Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (92 page)

those of other leading First World cities. How do those problems affect the
lives of my fellow Angelenos and me?

The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los Angeles are those
directly related to our growing and already high population: our incurable
traffic jams; the very high price of housing (Plate 36), as a result of millions
of people working in a few centers of employment, and only limited resi
dential space near those centers; and, as a consequence, the long distances,
of up to two hours and 60 miles one way, over which people commute daily
in their cars between home and work. Los Angeles became the U.S. city
with the worst traffic in 1987 and has remained so every year since then.
Everyone recognizes that these problems have gotten worse within the last
decade. They are now the biggest single factor hurting the ability of Los
Angeles employers to attract and retain employees, and they affect our will
ingness to drive to events and to visit friends. For the 12-mile trip from my
home to downtown Los Angeles or its airport, I now allow an hour and
15 minutes. The average Angeleno spends 368 hours per year, or the equiva
lent of fifteen 24-hour days, commuting to and from work, without consid
ering time spent driving for other purposes (Plate 37).

No cure is even under serious discussion for these problems, which will
only get worse. Such highway construction as is now proposed or under way
aims only at smoothing a few of the tightest points of congestion and will
be overwhelmed by the increasing number of cars. There is no end in sight
to how much worse Los Angeles's problems of congestion will become, because millions of people put up with far worse traffic in other cities. For example, my friends in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, now carry a portable
small chemical toilet in their car because travel can be so prolonged and
slow; they once set off to go out of town on a holiday weekend but gave up
and returned home after 17 hours, when they had advanced only three
miles through the traffic jam. While there are optimists who explain in the abstract why increased population will be good and how the world can ac
commodate it, I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people any
where in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased
population in the area where he or she personally lived.

The contribution of Southern California to the ongoing increase in the
world's average per-capita human impact, as a result of transfers of people
from the Third World to the First World, has for years been the most explosive issue in California politics. California's population growth is accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes
of the immigrants after their arrival. The border between California and

Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively against people from Cen
tral America seeking to immigrate here illegally in search of jobs and per
sonal safety. Every month, one reads of would-be immigrants dying in the
desert or being robbed or shot, but that does not deter them. Other illegal
immigrants come from as far away as China and Central Asia, in ships that
unload them just off the coast. California residents are of two minds about
all those Third World immigrants seeking to come here to attain the First
World lifestyle. On the one hand, our economy is utterly dependent on
them to fill jobs in the service and construction industries and on farms. On
the other hand, California residents complain that the immigrants compete with unemployed residents for many jobs, depress wages, and burden our
already overcrowded hospitals and public education system. A measure
(Proposition 187) on the 1994 state election ballot, overwhelmingly ap
proved by voters but then gutted by the courts on constitutional grounds,
would have deprived illegal immigrants of most state-funded benefits. No
California resident or elected official has suggested a practical solution to the long-standing contradiction, reminiscent of Dominicans' attitude
towards Haitians, between needing immigrants as workers and otherwise
resenting their presence and their own needs.

Southern California is a leading contributor to the energy crisis. Our
city's former network of electric streetcars collapsed in bankruptcies in the
1920s and 1930s, and the rights of way were bought up by automobile man
ufacturers and subdivided so as to make it impossible to rebuild the net
work (which competed with automobiles). Angelenos' preference for living
in houses rather than in high-rise apartments, and the long distances and
diverse routes over which employees working in any given district commute, have made it impossible to design systems of public transportation
that would satisfy the needs of most residents. Hence Los Angelenos are de
pendent on motorcars.

Our high gas consumption, the mountains ringing much of the Los Angeles basin, and prevailing wind directions generate the smog problem that is our city's most notorious drawback (Plate 38). Despite progress in com
bating smog in recent decades, and despite seasonal variation (smog worst in the late summer and early autumn) and local variation (smog generally
worse as one precedes inland), Los Angeles on the average continues to rank
near the bottom of American cities for air quality. After years of improve
ment, our air quality has again been deteriorating in recent years. Another
toxic problem that affects lifestyle and health is the spread of the disease-
causing organism giardia in California's rivers and lakes over the last several

decades. When I first moved here in the 1960s and went hiking in the
mountains, it was safe to drink water from streams; today the guaranteed
result would be giardia infection.

