What Do We Mean by Collapse

The United Nations Refugee Agency website (UNHCR, 2020) details stories of people from Syria whose lives were turned upside down by the war. Many fled as refugees. For these people life, as they had known it, no longer existed. A way of life had collapsed and new lives had to be formed from the remnants. In contrast, for many people, and especially those living in wealthier societies, life seems stable and far from any possible collapse. For many people, life has never been better. We have a secure water supply, we have shelter, and through modern herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers we have much more control over the production of food than many previous human generations. We also have the benefits of modern medicine. We are a very mobile society, no longer living within the limits of how far we can walk in a day. Now that same day can see you moving from one continent to another. At the touch of a switch, we can light up the night, something undreamed of for many people a century ago. A modern developed society is dependent on electricity as predicted in an article from 1928: “It should not be regarded merely as a new form of light and heat; electricity provides a complete revolution in method” (Dale, 1928). Electricity underpins all modern communication systems. Electricity supply can fail and for most people power cuts are the nearest they come to experiencing the collapse of something they have come to rely on, albeit the collapse is only temporary.