To Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, this was significant. When it does, the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it could flow right into the ocean, pushing up sea levels around the planet, flooding coastal cities worldwide.įrom a distance, the ice shelf looks flat, but as Pettit walked she saw the guide flags ahead of her rise and fall against the horizon-a sign that she was walking across an undulating surface. Pettit was studying defects within the ice, akin to hidden cracks in an enormous dam, that will determine when the ice shelf might crumble. But if that were the case, Pettit wouldn’t have been there. The Thwaites Ice Shelf appeared healthy on the surface. A row of red and green nylon flags, flapping in the wind on bamboo poles, extended into the distance, marking a safe route free of hidden, deadly crevasses. Pettit was surveying a part of Antarctica where, until several days before, no other human had ever stepped. The brittle snow crunched like cornflakes underneath her boots-evidence that it had recently melted and refrozen following a series of warm summer days. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.On December 26, 2019, Erin Pettit trudged across a plain of glaring snow and ice, dragging an ice-penetrating radar unit the size of a large suitcase on a red plastic sled behind her. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves.

They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people’s ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment. What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization.

How everything can collapse