What if collapse isn't the end of the story but part of a larger cycle?

In Part 5 of our six-part summer series, Finding Crazy Town, producer Alex Leff continues his investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller. Following clues from the Crazy Town archives leads to the adaptive cycle: a framework from ecology that describes how complex systems move through growth, maturity, collapse, and reorganization.

From the Titanic and lifeboats to Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition, the search turns toward a more difficult question: How do we navigate a period of contraction while building something more just, sustainable, and resilient on the other side?

Originally recorded on 9/10/26 with archival episodes.

Related Episodes

• Episode 25, “Koala Butts Ablaze and the Sweet Relief of the Adaptive Cycle”
• Episode 26, “Doors and Deck Chairs on the Titanic: Reimagining Lifeboat Ethics in the Age of Overshoot”

Credits

Production and editing by Alex Leff. Editorial assistance and transcripts by Taylor Antal.

Theme music is “Way Huge” and “Don’t Give Up” by Midnight Shipwrecks, used with permission.

Thanks to all the Crazy Townies, our listeners who are trying to understand humanity's overshoot predicament and do something about it.

Alex Leff:

The world is a crazy place. Every day the headlines make very little sense. And worst of all, Jason, Rob and Asher, the real hosts of this podcast, are still missing. For weeks now, the hosts of the Crazy Town Podcast have been nowhere to be found. Welcome to Finding Crazy Town. I'm Crazy Town producer Alex Leff, host of the Human Nature Odyssey Podcast, and now official detective of the Post Carbon Institute. I know, I know. I was supposed to keep an eye on the guys and make sure they didn't get in any trouble, but I've made a sacred oath to track them down and bring them back to the Post-Carbon Institute, safe and sound. I'm glad you're here. I couldn't carry out this vital mission without you.

The last thing they mentioned before vanishing was something about modern techno-industrial civilization. So that's where our investigation has taken us. We've crossed international shipping lanes, explored the intricacies of complexity, question economic growth, and critique the myth of progress. By better understanding Crazy Town, I suspect it'll help us find Jason, Rob, and Asher before it's too late. We only have two parts of the series left.

Our modern world is hard to understand. I mean, how are we supposed to make sense of this? Are we advancing towards some kind of tech singularity or are we on the verge of societal collapse? Is the economy going to hell even though the stock market is rising? I remember Jason once shared something that helped put this into perspective. What'd he say?

Jason Bradford:

We're worried now about, oh my gosh, what's happening to the economy and energy systems. I put it in the context of what's called the adaptive cycle, but I think it's a good time and go into some detail of what that means, right? This broader cycle called the adaptive cycle, which is really taken from ecology.

Alex Leff:

Right. The adaptive cycle. Maybe this is the map that'll help us navigate Crazy Town.

Jason Bradford:

Okay. So the adaptive cycle, it deals with four main phases. And so they usually talk about first the growth phase. So this is a time when resources are pretty abundant and the system or the organism will rapidly expand. And then after it reaches some kind of, it grows for quite a while, a certain amount of time, it reaches then it's mature or conservation phase where it's not growing, but it's very stable and that can persist for a while. But then that stability ends up becoming disrupted. The system becomes rigid and unable to cope then with environmental change. And that leads eventually to some kind of breakdown, collapse or release phase, various terms you can use, where that old system no longer is viable and all of the parts of that system can fall apart in this release phase.That's the third phase, right? Then they can be captured and reorganized in a sense as some new system coalesces. And then that new system can start over again with a growth phase. So those are the four phases of the adaptive cycle, the growth, maturity or conservation, release or collapse, and then this sort of reorganization, picking up the pieces again.

Rob Dietz:

I'm definitely an examples guy. So I'm wondering if we could take this through and maybe going back to environmental science ecosystems, let's just do the life of the forest through this system. So say we got an empty field, like a weed lot that is prime land to become forest. So it would be the growth phase where that weed lot stuff's colonizing, seedlings are growing over time, they're maturing, animals are coming in, making homes in this habitat and all these flows of energy are basically building up the infrastructure, the tree structure of this budding forest.

