Understanding Overshoot and Collapse

A recent Substack article by an unnamed author (“ItsOvershoot”) has exhaustively detailed the evidence for Understanding Our Collapsing World.

Abrupt climate change. The sixth mass extinction. Collapsing Forests. Dead soil. Dry rivers. Acidic oceans. Coral reefs bleaching. Insects vanishing. Plastic in the air. Microfibers in your lungs. Nanoplastics in your blood. In your brain. In birds. In fish. In babies.

Fossil fuels and ores depleting. Every barrel, every watt, more expensive. Drilling and scraping garbage rock. Less and less, needed by more and more.

Prices rising. Inequality exploding. Systems unraveling. Institutions failing. Minds breaking. Leaders lying. Attention spans frying. People dividing. Culture fracturing. Authoritarianism rising. Truth dying. Bombs flying.

“How the f*** did we get here?”

Chat GPT writes:

The litany of crises that opens the articles could be mistaken for apocalyptic poetry, yet every line—bleaching reefs, drying rivers, micro‑plastics in newborn blood—records a measurement, not a metaphor. The author’s central claim is brutally simple: the planet we inhabit is now too small, too exhausted and too poisoned to sustain the demands of eight‑plus billion industrial humans, and the multiple breakdowns we witness are symptoms of that single underlying overshoot.

It’s not a coincidence that we’re facing all of these issues at the exact same time. It’s not bad luck and it’s not random. Because it’s all connected. These are symptoms.

In case you don’t know: we’ve exceeded the limits of what this planet can support and are crossing several planetary boundaries. We’ve deplete non-renewable resources like oil, gas, coal, minerals, and phosphorus, things that don’t come back. We’ve used up renewable resources like forests, fish stocks, freshwater, and topsoil, faster than they can regenerate.

At the same time we’ve drowned the biosphere in waste, with CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, plastic and toxic chemicals in the ocean, nitrogen runoff in rivers, heavy metals in the soil, and mountains of toxic garbage piling up around the world.

How we outran our limits

Homo sapiens’ ability for abstraction allowed us to replace slow biological evolution with the rapid progress of technology. Fire and flint helped us rise to the top of food chains; agriculture converted sunlight into food surpluses; fossil fuels connected these surpluses to an unstoppable growth drive so absolute that, by 2025, the average human commands more than 50,000 food‑equivalent calories each day. But every civilizational leap was paid for with withdrawals from a finite Earth: first forests and soils, then coal seams and oil fields, now “garbage rock” ores and unconventional hydrocarbons whose energy return barely justifies their extraction. The Limits to Growth systems model warned in 1972 that a business‑as‑usual trajectory would peak and roll into decline “about…now.” Five decades of data have traced that curve with eerie fidelity, confirming we are living the descent phase, not postponing it.

Where the Earth system stands

The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s 2023 appraisal shows six of nine planetary boundaries already transgressed—climate, biosphere integrity, land‑system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows and novel entities (toxic chemicals and plastics) (science.org, stockholmresilience.org). Each boundary breach weakens the resilience of the others, setting the stage for tipping‑point cascades. Recent syntheses identify at least twenty‑five biophysical “dominoes,” several of which—Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, Atlantic overturning circulation (AMOC), permafrost thaw and global coral‑reef die‑off—may tip with as little as 1.5 °C of warming (theguardian.com, science.org, report-2023.global-tipping-points.org). The fourth global coral‑bleaching event now unfolding, with heat stress affecting ~84 % of reefs, confirms we are already elbowing one of those dominoes hard (noaa.gov, coralreefwatch.noaa.gov).

Uneven futures: sacrifice zones and refuges

Collapse is not a uniform avalanche; it is a patchwork of local extinctions, famines and institutional failures rippling outward at different speeds. Regions where wet‑bulb temperatures flirt with the 35 °C human survivability ceiling—the Indo‑Gangetic Plain, southern Arabian Gulf, parts of the Sahel—are poised to become large‑scale sacrifice zones as lethal heat, groundwater exhaustion and political fragility reinforce one another (agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com, science.org). Conversely, mid‑latitude, water‑secure areas such as the Great Lakes basin or parts of Scandinavia are being scouted as prospective “climate refuges,” although even these zones now register a new regime of hydrological and temperature extremes (greatlakesnow.org, phys.org). Refuge, then, is relative: it means “less bad, for longer,” not immune.

The polycrisis mind‑trap

The author borrows hypernormalisation to describe the psychic strain of living inside a system that is visibly disintegrating while official narratives insist on business‑as‑usual. In that cognitive dissonance, societies double down on the very behaviors—chasing GDP, scapegoating outsiders, militarizing borders—that accelerate the breakdown. Collapse awareness, as the essay testifies, first wounds the psyche; yet acceptance can open a different stance, one that measures success not in re‑inflated stock indices but in suffering averted and knowledge preserved.

What remains possible

The long emergency is already baked in, but its depth and cruelty are still negotiable. Three strategic tasks recur in both the Substack essay and planetary‑boundaries science:

Rapid energy descent with equity. Each year we cling to fossil expansion forecloses options later. Managed degrowth—contracting material throughput while safeguarding basic wellbeing—offers a controlled glide where the alternative is stall‑and‑crash.
Bioregional triage. Direct resources toward zones where communities, ecosystems and governance still have a fighting chance. Retire the fantasy of saving everything everywhere; practise compassionate selection instead of callous neglect.
Civilisational seed‑banking. Archive critical scientific, medical and ecological knowledge in low‑energy, decentralised media; cultivate open‑source tool libraries, micro‑renewables, and regionally adapted seed stocks so that refuges can rebuild without repeating our most ruinous mistakes.

