Stumbling towards collapse: coming to terms with the climate crisis

Abstract

Leading sociologists have approached the climate crisis by emphasising a way forward and identifying hopeful directions. What sense is to be made of suggestions that we are instead on the brink of a ‘collapse’ in which the crisis is not resolved but leads to the end of existing civilisation? Partly based on three studies of contemporary opinion in the Hunter Valley in Australia, a coal industry centre, this discussion is also based on an examination of the public response to climate change world wide, the nature of the crisis as understood by science, the political response so far and the economic problems of replacing fossil fuels. What social theories might help explain what is happening? It is concluded that ‘collapse’ can be understood by conceiving capitalist society as a social machine, informed by a ‘social imaginary’.