The Seneca Effect

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is member of the scientific committee of ASPO (Association for the study of peak oil) and regular contributor of "The Oil Drum" and "Resilience.org". His blog in English is called "Cassandra's legacy". His most recent book in English Extracted: How the Quest for Global Mining Wealth is Plundering the Planet (Chelsea Green”, 2014. He is also the author of The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer 2011).

Introduction.- Seneca's times: The fall of the Roman Empire.- The Seneca collapse as a critical phenomenon: why do things break?.- Networks: the Seneca collapse of complex structures.- Fast and Furious Seneca: Financial collapses.- Destroying what keeps you alive: the tragedy of the commons.- The World as a Giant Bathtub: the Seneca Collapse of Complex Systems.- World models and the collapse of everything.- The dark heart of the fossil empires.- Malthus was an optimist: famines and population collapses.- The Seneca asteroid: climate change as the ultimate collapse.- Managing complex systems: how to pull the levers in the right direction.- Conclusion: How to euthanize an empire.

"The bulk of this book is a catalogue of collapses. Bardi starts small with structural failures, such as collapsing building, avalanches, or cracks in metal objects and how these grow. He then walks the reader through a selection of cheerful examples of past or imminent collapses on larger scales ... . Bardi's book is an interesting and worthwhile exercise in bringing together many seemingly disparate topics into one framework that should get readers thinking." (Leon, NHBS Book Shop, nhbs.com, September, 2018)

“The bulk of this book is a catalogue of collapses. Bardi starts small with structural failures, such as collapsing building, avalanches, or cracks in metal objects and how these grow. He then walks the reader through a selection of cheerful examples of past or imminent collapses on larger scales … . Bardi’s book is an interesting and worthwhile exercise in bringing together many seemingly disparate topics into one framework that should get readers thinking.” (Leon, NHBS Book Shop, nhbs.com, September, 2018)