End of days: Is Western civilisation on the brink of collapse?
"History tells us all cultures have their sell-by date. Do political strife, crippling inequality and climate change mean the West's time is now up," asks New Scientist in this important magazine cover story.
Increasingly concerns about collapse have entered the Zeitgeist. For example, Margaret Atwood published a powerful essay about this two years ago: It's not climate change... it's everything change.
Multiple biogeochemical forces are mounting that together can become force multipliers, affecting us harder and faster than any one of the alone. The systems we have in place to detect their onslaughts are almost all siloed.
We are blind to many of the likely consequences of interactions.
And it's not just the West. Our global society is too intertwined to argue that collapse will envelope only one geographic part of civilization.
