PARIS – “The world will never be the same again,” has been the oft-repeated refrain since the coronavirus brought the global economy to a juddering halt.
For many it has shown how fragile our civilisation is.
The crisis has come as a new movement called “collapsology” — which warns of the possible collapse of our societies as we know them — is gaining ground.
With climate change exposing how unsustainable the economic and social model based on fossil fuels is, they fear orthodox thinking may be speeding us to our doom.
The theory first emerged from France’s Momentum Institute, and was popularised by a 2015 book, “How Everything Can Collapse”.
Some of its supporters, like former French environment minister Yves Cochet, believe the coronavirus crisis is another sign of impending catastrophe.
– Virus domino effect –
While the mathematician, who founded France’s Green party “still hesitates” about saying whether the virus will be the catalyst for a domino effect, he quoted the quip that “it’s too early to say if it’s too late”.
Yet Cochet — whose book “Before the Collapse” predicts a meltdown in the next decade — is convinced that the virus will lead to “a global economic crisis of greater severity than has been imagined”.
The 74-year-old, who retired to France’s rural Brittany region so he could live more sustainably, is also worried about an impending “global disaster with lots of victims, both economic and otherwise”.
“What is happening now is a symptom of a whole series of weaknesses,” warned Professor Yves Citton of Paris VIII University.
“It isn’t the end of the world but a warning about something that has already been set in motion,” he told AFP, “a whole series of collapses that have begun”.
The slide may be slow, said Jean-Marc Jancovici, who heads the Shift Project think-tank which aims to “free economics from carbon”. But “a little step has been taken (with the virus) that there is no going back on”, he argued.
Pablo Servigne, the ecologist and agricultural engineer who co-wrote “How Everything Can Collapse”, has a more chilling take.
“The big lesson of history… and of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse is that pestilence, war and famine tend to follow in each others’ wake. We have a pandemic which could lead to another shock — wars, conflicts and famines,” he warned.
