Collapse 2.0https://tomdispatch.com/collapse-2-0/In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland. Such societies, having achieved great success, imploded when their governing elites failed to adopt new survival mechanisms to face radically changing climate conditions.
Bear in mind that, for their time and place, the societies Diamond studied supported large, sophisticated populations. Pueblo Bonito, a six-story structure in Chaco Canyon, contained up to 600 rooms, making it the largest building in North America until the first skyscrapers rose in New York some 800 years later. Mayan civilization is believed to have supported a population of more than 10 million people at its peak between 250 and 900 A.D., while the Norse Greenlanders established a distinctively European society around 1000 A.D. in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Still, in the end, each collapsed utterly and their inhabitants either died of starvation, slaughtered each other, or migrated elsewhere, leaving nothing but ruins behind.
As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.
The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?
(From 2018): Yes, contemporary civilization might collapse, but if so, not any time soon. Five years later, it’s increasingly difficult to support such a relatively optimistic outlook. Not only does the collapse of modern industrial civilization appear ever more likely, but the process already seems underway.
When do we know that a civilization is on the verge of collapse? In his now almost 20-year-old classic, Diamond identified three key indicators or precursors of imminent dissolution: a persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse like long-lasting droughts; signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis; and an elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production. At some point, a critical threshold is crossed and collapse invariably follows.
Today, it’s hard to avoid indications that all three of those thresholds are being crossed. ... Worse yet, numerous events this very summer suggest that we are witnessing the first stages of just such a collapse. ...
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this author might need to study what happened to museums in Iraq in 2003, or after WWII ...Societal Collapse Is Underway and Museums Can Be Unlikely Heroes, Suggests Experthttps://phys.org/news/2023-09-societal-collapse-underway-museums-heroes.htmlStressors like climate trauma, corporate deceit and political incompetence signal the threat of societal collapse, a new book asserts.This claim lays the foundation for exploring arguments of "collapsology" in a new book by Robert R. Janes Ph.D., "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat." The book also contends with the unique role that can be played by museums during a mounting climate crisis.
"Social ecology is an integral and moral dimension of the collapse and the crisis we face—that social and environmental issues are intertwined, and both must be considered simultaneously," Dr. Janes, a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, explains.
"Our collective failure to honor this relationship lies at the core of our failure as species. It befits all museums, irrespective of their disciplinary focus and loyalties, to bridge the divide between nature and culture in all that they do."
Janes identifies six categories in which a number of key societal threats fall under, ranging from civilizational overshoot to ecomodernism.
The era of modernity, along with technological and industrial advancements, has also ushered in unsustainable economic growth, violence and warfare, dispossession and genocide. These interplay with other stressors like political incompetence and corporate deceit, as governments worldwide plan to produce more coal, gas and oil by 2030 than is allowable.
Janes, who is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the journal Museum Management and Curatorship, examines these threats individually and in tandem as he calls attention to "the madness of humanity."
He questions, "Recognizing what we know about civilizational overshoot, ecological overshoot, climate trauma, political and corporate deceit and ecomodernism, is this not madness?
"Madness that we in the Western world are failing to react with intelligence, courage, and dispatch to confront what is now being called an existential threat to our species, not to mention all we have created throughout prehistoric, oral, and written history."
Museums, understood as keepers of bygone eras and bastions of preservation, occupy a unique space within society with untapped potential.
Janes suggests that their role remains largely unexplored. "Museums have a much more enduring role to play in society by clearly demonstrating that no one group or ideology possesses the sole truth about how society should conduct itself."
"A competent museum is testimony to the fact that a healthy society is a multitude of competing interests, aspirations, plans, and proposals that cannot be ignored in favor of economic utility."
Janes also argues that there are ethical obligations that museums are especially well-placed to embody and pursue. These include being open to influence and impact outside the museum, being responsive to citizens' interests and concerns, and being fully transparent in fulfilling these first two expectation.
The author explains, "Museums have the opportunity and obligation to provide the means of intellectual self-defense with which to both resist the status quo and question the way in which society is governed."
"Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" unflinchingly examines the possibilities of societal collapse, resulting global scenarios and hopes for an evolving community-centered practice.
Concisely breaking down concepts and theories, Janes intentionally conducts this conversation beyond the field of museum and heritage practitioners, underscoring the necessity of a collaborative global response to the key threats he outlines.
Although he paints a grim picture, Janes—also the founder of the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice—insists that hope is still central to the quest for solutions. "In thinking about the uncertain future of museums in a world beset by unprecedented challenges, it is clear that hope is an essential ingredient in any successful outcome for museums, yet it is insufficient on its own."
Janes invites his readers—whether museum practitioners or not—to contend with the threats facing us as a global community and consider the roles we can occupy in the face of the indicators of collapse.
He says, "There is no question that we are living through the intensification of global climate trauma, casting the shadow of collapse. The underlying premise of this book is that each of us has something valuable to offer. There is no correct approach. We cannot stop global warming, but we can confront the threat of collapse."
Robert R. Janes,
Museums and Societal Collapse (2023)
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003344070/museums-societal-collapse-robert-janes------------------------------------------------------------------
A Canticle for Leibowitzhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz#Plot summary