Collapse & renewal: Civilisation at the brink of transformation with Nafeez Ahmed, Ginie Servant-Miklos & Till Kellerhoff

As climate chaos, political polarisation and collapsing trust shake the foundations of society, we stand at a turning point. These overlapping crises are not just signs of collapse but symptoms of a deeper breakdown, a system that puts profit before people, competition before community and short-term gain before the planet we share.

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, host Till Kellerhoff speaks with members of The Club of Rome, Nafeez Ahmed and Ginie Servant-Miklos about how this turmoil could seed renewal, a once-in-a-civilisation chance to reimagine how we live, work and care for one another. They explore why the far right gains ground amid chaos, why progressives struggle to respond and how tech billionaires exploit instability to sell the illusion that technology alone can save us.

Examining the psychological toll of losing our shared “normal,” the conversation invites listeners to move beyond despair, challenge outdated assumptions and engage in the collective renewal already emerging through new forms of economics, energy and education.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Till: Today, it feels like everything is falling apart. Climate chaos, political breakdown, collapsing social trust. But what if these aren't separate crises, but symptoms of a deeper systemic decline? At the heart of it lies a way of living based on self-maximisation and extraction from each other, from other species and from the planet itself. But collapse isn't only about ending.

I'm Till Kellerhoff, and in this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, we explore collapse not just as destruction, but as a potential phase shift, a reorganisation of human civilisation, through the flows of energy, technology and culture.

We ask, why does the far right seem to thrive in this chaos? Why do progressive movements struggle to respond, and how can we avoid falling into despair and imagine new systems that deliver wellbeing for all on a finite planet?  

I'm delighted to be joined by not one, but two members of The Club of Rome, Nafeez Ahmed, member of The Club of Rome, systems theorist and investigative journalist, Nafeez has been writing and researching about the intersection of major global ecological crises from climate, energy, food water and how they intersect with social and political crisis.

His most recent book is Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. Welcome Nafeez.

Nafeez: Thank you

Till: And I'm very happy to welcome Ginie Servant-Miklos, member of The Club of Rome, an environmental educator and Assistant Professor in Behavioral Science at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Science in Rotterdam.

Her most recent book is Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as we know it. Welcome Ginie.

Ginie: Thank you

Till: Ginie, so your recent book carries the term collapse in the title and Nafeez you also wrote an article already in 2016 titled Failing states: Collapsing systems, biophysical triggers of political violence. Before we get into the details of collapse, you both seem to share a certain fascination for this concept of collapse. Where does that come from? Why is that? Maybe we start with you Nafeez.

Nafeez: So, I think collapse is something which is often seen kind of taboo in our societies.

You know, the idea that things can be really falling apart is not something that we hear much systematic discussion of.  But I think increasingly in the last few years, even though the concept, or the, you know, the word collapse, is not something we're always seeing in the news media, but I think it's becoming something which we're all feeling, and a lot of people are now feeling this sense that something isn't right.

Something is falling apart. And it almost feels like everything is falling apart around us, but we don't really know why. So, the idea of collapse, I think, you know, begins to kind of put a bit of a specificity to what we're all experiencing. But what I hope, increasingly, we're seeing is that there's a body of quite strong scientific literature across both the natural sciences and the social sciences, showing that collapse is a real phenomenon in nature, and has therefore massive implications across our societies, our economies, our cultures, precisely because, as we're increasingly beginning to see, our societies, our economies, our cultures, are rooted in the natural world. They're not separate from it. They're actually very much part of it.

So, these life cycles that we can see in the natural systems, where, you know, we see systems growing, thriving, but then also experiencing collapses, and that's kind of a part of this, of a natural process. These are things which we can also see at a big macro scale in human society. And in my view, I think industrial civilisation as we know it is on the cusp of a very similar type of