"Collapse" contains a litany of societal / civilization collapses due to environmental degradation or resource depletion. We aren't doing anything entirely new in wrecking the world around us and having it kill us off in return, we're just doing it bigger, more efficiently, and faster than ever before.

The main difference now is that the consequences this time will be global. "Dire", as you termed it, could also be an understatement. Ocean acidification was the scariest thing I have read about in the past year, perhaps the past decade. Losing coral reefs would be bad enough, but losing plankton could pretty much lead to major changes in atmospheric oxygen concentrations (or basically, the loss of all aerobic life on the planet). Sea level rises and temperature change will be catastropic, but if we manage to screw up some of the really big, critical biological systems that keep this planet running, well, nuclear war isn't the only way to wipe out all life forms more complex than bacteria.

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