Asher Miller:

Right. And then if you think of the conservation phase, let's say that stopped growing, right? It's hit this place where it's kind of found some equilibrium. There may be things that are coming into the system, non-native species or something else that might come in and want to disrupt it, but the system is stable. Even if new things are introduced, kind of the dominant species in that forest system are able to continue doing what they're doing for a while. And that would be the conservation stage.

Rob Dietz:

I'm picturing this great big redwood forest, those huge trees and a giant canopy.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. There's not a lot that can destroy that, right? It seems so immense and it seems timeless in a sense. And that structure maintains itself through storms and diseases. And so that would be a conservation phase.

Rob Dietz:

So you mentioned stable structure and how the forest can go on for a long time, but then if you think about the most obvious example of it having a big collapse or a release, that would have to be the forest fire. So a lightning strike comes in or maybe Smokey the Bear didn't get there in time to stop the errant cigarette tossing dude and the whole giant forest just burns down. So you have this huge collapse, this release of materials, and kind of a very different thing on the day after the fire.

Jason Bradford:

Yes, but I want to, again, give you the peace, the perspective, the ashes to ashes, Rob. And so this is part of the natural world. This is part of the adaptive cycle. So from the fire comes the regrowth, the reorganization.

Rob Dietz:

Tell that to the fricking koala bear with the singed butt.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, I know. Right. But yeah, that's it.

Rob Dietz:

Okay. So take us through the reorganization. I'm glad I knocked you back into your normal voice.

Asher Miller:

Thank you, Rob. I appreciate that too.

Jason Bradford:

Well, it's just that all of these now parts that, in this case of the forest fire, all the mineral wealth, the potassium and stuff and the light now hitting the ground, for example, when a new seed starts to germinate, it's got light, it's got nutrients, and it's not competing with the established mature plants. And so all of a sudden it's go time. And so this reorganization phase is really quick and then it leads right back into the growth phase again.

Asher Miller:

Now the question is, is that the same kind of forest, right? Is it the same dominant species in that forest or are there new species that come? And it could go either way.

Jason Bradford:

It depends. And that's what's interesting is that these ecosystems that are old and stable kind of prevent the potentially new ecosystems from being born. And so when you get major shifts in vegetation, it's often because the old system perished, right? And then say if the climate's changing, then it's the species are able to migrate in that are more adapted to the new conditions.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. But then it totally matters what flows of energy you have available, like you were saying, sunlight now hitting the ground or what materials there are, but also what the broader environmental system is. Because you can think of fire adapted forests, like scrubby pine forests in the warmer regions of North America that are adapted to burning. But then the Amazon, for example, it's not adapted. So if you go and burn that, you probably do get a different system afterward.

Asher Miller:

Well, they're doing that in the Amazon right now on purpose, right? They're burning things down in order to plant other things.

Jason Bradford:

How that destruction happens, how that release phase happens matters for what kind of reorganization and regrowth you can have.

Alex Leff:

Growth, maturity, collapse and reorganization. That's the natural adaptive cycle of a forest. Wait a second. Is that what they are? Did they go camping in the redwoods or something? Is Rob hugging a tree?

Asher Miller:

Now, I'm sure many of our listeners love forests and they want to get into environmental science and understanding cycles of these things.

Jason Bradford:

Yes, they do.

Asher Miller:

But I think we should actually talk about the applicability of this thing. You talked about, Jason, that thinking about the adaptive cycle was really helpful for you even sort of emotionally to kind of withstand a lot of the shocks that we're seeing. And that's because this applies to all kinds of systems, right? You could talk about businesses that go through these kinds of cycles. You can talk about civilizations like Rome, for example.

Rob Dietz:

Okay. So the adaptive cycle can be applied to all kinds of systems, all sorts of different things, but okay, let's talk about it with respect to the current situation in our society. We could be talking globally, we could be talking about in the United States, but I would like us to go through where are we in the adaptive cycle?

