Book summary: The Collapse of Western Civilization

This summer, twelve students read one of my sponsored summer reading books, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. I thought they might have selected the book because it's only 76 pages of text, including 10 pages of a "Lexicon of Archaic Terms" and 16 pages of an interview with the authors (the interview is excellent). However, when we got together many of them expressed surprise at its brevity.

The stage of this book is the year 2393, western civilization has collapsed due to impacts of climate change, and a historian from the Second People's Republic of China is documenting our present age leading up to the collapse (the authors' explanation for why they chose China is brilliant).

This isn't a doomsday book; it is an insightful, objective analysis of our current cultural and political limitations to deal effectively with climate change.

In general, my students enjoyed reading it, liked the different perspective from which it is written, and were surprised by the science of human-induced climate change. As with my discussions with students about Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, these students were surprised not only by the scientific measurements and models of our climate trajectory, but very surprised that they don't hear about this stuff at all on the news.

Besides the content of the four main ideas below that made this book pretty insightful, the emotional distance that the historical perspective provides has a bit of a transformative power.

Here are four key ideas expressed and expounded in this book that I wanted to share:

• "Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew. Knowledge did not translate into power."

• "Those in what we might call active denial insisted that the extreme weather events reflected natural variability, despite a lack of evidence to support that claim. Those in passive denial continued life as they had been living it, unconvinced that a compelling justification existed for broad changes in industry and infrastructure... At the very time that the urgent need for an energy transition became palpable, world production of greenhouse gases increased."

• "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...A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels."

• "The scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind - including imminent threats... Meanwhile, scientists continued to do science, believing, on the one hand, that it was inappropriate for them to speak on political questions (or to speak in the emotional register required to convey urgency) and, on the other hand, that if they produced abundant and compelling scientific information (and explained it calmly and clearly), the world would take steps to avert disaster."

I recommend it.