The Collapse of 2020 by Kirkpatrick Sale
https://booktrib.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/TheCollapseOf2020_1.jpg
Way back in 1995, Kirkpatrick Sale, secessionist, environmentalist author and Neo-Luddite, bet Kevin Kelly (editor of Wired magazine) that by the year 2020, three disasters would occur: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor and environmental disasters of some significant size. Now in The Collapse of 2020 (Outskirts Press), Sale reconsiders the wager and its terms, the state of the world today and argues that, if we put aside our unrealistic hopefulness and our unwillingness to see the truth, we will see that he was actually correct. Haven’t each of these collapses already begun?
ECOLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE
Sale opens his argument with a grisly list of environmental statistics which prove, he says, that the environment is indeed collapsing. He quotes scientific studies and special statements issued by groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, comprised of some 15,372 scientists from 184 countries, which in the fall of 2017, issued a new warning to humanity that if we do not make “significant changes to our way of life immediately, we will no longer be able to ward off the inevitable precipitous decline of our planetary ecosystem.”
Or the May 2019 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which performed a review of 15,000 government and scientific papers and found that at least “one million species of animals and plants are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.”
The acidity of the oceans continues to increase, along with an increasing number of “dead zones” in which oxygen levels are insufficient for life. Experts such as James Bradley, an Australian oceanographer, are now writing about “The End of the Oceans.”
POLITICAL COLLAPSE
In the political world, Sale believes we have reached a state where citizens of developed nations have realized that ”capitalist-led democracies in an internationalist arrangement of benefit to corporate and banking interests just [is] not working,” leading to the various protests and unrest we now see across the globe.
“In other words, many political systems in the world have effectively collapsed, people are dispossessed and without governments, and almost everywhere else, including the U.S. and Europe, governments are severely strained and political rifts abound,” Sale explains. As of January 2020, out of the 195 countries that make up our world, 65 are now fighting wars — that’s one out of three countries.
Because of warfare and climate change, the number of migrants grows by tens of millions each year, and, in Sale’s estimation “half the world is without coherent government.”
He also includes the failings of the UN as part and parcel of political collapse. “The single purpose for which it was initially established — assuring peace in the world — it has not come anywhere near achieving,” he says, and its “feeble attempts at it have only demonstrated how empty and empty-headed was the idea that it could.”
THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF A SPECIES
There is no “good news” chapter at the end of Sale’s short, potent book. He seems to have reached a state of sorrowful acceptance, and writes about civilization in the past tense:
“I am of course deeply troubled that those I know and love may not continue to exist, that many benevolent and righteous souls may vanish, and that much that was good in human achievement and art is gone forever. That is nothing but sad, yea heartbreaking, for any sentient human. But when I reflect upon what that species has done, what fundamental evil it has thrust upon the world to cause its civilization to collapse, I cannot but feel that it is ultimately for the betterment of Gaea that it should cease to thrust its pernicious presence upon the earth. “
In Sale’s opinion, “Industrial civilization … is an inherently self-destructive system with limits beyond which it cannot survive.” Even technology can’t save us. Our exhilaration at our own technological “greatness” blinds us to the very nature of that technology as egotistical armature, the pathological excretion of a deep-seated unease.
Climate change is ever-increasingly threatening the world’s food supply, livable conditions and peace, as well as causing a level of political unrest that will in turn hamper whatever attempts we make to combat climate change.
So the collapse is very much underway, and there is no evidence that we are willing or able to stop it. In the end, whether or not he was off by a few years in his prediction isn’t all that important. It seems Sale has unfortunately won his bet.
