This is going to be the main site for the forthcoming Collapse Party, which recognizes the intractability of our mounting problems and attempts to mitigate them in advance through sustainable retreat. For now, please help build a grassroots community by joining us on Facebook

The world is finite, and so the resource stocks and pollution sinks that sustain industrial civilization ("the System") are limited. We have been in a state of "overshoot", beyond the "carrying capacity" of the Earth, since the 1980's (The Limits to Growth, 2004). Limited resources have been drawn down much faster than they could be replenished, and the Earth's pollution sinks have been overfilled much faster than they could be regenerated.

Elements of this overshoot can already be seen in phenomena as diverse as plateauing crop yields, topsoil loss, accelerating climate change, peak oil, collapsing fisheries, the depletion of higher-EROEI energy sources, dying rivers, global dimming, the proliferation of "failed states", neo-colonial exploitation, and rising antibiotic resistance. But things are yet going to get much worse...

Based on paleoclimate reconstructions of CO2 levels, an eventual global warming of above 2C is already inevitable. This will set off a cascade of climatic disasters that will speed up the rate of warming, leading to the desertification of much of the world's land and oceans, the drying of the great Asian rivers, and massive inundations of the low-lying coasts and deltas that harbor humanity's heartlands. States will collapse into anarchy, spawning Biblical-scale famines and floods of climate refugees.

Meanwhile, the energetic resources that power the System will be coming under severe strain. Oil production has already peaked, and natural gas and coal will follow in a few more decades. The remaining resources are much harder to extract, since the easiest pickings have already been exploited. We will have to divert ever more energy, labor, and capital towards mitigating the effects of both energy depletion (renewables, remote hydrocarbons) and runaway climate change (adaptation, geoengineering).

This will starve agriculture and the consumer sector, ushering in disillusionment, social discontent, and a longing for a strong hand at the helm of power. This will undermine liberal democracy's political legitimacy, leading either to anarchy ("failed states") or increasing coercion (authoritarianism). Geopolitical rivalries over the remaining energy resources will intensify, extinguishing the already dim prospects for international cooperation. Long-term thinking will recede into irrelevance, for political leaders will have their hands full with much more pressing issues - building sea walls, feeding the military, and placating (or dispersing) angry mobs.

Our only way to escape this trap is to rapidly effect a global transition towards "sustainable development". The imperative of such a transition was recognized as early as the 1970's, but we have yet to see any truly meaningful action. Nor are we likely to, since the defining feature of industrial-capitalist civilization is indefinite growth, based around the taking of loans against (higher) future returns. There's a reason why Malthusian societies suppressed usury - and should we continue business-as-usual, we will soon rediscover why.

Though the System is very effective in some ways, it cannot foresee its own demise; nor can its servants even ask questions that hint at the unpalatable answer. However, the casual, detached, and informed observer can. Yes, in a purely technical sense, disaster can still be averted if one could convince people to make, or more likely force through, drastic reductions in First World overconsumption, a full-scale retooling of the industrial system towards renewables and recycling, and a global system of "contraction and convergence" on CO2 emissions.

Achieving this, however, is unlikely in the extreme; any transition to sustainability is going to be stymied by social myopia and geopolitical anarchy, as well as innate human psychological features such as the conservative bias, the denial complex, hedonism, and susceptibility to "creeping normalcy" and "landscape amnesia". Unless we overcome these failings, or discover a technological silver bullet, we will collide with planetary limits to growth sometime around 2030 to 2050.

In that scenario, the System as a whole will become increasingly fragile, such that a large enough perturbation - say, a major war or global climatic disaster - will send it into a self-reinforcing spiral down into chaos. The electrical-industrial infrastructure supporting modern technology, especially the massive repositories of information entombed within cyberspace, will crumble away into oblivion.
After a short period of unprecedented violence, famine, pestilence, and death known as "the Collapse", the world will get larger once more, and society will retreat back into the comforting blackness of a new Dark Age.

Faced with these grim prospects, we see it fitting to launch a multi-pronged initiative to if not avert a Collapse (as is the purpose of the global Green movement), then at least to attempt to mitigate, as best we can, its catastrophic humanitarian consequences. We do not wish on the demise of technological civilization, for we recognize that for all its ecological obliviousness and social injustices, it has enabled tremendous progress in science and many aspects of culture and human welfare. That said, we recognize that sometimes, the Second Law of Thermodynamics - the tendency for all closed, complex systems to decay - cannot be sidestepped.

We are "kollapsniks", and our initiative is the Collapse Party.

We are an individual state of mind, for being mentally prepared for collapse is of the utmost importance. We are profoundly local, for each community will have to weather collapse on its own. We are a global project, for our predicament is global. We welcome everyone regardless of race, sex, creed, or political affiliation.

We propose a program of "sustainable retreat", to be characterized by the following policy planks:

• use the remaining high-EROEI fossil fuel stocks in a crash program to build as large a nuclear and renewable energy infrastructure as possible.
• clean up radioactive and toxic installations while we still have the technologies and resources to do so.
• work on fostering global unity and a common human identity to encourage cooperation and discourage competition and resource wars.
• preserve as much as possible of the world's stock of technologies, bioresources, and knowledge in dispersed repositories ("lifeboats") in durable, physical format.
• retool the education system to disseminate practical skills and democratize it using the power of the Internet (as long as it continues to exist).
• liberalize copyright laws.
• promote communal-agrarian values ("green communism"), while ditching the individualist and accumulative mentality that is spelling our doom.
• unite all social groups under different wings of the Party - conventional Greens, as well as socialists, feminists, right-wing survivalists, etc - that are amenable to the kollapsnik message.
• eschew militarism, dismantle overseas military bases, and repatriate the troops; but maintain a minimal nuclear deterrent.
• nationalization and / or regulation of the commanding heights of the economy to optimize resource conservation and pollution control.
• establish a network of self-contained "resiliencies" across the nation and the world, modeled on the Kibbutzim, that will provide physical, mental, and spiritual nourishment to those who need it.
• allow mostly-unimpeded free enterprise for small, non-strategic, and low-material throughput businesses, for it will still be necessary to keep the consumerist urgings satiated.
• the Party is to be aim to operate on a horizontal and democratic basis, in which promotion and honors are to be based on the judgments of peers on one's competence and commitment to the cause.
• the winding-down of the prison-industrial complex in a controlled manner; the nature of law and order to be determined in further internal debate.
• general debt amnesty to wipe the slate clean and start from Year Zero in our quest for sustainability.
• expand resources into research on areas such as sustainable energy, geoengineering, and artificial intelligence to increase the chances of achieving a technological "silver bullet".