Alex Leff:

Okay, hold on. This is a big deal. Up until this point, we've just been collecting clues, but now we finally have something every detective dreams of, a map. The adaptive cycle is a framework from which we can understand what's going on in the world and what's potentially to come. If we can find where our modern civilization is on the adaptive cycle map, maybe we'll find Jason, Rob, and Asher there too.

Rob Dietz:

Where are we in the adaptive cycle with regard to the economy and regard to society now?

Jason Bradford:

Politics, yeah.

Asher Miller:

I can't say I know. I mean, honestly, I thought, go back 10 years, a dozen years, I thought what we now call the great recession was maybe potentially even this kind of collapse release moment for kind of modern society, the American way of life. And it turned out not to be. And it's actually instructive to think about the adaptive cycle in that sense because what you actually had was a system trying to exert control, trying to maintain the conservation phase. And I think it's really important to recognize that these systems want to maintain their identity the way it is. So you have all these incumbent interests. In our case, you had these political and financial interests that were all - Remember the banks were too big to fail, right? They sort of convinced us and it was right that our system was set up in such a way that if we let the banks fail, the whole system was going to fail. But they were so hell bent on bailing out basically the people who benefited so much from the system itself.

And e've done all kinds of things, gone to all kinds of extremes to maintain that because of that. We've talked about Joseph Tainter's theories about the collapse of complex societies, they get more and more complex as they hit issues, and we've been doing that in this case. The jury's still out for me, but man, if we are not in that collapse and release phase right now of this system, we're damn close. We know climate change is coming in a big, big way. There are other crises that are going to be hitting us. The system may be trying to conserve itself through this and there's going to be a battle in a sense over whether that could be achieved, whether that's what we actually want as a society to conserve what we had, or to create something new and take all that energy and release it into some kind of new reorganization. So it may be that it actually operates in different ways in different parts of the world.

There are communities who've gone through the collapse phase and weren't even able to reorganize in a lot of ways. We've got indigenous populations, for example, that have been decimated for a long time. So it may not be happening consistently across the globe and across communities. But the big question is, if we say whether it's this moment or another moment that it's inevitable that these cycles happen and that we will be coming to a collapse and release phase. Is there anything we could do about it?

Jason Bradford:

Well, I think it's important to think about this not necessarily as a one-off. So when you lose the image of a forest fire, you have this image of the whole canopy burns and it just goes to ash. But actually in a lot of complex systems, if you think of this vast forest, it's like there's patches that burn out or it moves through the understory and a third of the matured trees die, but not all of them. And so it may take time. It may be that the ecosystem shifts or the forest shifts over decades or centuries rather than one giant forest fire that kills it all off. Maybe it's important to think of it more like the landscape level as opposed to the individual forest patch you could put in your head.

Asher Miller:

And wouldn't we prefer that?

Jason Bradford:

That would be nice.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. I think if you think about that in societal terms, that would be kind of like if we're going through a release, it's not just horrid human suffering. It's not a shit show of apocalyptic nightmares, right? It's more like things are changing, we're powering down, but maybe we could do that somewhat gracefully. Of course, the part that I think has the chance to feel like, okay, I can use this worldview, this model, and it gives me some agency is the knowledge that even after a collapse, there's a reorganization period coming. And so that raises the question of how do we prepare for that? What kind of things can we do to have that reorganization be something where we end up with the sustainable, the just society that we're all in favor of rather than everybody locked in a competition and fighting for the resources that are there?

Jason Bradford:

Totally. And that's sort of where do you put your energy to say, I want to be ready to take whatever resources become available where I am during some sort of release phase and repurpose them in a sane, pro-social, pro other species and long-term viability of the planet to allow complex life to exist way. And that is I think the question at this time.

Alex Leff:

So if collapse is ahead of us, if our system is reaching the end of its maturity and can only unravel from here, how do we navigate that wisely? Are there any examples we can learn from?

Rob Dietz:

We're going to talk about the number three movie at the box office of all time.

Jason Bradford:

Oh wow.

Asher Miller:

"Major League 2."

Rob Dietz:

It is not.

Jason Bradford:

"The Goonies."

