The ant nest outside my office window has been here longer than the suburb it overlooks. Each morning, I can watch a small stream of ants carry fragments of leaf and earth across the concrete. They are building and maintaining something that will endure.
The irony is not lost on me.
Core idea
Most discussions about ecological collapse focus on future scenarios. Peak oil. Climate tipping points. Biodiversity loss projections for 2050. Any number of targets to hit. These stories frame collapse, or simplification if you prefer a softer description, as something approaching, perhaps from far off. It is a cliff we might still avoid if we act swiftly.
This is a comfortable framing because it preserves agency. If the problem is coming, we can still prevent it. If what Nate Hagens calls The Great Simplification is a future threat, then current systems retain their complexity, their resilience, their capacity for renewal.
Hagens, N. J. (2020). Economics for the future–Beyond the superorganism. Ecological economics, 169, 106520.
But here is the thing.
The great simplification has already occurred. The wheat fields that stretch across continents are biological deserts compared to the grasslands they replaced. The supply chains that deliver goods to supermarket shelves are fragile monocultures of efficiency, stripped of the redundancies that once made communities self-sufficient. The soil beneath our feet has lost half its carbon content in the past century.
What we call normal is actually the end state of a massive simplification process driven by exogenous energy inputs, primarily from fossil fuels.
We have traded complexity for efficiency, resilience for speed, diversity for scale. And all of it is entirely consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Counterpoint
Mainstream environmental discourse operates on the assumption that we are preparing for collapse rather than living within it. This creates a particular kind of narrative comfort because preparation implies time. It suggests that current systems still function adequately, that we have breathing room to implement solutions.
Consider how we discuss food security.
The conversation centres on future threats to production, future climate disruptions, future soil degradation. Meanwhile, the industrial agricultural system that feeds most humans operates with three days of grain reserves in major cities. The genetic diversity of crop varieties has shrunk by 90 percent since 1900. Topsoil disappears at rates that would horrify farmers from any previous century.
This is not a system preparing for stress. This is a system already operating at the edge of its functional capacity, maintained only by constant inputs of fossil energy and synthetic nutrients.
The same pattern holds across infrastructure. Power grids designed for efficiency rather than resilience. Transportation networks dependent on just-in-time delivery. Financial systems that require constant growth to avoid collapse.
These are not robust systems facing future challenges. These are simplified systems already operating beyond their ecological means.
Recognising that simplification is the current state rather than a future threat changes everything about how we approach restoration work. Instead of prevention, we need remediation. Instead of preparing for complexity loss, we need to rebuild complexity within the constraints we have inherited.
This shift in perspective also has practical implications.
Permaculture projects stop being hobby farms for the environmentally minded and become urgent infrastructure repair. Seed saving transforms from nostalgic preservation to essential system restoration. Local food networks cease being lifestyle choices and become necessary redundancies in simplified supply chains.
A mindful sceptic recognises that most sustainability narratives break down when viewed through this lens of simplification as already here.
Carbon offsetting makes little sense if the problem is systemic simplification rather than just emissions. Renewable energy transitions miss the point if they maintain simplified, centralised distribution systems. Conservation efforts focused on individual species ignore the broader web degradation that has already occurred.
Thought challenges
Examine a system you depend on daily... Map the simplifications that have occurred over the past fifty years. Where did redundancy disappear? What backup systems were removed in the name of efficiency? Write down what complexity would need to be rebuilt for genuine resilience.
Choose a mainstream sustainability narrative... Test it against the assumption that simplification has already happened, rather than being a future risk. Which solutions still make sense? Which fall apart? Which new approaches become necessary?
Living in the ruins
The great simplification is not coming. It is here, embedded in the suburban lawns that replaced prairies, the highways that fragmented watersheds, the supply chains that made communities dependent on distant resources.
This recognition is necessary clarity.
We are living in the ruins of more complex systems, maintaining what remains through artificial inputs that cannot last indefinitely.
The work ahead is not prevention but restoration. The question is not whether we can avoid simplification by keeping going under some myth of sustainability, but whether we can rebuild complexity within the constraints of a simplified world.
The ant nest outside my window suggests it might be possible. One fragment at a time.
Evidence Support
Bennett, E. M., Peterson, G. D., & Levitt, E. A. (2005). Looking to the future of ecosystem services. Ecology and Society, 10(1), 53.
TL;DR… discusses how ecosystem services are degraded not as a hypothetical future trend but as the current trajectory in human-managed landscapes that sacrifice complexity for short-term provisioning benefits. The authors present extensive evidence that loss of biodiversity, soil fertility, and resilience are the direct result of simplification driven by industrial energy and agriculture.
Relevance to insight… supports the insight by documenting the present loss of ecological complexity and directly linking it to intensification and fossil-fuel-driven monocultures.
Foley, J. A., et al. (2005). Global consequences of land use. Science, 309(5734), 570–574.
TL;DR… how global land-use change driven by mechanised agriculture transforms diverse natural ecosystems into simplified production systems, with cascading effects on water, carbon, and nutrient cycles. Finds that these transformations are already responsible for massive reductions in ecological functionality, not just biodiversity.
Relevance to insight… foundational in demonstrating that the era of ‘simplification’ is contemporary, quantifiable, and inseparable from energy-intensive land management.
Rockström, J., et al. (2009). Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2), 32.
TL;DR… the boundaries within which civilisation can operate safely and details how the energetic simplification of agro-ecological and biogeochemical systems has already breached several planetary thresholds. The main finding is that overshoots in biogeochemical flows and biodiversity loss stem from current, not future, simplification trajectories.
Relevance to insight… the planetary boundaries concept crystallises how systemic simplification underpinned by fossil energy has already destabilised key earth systems.
Newbold, T., et al. (2016). Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment. Science, 353(6296), 288-291.
TL;DR… quantifies how biodiversity levels in most human-dominated regions have already fallen below safe planetary thresholds due to the simplification of landscapes for production. Newbold and colleagues use global datasets to demonstrate that current agricultural and infrastructural systems are already simplified to the point of systemic risk, challenging the “future risk” narrative.
Relevance to insight… how biodiversity and system complexity losses are not looming threats but ongoing reality.
Love the temporal reframe here. Most people treat collapse as this distant event when we're actualy operating in post-collapse maintenance mode. The 3-day grain reserve example is chilling because it exposes how fragile so-called 'normal' really is. I remeber studying soil carbon loss in undergrad and thinking it was a slow burn issue, but then realizing half of it gone in a century means we're way past prevention.