemed, was scarce: from food, to medicine, to materials. Soon enough our material standard of living barely resembled what preceded it, in ways that will be discussed further in due course. We endured these material privations stoically, however, determined to struggle onwards through this period of trial with our community and spirit of positivity more or less intact. There were social conflicts too, of course – such as the long, heated debates over how much of our minimal oil and coal reserves to use, and for what purposes – but generally these were measured, mature conflicts. Everyone knew that there was no place for childish egoism in times of social distress and economic crisis.

My point in briefly reviewing this period is simply to highlight the fact that our community, far from having a smooth or idyllic commencement, was born of struggle and considerable hardship. Nevertheless, even the clouds of a violent thunderstorm can have a silver lining. As it happened, this early, post-crash period shaped us in ways that are still with us, for what did not kill us made us stronger.

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There is obviously much more to say about how our community dealt with its isolation, and this book will describe our existing way of life in detail, as it has taken form roughly seven decades after the crash. This chapter, however, presents an historical review of industrial civilisation’s rise and demise, because this is necessary to provide a backdrop against which life on the Isle today can be fully understood. At first this may seem like rather too dark and heavy a foundation, but the flourishing sufficiency economy we have created on the Isle will seem clearest when defined in contrast to the industrialised, growth economies of the Old World, which now lie in ruins.

Fortunately, I have in my possession an old essay, dated 8 June 2031, written a few years after the Great Disruption, which provides a remarkably concise, if somewhat polemical, history of this collapse. I shall reproduce this essay below, knowing that I am unable to improve it. At some stage over the course of recent generations the author’s name was lost, or perhaps the essay was originally published anonymously – a practice that was not altogether uncommon on the Isle in earlier generations. Whatever the case, that issue need not concern us presently. What is important is that our journey through Entropia is given some historical context, and the following essay serves that purpose well. As the great poet, Thomas Hardy, once wrote: ‘If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst’.

On that basis, I present the essay: