Time to read…
PDF on Greer_on_collapse – a good read about what is going to happen and actually happening now.
The collapse of complex human societies, while a subject of perennial
scholarly and popular fascination, remains poorly understood. Tainter (1988),
surveying previous attempts to account for the demise of civilizations, noted that
most proposed explanations of collapse failed to adequately describe causative
mechanisms, and relied either on ad-hoc hypotheses based on details of specific cases
or, by contrast, essentially mystical claims (e.g., that civilizations have lifespans like
those of individual biological organisms). In another recent survey of collapses in
history (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988), contributors proposed widely divergent
explanatory models to account for broadly similar processes of decline and
breakdown.
Time to read…
WtR