The critical situation in which our planet finds itself is no longer in doubt. Some things are already collapsing while others are beginning to do so, increasing the possibility of a global catastrophe that would mean the end of the world as we know it.
As individuals, we are faced with a daily deluge of bad news about the worsening situation on the planet, preparing ourselves to live with years of deep uncertainty about the future of the planet and the species that inhabit it, including our own.
In all honesty, who is ready for that? How can we cope with the flood of bad news? How can we project ourselves beyond the present, think bigger and find ways not just to survive the collapse but to live it?
In this second book, following How Everything Can Collapse, the authors show that a change of course that opens up new horizons necessarily requires an inner journey and a radical rethinking of our vision of the world, one that might enable us to remain standing during the coming storm, to develop a new awareness of ourselves and of the world and to imagine new ways of living in it. Perhaps then it will be possible to regenerate life from the ruins, creating new alliances in differing directions - with ourselves and our inner nature, between humans, with other living beings and with the earth on which we dwell.
beaucoup de references litteraires et d’etudes sociologiques du comportement face a des situations de crise ou de changements. Un appel a la solidarite, l’empathie, l’acceptation, la sagesse mais dans l’action. Un encouragement a rester positif mais surtout a se tourner vers la nature, la respecter mais aussi mieux la comprendre, en comprendre des enseignements de resilience et lui accorder une place plus importante dans nos vies et sur notre planete.
I found this book to be something of a disappointment. It has great potential, but much of it is unrealised. This book is a companion to an earlier volume that makes the case that we are currently on a trajectory towards a civilisational collapse. That was a much easier case to make. However, having made the case, the next question is what to do about it? The aim of this book is to grapple with that question. Unfortunately, the book misses its target.
It starts well by framing the question. There are chapters on living through disasters, developing forms of resilience, and looking ahead to some form of recovery. Those chapters were quite good. After touching upon the first responder aspects of collapse, the book then moves on to envisioning a different world in the recovery. That was great.
Where things started to go wrong were in the prescriptions of what to do about it. It falls into the mire of relativism because it fails to provide a gauge to examine what would be a good future and what would not. Obviously, some post-collapse futures are more attractive than others, but the authors fail to provide a framework for us to consider the more utopian futures against the more dystopian visions of the future. The book then retreats into the ultimate cop out - the metaphysics of collapse.
Whenever I read waffle about ontology, I know that the authors aren't that sure about what they are saying. They lack belief and conviction in their own positions. That's where the second half of the book takes us. I found that deeply unsatisfying. I could say that we don't quite know where we will be after the collapse and that we will have to muddle along until something better turns up. I don't need to read half a book to say that.
Other than we all need friends in times of distress, the book has very little of practical value to add to the notion of a civilisational collapse. There is little about how to mitigate its impacts. There is little about how to forge networks to create resilience. There is little about how to access wider visions of future possibilities. The idea of waiting to be rescued doesn't appeal to me at all.
The book is hard work to read. It was written originally in French in an academic style that is the opposite of accessible. The reader has to cut their way through the undergrowth of some fairly obscure language. At the end of the ay you have to ask if it was worth it? In my case it wasn't.
A great and helpful book for those struggling with existential angst due to ecological meltdown and the fate of humans and non-humans on this planet. Still, I found a bone to pick with the narrative of collective action since I hold it disingenuous considering our population of 7.900.000.000 and growing rapidly, as well as all the different cultures that exist. As much as we would like it to hold hands together, the numbers and different identities, values, traditions, and morals just don't allow for such a thing. That part of the book and message appears to be dressed with too much of a feel-good attitude and not grounded in the reality of ecological overshoot, overpopulation, and incompatible cultures that exist nowadays.
Collapsology meets Deep Adaptation - putting focus on the emotional, cultural and sociological work implicit to collapse adaptation.
It's an interesting compendium of schools of thought and concepts associated with ecopsychology, drawing connections between the external work (e.g.: transition towns, mutual aid, activism) and the inner work (e.g.: Work that Reconnects, ecofeminism).
The most innovative link, for me, was making it quite clear that collapse adaptation requires resilient communities - and this means resilient at the technical level (resource self-sufficiency) and at the social level (community wellbeing).
It remains a bit of a mess, perhaps a bit too superficial and I can't shake the feeling that this is more of an exercise for the authors to go beyond their comfort zones - and not necessarily the best work they could do. That impression probably comes as I really wanted to get a better structure and framework on how to approach the so-called external work - and I grow impatient as time goes by.
Living the collapse will require our having built cohesive local communities BEFORE our civilisation falls in on itself. It will require including non-human animals in our diplomatic efforts, and a return to spirituality and emotional aliveness. It will require breaking down the boundaries of gender and accepting the masculine and feminine within all of us. These points made by this book speak to ways of living that my communities and I tend to be drawn to, so it was enlightening and reassuring to learn that the science of collapsology points to these very approaches as crucial for our future survival. The book is a little too short to fully explore its theme, and its investigation of the spiritual robustness we will need to survive the collapse felt light, almost dilettante. They have been doing the science part for decades and perhaps they should have done decades of the spiritual part and THEN written the book. At the same time, I understand the urgency they felt in getting it written. Not a book that will blow you away with its elegant style, but a quick read with highly relevant facts that could be a spark for a new outlook in readers.
Teenage quasi philosophical uninterrupted stream of thought full with quotations and references. It is divided in chapters though they don't give any structure to the book. Misinformation scattered at places.
Important sur beaucoup de points, mais je ne comprends pas la critique de la science. Les solutions non techniques sont justes: garder l’humain, mais la science reste vraie.
This book was a chore to get through. The first part, while it had reference to particular experiments and experiences that proved how beneficial nature is to humanity, how we’ve separated ourselves from the natural world over time, and specific organizations and movements in the struggle to re-bond with the planet, the general premise of this didn’t need to be proved to me. The second part, was much more engaging, though concrete steps to granting equality to our natural world, respecting other living things, and “saving the planet� (though that truly means, at this point, facing the loss of parts of our world that are, or will be, irretrievably lost), are so giant, (and so ingrained in our thermo-industrial culture), they can be overwhelming. Still, AEOTWIP offers hope. It will be a volume some future, forward-thinking, reflective civilization will uncover from the dust and debris of our ruined civilization, and see that we had the ways, just not the will, to correct our mistakes. I particularly liked the explanations of Joanna Macy’s work. I liked the term “collapsology�, the study of our civilization’s demise. And, I found “thermo-industrial� a good descriptive.