Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (78 page)

complex subject to which there would not be a single answer fitting all
situations.

What I'm going to propose instead is a road map of factors contributing
to failures of group decision-making. I'll divide the factors into a fuzzily delineated sequence of four categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the
problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they per
ceive it, they may fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it
but may not succeed. While all this discussion of reasons for failure and so
cietal collapses may seem depressing, the flip side is a heartening subject:
namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understood the reasons why groups often make bad decisions, we could use that knowledge as a
checklist to guide groups to make good decisions.

The first stop on my road map is that groups may do disastrous things be
cause they failed to anticipate a problem before it arrived, for any of several
reasons. One is that they may have had no prior experience of such prob
lems, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility.

A prime example is the mess that British colonists created for them
selves when they introduced foxes and rabbits from Britain into Australia in
the 1800s. Today these rate as two of the most disastrous examples of im
pacts of alien species on an environment to which they were not native (see
Chapter 13 for details). These introductions are all the more tragic because
they were carried out intentionally at much effort, rather than resulting in
advertently from tiny seeds overlooked in transported hay, as in so many
cases of establishment of noxious weeds. Foxes have proceeded to prey on
and exterminate many species of native Australian mammals without evo
lutionary experience of foxes, while rabbits consume much of the plant
fodder intended for sheep and cattle, outcompete native herbivorous mam
mals, and undermine the ground by their burrows.

With the gift of hindsight, we now view it as incredibly stupid that
colonists would intentionally release into Australia two alien mammals that
have caused billions of dollars in damages and expenditures to control
them. We recognize today, from many other such examples, that introduc
tions often prove disastrous in unexpected ways. That's why, when you go to
Australia or the U.S. as a visitor or returning resident, one of the first ques
tions you are now asked by immigration officers is whether you are car
rying any plants, seeds, or animals
—to reduce the risk of their escaping

and becoming established. From abundant prior experience we have now learned (often but not always) to anticipate at least the potential dangers of
introducing species. But it's still difficult even for professional ecologists to
predict which introductions will actually become established, which estab
lished successful introductions will prove disastrous, and why the same
species establishes itself at certain sites of introduction and not at others.
Hence we really shouldn't be surprised that 19th century Australians, lack
ing the 20th century's experience of disastrous introductions, failed to
anticipate the effects of rabbits and foxes.

In this book we have encountered other examples of societies under
standably failing to anticipate a problem of which they lacked prior experience. In investing heavily in walrus hunting in order to export walrus ivory to Europe, the Greenland Norse could hardly have anticipated that the Cru
sades would eliminate the market for walrus ivory by reopening Europe's
access to Asian and African elephant ivory, or that increasing sea ice would
impede ship traffic to Europe. Again, not being soil scientists, the Maya at
Copan could not foresee that deforestation of the hill slopes would trigger
soil erosion from the slopes into the valley bottoms.

Even prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a
problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten. That's especially a problem for non-literate societies, which have less ca
pacity than literate societies to preserve detailed memories of events long in
the past, because of the limitations of oral transmission of information compared to writing. For instance, we saw in Chapter 4 that Chaco Can
yon Anasazi society survived several droughts before succumbing to a big drought in the 12th century
a.d.
But the earlier droughts had occurred long
before the birth of any Anasazi affected by the big drought, which would
thus have been unanticipated because the Anasazi lacked writing. Similarly,
the Classic Lowland Maya succumbed to a drought in the 9th century, de
spite their area having been affected by drought centuries earlier (Chap
ter 5). In that case, although the Maya did have writing, it recorded kings'
deeds and astronomical events rather than weather reports, so that the
drought of the 3rd century did not help the Maya anticipate the drought of
the 9th century.

In modern literate societies whose writing does discuss subjects besides
kings and planets, that doesn't necessarily mean that we draw on prior ex
perience committed to writing. We, too, tend to forget things. For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, we Americans shied
away from gas-guzzling cars, but then we forgot that experience and are

now embracing SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events.
When the city of Tucson in Arizona went through a severe drought in the
1950s, its alarmed citizens swore that they would manage their water better,
but soon returned to their water-guzzling ways of building golf courses and
watering their gardens.

Another reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem involves
reasoning by false analogy. When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall
back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations. That's a good way to proceed if the old and new situations are truly analogies, but it can be
dangerous if they are only superficially similar. For instance, Vikings who
immigrated to Iceland beginning around the year
a.d.
870 arrived from
Norway and Britain, which have heavy clay soils ground up by glaciers. Even
if the vegetation covering those soils is cleared, the soils themselves are too heavy to be blown away. When the Viking colonists encountered in Iceland
many of the same tree species already familiar to them from Norway and
Britain, they were deceived by the apparent similarity of the landscape (Chapter 6). Unfortunately, Iceland's soils arose not through glacial grind
ing but through winds carrying light ash blown out in volcanic eruptions.
Once the Vikings had cleared Iceland's forests to create pastures for their
livestock, the light soil became exposed for the wind to blow out again, and
much of Iceland's topsoil soon eroded away.

