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308. Inspirational Collapses? Learning from the civilisations that tried to break down well

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By Jem Bendell, Rupert Read, originally published by Resilience.org

Most public discussion of societal collapse treats history as a warning system: if we read the past correctly, we might predict if collapse is coming, when it should arrive, and how severe it will be. This entire predictive impulse is understandable but not unproblematic. The historical and archaeological record is too contingent, context-bound, and selectively-preserved from which to generate reliable forecasts for our own times. We see a different and potentially more valuable role for historians and archaeologists today. Rather than helping us predict collapse, they can help us reflect on how some societies appear to have softened collapse, adapted to contraction, and transformed in ways that preserved elements of culture, meaning, and social coherence. Studying past civilisations to see how some of them managed their ‘descent’, or their ‘simplification’, could contribute to a conversation about new narratives for the current situation, so that we aren’t trapped in cultural imaginaries that defy biophysical realities. This type of historical curiosity would be interpretive and to some extent subjective, as we cannot escape contemporary values or present-day concerns. But that is not a flaw. On the contrary, acknowledging subjectivity can help this effort to be humble and honest: as a reflective exercise intended to inform present choices, not to claim timeless laws of history or near-certainties about what will happen by when.

Why this matters now

For some years now, we have argued that modern societies remain gripped by two inadequate narratives.

The first is perpetual progress: the assumption that modernisation, technological substitution, and economic growth can and must continue everywhere. In biophysical terms, this narrative is impossible, and increasingly recognised as such. Yet it persists because it structures institutions, identities, and political legitimacy.

The second narrative is a nostalgic, defensive, triage within global disruption: an effort to preserve a mythologised past by fortifying borders, cultures, and hierarchies as various systems come under stress and degrade. This is the emotional base of much contemporary reactionary politics, from the rise of religious traditionalism around the world to the view that immigration is the key cause of a society’s ills. This narrative includes a grain of truth in the need to reconsider the direction of societies and relocalise many aspects, as was explained in our Deep Adaptation book, by ourselves but also and especially by Skeena Rathor and Matthew Slater, who built on the seminal work of Helena Norberg-Hodge. However, what we have called the second narrative is flawed in imagining that some symbolic return to an earlier era will address what is a never-before-experienced biophysical context.

We regard such narratives as these two as offering a pressure-valve of pride and blame, without addressing root causes or pursuing actual remedies. Within the modern societies which we are aware of, what is missing in both popular culture and political discourse are narratives of intentional contraction, adaptive simplification, cultural continuity through transformation, and dignified loss. This is where historians and archaeologists can contribute — not so much warners of roads not to take, still less as prophets of doom — but as curators of possibility. They can contribute to dialogue from a stance of ‘positive pessimism’ that explores potential ‘thrutopias’: ways of getting through what is coming as well as humanly possible, given the impossibility now of perfect utopias. Thrutopia, a concept drawn initially from readings of Ursula le Guin’s great novel of political possibility ‘The dispossessed’, centres process rather than outcome, and possibility rather than alleged certainty.  Thrutopianism is thoroughly reality-based, and combines optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect. In being grounded in the non-negotiability of truthfulness about both our tragic predicament on the one hand and the vast and exciting chance we have of acting for good on the other, thrutopianism connects naturally with ‘apocalypse’ in its true sense: revelatory vision, once the veil of our hand-and-mind-forged manacles has been rended. We might then hazard a label such as ‘hopeful apocalypticism’ to the attitude which we along with the kind of historians and archaeologists for whom we write aim henceforth to take: active hope grounded in truthfulness and curiosity towards how really tough moments in our common human heritage were handled.

When we invite (attention to) such intellectual creativity, we are not ignoring the ongoing suffering, nor what could be reasonably attempted technologically to reduce the damage from environmental disruption. Nor do we forget that there is useful resistance to the ongoing damage being caused, nor deny there is blame for what is happening and accountability to be sought for that. Instead, our interest is how to ‘get real’ about what might help at the level of cultural narratives so as not to make matters worse as societies come under much greater strain.

Three examples of adaptive contraction and transformation

What societies in the past might stimulate such a dialogue? By being curious about this topic and noticing claims about the history of civilizations which resonated with that curiosity, we have identified three examples which could be candidates for further inquiry. As we are not historians or archaeologists, and certainly did not do a methodical study of past civilisations, we offer these examples cautiously. We don’t identify them as something to attempt to copy, but as means for us to ask different questions about what it means to endure.

