At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025).

For Scranton, the fate of the civilisation at Chaco Canyon is a microcosm for the crisis now confronting humanity. The challenges we face, from climate change to political instability, are so intractable in part because of their complexity. In this episode, Meehan and Peter discuss Scranton’s analysis of our predicament and his proposal for ‘ethical pessimism’, based on resistance to our bias for optimism, as a way of coping with an uncertain future.

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