A tragic and famous modern example of reasoning by false analogy involves French military preparations from World War II. After the horrible bloodbath of World War I, France recognized its vital need to protect itself
against the possibility of another German invasion. Unfortunately, the
French army staff assumed that a next war would be fought similarly to
World War I, in which the Western Front between France and Germany had
remained locked in static trench warfare for four years. Defensive infantry
forces manning elaborate fortified trenches had been usually able to repel infantry attacks, while offensive forces had deployed the newly invented
tanks only individually and just in support of attacking infantry. Hence
France constructed an even more elaborate and expensive system of fortifi
cations, the Maginot Line, to guard its eastern frontier against Germany.
But the German army staff, having been defeated in World War I, recog
nized the need for a different strategy. It used tanks rather than infantry to
spearhead its attacks, massed the tanks into separate armored divisions, by
passed the Maginot Line through forested terrain previously considered un
suitable for tanks, and thereby defeated France within a mere six weeks.
In reasoning by false analogy after World War I, French generals made a

common mistake: generals often plan for a coming war as if it will be like the previous war, especially if that previous war was one in which their side was victorious.

The second stop on my road map, after a society has or hasn't anticipated a problem before it arrives, involves its perceiving or failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. There are at least three reasons for such failures, all of them common in the business world and in academia.

First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible. For example, the nutrients responsible for soil fertility are invisible to the eye, and only in modern times did they become measurable by chemical analysis. In Australia, Mangareva, parts of the U.S. Southwest, and many other locations, most of the nutrients had already been leached out of the soil by rain before human settlement. When people arrived and began growing crops, those crops quickly exhausted the remaining nutrients, with the result that agriculture failed. Yet such nutrient-poor soils often bear lush-appearing vegetation; it's just that most of the nutrients in the ecosystem are contained in the vegetation rather than in the soil, and are removed if one cuts down the vegetation. There was no way for the first colonists of Australia and Mangareva to perceive that problem of soil nutrient exhaustion
—nor for farmers in areas with salt deep in the ground (like eastern Montana and parts of Australia and Mesopotamia) to perceive incipient salinization— nor for miners of sulfide ores to perceive the toxic copper and acid dissolved in mine runoff water.

Another frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it has arrived is distant managers, a potential issue in any large society or business. For example, the largest private landowner and timber company in Montana today is based not within that state but 400 miles away in Seattle, Washington. Not being on the scene, company executives may not realize that they have a big weed problem on their forest properties. Well-run companies avoid such surprises by periodically sending managers "into the field" to observe what is actually going on, while a tall friend of mine who was a college president regularly practiced with his school's undergraduates on their basketball courts in order to keep abreast of student thinking. The opposite of failure due to distant managers is success due to on-the-spot managers. Part of the reason why Tikopians on their tiny island, and New Guinea highlanders in their valleys, have successfully managed their re-

sources for more than a thousand years is that everyone on the island or
in the valley is familiar with the entire territory on which their society
depends.

Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to per
ceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide
up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. We now realize that temperatures around the world have been
slowly rising in recent decades, due in large part to atmospheric changes
caused by humans. However, it is not the case that the climate each year has
been exactly 0.01 degree warmer than in the previous year. Instead, as we all
know, climate fluctuates up and down erratically from year to year: three
degrees warmer in one summer than in the previous one, then two degrees
warmer the next summer, down four degrees the following summer, down another degree the next one, then up five degrees, etc. With such large and
unpredictable fluctuations, it has taken a long time to discern the average
upwards trend of 0.01 degree per year within that noisy signal. That's why it was only a few years ago that most professional climatologists previously skeptical of the reality of global warming became convinced. As of the time
that I write these lines, President Bush of the U.S. is still not convinced of its
reality, and he thinks that we need more research. The medieval Green-
landers had similar difficulties in recognizing that their climate was gradu
ally becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi had trouble discerning that
theirs was becoming drier.

Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends
concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic conges
tion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize
that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year be
fore, so one's baseline standard for what constitutes "normalcy" shifts
gradually and imperceptibly. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of
such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that con
ditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.

Another term related to creeping normalcy is "landscape amnesia": for
getting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50 years ago, be
cause the change from year to year has been so gradual. An example
involves the melting of Montana's glaciers and snowfields caused by global
warming (Chapter 1). After spending the summers of 1953 and 1956 in
Montana's Big Hole Basin as a teenager, I did not return until 42 years later,