It shows that to support today's population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. How far the human population size now is above the planet's long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis. The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’, and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity. These are not separate problems rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival land degradation and land-use change a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones) worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases) depletion of increasingly scarce resources, including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas and resource wars. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’, facing what the UK's Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems.

īut today, for the first time, humanity's global civilization-the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded-is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. In many, if not most, cases, overexploitation of the environment was one proximate or an ultimate cause.

Sometimes, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, new civilizations rose in succession. All those previous collapses were local or regional elsewhere, other societies and civilizations persisted unaffected. Some, such as those of Egypt and China, have recovered from collapses at various stages others, such as that of Easter Island or the Classic Maya, were apparently permanent. Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse, a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size.

How everything can collapse