Rob Dietz:

Yes. "The Goonies." Yes. Here in Oregon, everyone thinks the Goonies is the top of the box office. No, it's "Titanic." The movie is about the disaster of the Titanic. Do I have to say spoiler alert for such a popular movie?

Jason Bradford:

No

Rob Dietz:

Okay, good.

Jason Bradford:

Move on. Let's move on.

Rob Dietz:

Plus the boat goes down. Everybody knows this.

Jason Bradford:

Everybody knows.

Rob Dietz:

There's all these great disaster moments in that movie. And one of the things that I was thinking about is that quote. You guys heard that famous quote? "It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

Jason Bradford:

Of course.

Asher Miller:

Sure, yeah.

Rob Dietz:

Of course. So I looked up the guy that said that, his name -

Asher Miller:

You mean the original person?

Rob Dietz:

Asher Miller:

Now keep in mind, he had actually been president Gerald Ford.That's kind of hard to pull off.

Jason Bradford:

Ouch.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. He was not doing well. So his own PR guy is like, "Yeah, anything we do is like rearranging deck chairs on . . "

Asher Miller:

His own PR guy said that? Did he get fired right after that? He got thrown off the Titanic. Well, isn't that what we're doing? We're rearranging deck chairs. We're all losing the primary right now, but all we're doing is just trying to cobble together solutions to just keep going.

Rob Dietz:

You're talking about as we continue to expand population, expand consumption while we've got climate change, biodiversity extinction.

Asher Miller:

Yeah, I'm trying to bandaid everything.

Jason Bradford:

We're doubling down on what our previous activities have been that led us to this problem in the first place.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, but that deck chair would look really nice over there in the corner.

Asher Miller:

How do you rearrange it when it's listing at a 45 degree angle?

Rob Dietz:

It's where you get duct tape and tape it to the deck.

Jason Bradford:

What we are asking the people of this show, why we do this show is we're saying like, okay, it's not going to work. The ship's going to go down, but there's a lot you can do to prepare to have enough lifeboats, let's say, or to train people on how to use their life jackets. Hard to do in the panic of the moment, but -

Asher Miller:

But doable.

Jason Bradford:

But doable. And if you're prepared, maybe, and trained and thinking about if it's going down, I need to use all my resources really effectively, you can probably save more people than otherwise would've happened. One of the interesting conversations in that last scene was the people in the lifeboats were like, do we actually row into the crowds of people in the water or not or are we going to get swamped?

Rob Dietz:

Aha. So this is where you lead into the idea of lifeboat ethics.

Jason Bradford:

Right.

Rob Dietz:

You've got people in a lifeboat and there's people in the water. Do you risk picking them up and swamping your boat or do you just cruelly sit back and watch them drown?

Asher Miller:

If there's not enough room for everybody, how do you decide?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. And I looked up, there's an ecologist named Garrett Harden. He's famous -

Asher Miller:

He was not an ecologist, was he really?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah.

Asher Miller:

Oh my God.

Rob Dietz:

He's famous for his treatise on the Tragedy of the Commons.

Asher Miller:

I thought he was just a right wing fascist.

Jason Bradford:

No, no. He was a professor. He was an ecology professor.

Asher Miller:

He was an actual ecologist?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah and he actually wrote -

Asher Miller:

Not a good look for the rest of us.

Rob Dietz:

No. Well, he wrote an article called, "Lifeboat Ethics" and it was in Psychology Today. So we're not talking about peer reviewed journals here, but the subtitle of that article was, "The Case Against Helping the Poor."

Asher Miller:

That was the subtitle?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah.

Asher Miller:

Can you imagine publishing anything anywhere that would have that in the subtitle?

Rob Dietz:

Well, he originally was going to call it "Lifeboat Ethics: Fuck the Poor," but he softened up a little bit.

Asher Miller:

That's right.

Rob Dietz:

Well, so the whole idea, of course, is he has this analogy where he's saying the rich countries of the world are like the people who are already safely in a lifeboat and the poor countries are the Jack and Rose floating around in the water. He says it's harsh, but we can't pick up anybody else. You have problems if you do that.

Asher Miller:

Right.

