{"id":41737,"date":"2018-12-17T08:37:49","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T13:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41737"},"modified":"2018-12-17T08:37:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T13:37:49","slug":"the-big-picture-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41737","title":{"rendered":"The Big Picture"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Big Picture<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization\u2019s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kind of historic discontinuity.<\/p>\n

Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies<\/a> (another name for civilizations\u2014that is, societies with cities, writing, money, and full-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure\u2014a general unified theory of civilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science<\/a>, a branch of ecology<\/a> (the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments).<\/p>\n

\"adaptive<\/p>\n

Why Civilizations Collapse: The Adaptive Cycle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass through four phases of the adaptive cycle<\/a>: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released<\/em> into the environment), hardy and adaptable \u201cpioneer\u201d species of plants and small animals fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.<\/p>\n

This reorganization<\/em> phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation<\/em> phase, in which those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at the expense of diversity.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Big Picture Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization\u2019s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4280,23519,72,138,141,150,23518,195,425,11592,6665,1081],"class_list":["post-41737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-adaptation","tag-adaptive-cycle","tag-biodiversity","tag-civilisation","tag-climate-change","tag-collapse","tag-complex-societies","tag-debt","tag-inequality","tag-polarization","tag-resilience-org","tag-richard-heinberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41738,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41737\/revisions\/41738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}