COLLAPSE SERIES: Gaya Herrington - Complete global collapse by 2040? The prediction is “right on track”

Wild with Sarah Wilson

Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.

Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Gaya Herrington.

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Gaya Herrington (Club of Rome adviser, “global collapse” expert) hit the headlines when she showed that a world-stopping 1972 MIT study and bestselling book predicting the collapse of civilisation by 2040 was…right on track. She was a KPMG economist and financial advisor to the Dutch government when she released the report in 2021. I read it and was left speechless.

Gaya’s now just published a book, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse, which sets out a bunch of surprising ways we might be able to save ourselves in time. Gaya’s message is stark: Economic growth must stop now! We are hitting the global limits of our more-more-more approach and the decline will be fast. What does the data tell us that can save us? The answer won’t be what you’re expecting. In this chat we flesh out how systems theory works, why we’re obsessed with growth and why rich white men resist change the most.

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of the book Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

Feel free to read the now-famous 1972 paper The Limits to Growth

I mention the chat about the Indigenous knowledge system with Tyson Yunkaporta, you can listen to it here

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