Rob Dietz:

It's the worst outcome of all.

Asher Miller:

I think he was saying there's not enough room on the lifeboats for everybody. So how do you decide who to save? But then he goes off on this huge rant about population, and he is talking in ecological terms. I mean, he's basically saying a lot of, and this is in the '70s, I think he wrote this.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, 74.

Jason Bradford:

Oh this is after Ehrlich and limits to growth. And so sure, there's a lot of this conversation happening.

Asher Miller:

And he was, I think, responding to this kind of idea within environmental circles, thinking about the earth as a spaceship.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, spaceship. We've used that analogy here on this show.

Rob Dietz:

Tragedy of the Commons, that was his original analogy and thinking of the Earth as a spaceship.

Asher Miller:

He's saying you shouldn't think of it that way. You should think of it as some of us get on lifeboats and some of us don't. And he was, again, pointing I think a lot to population. There's been folks, if you want to call them on the conservative right, anti-immigrant, maybe racist folks like Richard Spencer, who's one of the leaders of the alt-right movement who have jumped on the bandwagon, have actually referenced lifeboat ethics directly as justification for the idea of closing borders.

Rob Dietz:

Well, and that's what's so weird. So the lifeboat ethics argument on its face seems pretty believable. You can kind of picture yourself in that scene and sort of be, yeah, you don't want your boat to get swamped, but it's so simplistic. In fact, I think Hardin, even in his article, shoots himself in the foot with some just craziness. I mean, his upshot for American policy is basically close the border. There should be no immigrants into the United States for environmental reasons. And he even tries to get around the criticism that he knows is going to come his way because he kind of says anybody who publicly questions this will be accused of being a bigot. But then he sort of goes and says, "Well, my ancestors," because he's a white guy, "stole this land." There's this quote in there where he says, "We Americans of non-Indian ancestry can look upon ourselves as the descendants of thieves who are guilty morally, if not legally, of stealing this land from its Indian owners. Should we then give back the land to the now living American descendants of those Indians?" He actually asked this question. And then his answer -

Asher Miller:

And what's his answer?

Rob Dietz:

It is amazing. He says, "However morally or logically sound this proposal may be, I, for one, am unwilling to live by it and know no one else who is, period, the end, no other discussion." This is basically like, "I don't like it. I don't want it. I don't want it."

Asher Miller:

This piece is called lifeboat ethics, but there's basically no ethics here at all, right?

Jason Bradford:

Well, I mean, this is a really tough situation because I think you're right in a sense. He's logical. If there is a lifeboat situation and the lifeboat only has a capacity of 20 per lifeboat, you don't have enough and there's too many people, that's bad planning, right? Okay. Horrible job there. But again, right, you have to make horrible, horrible sacrifices. But the problem I see from his perspective is that he doesn't talk about all the stuff we could be doing both to prevent the need for this. And that's what's sad, right? It's like, do you really want to live in a world where you've done this, you've created this us versus them, you've hardened all your borders?

I mean, there's an argument like, sure, do I want anybody who wants to come into the U.S. and then adopt the American lifestyle to do that? There's a problem. And part of the ecologists of the world are probably going to say the American consumption patterns are the worst. We need our population to go down and immigrants are one of the only reasons why they're going up. And so you can make these logical connections, but you also then, if you're going to do that, you should be talking about how you have less consumption in the U.S.? How do you prevent overpopulation?

Asher Miller:

But he's actually not saying that.

Jason Bradford:

That's the problem.

Asher Miller:

He's explicitly saying the opposite. If you read that piece, he talks about the fact that effectively rich nations, and we can call them European or nations of European descent.

Rob Dietz:

Colonialist Bastards would be another nickname, maybe.

Asher Miller:

Their numbers being relatively low in terms of global population and that gap is increasing because people in the global south or poor nations are having a lot more kids. And he actually says, if we bring them onto the lifeboat, we're going to get even more swamped because they're just going to keep having more kids.

Jason Bradford:

Which usually doesn't happen.

