OUR CURRENT HORIZON of ecological disaster has made catastrophe theory into something far more immediate than a mathematical problem. After decades of cyberfashion and grandiose claims for virtual reality and post-history, Nature has returned to History in a form as apocalyptic as was the Cold War threat of nuclear destruction. Even in commercial cinema, the sublime fantasy of disaster films now includes the destructive effects of global warming (in Roland Emmerich's 2004 The Day After Tomorrow). Theories of a supposed “clash of civilizations” must then coexist with theories of the perishability of all human civilization as such. So Jared Diamond, the same biogeographer and psychologist who, less than a decade ago, wrote a bestselling environmentalist narrative of Why The West Won, has recently published a more sobering consideration of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Implicit in Diamond's account of the failure of Easter Island civilization is the possibility that the skyscrapers of the American metropolis may suffer the same fate as Easter Island's famous stone statues. Bertolt Brecht already described this prospect from the vantage point of 1920s Germany: “Von diesen Städten wird bleiben, der durch sie hindurchging, der Wind!” (Of these cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!)

The horizon of apocalypse has been central to modernism for over a century, at least since Rimbaud's “ça ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avant” (from Les Illuminations). It has, however, become harder to respond with Brecht’s concluding stanza, in which the poet hopes he will not let his cigar go out “in the earthquakes that will come,” given that such natural disasters are no longer metaphorical or imaginary. Books like Diamond’s accordingly want to help us understand the historical lesson of failed civilizations in hopes that we may not repeat their fate. Others, such as Richard Posner’s Catastrophe: Risk and Response, look for prognostications and offer calculations of how current civilization might avert the risk of ecological catastrophe.