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For example, six thousand years ago, great parts of what is now the Sahara Desert were wet, featuring lakes and swamps that teemed with crocodiles, hippos, and fish. Foley said: “The lines of geologic evidence and evidence from computer models shows that it suddenly went from a pretty wet place to a pretty dry place. Nature isn’t linear. Sometimes you can push on a system and push on a system and, finally, you have the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Once the camel’s back is broken, it often cannot or will not heal the way it was before.

Another co-author, limnologist Stephen Carpenter, past president of the Ecological Society of America, said that this understanding—of the discontinuous nature of ecological change—is beginning to suffuse the scientific community, and then he continued, “We realize that there is a common pattern we’re seeing in ecosystems around the world. Gradual changes in vulnerability accumulate and eventually you get a shock to the system, a flood or a drought, and boom, you’re over into another regime. It becomes a self-sustaining collapse.”40

After I read the article, I received a call from a friend, Roianne Ahn, a woman smart and persistent enough that even a Ph.D. in psychology hasn’t clouded her insight into how people think and act. “It never ceases to amaze me,” she said, “that it takes experts to convince us of what we already know.”

That wasn’t the response I’d been expecting.

She continued, “That’s one of my roles as a therapist. I just listen and reflect back to clients things they know, but don’t have the confidence to believe until they hear an outside expert say them.”

“Do you think people will listen to these scientists?”

“It depends on how much denial they’re in. But the bottom line is that what they’re describing is no big surprise. It’s what happens when a person is under stress: she can only take so much before she falls apart. This is what happens in relationships. It happens in families. It happens in communities. Naturally it will be true on this larger scale, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“We work as hard as we can, even overextend ourselves, to maintain our stability, and when the pressure gets too much, something’s got to give. We collapse. Sometimes that’s bad, sometimes it’s good.”

There was silence while I thought about the fact that some collapses are unnecessary—the breaking down of prisoners under torture, the systematic dismantling of self-esteem under the grinding regime of an abusive parent or partner, ongoing ecological apocalypse—while others can be healing.

She continued, “It’s obvious why people try to maintain healthy structures that make them happy. It’s not always quite so obvious why we, and I include myself, seem to work just as hard to maintain structures and systems that make them miserable. We’re all familiar with the notion that many addicts have to hit rock bottom before they change, even when their addiction is killing them.”

I asked, “When do you think the culture will change?”

“This culture is clearly addicted to civilization,” she said. “So I think the answer to that question is another one: how far down does it have to go before it hits bottom?”

I talked to another friend about all of this. It was late at night. The wind blew outside. The computer was off. We heard the wind. This friend, an excellent thinker and writer, used to live in New York City, and carries with her a certain loyalty not only to that great city, but to cities in general. She was simultaneously sympathetic to and exasperated by me and what I said. After we’d been talking for hours, she asked, reasonably enough, “What right do you have to tell people they can’t live in cities?”

“None at all. I couldn’t care less where people live. But people who live in cities have no right to demand—much less steal—resources from everybody else.”

“Do you have a problem if people in cities just buy them?

“Buy resources, or people?” I was thinking of a line by Henry Adams: “We have a single system,” he wrote, and in “that system the only question is the price at