Asher Miller:

No, it doesn't happen. It's not based on, I mean, you look at affluence and education and the relationship between those things and population, but there's at no point, just like he's unwilling to even consider the possibility of doing some kind of reparative justice for indigenous native populations, descendants of those that were displaced and murdered. He's not even willing to consider any level of that.

Rob Dietz:

Because I, for one, am against it.

Asher Miller:

And he's not willing to consider that those in the most affluent nations and the most affluent of those within those nations might actually reduce their consumption.

Jason Bradford:

Right, exactly.

Rob Dietz:

Well, that's his problem is this all or nothing argument. You could share some resources. You could be working together to solve the problems.

Asher Miller:

But the flip side is also true. Now, this view to me is utterly reprehensible.

Rob Dietz:

So can I add a key fact you guys may not know? So Garrett Harden, who, like I said, is sort of an esteemed ecologist, but he's also listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist.

Asher Miller:

Yeah, this has been discussed. The sorted history of some strands of environmentalism and especially those who have been concerned about population issues with the most negative, horrible forces, cultural forces in the U.S. and in other countries. And we sometimes see the flip happening, which is those concerns being completely dismissed because they are being expressed by these really reprehensible people. The middle gets lost.

Jason Bradford:

The middle gets lost.

Asher Miller:

If people are expressing a concern about the sustainability crises we face, whether it's they're concerned about resources or they're concerned about climate change, and their response to that is to close borders, what they're basically saying is we want to maximize resources for people within these borders and fuck everybody else effectively.

Rob Dietz:

Right.

Jason Bradford:

Asher Miller:

Right. So that's where we grow food.

Jason Bradford:

I raised my hand. I said, "Well, that's where we grow food for the nation, not just fresh vegetables."

Rob Dietz:

We'll do that at Death Valley. That's what an economist would say.

Jason Bradford:

Well, he just said, "Well, we're just going to import it." So if the idea is you can always import whatever you need from somewhere else because they're not making asinine decisions, then yeah, why not have open borders and why not just trade and growth will take care of things? But if you actually believe there is going to be a problem with that and you're going to have to localize economies and people are going to have to live closer to relying on the local biocapacity, then yes, there's going to be a mismatch. I mean, the mismatch is going to happen within the U.S. itself, let alone between say Central America and North America. So I think it's definitely a tension point. And this is the thing is the right is going to resolve that tension in their brain by saying, "Us versus them, draconian." And I don't think the left has the ability right now to talk about this stuff honestly and say, "What is the humane, sensible way to maybe stabilize these countries as much as possible. There's all these things we could be doing. We could be preparing the Titanic with a lot more sense than we are, and that's what really makes me sad.

Alex Leff:

This is where the investigation gets uncomfortable because once you seriously entertain the possibility that civilizations can't grow forever, difficult questions start to emerge. There's questions about resources, population, migration, equality. And unfortunately, some people respond to those questions in, let's just say, pretty ugly ways. If talking about limits leads us to ugly places, maybe we just pretend there aren't any limits at all? No, I know. Pretending doesn't change reality.

Asher Miller:

If we start by recognizing things are going to break down and there's going to be chaos in that breakdown, and we need to be flexible in how we deal with that. We have to be smart and adept in thinking systems as we're dealing with that, then we could be much more successful in terms of thinking about what the reorganization looks like than if we're just scrambling to try to hold on to a vision that we had previously about how we're supposed to be. I think it starts with even just internalizing that that is not only likely, it's inevitable, right?

We can't know the form of it. We talked about sort of a slower going phased kind of collapse and release versus an acute holy shit overnight collapse. We can't necessarily know that, but we can really process the fact that these cycles are inevitable on some level. And that means psychologically coming to terms with that. And then I think it's about, and we've talked about this before, it's about investing our energy then in preparing to enter into that release phase in a way where the energy gets directed in the right ways, where the collapse maybe doesn't operate under a no quarters principle where everyone's taken out, that we're trying to protect the things that matter the most and shepherd people and the system through the process and protect what's most necessary. The things, the resources that we want to keep, our knowledge, our values, other species, all those things, and then putting our energies into modeling the kinds of ways - So we think about a reorganization like a forest, the seeds that get planted in the opportune moments are really, really key. So what are the things that we could be doing to plant the right kinds of seeds?

