ABSTRACT
Is it possible that the future of our world looks like some version of Mad Max, a trashy sci-fi movie in which oil scarcity has turned the planet into a low-tech, chaotic, neo-medieval society run by gangs? Is this implosion of the polis, this disintegration of society, not just probable, but maybe even inevitable? That is the question. In the famous, Limits to Growth. A Report to the Club of Rome, of 1972, this implosion was called “the collapse of the world system”:
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.1
