Dedication; A Report to the Club of Rome; Advance Praise for The Seneca Effect; Foreword; Contents; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Introduction: Collapse Is Not a Bug, It Is a Feature; Chapter 2: The Mother of All Collapses: The Fall of Rome; 2.1 Seneca and His Times; 2.2 Whence Empires?; 2.2.1 The Great Fall; Chapter 3: Of Collapses Large and Small; 3.1 The Breakdown of Everyday Things; 3.1.1 Why Ships Don't Have Square Windows; 3.1.1.1 Energy and Entropy; 3.1.2 Why Balloons Pop; 3.2 Avalanches; 3.2.1 The Fall of the Great Towers; 3.2.1.1 The Physics of the Hourglass; 3.2.2 Networks

3.3 Financial Avalanches3.3.1 Babylon Revisited; 3.3.1.1 But What Is this "Money" Anyway?; 3.3.1.2 Why Financial Collapses?; 3.4 Famines; 3.4.1 Malthus Was an Optimist; 3.4.1.1 The Land of the Rising Sun; 3.4.1.2 Famines to Come; 3.5 Depletion; 3.5.1 The Shortest-Lived Empire in History; 3.5.2 Tiffany's Fallacy; 3.5.2.1 Thanatia and the Mineral Eschatology; 3.6 Overshoot; 3.6.1 What's Good for the Bee, Is Good for the Hive; 3.6.2 The Fall of the Galactic Empire; 3.7 Gaia's Death: The Collapse of the Earth's Ecosystem; 3.7.1 What Killed the Dinosaurs?; 3.7.1.1 Gaia: the Earth Goddess

3.7.1.2 Hell on EarthChapter 4: Managing Collapse; 4.1 Avoiding Collapse; 4.1.1 Fighting Overexploitation; 4.1.2 Resilience; 4.1.3 Returning from Collapse; 4.1.4 Avoiding Financial Collapses; 4.2 Exploiting Collapse; 4.2.1 Hostile Collapses; 4.2.2 Creative Collapsing; 4.2.3 Pulling the Levers in the Right Direction; Chapter 5: Conclusion; Appendix: Mind-Sized World Models; Figure Copyright Notes; References; Index