Rob Dietz:

Well, we've got a colleague named Eileen Christ. She is an environmental philosopher and she wrote a nice article called "Decoupling the Global Population Problem from Immigration Issues." She's basically saying you can put aside the argument about immigration. And she says, when it comes to concerns about overpopulation, it's a problem that we can address within a human rights framework. I mean, that's really good news and there's only three pieces to it. One is you've got to empower men and women all over the world with accessible, affordable, state-of-the-art access to family planning. The second is agitating for women worldwide to have equal status with men. The equality piece. And then the third is providing, this is the easiest, I think, providing comprehensive sexuality education, age appropriate information all through the years of schooling. So you can do those three things and you have a path to stabilizing the global population. But the catch is that these are policies that require widespread trust and cooperation. It's not us versus them. We're all in it together.

Alex Leff:

Okay, I see. There are other ways to think about the population issue. We don't have to just ignore it. We don't have to stop caring about other people as we approach collapse. In fact, this is our opportunity to make sure the reorganization of society on the other side of collapse takes others into account.

Asher Miller:

There are many people who've been promised but have never received the benefits of the system that we've been existing in. You think about people whose aspirations have been told their aspirations should be getting a better job, getting more income, being able to buy more things, being able to travel. There's actually still a minority of the world's ever been on an airplane. Do you know what I mean? So there are people who've never been able to benefit from that and many people who have actually been victims of that system. I think for those of us who benefited, and we're really fortunate, the three of us in our current circumstances is to make sure that we offer people something, a vision for that future of what that reorganization phase looks like. You know what I mean? That is a positive and hopeful vision of the future. Maybe it's not predicated on consuming more shit, but it's -

Rob Dietz:

You can't just aim for sustainability. You have to aim for justice as well. And we've talked about this over and over, shared sacrifice and the need to all be in it together. And it's not like any of this is easy, but the best you can do is to start trying to incorporate those values. And I think the worldview that we've talked about here, this adaptive cycle is a really good way to view it and then start figuring out how do you turn toward if we're going to go through a collapse, if we're going to have an opportunity to reorganization, how do we try to direct that in a way that is likely to bring us a moment of justice and a chance for sustainability?

Alex Leff:

So if collapse and reorganization are inevitable parts of every adaptive cycle, maybe what's most important is who we choose to become when it arrives. The Titanic was a tragedy of poor planning and not enough lifeboats, but is there a different story we can look to?

Asher Miller:

We have to recognize that we're going to be dealing with these really difficult questions. We have to see that it's in our own self-interest to ensure that everybody has some way of surviving what's coming, and we have to build trust. Now, I think that the rate of change is a really key question here and it's a variable we can't really control.

Jason Bradford:

Is it going to be possible to do this?

Asher Miller:

If you get flooded overnight, that's different than if you have a plan where you say this is happening, we need to be anticipating this and you're getting a trickle versus a flood. You can adjust.

Rob Dietz:

Well, we started with the Titanic and lifeboats there and Garrett Harden's lifeboat ethics. There's another story that involves lifeboats. It probably has a few lessons here. I'm sure you guys know about the Antarctic adventures or misadventures of Ernest Shackleton on the endurance.

Jason Bradford:

I read one of the books about that. Is there a movie about that too yet?

Rob Dietz:

I don't think there is, but there- There should be.

Jason Bradford:

There should be. I don't think the love stories are going to go over as well.

Rob Dietz:

It's not as good. Nobody would -

Asher Miller:

300 days locked in a tiny little boat. That doesn't make for great filmmaking.

Rob Dietz:

So let me summarize what happened in case people don't know. So the idea for the Shackleton Adventure was to sail to Antarctica on one side of it and then hike across the continent with dog sleds through the South Pole.

Asher Miller:

First of all, why the fuck would you do this?

Jason Bradford:

To be the first.

Rob Dietz:

Asher Miller:

The war was already on, wasn't it?

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, it was getting going right then. So it was weird timing. And they sailed into the Weddle Sea and they got locked up in the ice there.

