Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (95 page)

doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvest-
ing wild animal sources of their protein, watching their topsoil erode away,
and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish
leaders who didn't have books and so couldn't learn from history, and who
embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about stay
ing in power, and didn't pay attention to problems at home. They got over
whelmed by desperate starving immigrants, as one society after another
collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the
societies that weren't collapsing. In all those respects, we moderns are fun
damentally different from those primitive ancients, and there is nothing
that we could learn from them. Especially we in the U.S., the richest and most powerful country in the world today, with the most productive envi
ronment and wise leaders and strong loyal allies and only weak insignificant
enemies
—none of those bad things could possibly apply to us."

Yes, it's true that there are big differences between the situations of those
past societies and our modern situation today. The most obvious difference is that there are far more people alive today, packing far more potent tech
nology that impacts the environment, than in the past. Today we have over 6 billion people equipped with heavy metal machinery such as bulldozers and nuclear power, whereas the Easter Islanders had at most a few tens of
thousands of people with stone chisels and human muscle power. Yet the
Easter Islanders still managed to devastate their environment and bring their society to the point of collapse. That difference greatly increases, rather than decreases, the risks for us today.

A second big difference stems from globalization. Leaving out of this
discussion for the moment the question of environmental problems within
the First World itself, let's just ask whether the lessons from past collapses
might apply anywhere in the Third World today. First ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads
a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries
facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation,
or both. The ecologist would answer: "That's a no-brainer, it's obvious. Your
list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely
include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagas
car, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Is
lands, and Somalia, plus others" (map, p. 497).

Then go ask a First World politician, who knows nothing and cares less
about the environment and population problems, to name the world's worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been

overwhelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been
wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those prob
lems of their own, are also creating problems for us rich First World coun
tries, which may end up having to provide foreign aid for them, or may face
illegal immigrants from them, or may decide to provide them with military
assistance to deal with rebellions and terrorists, or may even have to send in our own troops. The politician would answer, "That's a no-brainer, it's obvi
ous. Your list of political trouble spots should surely include Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal,
Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus
others."

Surprise, surprise: the two lists are very similar. The connection between
the two lists is transparent: it's the problems of the ancient Maya, Anasazi,
and Easter Islanders playing out in the modern world. Today, just as in the
past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both
become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments col
lapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope,
they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each
other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that
they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tol
erate terrorism.

The results of these transparent connections are genocides such as
the ones that already exploded in Bangladesh, Burundi, Indonesia, and Rwanda; civil wars or revolutions, as in most of the countries on the lists;
calls for the dispatch of First World troops, as to Afghanistan, Haiti, Indone
sia, Iraq, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia; the
collapse of central government, as has already happened in Somalia and the
Solomon Islands; and overwhelming poverty, as in all of the countries on
these lists. Hence the best predictors of modern "state failures"
—i.e., revolutions, violent regime change, collapse of authority, and genocide—prove
to be measures of environmental and population pressure, such as high in
fant mortality, rapid population growth, a high percentage of the popula
tion in their late teens and 20s, and hordes of unemployed young men
without job prospects and ripe for recruitment into militias. Those pres
sures create conflicts over shortages of land (as in Rwanda), water, forests,
fish, oil, and minerals. They create not only chronic internal conflict, but
also emigration of political and economic refugees, and wars between coun-

tries arising when authoritarian regimes attack neighboring nations in or
der to divert popular attention from internal stresses.

In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of
past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. That ques
tion is settled, because such collapses have actually been happening recently,
and others appear to be imminent. Instead, the real question is how many
more countries will undergo them.

As for terrorists, you might object that many of the political murderers,
suicide bombers, and 9/11 terrorists were educated and moneyed rather than uneducated and desperate. That's true, but they still depended on a
desperate society for support and toleration. Any society has its murderous
fanatics; the U.S. produced its own Timothy McVeigh and its Harvard-educated Theodore Kaczinski. But well-nourished societies offering good
job prospects, like the U.S., Finland, and South Korea, don't offer broad
support to their fanatics.

The problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated, distant countries become our own problems because of globalization. We
are accustomed to thinking of globalization in terms of us rich advanced
First Worlders sending our good things, such as the Internet and Coca-Cola,
to those poor backward Third Worlders. But globalization means nothing
more than improved worldwide communications, which can convey many
things in either direction; globalization is not restricted to good things car
ried only from the First to the Third World.

