Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (94 page)

10 people per square yard of land in 774 years, a mass of people equal to the Earth's mass in slightly under 2,000 years, and a mass of people equal
to the universe's mass in 6,000 years, long before Simon's forecast of 7 bil
lion years without such problems. As regards his second prediction, we learn
in our first course of chemistry that copper is an element, which means that by definition it cannot be made from other elements. My impression is that
pessimistic predictions that have proved incorrect, such as Ehrlich's, Harte's,
and Holdren's about metal prices or the Club of Rome's about future food
supplies, have on the average been much more realistic possibilities at the
time that they were made than were Simon's two predictions.

Basically, the one-liner about some environmentalist predictions prov
ing wrong boils down to a complaint about false alarms. In other spheres
of our lives, such as fires, we adopt a commonsense attitude towards false
alarms. Our local governments maintain expensive firefighting forces, even though in some small towns they are rarely called on to put out fires. Of the
fire alarms phoned in to fire departments, many prove to be false alarms,
and many others involve small fires that the property owner himself then succeeds in putting out before the fire engines arrive. We comfortably ac
cept a certain frequency of such false alarms and extinguished fires, because we understand that fire risks are uncertain and hard to judge when a fire has just started, and that a fire that does rage out of control may exact high costs in property and human lives. No sensible person would dream of abolishing
the town fire department, whether manned by full-time professionals or
volunteers, just because a few years went by without a big fire. Nor would
anyone blame a homeowner for calling the fire department on detecting a
small fire, only to succeed in quenching the fire before the fire truck's ar
rival. Only if false alarms become an inordinately high proportion of all fire
alarms do we feel that something is wrong. In effect, the proportion of false
alarms that we tolerate is based on subconsciously comparing the frequency
and destructive costs of big fires with the frequency and wasted-services
costs of false alarms. A very low frequency of false alarms proves that too
many homeowners are being too cautious, waiting too long to call the fire
department, and consequently losing their homes.

By the same reasoning, we must expect some environmentalist warnings
to turn out to be false alarms, otherwise we would know that our environ
mental warning systems were much too conservative. The multibillion-
dollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency of false alarms. In addition, the reason that alarms proved false is often that
they convinced us to adopt successful countermeasures. For example, it's

true that our air quality here in Los Angeles today is not as bad as some gloom-and-doom predictions of 50 years ago. However, that's entirely be
cause Los Angeles and the state of California were thereby aroused to adopt
many countermeasures (such as vehicle emission standards, smog certifi
cates, and lead-free gas), not because initial predictions of the problem were
exaggerated.

"The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase
of the world's population is decreasing, such that world population will level off
at less than double its present level."
While the prediction that world popula
tion will level off at less than double its present level may or may not prove true, it is at present a realistic possibility. However, we can take no comfort
in this possibility, for two reasons: by many criteria, even the world's present
population is living at a non-sustainable level; and, as explained earlier in
this chapter, the larger danger that we face is not just of a two-fold increase
in population, but of a much larger increase in human impact if the Third
World's population succeeds in attaining a First World living standard. It is
surprising to hear some First World citizens nonchalantly mentioning the
world's adding "only" 2V2 billion more people (the lowest estimate that anyone would forecast) as if that were acceptable, when the world already holds
that many people who are malnourished and living on less than $3 per day.

"The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The
more people, the better, because more people mean more inventions and ulti
mately more wealth."
Both of these ideas are associated especially with Julian
Simon but have been espoused by many others, especially by economists.
The statement about our ability to absorb current rates of population
growth indefinitely is not to be taken seriously, because we have already
seen that that would mean 10 people per square yard in the year 2779. Data on national wealth demonstrate that the claim that more people mean more
wealth is the opposite of correct. The 10 countries with the most people
(over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, In
dia, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and
Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP)
are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Den
mark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only
country on both lists is the U.S.

Actually, the countries with large populations are disproportionately
poor: eight of the 10 have per-capita GDP under $8,000, and five of them
under $3,000. The affluent countries have disproportionately few people: seven of the 10 have populations below 9,000,000, and two of them under

500,000. Instead, what does distinguish the two lists is population growth
rates: all 10 of the affluent countries have very low relative population
growth rates (1% per year or less), while eight of the 10 most populous
countries have higher relative population growth rates than any of the most affluent countries, except for two large countries that achieved low popula
tion growth in unpleasant ways: China, by government order and enforced abortion, and Russia, whose population is actually decreasing because of
catastrophic health problems. Thus, as an empirical fact, more people and a
higher population growth rate mean more poverty, not more wealth.

"Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First
World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens
what they should be doing."
This view is one that I have heard mainly from
affluent First World yuppies lacking experience of the Third World. In all
my experience of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, Peru, and
other Third World countries with growing environmental problems and
populations, I have been impressed that their people know very well how
they are being harmed by population growth, deforestation, overfishing, and other problems. They know it because they immediately pay the
penalty, in forms such as loss of free timber for their houses, massive soil
erosion, and (the tragic complaint that I hear incessantly) their inability to
afford clothes, books, and school fees for their children. The reason why the
forest behind their village is nevertheless being logged is usually either that a corrupt government has ordered it logged over their often-violent protest,
or else that they signed a logging lease with great reluctance because they saw no other way to get the money needed next year for their children. My
best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that
they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the
First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but
they can't afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. gov
ernment to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.

Another view that is widespread among affluent First World people, but which they will rarely express openly, is that they themselves are managing
just fine at carrying on with their lifestyles despite all those environmental
problems, which really don't concern them because the problems fall
mainly on Third World people (though it is not politically correct to be so
blunt). Actually, the rich are not immune to environmental problems. CEOs
of big First World companies eat food, drink water, breathe air, and have (or
try to conceive) children, like the rest of us. While they can usually avoid
problems of water quality by drinking bottled water, they find it much more

difficult to avoid being exposed to the same problems of food and air
quality as the rest of us. Living disproportionately high on the food chain, at
levels at which toxic substances become concentrated, they are at more
rather than less risk of reproductive impairment due to ingestion of or ex
posure to toxic materials, possibly contributing to their higher infertility
rates and the increasing frequency with which they require medical assistance in conceiving. In addition, one of the conclusions that we saw emerg
ing from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their
own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing soci
ety and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.
As for First World society as a whole, its resource consumption accounts for
most of the world's total consumption that has given rise to the impacts de
scribed at the beginning of this chapter. Our totally unsustainable con
sumption means that the First World could not continue for long on its
present course, even if the Third World didn't exist and weren't trying to
catch up to us.

"If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time
far off in the future, after I die, and I can't take them seriously."
In fact, at cur
rent rates most or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems
discussed at the beginning of this chapter will become acute within the life
time of young adults now alive. Most of us who have children consider the
securing of our children's future as the highest priority to which to devote
our time and our money. We pay for their education and food and clothes, make wills for them, and buy life insurance for them, all with the goal of
helping them to enjoy good lives 50 years from now. It makes no sense for
us to do these things for our individual children, while simultaneously do
ing things undermining the world in which our children will be living 50 years from now.

This paradoxical behavior is one of which I personally was guilty, be
cause I was born in the year 1937, hence before the birth of my children I
too could not take seriously any event (like global warming or the end of
the tropical rainforests) projected for the year 2037. I shall surely be dead
before that year, and even the date 2037 struck me as unreal. However, when my twin sons were born in 1987, and when my wife and I then started going
through the usual parental obsessions about schools, life insurance, and
wills, I realized with a jolt: 2037 is the year in which my kids will be my own
age of 50 (then)! It's not an imaginary year! What's the point of willing our
property to our kids if the world will be in a mess then anyway?

Having lived for five years in Europe shortly after World War II, and
then having married into a Polish family with a Japanese branch, I saw at
first hand what can happen when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children's future world. The parents of my Polish,
German, Japanese, Russian, British, and Yugoslav friends also bought life in
surance, made wills, and obsessed about the schooling of their children, as my wife and I have been doing more recently. Some of them were rich and would have had valuable property to will to their children. But they did not
take good care of their children's world, and they blundered into the disas
ter of World War II. As a result, most of my European and Japanese friends
born in the same year as I had their lives blighted in various ways, such as
being orphaned, separated from one or both parents during their child
hood, bombed out of their houses, deprived of schooling opportunities, de
prived of their family estates, or raised by parents burdened with memories of war and concentration camps. The worst-case scenarios that today's chil
dren face if we too blunder about their world are different, but equally
unpleasant.

This leaves us with two other common one-liners that we have not con
sidered:
"There are big differences between modern societies and those past so
cieties of Easter Islanders, Maya, and Anasazi who collapsed, so that we can't
straightforwardly apply lessons from the past."
And:
"What can I, as an indi
vidual, do, when the world is really being shaped by unstoppable powerful jug
gernauts of governments and big businesses?"
In contrast to the previous
one-liners, which upon examination can be quickly dismissed, these two concerns are valid and cannot be dismissed. I shall devote the remainder of
this chapter to the former question, and a section of the Further Readings
(pp. 555-59) to the latter question.

Are the parallels between the past and present sufficiently close that the col
lapses of the Easter Islanders, Henderson Islanders, Anasazi, Maya, and
Greenland Norse could offer any lessons for the modern world? At first, a
critic, noting the obvious differences, might be tempted to object, "It's
ridiculous to suppose that the collapses of all those ancient peoples could
have broad relevance today, especially to the modern U.S. Those ancients
didn't enjoy the wonders of modern technology, which benefits us and
which lets us solve problems by inventing new environment-friendly tech
nologies. Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of cli
mate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environment by