Asher Miller:

Which by the way, they'd been warned about. Don't do this.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. On January 19th, they became trapped. So then they're in these ice flows and they basically said, okay, we just got to turn the boat into a winter camp and wait until the ice melts. But what started happening is the ice started shifting around and crushing the timbers of the boat. And basically they had to abandon ship and form this -

Asher Miller:

By the way, this is after how many. I mean, they were on that boat for a long time.

Rob Dietz:

Well, once they had to abandon, they took these lifeboats and they sailed over to Elephant Island and it was the first time they got on land for 497 days. And this is why you're right, you can't make a movie about this. Day one, we're in the ice. Day two, we're in the ice.

Asher Miller:

Can you imagine?

Rob Dietz:

Day three -

Asher Miller:

The acting chops you need to show the excitement that they felt touching rocks for the first time in 400 days.

Jason Bradford:

I think someone's got to take this on. This sounds fantastic.

Asher Miller:

It's got to be Leonardo.

Rob Dietz:

Well, so then this thing turns into a crazier journey. Shackleton took some of his crew and they made a 720 nautical mile open boat journey in the lifeboats back to South Georgia Island. But the problem is there's some whaling station there, but they landed on the other side of the island. So now they got to make this treacherous mountainous trip over.

Asher Miller:

Which by the way, do they even have food at this point?

Jason Bradford:

They're eating blubber and stuff.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, they've probably got a little bit. Yeah. They were hunting penguins and stuff on the ice.

Jason Bradford:

There's a lot of fat.

Rob Dietz:

There were three of these men who had to hike their way to this whaling outpost and they drove screws into their boots to act as crampons and they had 50 feet of rope in a carpenter's ads. I didn't even know what an ads was, but it's kind of like a little tool for chopping into wood. But it's not an ice ax.

Jason Bradford:

Closest you can get.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah, this is what they had. And they made it. And basically long story short, they rescued everybody and got them back home safely, which I started thinking of all these possible analogies, but then I was wondering, well, I certainly didn't think of this first. So I looked it up and there's a Harvard professor who -

Jason Bradford:

Creds.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. Her name is Nancy Cohn. I hope I'm pronouncing her last name correctly. And she made a case study for students to study leadership based on Shackleton's Adventure.

Asher Miller:

Which part? The part where he fucked up and got stuck -

Jason Bradford:

Exactly

Asher Miller:

- on the ice or the part where he saved all of these people?

Jason Bradford:

It's complex, isn't it?

Rob Dietz:

It's probably the second, but there are lessons to learn from both sides, I'm sure.

Jason Bradford:

Just keep going. Just stick with your plan forever.

Rob Dietz:

Yeah. Well, so she wrote an article about this for the New York Times a few years back about sort of the leadership lessons from that expedition. And I think the very most important one, and this is something to think about as we face emergency times and climate migration, is that what Shackleton did is he reinvented the goal of the expedition. He made a shift. We're not exploring Antarctica anymore. We're trying to go home and survive and just completely redid all plans, everything that this mission was about.

Jason Bradford:

Right. Right. Do we need some kind of absolute clear as a bell crisis to basically have the world wake up? And this is a problem. It's not just one person having to wake up. It's enough to say, okay, new goals. We're going to survive as opposed to grow forever.

Alex Leff:

So maybe this is where our investigation has to head next. If every civilization goes through an adaptive cycle, the question is, what kind of society do we want to reorganize into? What would a more just, equitable and resilient society actually look like? Not just because that would be the best morally, but because taking care of one another might be one of the best survival strategies we have. How do we shift from a civilization obsessed with endless growth to one that's trying to make it home in one piece? A civilization that's trying to leave behind a livable world for the generations that come after us.

Our adaptive cycle map has gotten us a long way today, but we still haven't found Jason, Rob, and Asher. And we've only got one episode left in the series to find them. Man, the stakes couldn't be higher. And if we're going to solve this case, we're going to have to look in the one place we haven't searched yet. The future. The future. See you next time.

Melody Travers:

That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.