Sustainability or dystopia? What past patterns tell us about where society is heading

Tipping Out of Trouble: How Societies Transformed and How We Can Do So Again Marten Scheffer Cambridge Univ. Press (2026) What connects the collapse of Late Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean some 3,000 years ago, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century, the societal and economic reforms of the US progressive era in the 1890s to 1920s, and falling fertility rates around the world today? According to complex-systems researcher Marten Scheffer in his book, Tipping Out of Trouble , they are all examples of tipping points. Current societies have a crucial, diminishing chance to learn from them how to tip the world towards a sustainable, rather than dystopian, future. Catastrophic change looms as Earth nears climate ‘tipping points’, report says Tipping points have received substantial attention lately in research, the media and books. The focus has been mainly on environmental tipping points, in which gradual changes in conditions, such as rising atmospheric temperatures, reach a point at which parts of the Earth system irreversibly shift to a fundamentally different state. Two books published last year, Earth-system scientist Tim Lenton’s Positive Tipping Points and Am Kipppunkt , written by German journalists Toralf Staud and Benjamin von Brackel, deal with such ‘negative’ tipping points, as well as positive societal ones that might counter them. …