The problem of habitat management of which we are most conscious is the fire risk in Southern California's two predominant habitats, chaparral (a
scrub woodland similar to the
macchia
of the Mediterranean) and oak
woodland. Under natural conditions both habitats experienced occasional
fires from lightning strikes, like the situation in Montana forests that I dis
cussed in Chapter 1. Now that people are living in and next to those highly
flammable habitats, Angelenos demand that fires be suppressed immedi
ately. Each year, the late summer and early fall, which are the hottest and
driest and windiest time of year in Southern California, are the fire season,
when somewhere or other hundreds of homes will go up in flames. The
canyon in which I live has not had a fire get out of control since 1961, when
there was a big fire that burned 600 houses. A theoretical solution to this problem, as in Montana forests, might be frequent controlled small-scale
fires to reduce the fuel load, but such fires would be absurdly dangerous in
this densely populated urban area, and the public would not stand for it.

Introduced alien species are a big threat and economic burden to Cali
fornia agriculture, the current leading threat being the Mediterranean fruit
fly. Non-agricultural threats are introduced pathogens threatening to kill
our oak trees and pine trees. Because one of my two sons became interested
as a child in amphibians (frogs and salamanders), I have learned that most
species of native amphibians have been exterminated from two-thirds of
the streams in Los Angeles County, as the result of the spread of three alien
predators on amphibians (a crayfish, bullfrog, and mosquitofish) against
which Southern California amphibians are helpless because they never
evolved to avoid those threats.

The major soil problem affecting California agriculture is salinization as
a result of irrigation agriculture, ruining expanses of agricultural land in
California's Central Valley, the richest farmland in the United States.

Because rainfall is low in Southern California, Los Angeles depends for
its water on long aqueducts, principally from the Sierra Nevada mountain range and adjacent valleys of Northern California, and from the Colorado
River on the eastern border of our state. With the growth of California's
population, there has been increasing competition for those water supplies
among farmers and cities. With global warming, the Sierra snowpack that
provides most of our water will decrease, just as in Montana, increasing the
likelihood of water shortages in Los Angeles.

As for collapses of fisheries, the sardine fishery of Northern California
collapsed early in the 20th century, the abalone industry of Southern Cali
fornia collapsed a few decades ago soon after my arrival, and the rockfish fishery of Southern California is now collapsing and has become subject to
severe restrictions or closure within the last year. Fish prices in Los Angeles
supermarkets have increased by a factor of 4 since I moved here.

Finally, losses of biodiversity have affected Southern California's most
distinctive species. The symbol of the state of California, and of my univer
sity (the University of California), is the California Golden Bear, but it is now extinct. (What dreadful symbolism for one's state and university!) Southern California's population of sea otters was exterminated in the last century, and the outcome of recent attempts at reintroduction is uncertain.
Within the time that I've lived in Los Angeles, populations of two of our
most characteristic bird species, the Roadrunner and the California Quail,
have crashed. Southern California amphibians whose numbers have plummeted are the California Newt and the California Tree Frog.

Thus, environmental and population problems have been undermining
the economy and the quality of life in Southern California. They are in large
measure ultimately responsible for our water shortages, power shortages,
garbage accumulation, school crowding, housing shortages and price rises,
and traffic congestion. In most of these respects except for our especially bad traffic jams and air quality, we are no worse off than many other areas
of the United States.

Most environmental problems involve detailed uncertainties that are legitimate subjects for debate. In addition, however, there are many reasons that are commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental prob
lems, and that are in my opinion not well informed. These objections are
often posed in the form of simplistic "one-liners." Here are a dozen of the
commonest ones:

"The environment has to be balanced against the economy."
This quote
portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve envi
ronmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environ
mental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts
the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing
those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run
as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it

is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed. Just think of the damage caused by agricultural
weeds and pests, non-agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mus
sels, the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value of lost time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks,
and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization. It
adds up to a few hundred million dollars per year here, tens of billions of dollars there, another billion dollars over here, and so on for hundreds of
different problems. For instance, the value of "one statistical life" in the U.S.
—i.e., the cost to the U.S. economy resulting from the death of an
average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and
educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national
economy—is usually estimated at around $5 million. Even if one takes the
conservative estimate of annual U.S. deaths due to air pollution as 130,000, then deaths due to air pollution cost us about $650 billion per year. That il
lustrates why the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, although its cleanup measures
do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings (benefits in excess of costs) of about $1 trillion per year, due to saved lives and reduced health
costs.

"Technology will solve our problems."
This is an expression of faith about
the future, and therefore based on a supposed track record of technology
having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying
this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow on
wards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and
will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that
the new technologies now under discussion will succeed, and that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon. In extended conversa
tions that I had with two of America's most successful and best-known
businessmen and financiers, both of them eloquently described to me
emerging technologies and financial instruments that differ fundamentally
from those of the past and that, they confidently predicted, would solve our
environmental problems.

But actual experience is the opposite of this assumed track record. Some
dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don't. Those that do
succeed typically take a few decades to develop and phase in widely: think of
gas heating, electric lighting, cars and airplanes, television, computers, and