First, we could consider the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire after the 7th century. Following territorial losses, demographic collapse, and fiscal contraction, the Byzantine world did not simply fall. This section of the Roman Empire, across parts of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, appeared to intentionally reorganise itself. Urban life shrank, monetary circulation narrowed, and state capacity was reduced, yet many core institutions, such as law, liturgy, language, and administrative memory, persisted for centuries. The Empire appears to have willingly embraced forms of localisation: it responded to incursions by the rising Muslim armies not by attempting to double down on an unsustainable large central army, but to give soldiers land and to get cohorts of soldiers to defend their portion of the Empire against the invaders. For more than we have space for here, see Read’s Why climate breakdown matters, which draws upon Joseph Tainter’s classic – though controversial – interpretation of the long survival of the Byzantine Empire. The invitation we see in this case is to consider the possibility that eased material suffering does not require territorial expansion, material growth, or ideological projection, but the relinquishing of some power to communities. We are curious to the extent this was intentional and, if so, by whom and how they communicated with different aspects of society.

A second civilisation we could learn about to inspire our ideas of managed decline is the Mayan civilisation in modern day Central America. It is one that has fascinated archeologists, as well as the anthropologists who study present-day descendants. One of your authors looked into this scholarship for his book Breaking Together, and discovered that the history should not be framed as civilisational failure, but as processes of urban-rural migration and the re-localisation of trade and governance. At various times in the history of the Mayans, their power decentralised, populations dispersed, and ritual life changed rather than disappeared. Many people may have preferred that way of life, even if it was compelled initially by changes in climate or the spread of disease. We note that some scholars (reasonably) claim that the elites in Mayan societies made difficult situations worse, tipping the situation into outright collapse. Clearly the conversation is limited by what evidence archeologists can find. Nevertheless, we see an invitation in this history to shift our attention from the collapse of elite power to everyday persistence, and from worrying loss to lived adaptation.

A third example to reconsider is Post-Roman Britain and Western Europe after the collapse of Roman imperial systems. Of course much was lost at the time, including infrastructure, literacy, and long-distance trade. Yet both ancient and new forms of social organisation, spirituality, and local resilience, all emerged. Meanwhile much was preserved, such as the knowledge that endured and even flourished within Monastic networks. A range of hybrid cultures formed and there is evidence people had bright lives in the “dark ages” — a term merely arising from the subsequent interest in written records (We note the fascinating recent work ‘The Green Ages: Mediaeval innovations in sustainability’). Compared to the Byzantine case, there is less to suggest there was an intention from Rome to manage a transition to a post-imperial situation. So perhaps it was an organic process from people having the opportunity to reclaim their power. We know we are speculating with limited data, but do so to generate the type of reflection we think will be helpful today. Perhaps the invitation here is for us to let go of the idea that complexity must be defended at all costs, and explore how value and meaning can be found in more diverse, yet simpler and more localised ways of living.

Although we have only read some studies on each of these cases, already we notice several recurring themes for narrative-generation that might alleviate the metacrisis, societal decline and collapse. There was the importance of scale-reduction where endurance involved shrinking prevailing systems to ecologically and socially manageable sizes. Interestingly, this shrinking reminds us of the principle of ‘relinquishment’ in the contemporary Deep Adaptation  framework. Another theme we notice is cultural portability, where the practices, rituals, and values that could migrate were able to survive, rather than the fixed infrastructures. Highly interesting is that there frequently appeared to be elite loss and popular survival. By that, we mean that the collapses typically meant the end of ruling classes, not the end of culture itself. We also notice that the adaptations sometimes unfolded over generations, so probably required some people to be thinking at that scale. That contrasts with the amount of people today who focus on the next election, annual report, or their retirement fund (or even an afterlife).

As we speculate on such cross-cutting themes, we don’t see them offering any great solace for what is a terrible and unprecedented situation facing humanity today, along with the catastrophic damage to habitats and biodiversity that is unfolding. However, they do expand the imaginative space in which we can think and act. There could be lessons here for people working in the field of futures studies, design thinking, scenario planning, and those wishing to enable hope and imagination in society, at various levels. Artists, writers and imagineers of all stripes plainly have a role to play here, too. We think for instance of ‘solarpunk’ (though we find much too much of it overly utopian in how it pictures technology and politics); or of StarHawk’s remarkable parable of non-violence under extreme strain, ‘The fifth sacred thing’; or of broadly thrutopian novels such as Steve Markley’s ‘The Deluge’ or Ian McEwan’s ‘What we can know’.

