Climacteric

The climacteric considered in Lean Logic and Surviving The Future is the convergence of events which can be expected in the period 2010–2040. They include deep deficits in energy, water and food, along with climate change, a shrinking land area as the seas rise, and heat, drought and storm affecting the land that remains. There is also the prospect of acidic oceans which neither provide food nor remove carbon; ecologies degraded by introduced plants and animals; the failure of keystone species such as bees and plankton; and the depletion of minerals, including the phosphates on which we depend for a fertile soil.

An instructive climacteric for us would be the collapse of the Roman Empire. As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, the breakdown of Roman society in Britain in the fifth century was followed by a retreat, not to the pre-Roman Celtic Iron Age, but to an earlier form without such simple artefacts as potters’ wheels. To sustain even a technology as basic as pottery you need a supply chain to provide clay, wheels and kilns, some assurance of stability and peace, and customers who can pay—or who can at least be expected to be around long enough to keep their side of the barter agreement or reciprocal obligation. To crawl back towards this level of material comfort in post-Roman Britain took some four centuries. Small communities made those conditions survivable.

Another way to think of a climacteric would be as a collection or series, or other accumulation, of Disasters that makes recovery to the previous state impossible (or at least highly improbable). A climacteric could lead either to a gradual Descent or to a sudden Collapse. Fleming calls this the Radical Break, borrowed from the kaikaku concept in Lean.See David Fleming’s Radical Break definition The Post Carbon Institute calls these crises the E4 Crises: for Ecological, Energy, Economic, and Equity crises.See Lerch, Daniel, editor. The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval. pp 10, Island Press, 2017.