Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2 page)

hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more centrally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces
beyond their owners' control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of
their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the
countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning
of threats from distant enemy societies.

The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their
current status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and
their spouses in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is
currently prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts
one of the highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim,
Trudy, and Dan Huls, who are among Huls Farm's owners, personally took me on a tour of their high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse
in the foreseeable future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the
Norse bishop of southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years
ago. Greenland Norse society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabitants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy,
or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone
walls of Gardar barn and nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that
I was able to count the individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me to
day of Gardar's former attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceiv
able as does the decline of Huls Farm and the U.S. today.

Let me make clear: in drawing these parallels between Huls and Gardar Farms, I am not claiming that Huls Farm and American society are doomed
to decline. At present, the truth is quite the opposite: Huls Farm is in the
process of expanding, its advanced new technology is being studied for
adoption by neighboring farms, and the United States is now the most powerful country in the world. Nor am I claiming that farms or societies in gen
eral are prone to collapse: while some have indeed collapsed like Gardar,
others have survived uninterruptedly for thousands of years. Instead, my
trips to Huls and Gardar Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing envi
ronmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated.
Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined Gardar
Farm and Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also strug-

gled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse),
and others succeeded (like the Japanese and Tikopians). The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on
succeeding.

Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or van
ished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imag
ined in his poem "Ozymandias." By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a
considerable area, for an extended time. The phenomenon of collapses is
thus an extreme form of several milder types of decline, and it becomes
arbitrary to decide how drastic the decline of a society must be before it
qualifies to be labeled as a collapse. Some of those milder types of decline
include the normal minor rises and falls of fortune, and minor political/
economic/social restructurings, of any individual society; one society's con
quest by a close neighbor, or its decline linked to the neighbor's rise, with
out change in the total population size or complexity of the whole region;
and the replacement or overthrow of one governing elite by another. By
those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor
declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern
U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia,
and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean (map, pp. 4-5).

The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a roman
tic fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vaca
tions in order to experience them at firsthand as tourists. We feel drawn to
their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that
they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power
of their builders
—they boast "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" in
Shelley's words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning the great structures
that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so
mighty end up collapsing? What were the fates of its individual citizens?— did they move away, and (if so) why, or did they die there in some unpleas
ant way? Lurking behind this romantic mystery is the nagging thought:
might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists

someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York's skyscrapers,
much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?

It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandon
ments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadver
tently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies
depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide
—ecocide—has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scien
tists). The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose
relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), wa
ter management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced
species on native species, human population growth, and increased percapita
impact of people.

Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses consti
tuting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of
hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of
one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally mar
ginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society in
cluded food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting
for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned
masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or dis
ease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural com
plexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw
analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives
—to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senes
cence, and death—and to assume that the long period of senescence that
most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly after reaching peak
numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, every
body in the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajec
tory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion:

different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different
ways, while many societies didn't collapse at all.

The risk of such collapses today is now a matter of increasing concern;
indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some
other Third World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come
to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a threat to global civi
lization. The environmental problems facing us today include the same
eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused
climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy
shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will become globally critical within
the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems
will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies. Much more
likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be "just" a future of signifi
cantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could as
sume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of
wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources. If this rea
soning is correct, then our efforts today will determine the state of the
world in which the current generation of children and young adults lives
out their middle and late years.

But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigor
ously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they un
derestimated? Does it stand to reason that today's human population of
almost seven billion, with our potent modern technology, is causing our en
vironment to crumble globally at a much more rapid rate than a mere few
million people with stone and wooden tools already made it crumble locally
in the past? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating
new problems faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource
(e.g., wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute
some new resource (e.g., plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)?
Isn't the rate of human population growth declining, such that we're already
on course for the world's population to level off at some manageable num
ber of people?

All of these questions illustrate why those famous collapses of past civili
zations have taken on more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some practical lessons that we could learn from all those 
past collapses. We know that some past societies collapsed while others didn't: what made certain societies especially vulnerable? What, exactly, were the processes by which past societies committed ecocide? Why did some past societies fail to see the messes that they were getting into, and that (one would think in retrospect) must have been obvious? Which were the solutions that succeeded in the past? If we could answer these questions, we might be able to identify which societies are now most at risk, and what measures could best help them, without waiting for more Somalia-like collapses.