COVID-19 can be seen as an overwhelming singularity for the entire world; a force from which no society can escape. This draws immediate comparison to other breakdowns in the relationship to nature which we find in long crises across centuries and even millennia of human development. History is full of warnings of how events in the ecosphere interacted with the human world to generate extreme breakdowns. The crises of the 14th and 17th centuries drove changes in the socioeconomic and institutional organization of societies across the globe. This modernization was, itself, a violent process involving intense struggle between classes and states, which overlay the hardship brought about by the changing ecological context. Yet, viewed in retrospect, it is still possible to discern some sense of scientific and other forms of social progress within this long pattern of historical change. But different cases of long crises offer more dire warnings of the potentials for eco-driven system breakdown. A compelling example is the Late Bronze Age collapse. In the first half of the 12th century bc, the civilizations of the interconnected regional system encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean, Aegean and Western Asia all collapsed. They included the Egyptian empire, the Kassites of Babylonian, the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece, and the Hittites whose empire centred on Anatolia. Climate change, producing severe, generalized drought, has been identified as an underlying environmental condition. These fractures in the human ecology prompted socioeconomic crises in what were, at the time, some of the most advanced societies on Earth (Kaniewski et al, 2010; Drake, 2012). Like in our own era, however, these ecological conditions interpenetrate with causal dynamics arising from the social world.