A Possible Planet perspective

Seen through the lens of Possible Planet, the story is neither doom nor techno‑myth. It is the mid‑story of a species crossing a threshold it did not know existed. We are called to relinquish the cultural addiction to “more” and embrace a humbler prosperity grounded in reciprocity with Earth’s limits. Triage becomes an act of care, not abandonment; degrowth a deliberate pruning that lets the living tree survive a drought. In this view, collapse is not the end of the human journey but the closing of one chapter and the uncertain opening of another. The question is no longer whether we will descend, but how: with clenched fists and fortress walls, or with open hands, sharing the salvage and the stories that might yet guide us home.

If we concede that industrial humanity has already sprinted beyond the biophysical limits of Earth, the question shifts from whether collapse can be averted to how it will unfold and how much pain we can still prevent. The evidence—six breached planetary boundaries, net‑energy from oil expected to crest this decade, and multiple climate tipping points edging closer than models assumed—makes a soft landing unlikely. ipcc.chjpt.spe.orgtheguardian.com

The Shapes Collapse Can Take

Archetype	What Fails First	Tempo	Signature Symptoms
Rolling Blackout	Energy & supply chains	Rhythmic: months of scarcity followed by partial recoveries	Fuel rationing, brown‑outs, price spikes, regional “de‑globalisation” corridors
Climate Body‑Blow	Food & habitat	Abrupt: single‑event shock tips systems	AMOC slowdown → crop failures; megadrought → state fracture
Polycrisis Spiral	Finance & governance	Cascading: each shock amplifies the next	Debt deflation, authoritarian turn, cross‑border conflict, information fractures
Slow Erosion	Ecosystems & demography	Creeping: decades‑long attrition	Declining birth‑rates, soil exhaustion, biotic homogenisation

Most regions will experience all four in shifting combinations. The Indo‑Gangetic Plain exemplifies the “Climate Body‑Blow” risk as deadly wet‑bulb temperatures collide with groundwater collapse, while the U.S. Great Lakes show traits of “Slow Erosion”—a relative refuge that still faces lake‑effect megastorms and infrastructure rot. ipcc.chtheguardian.com

Levers That Still Matter

Because collapse is a process, each year of delay or foresight alters its profile. Three concentric arenas—Planetary, Bioregional, and Household—offer leverage.

A. Planetary Levers

Trigger positive social tipping points. As Timothy Lenton notes, cascades can run the other way—rapid cost declines in solar, EVs and heat‑pumps are nudging markets abruptly away from fossil incumbency. Policy “shoves” (zero‑emission mandates, green public banks) can magnify these flips. theguardian.com
Phase‑down high‑EROI loss‑leaders fast. Every barrel drilled from tight shale at <7 : 1 EROI squanders capital we will soon need for adaptation; moratoria on new ultra‑low‑EROI fields and a windfall levy to bankroll community resilience buy time without new physics. jpt.spe.org
Global triage for the irreplaceable. Focus multilateral finance on safeguarding remaining carbon sinks (Amazon, Congo Basin, intact boreal peat) and seed vaults; these are civilization’s non‑negotiables.

B. Bioregional Levers

Regenerate and relocalise food. Regenerative polycultures, perennial grains and rotational grazing can raise soil carbon and drought tolerance 20‑60 % while cutting fossil inputs. Bioregional seed‑bank networks (e.g., the Great Lakes Seed Sovereignty Network) already outperform commercial seed during extreme weather by >35 %. ecosystemsunited.com
Assist ecosystem migration. Forest stewards from Minnesota to British Columbia are testing “assisted range expansion” so tomorrow’s climate can still host a canopy. Doing it now—while roads and nurseries exist—reduces future habitat loss. en.wikipedia.org
Mesh‑grid the commons. Islandable micro‑grids powered by wind, solar and small‑hydro keep clinics, water pumps and data vaults live during national grid failures. The technology is mature; what’s missing is local ownership and training.

C. Household & Community Levers

Mutual‑aid infrastructure. Food forests, tool libraries, repair cafés and community health brigades buffer shocks better than private stock‑piles. The Cincinnati Permaculture Institute shows how dozens of micro food‑forests can scale quickly with modest grants. midwestsustainabilitysummit.org
Skills over stuff. First‑response medicine, soil stewardship, low‑tech fabrication (bicycles, pumps, radios), and conflict‑resolution skills convert uncertainty into agency.
Collapse‑aware psychology. Acceptance, as the Substack author writes, ends paralysis. Groups that ritualise grief and cultivate shared purpose weather disruption with lower violence and higher cooperation.

What Mitigation Cannot Do

It will not restore a Holocene climate. Even an overnight zero‑emissions miracle leaves centuries of ice loss and ocean heat. Adaptation plans must assume +2 °C and prepare for +3 °C tail‑risk. ipcc.ch

It cannot guarantee refuge immunity. The “haven” narrative ignores flood‑flash, invasive pests and climate‑inflated insurance collapse already hitting Midwestern towns. The goal is relative resilience, not escape. theguardian.com

Choosing the Descent

A managed descent is still available: phased degrowth, regenerative land‑use, knowledge seed‑banking, and rapid fossil wind‑down can trade impossible perpetuity for a smaller‑but‑viable civilization. The alternative is unmanaged free‑fall in which the same physical limits decide for us—with greater suffering.

In the spirit of Possible Planet, the task is therefore two‑fold:

Ease the landing where we stand—cut throughput, heal land, build commons.
Carry forward the seeds—literal and intellectual—of a wiser culture that remembers why overshoot hurts and how reciprocity heals.

Collapse does not happen in a single day; it is a slope we are already sliding down. The gradient we choose—steep chaos or stepped descent—depends on how quickly we pick up the tools still within reach.