Our invitation to explore lessons from those past civilisations which softened their collapse is not ignoring or downplaying the importance of recognising the enduring forms of Indigenous Peoples’ societies. Those societies might not be considered “civilisations” by some observers, but they are culturally rich and have persisted despite efforts of colonialists and modern humans to extinguish or assimilate them. However, the urban societies which the vast majority of humans live within, or are partly dependent on, today, aren’t able to directly copy the lower density and lower specialisation of such societies. We can take inspiration from them in more general terms, and also from the way they coped with external genocidal pressures, as we will explain further in a moment.

Existing scholarship pointing towards narratives to soften collapse

In our edited collection Deep Adaptation: navigating the realities of climate chaos, we included perspectives from a range of intellectual disciplines. However, as we did not know any historians or archeologists who were trying to learn about the narratives accompanying softened collapses of past civilisations, we did not include those disciplines in the book. We think this is an important absence, and so would welcome seeing more work done on this topic in future. Currently we know of some scholarship which moves close to such an agenda.

Chris Wickham has usefully reframed post-Roman Europe not as ruin but as reorganisation, producing winners and losers. James C. Scott has drawn attention to non-state spaces and forms of life that evaded societal collapses as they avoided over-integration. In their classic 2009 book Questioning Collapse, Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee present evidence for how famous collapses were actually periods of reorganisation and decentralisation. The work most relevant to our topic here is contained in the 2023 edited compilation “How Worlds Collapse.” Their central explanation is that leaders often faced a ‘cognitive crunch,’ when they recognised crises like resource depletion, but could not respond to the complexity of that, leading to maladaptive decisions. This created tension between elite protection (clinging to power by intensifying extraction) and adaptive leadership (orchestrating a deliberate simplification for wider survival). Regarding collapse as a process, not an event, the authors in this book identify an optimal outcome is a managed reorganisation with smaller units of complexity — a “soft landing.” It stands as the first major scholarly synthesis to explicitly explore the daunting principles and historical precedents for a managed descent in response to our current situation of global ecological overshoot. Luke Kemp, in Goliath’s Curse, explores similar themes, particularly how coercive institutions generate both power and fragility, suggesting that collapse can sometimes release adaptive capacity rather than extinguish it. Building on and rhyming with Graeber, Wengrove and other scholars, Kemp’s work challenges the assumption that larger, more coercive systems are inherently more successful. So if we consider collapse to involve the unravelling of coercive over-reach, then historians could help us imagine futures that are less powerful but more viable.

In the original Deep Adaptation paper on climate chaos, one of your authors referred to an analysis of how leaders of the North American Crow Nation coped with the destruction of their culture. Jonathan Lear explained that some of the Native American chiefs developed a form of “imaginative excellence” by trying to imagine what ethical values would be needed in their new lifestyle within a bounded land reservation. He found that besides the standard alternatives of freedom or death (in service of one’s culture) there is another way, less grand yet demanding just as much courage: the way of “creative adaptation.” He wrote that “what makes this hope radical, is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Identifying that process is not to acquiesce to the destruction of Indigenous cultures, but to include within our appreciation of them how they coped with the devastations of colonialism. Some critics then bizarrely cited this part of the Deep Adaptation paper as if it was welcoming the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Their distortion is a reminder of how upset some people can become about analyses which require us to shift our imaginations beyond modernism and the assumption of progress — but it’s clearly the ideological task of our time.

When seeking evidence for narratives or intellectual perspectives that might have aided a softening of collapse in the past, historians and archeologists could benefit from deep dialogue with philosophers and systems-thinkers from a variety of intellectual traditions — Western, Eastern and Indigenous. Now, to be fair, there are less philosophically-minded thinkers and writers than there should be working openly on this. But there are some who are very much in the ballpark: in the West, we think of Iain McGilchrist, or Roy Scranton; of Paul Kingsnorth’s novels of ideas and non-fiction, and of Michael Albert’s important book ‘Navigating the polycrisis’. Looking a little further back, we think of the immense relevance of Arendt’s ‘The human condition’, and of the great works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Daoism is a source of relevant riches from the East. One thinker who has done much to make the incredible resources of Indigenous thinking available to the collapse-aware is Tyson Yunkaporta, from whom we have learnt much; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings are also of signal importance, in this connection.

What is potentially to be gained from engagement with figures such as these? Far too much, obviously, to even begin to gesture at in a sentence or two: but the glimmerings of a sense of what can be found when one notices the way that many of these thinkers are simply willing to look into the abyss and yet not to drown in despair. Instead, to offer potential pathmarks, including reminders of what we have lost that are not merely nostalgic, but are instead practically beneficial.

