How Everything Can Collapse

Author: Pablo Servigne
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509541403
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Book Description
What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the capacity of human populations to maintain themselves in a sustainable environment. In this important book, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront these issues head-on. They examine the scientific evidence and show how its findings, often presented in a detached and abstract way, are connected to people’s ordinary experiences – joining the dots, as it were, between the Anthropocene and our everyday lives. In so doing they provide a valuable guide that will help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves. Today, utopia has changed sides: it is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience. Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.

Another End of the World is Possible

Author: Pablo Servigne
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509544674
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
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, preparing ourselves to live with years of deep uncertainty about the future of the planet and the species that inhabit it, including our own. How can we cope? 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 book, the sequel to How Everything Can Collapse, the authors show that a change of course necessarily requires an inner journey and a radical rethinking of our vision of the world. Together these 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.

Work's Intimacy

Author: Melissa Gregg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

X-Events

Author: John L. Casti
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062088300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Book Description
A necessary and thought-provoking read for the age of coronavirus, exploring eleven scenarios that may trigger the collapse of the modern world — from pandemics to nuclear apocalypse to robot uprisings — and what we can do to prevent and survive them. In the twenty first century, our world has become impossibly complicated, relying on ever more advanced technology that is developing at an exponential rate. Yet it is a fact of mathematical life that higher and higher levels of complexity lead to systems that are increasingly fragile and susceptible to sudden, spectacular collapse. In this highly provocative and grippingly readable book, John Casti brilliantly argues that today’s advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that will ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards. Like Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan meets Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Casti’s book provides a much-needed wake-up call, sounding a fascinating and frightening warning about civilized society’s inability to recover from a global catastrophe. An eye-opening and necessary read, X-Events is a shocking look at a world teetering on the brink of collapse, and a population under constant threat from pandemic viruses, worldwide communication breakdowns, nuclear winter, or any number of unforeseeable “X-Events.” Fascinating and chilling, X-Events provides a provocative tour of the catastrophic outlier scenarios that could quickly send us crashing back to the preindustrial age – and shows that they may not be as far-fetched as they seem.

Resilient Life

Author: Brad Evans
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745682839
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

The Knowledge

Author: Lewis Dartnell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143127047
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.

Liberty and Security

Author: Conor Gearty
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669980
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Book Description
All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.

Waste

Author: Kate O'Neill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745687431
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are finding ways to profit from waste while diverting materials from overcrowded landfills. Yet beyond these benefits, this “new” resource still poses serious risks to human health and the environment. In this unique book, Kate O’Neill traces the emergence of the global political economy of wastes over the past two decades. She explains how the emergence of waste governance initiatives and mechanisms can help us deal with both the risks and the opportunities associated with the hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of tons of waste we generate each year. Drawing on a range of fascinating case studies to develop her arguments, including China’s role as the primary recipient of recyclable plastics and scrap paper from the Western world, “Zero-Waste” initiatives, the emergence of transnational waste-pickers’ alliances, and alternatives for managing growing volumes of electronic and food wastes, O’Neill shows how waste can be a risk, a resource, and even a livelihood, with implications for governance at local, national, and global levels.

Contact!

Author: Max Velocity
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781478106692
Category : Preparedness
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
REVISED & EXPANDED SECOND EDITION This manual is the result of a detailed consideration of a societal collapse and the civil shift and aftermath that would impact individuals and families who are intent on survival. The purpose of this manual is to provide information to enhance the security, tactics, and survival skills of law-abiding citizens who are faced with civil disorder, lawlessness, violence, and physical threat in a post-collapse environment. The information in this manual is derived from training and experience gained from service with special operations forces (SOF) and subsequent employment as a security contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a distillation of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) adapted to the threat and environment anticipated in this type of scenario, in order to provide the knowledge needed to survive in a world turned upside down. It is no longer just survival of the fittest but survival of those prepared. The manual will take you from self-defense as an individual, team and family, and on to tactics, techniques, procedures and training that can be used by tactical teams that you may need to form in order to survive or to resist tyranny. In a serious post-event scenario, one of total collapse with several months or years before recovery, families, groups and communities may be forced to create such tactical defense forces to protect personnel, loved ones and resources against hostile forces. There is something in this manual for both the tactical newbie and the military veteran. Authors Website: maxvelocitytactical.com Author's blog: maxvelocitytactical.com\blog Authors note on choosing Contact or Rapid Fire: Contact and Rapid Fire are not designed as sequels, but are aimed at different audiences. There is an amount of material, the main bulk of the tactical stuff, which is common to both books. It is not intended that you buy both, just one or the other depending on your requirements.

SUMMARY - How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual For Our Times By Pablo Servigne And Raphaël Stevens

Author: Shortcut Edition
Publisher: Shortcut Edition
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
* Our summary is short, simple and pragmatic. It allows you to have the essential ideas of a big book in less than 30 minutes. By reading this summary, you will discover from which angle collapsology views current crises. You will also discover : that environmental, social, geopolitical, economic, climatic and energy problems are connected to each other; how energy is at the heart of all problems; how the finance-energy system increases the risk of collapse; how globalization has created complex but very fragile systems; the mechanisms that lead to collapse; how humans perceive the concept of collapse. Humans have entered the era where their actions are changing the Earth system. Many predict the end of industrial societies if humans continue to disrupt these ecosystems. Thus, the debate on collapse is today dominated by two extremes: apocalyptic discourses and those of denial. Collapsology puts the issue of collapse back at the center, by dealing with all aspects of this systemic phenomenon closely linked to humans. Collapse seems inevitable. How to apprehend it? *Buy now the summary of this book for the modest price of a cup of coffee!