Collapse

Abstract

After centuries of intense activity at the behest of some humans in the Minority World, we seem to be witnessing the collapse of the climate and ecosystems that defined the stability of the Holocene epoch. As a consequence, we face ranges of environmental variability unprecedented in human history, now projected within the lifetimes of present generations. Collapse has thus become a predicament—and, perhaps, a heuristic—enveloping everybody, human and nonhuman, in ever particular, yet uncertain ways.