And of course there is much more that could be done to learn relevant historical lessons hereabouts: including seeking to learn from what happened under grave pressure during – and after – World War II; and what happened in Cuba when it experienced ‘peak oil’ dramatically, as it lost its oil supply suddenly in 1991 (and Cuba is going through a worse process now, as we write, with outcomes uncertain). The film ‘The power of community’, about the Cuban experience post-1991, is worth watching seriously.

But our topic in this essay has been something different, and comparatively neglected: lessons from deeper-past and more severe still but yet effectually softened– collapses and contractions. As climate and ecological breakdown beckons, tragically, to the human race, it is high time that such lessons were contemplated. We must now begin to treat transformative, strategic and deep adaptation as a genuinely urgent matter that increasingly entails a whole-society approach to its contemplation and enactment. The advantage of using collapse — and descent — softening strategies from civilisations of the last 2000 years as objects of comparison in this endeavour is that they will tend to combine greater psychological accessibility/relevance (compared to Indigenous cultures) on the one hand with sufficient distance to be fairly calmly ‘contemplatible’ on the other.

An invitation, not a prescription

With this essay we are inviting deeper reflection on how some unusual past civilisations/peoples managed one way or another to work out their down-going. It is inspiring how very many Mayan people outran their elites; how the Byzantine empire apparently managed to voluntarily simplify; how post-Roman Britain incrementally set up the quiet glories of the ‘Dark Age’. In further work, one might connect that more directly with some similar emerging trends today: one might for instance see the ‘undensification’ occurring in encouraging examples such as the regreening of Detroit as nodding to aspects of what happened in all three of the main examples that we gave: of civilisations / communities under terrible stress becoming more able to support themselves locally.

Clearly, mainstream civilisational rhetoric is misaligned with biophysical realities, so without stimulating mass imagination beyond the paradigm of progress, the only alternative becomes defensive nostalgia — forms of which we see spreading everywhere without meaningfully confronting reality. We believe that more historians and archaeologists can step into a public, reflective role, helping societies explore narratives beyond either progress and growth fetishism on the one hand, or nostalgic and fortress mentalities on the other. We believe that some of the discussions in the book How Worlds Collapse are a step towards that role. As more scholars take on that role, they do not need to speculate on what might happen, but to help us all ask better questions about what might still matter, what could be carried forward, and how loss might be metabolised without violence or denial. In that sense, ours is absolutely not a call for historical or futural certainty, but for narrative courage and creativity.

To aid this discussion, we are organising a free international online discussion on what inspiration we might take from past civilisational collapses and their handling at the time, under the working title ‘Inspirational collapses: learning from the way some civilisations chose to break down well.’ We will invite historians, archeologists, philosophers and artists to attend and share their ideas on the matter with other interested persons, including activists. Occurring on 7th July 2026, as part of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative, it will mark the 5th anniversary of the book we edited together. That book demonstrated what can be gained when academics from different disciplines lean into the topic of collapse; and it is in that spirit we are curious about the role of history and archeology.

Please look out for those initiatives (eg via our newsletters/substacks, for which do sign up). But more important: please consider whether you, reader, may have a direct role to play, hereabouts. Is there something in the area where you live which is relevant to the enterprise we have sketched here? Does your location harbour the seeds of a helpful history, for navigating the descent that is to come for us all? Or perhaps it is in your own family-tree, or in your diaspora if that is your background. Or perhaps you simply have a good example to add to the three that we paraded earlier. Whichever it is: consider surfacing it yourself. Or sending it to us.

It may matter more than you think…

307. How to Think About the Future (Part 3): Uphill Futures in a Downhill World

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Frankly #145

Nate Hagens

Jun 05, 2026

This week’s Frankly is part three of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, I build a framework for understanding the pathways that connect today’s choices to tomorrow’s realities. Drawing from biology, ecology, history, and systems thinking, I introduce a civilizational terrain of ridges and valleys that is constantly shifting as we are moving through it. I also use the concepts of switchbacks and erosion to explain why some futures emerge by default from existing incentives and momentum, while others require deliberate effort, coordination, and sustained commitment.

Through examples that range from cell development to lake ecosystems to political systems, I examine how complex systems settle into stable states, and why some transitions are far easier to make than to reverse. As economic, geopolitical, and ecological pressures reshape the landscape we traverse, knowing which futures are downhill and which require climbing becomes increasingly important. The episode offers a conceptual tool for interpreting the composite worlds I will outline in the next part of the series, and invites listeners to consider both where they stand in the terrain and whether their daily actions are building pathways toward a more desirable future, or letting those paths erode.

