The Collapse of Civilization: "It Wouldn’t Be An Adventure"

It's disturbing to think that some people might think that the collapse of civilisation could be an adventure, clearly they haven't heard of the Dark Ages or watched Mad Max -well maybe they have done the latter but not realised that most of us would be the ones dying. So this article It Wouldn’t Be An Adventure is right to draw our attention to the words of Kim Stanley Robinson

"'It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.
For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.'

But right also to remind us:

The other half of this coin, of course, is that many of the things we need to do to avoid meltdown will also help us lead happier, more secure lives, both on local and national levels.

The interesting thought experiment suggested is the possibility that at the end of the 70's we might have chosen other roads politically and they might have put us in a better place now. One stab at that thought-experiment in counterfactual history is here mostly done in the comments section.