Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (3 page)

But there are also differences between the modern world and its problems, and those past societies and their problems. We shouldn't be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and, soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons.

Efforts to understand past collapses have had to confront one major controversy and four complications. The controversy involves resistance to the idea that past peoples (some of them known to be ancestral to peoples currently alive and vocal) did things that contributed to their own decline. We are much more conscious of environmental damage now than we were a mere few decades ago. Even signs in hotel rooms now invoke love of the environment to make us feel guilty if we demand fresh towels or let the water run. To damage the environment today is considered morally culpable.

Not surprisingly, Native Hawaiians and Maoris don't like paleontologists telling them that their ancestors exterminated half of the bird species that had evolved on Hawaii and New Zealand, nor do Native Americans like archaeologists telling them that the Anasazi deforested parts of the southwestern U.S. The supposed discoveries by paleontologists and archaeolo
gists sound to some listeners like just one more racist pretext advanced by
whites for dispossessing indigenous peoples. It's as if scientists were saying, "Your ancestors were bad stewards of their lands, so they deserved to be dis
possessed." Some American and Australian whites, resentful of government
payments and land retribution to Native Americans and Aboriginal Aus
tralians, do indeed seize on the discoveries to advance that argument today. Not only indigenous peoples, but also some anthropologists and archaeologists who study them and identify with them, view the recent supposed dis
coveries as racist lies.

Some of the indigenous peoples and the anthropologists identifying
with them go to the opposite extreme. They insist that past indigenous peoples were (and modern ones still are) gentle and ecologically wise stewards
of their environments, intimately knew and respected Nature, innocently
lived in a virtual Garden of Eden, and could never have done all those bad
things. As a New Guinea hunter once told me, "If one day I succeed in
shooting a big pigeon in one direction from our village, I wait a week before
hunting pigeons again, and then I go out in the opposite direction from the
village." Only those evil modern First World inhabitants are ignorant of Na
ture, don't respect the environment, and destroy it.

In fact, both extreme sides in this controversy
—-the racists and the be
lievers in a past Eden—are committing the error of viewing past indigenous
peoples as fundamentally different from (whether inferior to or superior to)
modern First World peoples. Managing environmental resources sustain-
ably has
always
been difficult, ever since
Homo sapiens
developed modern
inventiveness, efficiency, and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago.
Beginning with the first human colonization of the Australian continent
around 46,000 years ago, and the subsequent prompt extinction of most of Australia's former giant marsupials and other large animals, every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans—whether of Australia, North America, South America, Madagascar, the Mediterranean is
lands, or Hawaii and New Zealand and dozens of other Pacific islands—has
been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to kill, or else succumbed to human-associated habitat changes, introduced pest species, and diseases. Any peo
ple can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources, because
of ubiquitous problems that we shall consider later in this book: that the re
sources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient
depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels be
tween years or decades; that it's difficult to get people to agree on exercising 
restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons, to be discussed in later chapters); and that the complexity of ecosys
tems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation
virtually impossible to predict even for a professional ecologist. Environ
mental problems that are hard to manage today were surely even harder to
manage in the past. Especially for past non-literate peoples who couldn't
read case studies of societal collapses, ecological damage constituted a
tragic, unforeseen, unintended consequence of their best efforts, rather than
morally culpable blind or conscious selfishness. The societies that ended up
collapsing were (like the Maya) among the most creative and (for a time)
advanced and successful of their times, rather than stupid and primitive.

Past peoples were neither ignorant bad managers who deserved to be ex
terminated or dispossessed, nor all-knowing conscientious environmental
ists who solved problems that we can't solve today. They were people like us,
facing problems broadly similar to those that we now face. They were prone
either to succeed or to fail, depending on circumstances similar to those
making us prone to succeed or to fail today. Yes, there are differences be
tween the situation we face today and that faced by past peoples, but there are still enough similarities for us to be able to learn from the past.

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke histori
cal assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to
justify treating them fairly. In many or most cases, historians and archaeolo
gists have been uncovering overwhelming evidence that this assumption
(about Eden-like environmentalism) is wrong. By invoking this assumption
to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their envi
ronmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another
people.

