Does Social Death Focus the Mind? Thinking Past Ecological Catastrophe

• In Event: 3555 - Section on the Political Economy of the World-System Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Global Dynamics and Local Struggles

Abstract

While the alarming findings of climate science are now widely known and a resulting sense of foreboding could easily be documented with data from popular culture and social media, most people, sociologists and otherwise, have avoided thinking about the potential consequences. Denial is predominant, and social death fails to focus the mind. This paper presents a typology of possible post-catastrophe scenarios. While it becomes more and more unlikely with every passing year, a sustainable future exists at one end of a spectrum. Sustainability might be achieved via more or less democratic means, and at varying levels of consumption across the zones of the world-system. At the other end of the spectrum is runaway global warming and an uninhabitable planet. In between can be found scenarios with severe ecological degradation, which of course is already far advanced, but social adaptation of various sorts, including a high-tech future for a small elite, and a prolonged Dark Age of precarious feudal survival. Any scenario in which human society survives is one which by definition also includes a minimally intact biosphere/ecosystem. Finally, it is possible that the human species will be unable to adapt and will go extinct without entirely destroying the biosphere, which will then eventually regenerate new life forms as it has following the many previous mass extinction events.

Author

• Richard Hutchinson, Kennesaw State University