How do societies become trapped in self-reinforcing systems, and what does that look like in our current reality? Which futures seem most likely if present incentives and momentum hold? And which social, cultural, or ecological switchbacks are being built today that could open new possibilities tomorrow

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vTBQ1AS-KVw?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them

272. How to Think About the Future (Part 1): Changing the Future Starts with How You Think

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Nate Hagens

In this week’s Frankly, I open a new series called How to Think About the Future. I begin with some comments I’ve heard repeatedly on this platform: why cover nuclear, plastics, renewables, or climate when something else is the real issue? I observe that these questions come from people who have already settled on a single storyline about what’s coming, and are filtering everything else through it. Our actual reality is much more complex and unknowable, and even the most well-informed perspectives may only be able to capture pieces of the bigger picture. I emphasize that even my own base scenario – that the global economy is likely to hit a wall in the relatively-near future – should be held with humility.

I introduce the idea of “scenario thinking” as a practical strategy to reflect on and prepare for several versions of the future, keeping one engaged and grounded in what matters. I also name why this line of thinking is hard in practice – 1. our nervous systems want resolution, 2. our careers and identities are attached to particular futures, and 3. cultural incentives reward confident stories over honest uncertainty. The episode closes by introducing shortfall risk, which is the danger that something essential, like topsoil, social trust, grid stability, or the nuclear taboo drops below a threshold from which it cannot easily recover. This concept will act as connective tissue across the rest of the series, which is an attempt to expand perception instead of picking the right future, and to identify what is coupled, what is irreversible, and what kinds of responses stay robust across many possible worlds.

Where in your life have you quietly settled on a single story about the future? Which of the essentials you rely on would be hardest to rebuild if they fell below a threshold? And how might the decisions you make this week change if you held more than one plausible future in mind at the same time?

242. What Futures Are Possible?

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Richad Heinberg

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People have been forecasting the future for as long as they’ve had language. Premodern ideas of what’s to come often featured either a catastrophic end of the world or an eventual paradisiacal condition of peace and plenty. This was true both for many, though not all, Indigenous peoples and for followers of the world’s missionary religions (i.e., Christianity and Islam, and to a lesser degree Buddhism). For some cultures, the arc of time was imagined as a progression from ancient virtue to present corruption and eventual ruin or salvation; for others, time was cyclical, with multiple Golden Ages and periods of decline.

Today, most scientific futurists regard such traditional concepts of collective human destiny as worthy of ethnographic study but otherwise useless. In their place, the modern futurist supplies scenarios based on quantifiable trends. Extrapolating trends in population, economic activity, and technology can lead, in their view, to projections reliable enough to be used by city planners, policy makers, and CEOs. In fact, some municipalities, like those in Oregon, are required to base their planning on population forecasts provided by the State, which are in turn based on historical and current trends.

But there’s a problem with these scenarios: trends change. They encounter limits, countervailing trends, and contradictions inherent in social systems. For example, simply extrapolating human population growth that occurred during the past century leads to a world, only eight centuries from now, where there is one person for every square foot of Earth’s land surface. That scenario won’t be realized for many reasons, including insufficient food to feed such an immense population. Long before we achieve a standing-room-only planet, our recent population growth trend will slow, stop, and reverse itself (as is already starting to occur).

Failed technology predictions make for colorful and amusing reading. Just one example: in 1959, Arthur Summerfield, the U.S. Postmaster General, forecast that “before man reaches the moon,” mail would be delivered long distances (e.g. from New York to Sydney) using guided missiles. Instead, we got email.

Socio-political forecasting has likewise produced some clinkers. In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that the fall of the Soviet Union would usher in “the end of history,” meaning “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukuyama’s forecast seems quaint today, following the rise of Vladimir Putin in Russia and the decline of democracy in the United States.

In the 1950s, spectacular technological and scientific achievements led to bold predictions of eventual human interplanetary or even interstellar supremacy; yet, at the same time, the prospect of nuclear war posed the possibility of human annihilation. The traditional paradise-versus-end-of-world dichotomy had taken on trendy new garb—as it has done again more recently, with climate change and unregulated artificial intelligence (AI) as potential vectors of societal shattering.

In this article, we’ll explore a four-part typology of futures from the perspective of physical constraints, which are often overlooked by futurists concerned only with culture, technology, or politics. As we’ll see, this approach—like others—generates both best-and worst-case scenarios. Its main virtue is that it prioritizes future scenarios that are likely to be realized from the standpoint of physical factors like energy and materials; in effect, we’ll be sorting the possible from the purely fanciful.