Among bad things transported from the First World to developing
countries, we already mentioned the millions of tons of electronic garbage intentionally transported each year from industrialized nations to China. To
grasp the worldwide scale of unintentional garbage transport, consider the garbage collected on the beaches of tiny Oeno and Ducie Atolls in the Southeast Pacific Ocean (see map on p. 122): uninhabited atolls, without
freshwater, rarely visited even by yachts, and among the world's most remote bits of land, each over a hundred miles even from remote uninhabited Henderson Island. Surveys there detected, for each linear yard of beach, on
the average one piece of garbage, which must have drifted from ships or else
from Asian and American countries on the Pacific Rim thousands of miles
distant. The commonest items proved to be plastic bags, buoys, glass and
plastic bottles (especially Suntory whiskey bottles from Japan), rope, shoes,
and lightbulbs, along with oddities such as footballs, toy soldiers and air
planes, bike pedals, and screwdrivers.

A more sinister example of bad things transported from the First World to developing countries is that the highest blood levels of toxic industrial chemicals and pesticides reported for any people in the world are for Eastern Greenland's and Siberia's Inuit people (Eskimos), who are also among the most remote from sites of chemical manufacture or heavy use. Their blood mercury levels are nevertheless in the range associated with acute mercury poisoning, while the levels of toxic PCBs (polychlorinated bi-phenyls) in Inuit mothers' breast milk fall in a range high enough to classify the milk as "hazardous waste." Effects on the women's babies include hearing loss, altered brain development, and suppressed immune function, hence high rates of ear and respiratory infections.

Why should levels of these poisonous chemicals from remote industrial nations of the Americas and Europe be higher in the Inuit than even in urban Americans and Europeans? It's because staples of the Inuit diet are whales, seals, and seabirds that eat fish, molluscs, and shrimp, and the chemicals become concentrated at each step as they pass up this food chain. All of us in the First World who occasionally consume seafood are also ingesting these chemicals, but in smaller amounts. (However, that doesn't mean that you will be safe if you stop eating seafood, because you now can't avoid ingesting such chemicals no matter what you eat.)

Still other bad impacts of the First World on the Third World include deforestation, Japan's imports of wood products currently being a leading cause of deforestation in the tropical Third World; and overfishing, due to fishing fleets of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the heavily subsidized fleets of the European Union scouring the world's oceans. Conversely, people in the Third World can now, intentionally or unintentionally, send us their own bad things: their diseases like AIDS, SARS, cholera, and West Nile fever, carried inadvertently by passengers on transcontinental airplanes; unstoppable numbers of legal and illegal immigrants arriving by boat, truck, train, plane, and on foot; terrorists; and other consequences of their Third World problems. We in the U.S. are no longer the isolated Fortress America to which some of us aspired in the 1930s; instead, we are tightly and irreversibly connected to overseas countries. The U.S. is the world's leading importer nation: we import many necessities (especially oil and some rare metals) and many consumer products (cars and consumer electronics), as well as being the world's leading importer of investment capital. We are also the world's leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked with the rest of the world.

That's why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, our
trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers. We are so dependent on the rest of the world that if, 30 years ago, you had asked a politician to
name the countries most geopolitically irrelevant to our interests because of
their being so remote, poor, and weak, the list would surely have begun with
Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognized as im
portant enough to warrant our dispatching U.S. troops. Today the world no
longer faces just the circumscribed risk of an Easter Island society or Maya
homeland collapsing in isolation, without affecting the rest of the world. In
stead, societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a
worldwide decline. That conclusion is familiar to any investor in stock mar
kets: instability of the U.S. stock market, or the post-9/11 economic down
turn in the U.S., affects overseas stock markets and economies as well, and
vice versa. We in the U.S. (or else just affluent people in the U.S.) can no
longer get away with advancing our own self-interests, at the expense of the
interests of others.

A good example of a society minimizing such clashes of interest is the
Netherlands, whose citizens have perhaps the world's highest level of envi
ronmental awareness and of membership in environmental organizations. I
never understood why, until on a recent trip to the Netherlands I posed the question to three of my Dutch friends while driving through their country
side (Plates 39,40). Their answer was one that I shall never forget:

"just look around you here. All of this farmland that you see lies below
sea level. One-fifth of the total area of the Netherlands is below sea level, as
much as 22 feet below, because it used to be shallow bays, and we reclaimed
it from the sea by surrounding the bays with dikes and then gradually
pumping out the water. We have a saying, 'God created the Earth, but we Dutch created the Netherlands.' These reclaimed lands are called 'polders.'
We began draining them nearly a thousand years ago. Today, we still have to
keep pumping out the water that gradually seeps in. That's what our wind
mills used to be for, to drive the pumps to pump out the polders. Now we
use steam, diesel, and electric pumps instead. In each polder there are lines
of pumps, starting with those farthest from the sea, pumping the water in
sequence until the last pump finally pumps it out into a river or the ocean.
In the Netherlands, we have another expression, 'You have to be able to get
along with your enemy, because he may be the person operating the neigh
boring pump in your polder.' And we're all down in the polders together. It's
not the case that rich people live safely up on tops of the dikes while poor
people live down in the polder bottoms below sea level. If the dikes and