I began this essay series by explaining that I am no longer attempting to create a rigorous science for large-scale social change. Many who read these words came to the understandable conclusion that (a) Joe must be giving up; and (b) he won’t be doing anything in this space again. What I realized while reflecting on the various ways that people reacted was that there are three assumptions made in the way I framed that first essay—all of which in some way conceal what I am preparing to do now that I have concluded my life’s work over the last 18 years has been a failure. These assumptions are (1) a rigorous science of social change can never emerge; (2) there is no room for small-scale approaches that are empirically rigorous and effective; and (3) if it is hopeless to avoid planetary collapse there is nothing worthwhile that can still be done. Let me state clearly that I believe all three of these assumptions are (or could be) wrong.

1. Need Rigorous Science for
Managing Planetary Collapse
Joe Brewer
Director of the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution
June 13, 2018
———
I began this essay series by explaining that I am no longer attempting to create a rigorous
science for large-scale social change. Many who read these words came to the
understandable conclusion that (a) Joe must be giving up; and (b) he won’t be doing anything
in this space again. What I realized while reflecting on the various ways that people reacted
was that there are three assumptions made in the way I framed that first essay—all of which in
some way conceal what I am preparing to do now that I have concluded my life’s work over the
last 18 years has been a failure.
These assumptions are (1) a rigorous science of social change can never emerge; (2) there is
no room for small-scale approaches that are empirically rigorous and effective; and (3) if it is
hopeless to avoid planetary collapse there is nothing worthwhile that can still be done. Let me
state clearly that I believe all three of these assumptions are (or could be) wrong.
The first assumption is only prospectively correct on the timescales laid out in the original
essay (roughly the next 30-50 years). I no longer believe our institutions capable of pulling away
from their entrenched pathways as the global economy and much of the biosphere collapse
across them. If we look out to timeframes of 100 to 500 years, I see a slim possibility that much
of the knowledge needed for a rigorous science of applied cultural evolution might just survive
through civilization collapse and remain useful as cultural seeds for the paradigm that follows
this one. Some of you know that I have begun gathering a collection of books in the world’s
first Cultural Evolution Research Library that I see as part of this heritage to be preserved and1
archived for use by future generations.
The second assumption is only correct if the decline, stagnation, disruption, or outright
dismantling of societal institutions cascades into fully-systemic collapse of smaller scale
learning ecosystems. I see great potential (and urgent need) for tens of thousands of expert
practitioners to learn the scientific craft of applied cultural evolution and hold it as knowledge
repositories through the cascading collapses of the coming century. It is here that I now place
emphasis for my own work moving forward. More on this below.
The third assumption presumes an all-out-apocalypse of sorts that will be how the planetary
collapse unfolds. I have written and spoken in other places that the Roman Empire took several
hundred years to fully collapse. It didn’t happen in fifteen minutes of explosions or some
variation of Hollywood entertainment for how massive destruction might occur. A more
plausible collapse pattern will be like the end of the Soviet Union in the last century, except at
planetary scales and unfolding over much longer time periods. That episode included a
catastrophic failure of economic and governing systems—with corresponding problems in
An online list for the physical collection can be found here: https://cerl.libib.com/1

2. supply chains and food supply for the millions of people who lived through it. Yet if we flash
forward 30 years to the present we observe that (a) most of the people impacted were able to
survive with varying levels of difficulty; and (b) new governing and economic structures
emerged in the lower-level social units of individual countries and municipalities as the “supra”
structure of the Union dissipated.
We are now on a path of extreme fragility for global supply chains, nation-states, financial
institutions, universities, and so forth. Just as the vast majority of species throughout 3.8 billion
years of life on Earth are now extinct, we can safely say that most of these cultural structures
will go the way of history in the near to medium future. But there will still be life. Humans are
unlikely to go extinct in this timeframe. We could potentially unleash a “runaway” greenhouse
effect that wipes out our species in several hundred to a thousand years—an outcome that
must be avoided if in any way possible. But we can safely presume that community health and
resilience will be important management challenges for at least the next few generations and
possibly for many thousands (or millions) of years beyond current capacities of imagination.
Turning these assumptions around, I now say that a rigorous science of social change CAN
emerge for the future of humanity but it will need to be incubated in small-scale community
resilience projects across a distributed network of learning ecosystems. This was outlined in
the Billion Dollar Proposal essay as a global network of field sites for applied cultural evolution.
This meshwork of learning ecosystems must be resilient enough to survive planetary-scale
civilization and biosphere collapse over a span of an entire century or longer.
Unfortunately, even this is unlikely to emerge because no one that I am aware of is attempting
to build a rigorous approach to manage the decades-long planetary collapse that is now well
underway. This is the topic of this fourth essay in the series.
If We Can’t Avoid Collapse, Then What Do We Do?
Recall that one of the key framing missteps among change practitioners is the false choice
between hope and doom. Most efforts to create beneficial change in the world are operating
under the belief (not empirical evidence, it is more like blind faith) that humanity must make
progress and we will ultimately prevail in our efforts to avoid planetary collapse despite the fact
that doing so violates fundamental laws of physics. This is a pernicious expression of denial
that was helpful in some ways for the last few decades but is now very far out of sync with the
realities on the ground.
People need to be preparing for collapse. They need to know that this involves more than
stockpiling food and checking supplies in their First Aid kits. Collapse is a lifetime affair. It
might even last for several generations (think timescales of 200 years). I will be as concrete
about this as I can with my own family’s predicament. We chose to give birth to a child last
year. Our daughter is seventeen months old as I write these words to the page. In 2030, she
will become a teenager. By the time 2050 rolls around, she will be in her thirties and have
responsibilities to help heal and maintain a very broken world. If she is lucky enough to live a
full adult life, she could even see the end of the 21st Century with her own eyes. Imagine the
atrocities and beautiful horizons those brownish-green eyes of hers will see.
My wife and I know that we cannot simply place our child in public schools and hope for the
best. We are fully aware that the education system here in the United States is geared toward
producing employable corporate servants (whether they be at for-profit, governmental, or civil
society organizations) for jobs that are unlikely to exist twenty years from now. As she goes
through STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) she will also need
to learn how to think critically, build trusting relationships, manage conflict, and participate in
ecosystem restoration on unprecedented scales. Her entire life will play out within a context of

3. planetary collapse. It won’t be finished when she takes her last breath. It started long before
she was a twinkle in our eyes.
Is that concrete enough?
So here’s the new challenge: how do we build as much rigor and efficacy for social
learning that communities all over the world are able to prepare their residents to
navigate planetary-scale collapse? I don’t ask this question idly or on my own. Later this
summer I will host people at my home in Eugene, Oregon for a three day workshop about how
to manage planetary collapse. It will be a heavy conversation. A serious one. And a very timely
one at that.
The challenge now before us is to learn what we already know about systemic social change
and apply this knowledge to the safeguarding of its potential capabilities for future generations.
A key element of this will be to embody the knowledge in the lives of as many diverse
practitioners as we possibly can. For they will be the ones capable of holding and maintaining,
evolving and improving, and ultimately passing on this knowledge to those who come to
practice and train with them.
The rest of this essay will explore how to shift your thinking so that you can participate in the
management of social change in the midst of planetary-scale collapse. This will mean learning
how to improvise, take actions toward goals on much longer time horizons, practice discerning
what is really going on amidst great turbulence and confusion, and doing all that you can to
regenerate ecosystem and social health to avoid cascading consequences for people and
planet that could possibly bring the human experiment to an end.
The stakes are as high as they could possibly be. Nothing short of future life on Earth is at risk
here. We have acted as a cultural animal with incredible powers to alter landscapes that serve
our purposes—without sufficient foresight, insight, or wisdom—and must correct this right
away. It is time to become “wise managers of our own evolutionary process” as my friend and
mentor David Sloan Wilson likes to say.
What IS Planetary-Scale Collapse?
It is time to stop pretending that collapse won’t happen. The truth of the matter is that it is
already happening, and has been for at least the last century. How can this be the case and so
few seem to be aware of what is going on? The answer has partly to do with the fact that we
have only gathered enough monitoring and data analysis capabilities to construct a global
picture of ecological change in the last few decades. The term “biodiversity”—as one example
—was coined in 1985 and only began to be measured with vigor from the 1980’s onward.
In other words we have only been able to track and comprehend global trends for a short
period of time. What we immediately began to note as we launched satellites into space, set
up monitoring stations for river flows, conducted global surveys of soil health, and so forth was
that our planet was in crisis. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring stands alongside the Club of
Rome’s Limits to Growth and every major environmental assessment in recent decades to
confirm the collapse of fish stocks, intensification of extinction rates, depletion of industrial
inputs, loss of topsoils, and a litany of other trends.
One thing that makes planetary-scale collapse difficult to understand is that the Earth is
comprised of multiple nested dynamic systems, each having its own characteristic timescales
and geographies. The collapse patterns are broadly convergent, yet contextually distinct in
their particulars. For example, the coral reefs have reduced by 60% in the last decade while
topsoils declined by 50% in the last 100 years. Global fish stocks of economic significance

4. were “over fished” and reduced in numbers by more than 90% in the 20th Century. A four-fold
increase in chemically active nitrogen has spilled into the river systems of the world since the
Green Revolution in the 1950’s. I could go on and on describing how differently each pattern
plays out within a convergent pattern of systemic unravelling informed by and shaping each of
these patterns.
Such incredible complexity makes the mind whirl. So let me simplify all of this by framing the
different trends within a singular developmental process. All of these trends are the interwoven
feedbacks of runaway cultural evolution by human societies. One thing that defines our species
is the incredible way that social behaviors influenced our biology in the past, enabling us to
increasingly build technologies and complex community practices that alter our environments.
The name for this is “social niche construction” and it can be understood by comparing what
beavers do to alter a river system with what humans do to build an urban landscape. Beavers
cut down small trees and stack them to build dams. By doing so, they turn the natural
environment into a nest that continually replenishes their food supply and provides shelter for
their young. They engage in a behavioral activity that enhances their environment with respect
to their own survival and flourishing—even if it is detrimental to other species or the health of
the river itself. Humans do this on steroids by creating shared social spaces in the construction
of buildings and roads, canals and dikes, water treatment plants and factories, schools and city
parks, and so much more.
The story of human evolution can be snapshotted as a socially-competent hominid learned
how to build tools and cooperate to achieve shared goals; this created the conditions for a
“ratchet effect” whereupon culture could build on existing culture to open up entire new
domains of landscape, technology, and culture for future evolution. A principle characteristic of
human-managed environments is that we (a) selectively reduce the complexity of each
ecosystem such that (b) it is more conducive to the ways we know how to live in that particular
context. The decreasing ecosystem complexity comes with an accompanying potential for
fragility and vulnerability to disruptions driven by ecological change. In other words,
biodiversity loss is entangled with every measure of social progress for human societies.
Thus the planetary-scale collapse is an aggregate of consequences from the hollowing out of
ecosystems by human cultures as they went about their business of altering landscapes as
part of socially-constructed niches in the last few thousand years (with a longer history of
hominid evolution dating back roughly three million years). Understood in this way, we can see
that collapse is fundamentally a human endeavor. There is no way we can escape our roles and
responsibilities in creating it, nor for how we go about managing it as we find ourselves fully
immersed within it.
I often find myself thinking about this in thermodynamic terms with the concept of entropy.
Physicists measure the amount of information needed to fully characterize a thermodynamic
system—with things like temperature and pressure understood as average values in aggregate
for astronomical numbers of atoms. If the information is easily compressed into a single value
(e.g. the material is uniformly crystalline with a temperature of 70 degree Fahrenheit), we say it
has low entropy. But if a large amount of information is needed to characterize the system
(entropy is high), this means there is considerable non-uniformity and the details matter such
that we must take them into account. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that in any
energy exchange the entropy cannot decrease, and will typically increase.
Apply this to human ecology and we can see that any increase in societal complexity for us will
have an accompanying decrease in ecological complexity for the larger environments our
societies depend upon. The clearest cut example of this is monoculture agriculture—where a
grassy meadow with hundreds of species is mowed down, troughed out, irrigated, and

5. managed for the optimal productivity of one species. In the breadbasket of North America, for
example, most of our grassy plains have been converted to grow corn or soybeans. This
agricultural simplification of ecology is what makes the nested complexities of our cities so
vast and mature. We would not be able to maintain a London, Shanghai, or Paris without a
hundred-fold increase in land area converted for growing their food supplies.
Planetary collapse is a thermodynamic process driven by cultural evolution. We increase the
complexity, scope, and scale of our own civilizations by converting the existing complexity,
scope, and scale of Earth’s biosphere in service to our short-term (and short-sighted)
aspirations for growth and development. When understood in this way it is clear that nothing
else could possibly be the case. We grow at the expense of other living things, just as all living
things do. Yet our cultural capacities to accumulate knowledge and build on what came before
have given us exponential steroids to ratchet our way up to the size of the entire planet that we
call home.
Can This Be Managed?
Skepticism is a reasonable response to the audacious claim that humans might learn how to
wield such incredible power as that which is embodied in our cultural evolutionary processes.
We are like King Midas in our naive dreams of turning everything on Earth into fool’s gold. This
Faustian bargain is our inheritance as people alive today—for we cannot undo the past by
wishing it away. This is the bed our species made and now we must learn how to sleep in it.
But can planetary collapse be managed? That is a question I have only seen asked in a few
places. Most of the people who track the ecological crisis are not yet ready to believe collapse
is upon us, let alone dedicating the time and energy to learning how to manage its full
complexities. Communities like those who acknowledge Peak Oil and those striving for
“transition” efforts do exist. If we use the number of intentional communities as a proxy for
them, there are at least 10,000 in existence today.
Yet even the best among them are not finding ways to keep science viable at institutional
scales or working to build alternative economic models for higher education as universities
succumb to late-stage capitalism and its parasitic debt bubbles. How do we “learn how to
learn” in these trying times? Are we destined to fall into village-scale anarchism with no hope
for coordination at the species level?
I was trained in Earth Systems Science earlier in my life. I know that the cascading changes to
our planet’s geochemical cycles, weather systems, ocean circulations, and so forth are going
to make permanent human settlements vulnerable regardless of their size in the foreseeable
future. We need to maintain our observational satellites, river monitoring systems, and other
larger-than-human-community-scale learning tools to preserve the ability to see how the planet
is changing around us. Accepting collapse to village scales means losing such capacities—
likely forever. This will not do.
So we must learn how to manage planetary collapse. In the near term, this means preserving
institutional functions to the best of our abilities as we navigate the end times of wealth
hoarding, rising fundamentalism and xenophobia, increased rates of regional conflict over
scarce resources, and so forth. All of this will require a currently non-existent Social Systems
Science that is fully integrated with the monitoring tools of the Earth System alluded to above.
We need ways to track increasing polarization, cascades toward massive outbreaks of
violence, corruption and structural inequalities that undermine trust and cooperation.
All of this is applied cultural evolution, by the way.

6. Social Learning Is The Foundation
Researchers of cultural evolution have long debated what makes humans unique among living
things on Earth. As we have learned more about things like the sophisticated tool use of crows
and language evolution of whales, our presumed superiority fell back to humble kinship with
our biological neighbors. The dust continues to settle in these scholarly debates—and likely will
take a few more decades to be fully resolved—but one thing is now strongly supported. The
key to human success has been our abilities to learn from each other and build culturally on
that which came before.
This is called social learning and it roughly means we garner knowledge, skills, and survival
strategies by looking at other members of our group and seeing what works for them. Our early
childhood development is an extended period of inculturation that enables us to act like
Romans when in Rome. If we grow up in nurturing environments, we cultivate the abilities to
regulate our own emotions and take on contradictory perspectives to help us manage the
complexities of our social lives.
With so many systemic influences in play around us in the world today, we are going to need to
maintain as much capacity for social learning as we can muster. Any management attempts for
planetary-scale collapse will need to focus effort on education and human development as
fundamental pillars for ultimate success. I draw inspiration from the “folk high schools” that
were established in the Scandinavian countries in the 19th Century to help them cultivate
shared social identities, practical skills, and a sense of familial connections with one another as
they formed into nation-states. The intentional communities of the world will need ways to link
their own bioregional embeddedness with enough global awareness to see how they relate to
people living in other communities.
Every time the conditions are ripe for fundamentalist intergroup violence it will be a potent
reminder that our neighbor’s economic health is vital to preserving our own. We will need
whatever the learning ecosystems are in each community to build up cooperative
arrangements that help the learning ecosystems of others in their larger trade networks.
Special metrics of cooperative health will be required for this as monitoring tools for diagnosing
risks and restoring trust where it becomes necessary.
Consider what happens when a mountain glacier melts dry that is the water supply for an entire
valley of human settlements. Some will strike out violently against others with their own survival
on the line. In situations like this, the questions about how to encourage cooperation and trust
will not be idly considered at all. Either they will be paramount emergency responses or they
will be excluded from possibility until after the violence subsides. As you can see, managing
planetary collapse is very serious indeed!
Envisioning A Design Process for Managing Collapse
My purpose in this essay is not to outline all that is needed for managing collapse. Rather it is
to point out that a great deal of coordinated effort is needed in this area right now. It is urgently
cast upon us to become wise managers of our own cultural evolution while dealing with
cascading systemic collapses of social and ecological systems around us.
This is about as tall of an order as one can imagine. I don’t write these words flippantly, for this
is the seriousness of our current predicament. If somehow my Billion Dollar Proposal got
funded, I would immediately initiate a series of convenings that bring together relevant
expertise for community health and resilience, integrative and applied social science,
educational futures, design and entrepreneurial training, and more—all around the practical,
logistical challenges of preserving societal capacities at the level of network relationships
among diverse communities while those same capacities are lost in many of them individually.

7. The kinds of questions to be asked include:
✦ What is the full inventory of social and ecological systems that need to be managed
throughout a period of planetary collapse?
✦ What are the best forecasting and systems modeling tools available for all of these
systems?
✦ How are they monitored at present and what are the risks to these monitoring systems?
✦ What kinds of learning processes are needed to help communities learn how to manage
their own cultural evolution?
✦ How can these learning processes be incubated and established within existing
institutional frameworks?
✦ How must such an effort address the pain and grief of unprecedented losses? Will it
prove to be impossible in practice to persevere and preserve management capabilities?
✦ What are the relevant timeframes and scales of intervention needed for the
vulnerabilities and risks that are currently anticipated?
This is a suggestive list that warrants further elaboration and clarification. Convening a summit
of “collapse managers” would enable it to be thoroughly critiqued and improved.
Another part of the design process should be to work with existing projects that preserve the
cultural heritages of different peoples across diverse ecological landscapes. Most of what will
be needed to adapt in the changing future are the cultural adaptations that were functionally fit
to similar environments in the past. I have already engaged with a few sociologists, cultural
anthropologists, and archeologists about this topic and see great need to connect evolutionary
fitness of past cultural practices with scenario planning tools for future vulnerabilities and risks.
Imagine if the peoples of the Pacific Northwest where I live were to partner with indigenous
peoples whose ancestors have survived here for thousands of years. Similar opportunities for
connecting with the deep history of landscapes in other parts of the world exist to be cultivated
as the recent “pulse” of industrial societies crash like a tsunami across them and may soon
flow back into the formless currents of their own deep oceans. We have much to learn from
what has already withstood the numerous tests of time.
I see the effort to manage planetary collapse having at least these three dimensions. The first
being a “network resilience” framework for collaboration and sharing of lessons across diverse
communities around the world. The second is to preserve and augment existing institutional
functions for planetary monitoring of ecosystem health. The third is transfer of past learnings
through indigenous cultural heritage projects that are informed by the best cultural evolution
scholarship in existence today.
Underlying all three of these is a fourth dimension—which is to cultivate capacities for change
management by focusing on human development in the learning ecosystems we build and
maintain throughout the next 100 years. All of these components will need to hold the dual
purposes of community preservation and ecological regeneration as we strive to undo harms
caused during the industrial wave of exponential growth and decay that are currently collapsing
around us—and taking parts of the biosphere with them.

8. This will be a focus of conversation at the small gathering I will host in Eugene, Oregon later
this summer. And it will increasingly be the focus of change managers around the world as they
gradually come to acceptance that collapse is well underway and can no longer be avoided.
Onward, fellow humans.