The use of energy and material constraints as the basis for scenario forecasting is most famously identified with the Limits to Growth (LTG) study of 1972 (which also considered pollution, food, and population constraints). That study has shown itself to be more reliable than competing scenario forecasts that tended to ignore physical limits while simply extrapolating existing socio-economic trends. In this article, we won’t be using computer modeling (as the LTG team did); what I have in mind is less formal and more playful—think broad-brush, best-guess scenarios that lean on science fiction novels and movies rather than data and systems models.

quardrant diagram

For the purposes of this article, I’ve divided fictional futures into four quadrants. The first quadrant describes optimistic limits-blind visions of the future. The second quadrant focuses on pessimistic limits-blind visions. The third quadrant describes limits-aware pessimistic possibilities, while the fourth quadrant focuses on optimistic limits-aware possibilities. Spoiler alert: only one quadrant is worthy of our serious, long-term attention and effort.

Note: For most economists, an “optimistic future” is one in which human population and consumption grow endlessly. As we’ll see, we humans need a very different kind of optimism.

1. Optimistic Limits-Blind Future Visions

If we ignore natural constraints, lots of things—good and bad—seem possible. On the hopeful side (as economists interpret it), ignoring limits to soil and water encourages expectations of ever-increasing food abundance. Ignoring limits to energy opens the possibility of humans voyaging to other star systems and colonizing space. Ignoring limits to computer power and complexity leads to expectations of AI surpassing human beings in intelligence, thereby removing any future requirement for human toil. This kind of limits-blind speculation is widespread. Indeed, for the past few decades, even the “sustainable development” agenda of international agencies that aim to end poverty and disease has been mired in ignorance of physical limits.

Futurama diorama, part of the 1939 World’s Fair. By Richard Garrison, public domain.

Fictional depictions of resource- and energy-unconstrained futures are numerous and familiar—from the cartoon suburbia of The Jetsons to the utopian interstellar voyages of Star Trek. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the unleashing of vast amounts of energy from fossil fuels created temporary abundance, especially in the oil-rich United States. Most science fiction extrapolated that abundance forward in time, depicting a future of technology-assisted ease and plenty. This was exemplified in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which foreshadowed the modern suburb in its fictional “Democracity,” where nuclear families own their homes and tend their yards while children frolic on green lawns, ride bicycles, and play softball, all far from the business hub of the planned metropolis. Disneyland’s ”Tomorrowland” exhibit (originally constructed in 1955), gave visitors a view of the Interstate Highway System, which would be constructed at the cost of hundreds of billions of inflation-adjusted dollars over the coming decades. Suburbs and superhighways were built during humanity’s short period of energy super-abundance; however, we haven’t gotten around to the creation of an exploratory Star Trek-envisioned Starfleet, and it’s a safe bet that we never will.

Starting in the 1950s, with the advent of the nuclear arms race, along with growing realizations that suburban life could be less than liberating and that bigger highways just meant even worse traffic jams, many visions of the future began to have a distinctly dystopian flavor. Which brings us to quadrant two.

2. Pessimistic Limits-Blind Future Visions

With the enormous amounts of energy that are being unleashed by burning fossil fuels, and that could potentially be released by the explosion of atomic weapons, it really is possible to create hell on Earth. Not much fictionalizing is required.

Nevertheless, some dystopian visions of the future, because they assume a continuation of the growth trends of the past century, are unrealistic. For example, projecting AI growth into the coming decades can lead to expectations of universal human slavery to the machines we’ve created, as in the 1999 film The Matrix. We already live in a Matrix-like web of electronic illusion and disinformation; however, a full-scale Matrix (as portrayed in the movie) would require many thousands more data centers, each devouring energy and water at unsustainable rates. Indeed, energy and water limits are already problems for AI, and are one reason AI will probably not, in fact, take over the world (or, if it does, not for very long). The scientifically laughable premise of The Matrix was that AI was using human bodies as a power supply. Given the energy efficiency of metabolism, that will never happen.

Here’s another dystopian future we don’t have to worry about: alien invasion. Sci-fi books and movies that revolve around this theme are plentiful, perhaps best typified by the 1979 horror film Alien. But, as astrophysicist Tom Murphy has argued persuasively, space travel on any scale greater than the deployment of a few interplanetary probes is physically impossible: distances are too great, energy sources are insufficient, and space is too inhospitable.

