The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future

105 Pages·2014·0.904 MB·English

by  Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Collapse
The of
WesTern CivilizaTion
aa vviieeWW ffrroomm TThhee ffuuTTuurree
naomi oreskes erik m. ConWay
and
The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion
the
Collapse
of
Choice manifests itself in society in small Western
increments and moment-to-moment
decisions as well as in loud Civilization
dramatic struggles.
—lewis Mumford,
Technics and Civilization (1934)
A View from the Future
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
the
Collapse
of
Western
Civilization
A View from the Future
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
ColuM bia university press
neW york
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2014 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oreskes, Naomi.
The collapse of western civilization : a view from the future /
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-231-16954-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-231-53795-7 (ebook)
1. Civilization, Western—Forecasting. 2. Civilization,
Western—21st century. 3. Science and civilization.
4. Progress—Forecasting. 5. Twenty-first century—Forecasts.
I. Conway, Erik M., 1965– II. Title.
CB158.064 2014
909'.09821—dc23
2013048899
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and
durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee
cover art: Colin Anderson © Getty Images
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Nei-
ther the authors nor Columbia University Press are responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
This book is based on the essay of the same name that was originally
published in Daedalus (Winter 2013), the journal of The American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. That essay has been slightly
expanded and modified from its original publication, and
the lexicon and interview are new to this book.
Contents
acknowledgments vii
introduction ix
1
The Coming of the Penumbral Age
1
2
The Frenzy of Fossil Fuels
11
3
Market Failure
35
Epilogue
51
vi Contents
Lexicon of Archaic Terms
53
Interview with the Authors
63
notes 81
about the authors 91
maps
Amsterdam xii
Bangladesh 10
New York City 34
Florida 50
acknowledgments
We are grateful to Robert Fri, Stephen Ansolabehere, and
the staff at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
for commissioning the original version of this work; to the
Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western
Australia where that version was first written; and to Patrick
Fitzgerald, Roy Thomas, Milenda Lee, and the diligent and
creative team at Columbia University Press for turning it
into a book.
We also thank our agent, Ayesha Pande, without whom
our work would be written but not necessarily read; Kim
Stanley Robinson for inspiration; and the audience mem-
ber at the Sydney Writers’ Festival who asked one of us:
“Will you write fiction next?”

introduction
Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; his-
torians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both
are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we
blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking
back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The
occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture
(1540–2093); the dilemma being addressed is how we—
the children of the Enlightenment—failed to act on robust
information about climate change and knowledge of the
damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian
concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western
civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted
in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the
world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover,
the scientists who best understood the problem were ham-
strung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an
excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any