Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (89 page)

Nephrops. Pending accreditation are Alaska pollock, the largest fishery in
the U.S., accounting for half of the U.S. catch; U.S. West Coast halibut, Dungeness crab, and spotted prawn; U.S. East Coast striped bass; and Baja
California lobster. Plans are also under way to extend certification from
wild-caught fish to aquaculture operations (which pose their own big prob
lems mentioned in the next chapter), beginning with shrimp and proceed
ing to 10 other species, including perhaps salmon. It appears at present that
the most difficult problems of certification for the world's major fisheries
will arise with wild-caught shrimp (because it is caught mostly by bottom-
trawling producing a large by-catch), and with fisheries extending beyond
the jurisdiction of a single nation.

Overall, certification has been proving more difficult and slower for
fisheries than for forests. Nevertheless, I find myself pleasantly surprised by
the progress in fisheries certification achieved in the last five years: I had ex
pected it to be even more difficult and slower than it actually has been.

In brief, environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that for many of us offends our sense of justice. Depending on
the circumstances, a business really may maximize its profits, at least in the
short term, by damaging the environment and hurting people. That is still
the case today for fishermen in an unmanaged fishery without quotas, and
for international logging companies with short-term leases on tropical rain
forest land in countries with corrupt government officials and unsophisti
cated landowners. It was also the case for oil companies before the Santa
Barbara Channel oil spill disaster of 1969, and for Montana mining compa
nies before recent cleanup laws. When government regulation is effective,
and when the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big
businesses may outcompete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and if the public doesn't care.

It is easy and cheap for the rest of us to blame a business for helping it
self by hurting other people. But that blaming alone is unlikely to produce
change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not non-profit charities but
profit-making companies, and that publicly owned companies with share
holders are under obligation to those shareholders to maximize profits, pro
vided that they do so by legal means. Our laws make a company's directors
legally liable for something termed "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if
they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. The car
manufacturer Henry Ford was in fact successfully sued by stockholders in

1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day: the courts
declared that, while Ford's humanitarian sentiments about his employees
were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders.

Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the
public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through hurting
the public: e.g., for not requiring mining companies to clean up, or for con
tinuing to buy wood products from non-sustainable logging operations. In
the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that
has the power to make destructive environmental policies unprofitable and
illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable. The pub
lic can do that by suing businesses for harming them, as happened after the
Exxon Valdez,
Piper Alpha, and Bhopal disasters; by preferring to buy sus-tainably harvested products, a preference that caught the attention of Home
Depot and Unilever; by making employees of companies with poor track records feel ashamed of their company and complain to their own man
agement; by preferring their governments to' award valuable contracts
to businesses with a good environmental track record, as the Norwegian
government did to Chevron; and by pressing their governments to pass and
enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices, such
as the U.S. government's new regulations for the coal industry in the 1970s and 1980s. In turn, big businesses can exert powerful pressure on their sup
pliers that might ignore public or government pressure. For instance, after
the U.S. public became concerned about the spread of mad cow disease, and
after the U.S. government's Food and Drug Administration introduced
rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of spread, meat packers resisted for five years, claiming that the
rules would be too expensive to obey. But when McDonald's Corporation
then made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers plummeted, the meat industry complied within weeks: "because we have the world's biggest shopping cart," as a McDonald's representative ex
plained. The public's task is to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure: for instance, McDonald's, Home Depot, and
Tiffany, but not meat packers, loggers, or gold miners.

Some readers may be disappointed or outraged that I place the ultimate
responsibility, for business practices harming the public, on the public it
self. I also assign to the public the added costs, if any, of sound environmen
tal practices, which I regard as normal costs of doing business, like any others. My views may seem to ignore a moral imperative that businesses
should follow virtuous principles, whether or not it is most profitable for

them to do so. I instead prefer to recognize that, throughout human history, in all politically complex human societies in which people encounter other
individuals with whom they have no ties of family or clan relationship,
government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be nec
essary for the enforcement of moral principles. Invocation of moral principles is a necessary first step for eliciting virtuous behavior, but that alone is
not a sufficient step.

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for
the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful,
rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who
is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclu
sion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the
past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require
different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted,
and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the
public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in
public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental
practices.

CHAPTER
16

The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?

Introduction
■ The most serious problems ■ If we don't solve

them...
■ Life in Los Angeles
a
One-liner objections ■

The past and the present
■ Reasons for hope
■

T

he chapters of this book have discussed why past or present societies succeed or fail at solving their environmental problems. Now, this fi
nal chapter considers the book's practical relevance: what does it all mean to us today?

I shall begin by explaining the major sets of environmental problems
facing modern societies, and the time scale on which they pose threats. As a
specific example of how these problems play out, I examine the area where I
have spent most of the last 39 years of my life, Southern California. I then consider the objections most often raised to dismiss the significance of environmental problems today. Since half of this book was devoted to ancient societies because of the lessons that they might hold for modern societies, I
look at differences between the ancient and the modern worlds that affect
what lessons we can draw from the past. Finally, for anyone who asks,
"What can I do as an individual?" I offer suggestions in the Further Read
ings section.