Some climate fiction (“cli-fi”) is similarly unrealistic because of its failure to appreciate energy and materials limits. Cli-fi is, by its very nature, mostly doomy. It seeks to help readers understand how our world is changing, and will change, due to humanity’s destabilization of geosystems and ecosystems. Cli-fi that attempts to be optimistic often features fictionally portrayed climate solutions that are unlikely to be realized due to natural limits. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future is a case in point: in it, as horrific climate impacts ravage India, nations cooperate to reduce carbon emissions and undertake geoengineering projects. They succeed in greatly slowing climate change, and global industrial civilization persists—though with airships replacing jetliners and carbon farming supplanting conventional agriculture. However, in view of energy and material limits, even those sorts of tweaks can’t make current levels of population and industrial activity sustainable for more than another few decades.

Not doomy enough for you? Onward to quadrant three!

3. Pessimistic Limits-Aware Future Visions

The 1973 dystopian thriller film Soylent Green was an early and quintessential exemplar for this third quadrant of scenarios. By 2022, according to the movie’s plot, the cumulative effects of overpopulation, global warming, and pollution have triggered a collapse of ecosystems, leading to severe worldwide shortages of food, water, and housing. Civilization is on the brink. Most people live in squalor and eat highly processed food wafers made by the Soylent Corporation—whose latest product, Soylent Green, is purportedly made from plankton. In one of cinema history’s biggest reveals, we later learn from Charlton Heston’s cry at the film’s conclusion that, “Soylent Green is people!” Soylent Green may be the most brutal solution imaginable to the problem of too many people and not enough resources, but it’s not viable long-term, since humans would be an extremely inefficient food-energy source.

Most novels that fit in this quadrant of futures simply describe people trying to survive in a world that’s falling apart. One example, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009), tells of a climate-ravaged future where fossil fuels are depleted and genetically engineered plagues repeatedly decimate the population. The story follows several characters in Thailand struggling to persist in a world of cutthroat competition for scarce food and water.

Another example, One Second After by William R. Forstchen (2009), highlights our current profound dependency on the electricity grid. In the story, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack cripples the United States, causing civilization to collapse. The rest of the book chronicles a small town’s struggle to persist without electricity.

Post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t always specify the cause of the disaster that has laid waste to civilization. Such is the case in The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006), and the 2009 movie based on it. These are unrelievedly grim portrayals of what the future might hold for survivors in the wake of societal collapse, whatever the trigger event might be.

4. Optimistic Limits-Aware Future Visions

Sometimes fictional collapse eventually leads to cultural renewal, a signal element of quadrant four. A classic in this vein is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1949), in which a virus-borne plague wipes out nearly all of humanity. The scattered survivors gradually find one another and begin to re-learn the social and practical skills of their ancient ancestors. In the ensuing three generations, humanity starts over, now living closer to the Earth.

While Earth Abides doesn’t attribute civilizational collapse to humanity’s abuse of its environment, later hopeful post-apocalyptic fiction often takes this route. One example is All the Water in the World (2025) by Eiren Caffall, in which a young woman and her family navigate a flooded, post-collapse, climate change-battered New York while trying to preserve the best of human culture and human nature.

As I wrote in a recent essay, a future long-term sustainable human culture would need to value ecosystems, cooperation, humility, and sharing; building it would effectively require us to re-indigenize ourselves. If such is our aim, then one futurist literary genre we should consult for guidance is Indigenous futurism. Walking the Clouds (2012) is an anthology edited by Grace Dillon, who coined the term “Indigenous Futurisms”; it collects a wide range of speculative fiction by Indigenous authors exploring future possibilities for Native peoples through the lenses of science fiction, alternative histories, and Indigenous knowledge. Another example is Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (2018), which prominently features Diné (Navajo) cosmology, heroes, and monsters in a landscape reshaped by both climate change and Indigenous knowledge.

Two other sub-genres fit into this quadrant: solarpunk and eco-fiction. They are poles of a spectrum, ranging from futures bristling with high-tech sustainability solutions at one end, to stories of human re-wilding on the other. Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers, an anthology edited by Sarena Ulibarri (2018), is a good entry point for readers wanting to explore solarpunk; Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020), which follows a mother and daughter who are members of a nomadic tribe living in a government-controlled “Wilderness State” after the collapse of modern society, is emblematic of eco-fiction.

Hopeful post-apocalyptic fiction often describes the breaking apart of great nation-states into smaller bioregional communities. This was a theme of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), which was fictionally set in the year 1999; it describes a small country that secedes from the U.S. in 1980 following an economic collapse. The new nation of Ecotopia consists of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, and has adopted a range of solarpunk practices (though the word had not yet been coined in 1975). Similarly, in Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), which is fictionally set in 2048, the northern Pacific coastal region of the U.S. has politically broken away from the rest of the country, which is authoritarian and corporate-controlled. The new eco-utopia must defend itself from hostile outside forces, thereby testing its people’s commitment to nonviolence, equity, and consensus decision-making.

Altogether, this quadrant of futures offers gritty realism with a dose of optimism. We have come nearly full circle, again envisioning hopeful futures, but ones far afield from the naïve imaginings of The Jetsons. The general message of most fiction in this quadrant is that humanity has already exceeded natural limits and broken boundaries; there will be consequences—some of them horrific. Still, collapse brings the opportunity to abandon global economic and political structures that have driven us to the point of ruin, and to build instead a fabric of locally adapted, rooted, re-indigenized human cultures that are both capable and worthy of thriving for many generations.

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My favorite adage about the future is from what is widely considered the worst sci-fi movie ever made, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958): “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” It’s essential that we imagine futures that are both possible and desirable—and then, that we work toward realizing them. Otherwise, we become irrelevant bit players in a world shaped by people who simply seek power above all. Community-scale and bioregional-scale responses to the Great Unraveling invite personal action and lead both to convivial social arrangements and to the discovery of ways to live more in cooperation with, less in domination of, the web of life.

178. Houses and Cottages in a Wood Economy

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In a fossil-fuel world, houses are made from brick, concrete, steel, and plaster-board — materials that may travel thousands of miles and depend on distant energy.

In a wood economy, homes return to what grows underfoot. Shelter becomes local again, rising from the same coppice that feeds the fire and mints the coin.

Houses That Grow

Each locality keeps a map of its coppice — oak and chestnut for beams, hazel for wattle, willow for thatch spars. A small part of the harvest is reserved for building and repair. The rest goes to fuel and trade.

A cottage in the wood economy is not a mass-produced box. It is a living structure built for repair and renewal:

  • Frames pegged together from oak or chestnut.
  • Walls woven from hazel rods and plastered with clay and straw.
  • Roofs of shingle, thatch, or split larch boards.
  • Floors and fittings in beech and elm.

Every part can be mended with hand tools and local materials. Timber seasoning, daub mixing, and thatching are skills held by the community, not by distant firms.

Building with Biochar

Some materials can improve with age. Biochar — the stable carbon produced in clean kilns — can be mixed into lime plaster or clay walls. It lightens the structure, stores carbon, and regulates moisture. Roads and paths can also use charcoal fines as a binder, giving them strength and a dark, heat-absorbing surface.

In this way, each new cottage helps bank carbon rather than release it. Fire, used carefully, cools the earth.

Fairness Through the Coin

Housing is paid for in wood coins. Because each adult receives an equal issue, no one is excluded from warmth or shelter. Those with skill earn extra coins through carpentry, joinery, or roofing. The cost of a house is tied to the coppice itself — a natural brake on speculation and debt.

A new family can build or expand only when the coppice allows. Growth is organic, not explosive. Villages stay within walking distance of their woods.

Shade, Shelter, and Climate

Houses stand among trees. Broadleaf canopies shade the roofs in summer and break the wind in winter. Trees absorb water from heavy rain and cool the air through evaporation. Planting becomes part of building. Each new cottage comes with saplings in the ground.

The Work of Cottagers

Cottagers are the foundation of the wood economy. They cut poles, tend gardens, weave wattle, and carry fuel. Their work is physical but steady, linked to the seasons. Those with weaker bodies find lighter roles — keeping ledgers, measuring moisture, or running communal workshops. Every hand counts.

Community Buildings

Not every structure is a cottage. There are shared spaces built from the same materials:

  • The bakehouse, with its masonry stove burning seasoned wood.
  • The bathhouse, heated by a district loop from the same kiln.
  • The meeting hall, timber-framed and whitewashed, serving as school, theatre, and chapel.

These buildings remind the area that heat, labour, and leisure all come from common effort.

Aesthetics of Restraint

In a wood economy beauty comes from proportion, not ornament. A well-built cottage shows its frame. Roof lines follow the slope of the land. Paint is rare; limewash and oil stains suffice. Light filters through small windows rather than large panes. The result is a quiet beauty — humble, practical, and enduring.

A Living Architecture

When a house burns, storms, or decays, the wood returns to the cycle. Charred beams feed the biochar kilns. New timber is cut and seasoned. A home is rebuilt, not replaced. Architecture becomes part of the woodland rhythm: growth, use, decay, and renewal.