That's the controversy about past ecological collapses. As for the complications, of course it's not true that all societies are doomed to collapse because of environmental damage: in the past some societies did while others didn't; the real question is why only some societies proved fragile, and what distin
guished those that collapsed from those that didn't. Some societies that I
shall discuss, such as the Icelanders and Tikopians, succeeded in solving ex
tremely difficult environmental problems, have thereby been able to persist 
for a long time, and are still going strong today. For example, when Norwe
gian colonists of Iceland first encountered an environment superficially
similar to that of Norway but in reality very different, they inadvertently de
stroyed much of Iceland's topsoil and most of its forests. Iceland for a long
time was Europe's poorest and most ecologically ravaged country. However,
Icelanders eventually learned from experience, adopted rigorous measures
of environmental protection, and now enjoy one of the highest per-capita
national average incomes in the world. Tikopia Islanders inhabit a tiny
island so far from any neighbors that they were forced to become self-
sufficient in almost everything, but they micromanaged their resources and
regulated their population size so carefully that their island is still produc
tive after 3,000 years of human occupation. Thus, this book is not an uninterrupted series of depressing stories of failure, but also includes success
stories inspiring imitation and optimism.

In addition, I don't know of any case in which a society's collapse can
be attributed solely to environmental damage: there are always other contributing factors. When I began to plan this book, I didn't appreciate those complications, and I naively thought that the book would just be about
environmental damage. Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to under
stand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors
—
environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners—may or may not prove significant for a particular soci
ety. The fifth set of factors—the society's responses to its environmental
problems—always proves significant. Let's consider these five sets of factors
one by one, in a sequence not implying any primacy of cause but just conve
nience of presentation.

A first set of factors involves damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment, as already discussed. The extent and reversibility of that
damage depend partly on properties of people (e.g., how many trees they cut down per acre per year), and partly on properties of the environment
(e.g., properties determining how many seedlings germinate per acre, and how rapidly saplings grow, per year). Those environmental properties are
referred to either as fragility (susceptibility to damage) or as resilience (po
tential for recovery from damage), and one can talk separately of the fragility
or resilience of an area's forests, its soils, its fish populations, and so on.
Hence the reasons why only certain societies suffered environmental col
lapses might in principle involve either exceptional imprudence of their
people, exceptional fragility of some aspects of their environment, or both.

A next consideration in my five-point framework is climate change, a
term that today we tend to associate with global warming caused by hu
mans. In fact, climate may become hotter or colder, wetter or drier, or more
or less variable between months or between years, because of changes in
natural forces that drive climate and that have nothing to do with humans. Examples of such forces include changes in the heat put out by the sun, volcanic eruptions that inject dust into the atmosphere, changes in the ori
entation of the Earth's axis with respect to its orbit, and changes in the distribution of land and ocean over the face of the Earth. Frequently discussed
cases of natural climate change include the advance and retreat of continental ice sheets during the Ice Ages beginning over two million years ago, the
so-called Little Ice Age from about
a.d.
1400 to 1800, and the global cooling
following the enormous volcanic eruption of Indonesia's Mt. Tambora on
April 5, 1815. That eruption injected so much dust into the upper atmo
sphere that the amount of sunlight reaching the ground decreased until the dust settled out, causing widespread famines even in North America and
Europe due to cold temperatures and reduced crop yields in the summer of 1816 ("the year without a summer").

Climate change was even more of a problem for past societies with short
human lifespans and without writing than it is today, because climate
in many parts of the world tends to vary not just from year to year but also on a multi-decade time scale; e.g., several wet decades followed by a dry
half-century. In many prehistoric societies the mean human generation time
—average number of years between births of parents and of their
children—was only a few decades. Hence towards the end of a string of wet
decades, most people alive could have had no firsthand memory of the pre
vious period of dry climate. Even today, there is a human tendency to in
crease production and population during good decades, forgetting (or, in
the past, never realizing) that such decades were unlikely to last. When the
good decades then do end, the society finds itself with more population
than can be supported, or with ingrained habits unsuitable to the new cli
mate conditions. (Just think today of the dry U.S. West and its urban or
rural policies of profligate water use, often drawn up in wet decades on the
tacit assumption that they were typical.) Compounding these problems of
climate change, many past societies didn't have "disaster relief" mechanisms
to import food surpluses from other areas with a different climate into areas
developing food shortages. All of those considerations exposed past soci
eties to increased risk from climate change.

Natural climate changes may make conditions either better or worse for