It seems to me that the most serious environmental problems facing past
and present societies fall into a dozen groups. Eight of the 12 were signifi
cant already in the past, while four (numbers 5, 7, 8, and 10: energy, the
photosynthetic ceiling, toxic chemicals, and atmospheric changes) became
serious only recently. The first four of the 12 consist of destruction or losses of natural resources; the next three involve ceilings on natural resources; the
three after that consist of harmful things that we produce or move around;
and the last two are population issues. Let's begin with the natural resources

that we are destroying or losing: natural habitats, wild food sources, biologi
cal diversity, and soil.

1. At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands
and pastures, roads, and golf courses. The natural habitats whose losses
have provoked the most discussion are forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the
ocean bottom. As I mentioned in the preceding chapter, more than half of
the world's original area of forest has already been converted to other uses,
and at present conversion rates one-quarter of the forests that remain will
become converted within the next half-century. Those losses of forests rep
resent losses for us humans, especially because forests provide us with tim
ber and other raw materials, and because they provide us with so-called
ecosystem services such as protecting our watersheds, protecting soil
against erosion, constituting essential steps in the water cycle that generates
much of our rainfall, and providing habitat for most terrestrial plant and
animal species. Deforestation was a or
the
major factor in all the collapses of
past societies described in this book. In addition, as discussed in Chapter 1 in connection with Montana, issues of concern to us are not only forest destruction and conversion, but also changes in the structure of wooded habi
tats that do remain. Among other things, that changed structure results in
changed fire regimes that put forests, chaparral woodlands, and savannahs
at greater risk of infrequent but catastrophic fires.

Other valuable natural habitats besides forests are also being destroyed.
An even larger fraction of the world's original wetlands than of its forests has already been destroyed, damaged, or converted. Consequences for us
arise from wetlands' importance in maintaining the quality of our water
supplies and the existence of commercially important freshwater fisheries,
while even ocean fisheries depend on mangrove wetlands to provide habitat
for the juvenile phase of many fish species. About one-third of the world's
coral reefs
—the oceanic equivalent of tropical rainforests, because they are
home to a disproportionate fraction of the ocean's species—have already been severely damaged. If current trends continue, about half of the re
maining reefs would be lost by the year 2030. That damage and destruction
result from the growing use of dynamite as a fishing method, reef over
growth by algae ("seaweeds") when the large herbivorous fish that normally graze on the algae become fished out, effects of sediment runoff and pollu
tants from adjacent lands cleared or converted to agriculture, and coral

bleaching due to rising ocean water temperatures. It has recently become
appreciated that fishing by trawling is destroying much or most of the shal
low ocean bottom and the species dependent on it.

2.
Wild foods, especially fish and to a lesser extent shellfish, contribute a
large fraction of the protein consumed by humans. In effect, this is protein that we obtain for free (other than the cost of catching and transporting the fish), and that reduces our needs for animal protein that we have to grow
ourselves in the form of domestic livestock. About two billion people, most
of them poor, depend on the oceans for protein. If wild fish stocks were
managed appropriately, the stock levels could be maintained, and they
could be harvested perpetually. Unfortunately, the problem known as the
tragedy of the commons (Chapter 14) has regularly undone efforts to man
age fisheries sustainably, and the great majority of valuable fisheries already either have collapsed or are in steep decline (Chapter 15). Past societies that
overfished included Easter Island, Mangareva, and Henderson.

Increasingly, fish and shrimp are being grown by aquaculture, which in
principle has a promising future as the cheapest way to produce animal pro
tein. In several respects, though, aquaculture as commonly practiced today is making the problem of declining wild fisheries worse rather than better.
Fish grown by aquaculture are mostly fed wild-caught fish and thereby usu
ally consume more wild fish meat (up to 20 times more) than they yield in
meat of their own They contain higher toxin levels than do wild-caught
fish. Cultured fish regularly escape, interbreed with wild fish, and thereby
harm wild fish stocks genetically, because cultured fish strains have been se
lected for rapid growth at the expense of poor survival in the wild (50 times
worse survival for cultured salmon than for wild salmon). Aquaculture
runoff causes pollution and eutrophication. The lower costs of aquaculture
than of fishing, by driving down fish prices, initially drive fishermen to exploit wild fish stocks even more heavily in order to maintain their incomes constant when they are receiving less money per pound of fish.

3.
A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diver
sity has already been lost, and at present rates a large fraction of what re mains will be lost within the next half-century. Some species, such as big
edible animals, or plants with edible fruits or good timber, are of obvious
value to us. Among the many past societies that harmed themselves by ex
terminating such species were the Easter and Henderson Islanders whom
we have discussed.

But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the re
sponse, "Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy