This chapter examines Shelley’s images of the collapse of human civilizations and the colonization of their ruins by a darkly resurgent nature. In particular, it places Shelley’s fascination with civilizational collapse and natural overgrowth in the context of recent conceptions of “rewilding.” It argues that “rewilding” as currently conceived by its leading advocates remains an irreducibly human project, whereas Shelleyan overgrowth conceives of a resurgent nature that both occludes and darkly perpetuates the ruins of humanity. A number of key moments in Shelley’s work are central here: his description in his preface to Prometheus Unbound of the situation of the composition of that poem; a fragment of 1818, “Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow”; and the description in Adonais of “Desolation’s bones.” Through close readings of these episodes, the chapter shows that Shelleyan overgrowth represents what we may call a “dark rewilding” – which is for us, as it was for Shelley, a future that human civilization increasingly appears to anticipate. Shelley anticipates many of the conceptual and ethical complexities of today’s rewilding, articulating instead a more ambivalent, less obviously hopeful conception of overgrowth as the eerie perpetuation of the ruins of a disappeared humanity.

Sensemaking is widely seen as one of the most crucial processes in crisis response operations. Frontline responders need an adequate understanding of a crisis situation to implement the appropriate actions. Gaining a better grasp of the situation requires acquiring more cues and avoiding premature commitment to a particular frame of reference. Ideally, operational members need to engage in adaptive sensemaking to achieve a perfect understanding of the crisis. Yet, crises are defined by uncertainty, which hinders a full understanding of the situation. The pursuit of a perfect understanding may also impede a rich awareness of the context and create blind spots. Thus, responders need to embrace some degree of uncertainty in their sensemaking as well, even though this is counterintuitive and demanding. The dilemma for responders is that they need to balance gaining a better understanding with embracing uncertainty. Frontline responders may deal with this sensemaking dilemma by pursuing a plausible understanding. A plausible understanding matches the demands of the situation and helps responders take bold action, but is also treated with an attitude of ambivalence, doubt, and modesty.

To tilt the scales in favour of a faster energy transition, significant efforts to decarbonise the economy are required. This means flipping the political and economic systems that are failing to deliver deep decarbonisation and replacing them with ones built on compassion and justice. Through a cascade of regime transitions in the energy sector, mass mobilisation, and support politics, these reforms are achievable.

Chapter 2 considers the extinction crisis, eco-collapse, ecocide, and their consequences for humanity as well as global solutions and what individuals can do.

This chapter provides a survey of the close of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Iron Age towns, and delivers an updated synthesis of existing evidence and arguments for climatic shifts across the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to fourth centuries BCE. Kearns then undertakes an island-wide comparative analysis of ruralization and urbanization apparent in survey records by the mid-first millennium BCE. Focusing on legacy and recent survey data, the chapter argues for oscillations in sedentism across the island as communities experienced environmental changes and cultivated new weathering practices, and situates the re-emergence of social differentiation in the relationships between households and land and new spaces for public gathering at tombs and shrines.

The notion of collapse and its importance in geotechnical engineering is introduced. The two main approaches are explained: (i) stress fields that fulfil the Mohr–Coulomb limit condition (together with slip line analysis as an application of the method of characteristics) and (ii) analysis of collapse mechanisms consisting of rigid blocks. The harmonisation of codes and the problematic definition of safety on the basis of probability theory are discussed.

Can we regain our humanness? Considering the massive loss of the natural world, the impending effects of climate change, staggering inequality, and the power of the elite, it may be impossible to avoid a dystopian future. Nevertheless, many scenarios for the future are possible, including a prolonged or sudden collapse, a new optimist paradise, or a decentralized golden age of barbarism. I argue that a plausible future is a return to a hunting and gathering way of life as the coming climate instability and the exhaustion of accessible fossil fuels make agriculture impossible. If there is cause for optimism, it lies in our deep evolutionary past. Selfishness and exploitation are no more a part of human nature than cooperation and caring about others and the natural world. If we are to avoid a dystopian future, we need a collective political movement to challenge the ultrasocial status quo and its defenders. Individual action is not enough.

Chapter 6 discusses the effects of disasters. It distinguishes between effects in the immediate aftermath of the disaster – mortality and demographic recovery; land loss and capital destruction; economic crisis; and blame, scapegoating, and social unrest – and longer-term structural consequences – societal collapse; economic reconstruction; long-term demographic change; reconstruction, reform, and social changes; and redistribution of resources. This chapter argues that disasters, even similar ones, did not always produce homogeneous outcomes. Furthermore, rather than being totally damaging or even controversially regarded as a ‘force for good’, the effects of disasters are best assessed by making a basic distinction between the aggregate level and the distributive level: disasters could be instrumentalized to benefit a certain segment of a given population over others.

To bring our examination of primary sources in Part II to a close we come to a special chapter – more of an extended case study – that deals with the demise of Classic Maya society. It is difficult to address such a profoundly complex and still far from comprehended topic in brief, but it is important to appreciate the ways in which the epigraphic record can contribute to our understanding. Indeed, it will be argued here that the texts are a valuable and underestimated resource in this regard.

Several possible “future scenarios” and implementation pathways lead to significant UN and global governance reform. The “rational trajectory” would involve international governments, responding to well-mapped and emerging crises, convening a UN Charter review conference to adopt changes such as those proposed in this book. In a “business as usual” trajectory, governments would do “too little too late,” with insufficient leadership for the reforms necessary to navigate current and emerging crises. Such a “drift” scenario is a recipe for inevitable disaster, with uncertain economic, ecological and human costs. Rebuilding after major global disaster(s) is a third scenario, if, for example, the world stumbles into war, or the Earth shifts into a worst-case “hothouse” scenario due to unchecked climate change. Finally, this chapter explores some immediate steps the international community could take, including; reopening a serious and wide-ranging debate on the need for revision of the UN Charter, with a coalition of like-minded governments not allowing the threat of the use of the veto to stymie debate and action; and effecting priority reforms as soon as possible, including, for example, the establishment of a World Parliamentary Assembly, and enhanced international action to address effectively climate change.

The chapter explores the collapse of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the Contested Region. The overland Underground Railroad networks in the region were quickly being bypassed by the railroad transportation in the 1850s. Nevertheless, the high-profile fugitive rescues in the Free Soil Region convinced slave catchers that their efforts were better focused farther south, and as a result slave catching accelerated in the Contested Region in the middle and late 1850s. This led to a series of confrontations in which the behavior of the slave catchers and accompanying US Marshals was egregiously violent. Attempts by local and state authorities to bring the assailants to justice were frustrated by federal judges who fully sanctioned their recourse to the violence of mastery. These cases rendered the region’s conditional toleration of slave catching untenable. The result was a striking shift in the culture of violence as the region embraced the outright defiance that had long characterized Free Soil communities. As a consequence, in the late 1850s, the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act collapsed outside the narrow strip of territory that comprised the Borderland.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.