Alfred said...
This is a nice explanation of some very unpleasant facts. I first learnt of them back in the early 70's when I used the Dynamo modelling language and read up all Professor Jay Forrester's books.
6/1/06, 12:19 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Alfred,
Thank you! You probably won't be surprised to learn that "The Limits to Growth," which I also read in the 70s, had quite a bit of influence on the catabolic collapse theory. TLtG's prediction that the costs of growth would rise faster than the benefits, and put industrial society into a vise between rising costs and diminishing resources, is more or less the catabolic collapse theory, phrased another way.
6/4/06, 12:40 AM
shiningwhiffle said...
The link to your article is broken, and even the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy of it from when it was still up. Is there another place to find your article?
1/22/13, 8:41 AM
Joy said...
If shiningwhiffle is still checking in, he/she can find "How Civilizations Fall" at: www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf
8/20/13, 8:01 PM
Annabel said...
Hello, John
Do all the most important ideas you present here end up in your books? I'm learning a lot from your blog and contemplating going back to the beginning and going through every post in order. But if it's all in your books, I'd rather read the books.
Thanks,
Annabel
2/27/14, 2:25 AM
Howie Longstone said...
You know, the new field of constructual law theory could lend insight into this topic as it's applications offer the opportunity to place a value on such societal, economic, and environmental events as they pertain to a civilization and how they either speed up or decline the rate of collapse within society.
To simplify, take for instance a stream, a civilization may put a damn on the stream, however this damn interferes with the natural access flow of the pre-excisting environment. As the theory suggests, when a technology or innovation begins to alter, or otherwise impede this flow, it creates more problems as it denies or limits access to anyone not benefiting from the dam. Now depending on the surrounding environment, how the water from the dam is used and applied, and the societies laws surrounding the dam it will either be more or less beneficial depending on how drastically it effects the evolutionary traits of the surrounding environment, ecosystems, and even the society itself.
In this way, with the application of constructual law as it pertains to archeology and collapse of complex societies, one can begin to collaborate data to begin to offer a value to societal, economic, technological, and environmental impacts as they are applied and how they are applied, to determine and even begin to predict the downfall of societies based upon these traits and variables within a provable physics equation.
However that particular field is still in its infancy stages and requires much more mathematical calculations before one can begin to create an algorithm to predict the fall of civilizations given its traits, tendencys, societal laws, environment, technology, and the use/applications of those things.
1/2/17, 12:48 PM
