Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (96 page)

pumps fail, we'll all drown together. When a big storm and high tides swept inland over Zeeland Province on February 1,1953, nearly 2,000 Dutch peo
ple, both rich and poor, drowned. We swore that we would never let that
happen again, and the whole country paid for an extremely expensive set of tide barriers. If global warming causes polar ice melting and a world rise in
sea level, the consequences will be more severe for the Netherlands than for
any other country in the world, because so much of our land is already un
der sea level. That's why we Dutch are so aware of our environment. We've learned through our history that we're all living in the same polder, and that
our survival depends on each other's survival."

That acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society
contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people in
creasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to cre
ate their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those
amenities as public services to everyone else. Those private amenities in
clude living inside gated walled communities (Plate 36), relying on private
security guards rather than on the police, sending one's children to well-funded private schools with small classes rather than to the underfunded
crowded public schools, purchasing private health insurance or medical
care, drinking bottled water instead of municipal water, and (in Southern
California) paying to drive on toll roads competing with the jammed public freeways. Underlying such privatization is a misguided belief that the elite can remain unaffected by the problems of society around them: the attitude
of those Greenland Norse chiefs who found that they had merely bought
themselves the privilege of being the last to starve.

Throughout human history, most peoples have been connected to some
other peoples, living together in small virtual polders. The Easter Islanders
comprised a dozen clans, dividing their island polder into a dozen territo
ries, and isolated from all other islands, but sharing among clans the Rano
Raraku statue quarry, the Puna Pau pukao quarry, and a few obsidian quarries. As Easter Island society disintegrated, all the clans disintegrated to
gether, but nobody else in the world knew about it, nor was anybody else
affected. Southeast Polynesia's polder consisted of three interdependent is
lands, such that the decline of Mangareva's society was disastrous also for
the Pitcairn and Henderson Islanders but for no one else. To the ancient
Maya, their polder consisted at most of the Yucatan Peninsula and neighboring areas. When the Classic Maya cities collapsed in the southern Yu
catan, refugees may have reached the northern Yucatan, but certainly not

Florida. In contrast today our whole world has become one polder, such
that events anywhere affect Americans. When distant Somalia collapsed, in
went American troops; when the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union col
lapsed, out went streams of refugees over all of Europe and the rest of the world; and when changed conditions of society, settlement, and lifestyle
spread new diseases in Africa and Asia, those diseases moved over the globe.
The whole world today is a self-contained and isolated unit, as Tikopia Is
land and Tokugawa Japan used to be. We need to realize, as did the Tikopi-
ans and Japanese, that there is no other island/other planet to which we can
turn for help, or to which we can export our problems. Instead, we need to
learn, as they did, to live within our means.

I introduced this section by acknowledging that there are important differ
ences between the ancient world and the modern world. The differences
that I then went on to mention
—today's larger population and more potent
destructive technology, and today's interconnectedness posing the risk of a
global rather than a local collapse—may seem to suggest a pessimistic outlook. If the Easter Islanders couldn't solve their milder local problems in the
past, how can the modern world hope to solve its big global problems?

People who get depressed at such thoughts often then ask me, "Jared, are
you optimistic or pessimistic about the world's future?" I answer, "I'm a
cautious optimist." By that, I mean that, on the one hand, I acknowledge the
seriousness of the problems facing us. If we don't make a determined effort
to solve them, and if we don't succeed at that effort, the world as a whole
within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or per
haps something worse. That's the reason why I decided to devote most of
my career efforts at this stage of my life to convincing people that our prob
lems have to be taken seriously and won't go away otherwise. On the other hand, we shall be able to solve our problems
—if we choose to do so. That's
why my wife and I did decide to have children 17 years ago: because we did
see grounds for hope.

One basis for hope is that, realistically, we are not beset by insoluble
problems. While we do face big risks, the most serious ones are not ones be
yond our control, like a possible collision with an asteroid of a size that hits the Earth every hundred million years or so. Instead, they are ones that we are generating ourselves. Because we are the cause of our environmental
problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not
choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for

grabs, lying in our own hands. We don't need new technologies to solve our
problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the
most part we "just" need the political will to apply solutions already avail
able. Of course, that's a big "just." But many societies did find the necessary
political will in the past. Our modern societies have already found the will to solve some of our problems, and to achieve partial solutions to others.

Another basis for hope is the increasing diffusion of environmental
thinking among the public around the world. While such thinking has been
with us for a long time, its spread has accelerated, especially since the 1962
publication of
Silent Spring.
The environmental movement has been gain
ing adherents at an increasing rate, and they act through a growing diversity
of increasingly effective organizations, not only in the United States and Europe but also in the Dominican Republic and other developing countries. At
the same time as the environmental movement is gaining strength at an in
creasing rate, so too are the threats to our environment. That's why I referred
earlier in this book to our situation as that of being in an exponentially ac
celerating horse race of unknown outcome. It's neither impossible, nor is it
assured, that our preferred horse will win the race.

What are the choices that we must make if we are now to succeed, and
not to fail? There are many specific choices, of which I discuss examples in
the Further Readings section, that any of us can make as individuals. For
our society as a whole, the past societies that we have examined in this book suggest broader lessons. Two types of choices seem to me to have been cru
cial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term plan
ning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also
recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our
individual lives.

One of those choices has depended on the courage to practice long-term
thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time
when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis
proportions. This type of decision-making is the opposite of the short-
term reactive decision-making that too often characterizes our elected
politicians
—the thinking that my politically well-connected friend decried
as "90-day thinking," i.e., focusing only on issues likely to blow up in a crisis
within the next 90 days. Set against the many depressing bad examples of
such short-term decision-making are the encouraging examples of coura
geous long-term thinking in the past, and in the contemporary world of
NGOs, business, and government. Among past societies faced with the
prospect of ruinous deforestation, Easter Island and Mangareva chiefs

succumbed to their immediate concerns, but Tokugawa shoguns, Inca em
perors, New Guinea highlanders, and 16th-century German landowners
adopted a long view and reafforested. China's leaders similarly promoted
reafforestation in recent decades and banned logging of native forests in
1998. Today, many NGOs exist specifically for the purpose of promoting sane long-term environmental policies. In the business world the American
corporations that remain successful for long times (e.g., Procter and Gamble) are ones that don't wait for a crisis to force them to reexamine their
policies, but that instead look for problems on the horizon and act before
there is a crisis. I already mentioned Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company as hav
ing an office devoted just to envisioning scenarios decades off in the future.

Courageous, successful, long-term planning also characterizes some
governments and some political leaders, some of the time. Over the last 30
years a sustained effort by the U.S. government has reduced levels of the six
major air pollutants nationally by 25%, even though our energy consump
tion and population increased by 40% and our vehicle miles driven in
creased by 150% during those same decades. The governments of Malaysia,
Singapore, Taiwan, and Mauritius all recognized that their long-term eco
nomic well-being required big investments in public health to prevent
tropical diseases from sapping their economies; those investments proved to be a key to those countries' spectacular recent economic growth. Of the for
mer two halves of the overpopulated nation of Pakistan, the eastern half (independent since 1971 as Bangladesh) adopted effective family planning
measures to reduce its rate of population growth, while the western half
(still known as Pakistan) did not and is now the world's sixth most popu
lous country. Indonesia's former environmental minister Emil Salim, and
the Dominican Republic's former president Joaquin Balaguer, exemplify
government leaders whose concern about chronic environmental dangers
made a big impact on their countries. All of these examples of courageous
long-term thinking in both the public sector and the private sector con
tribute to my hope.

The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to
make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly
served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed cir
cumstances? Which of those treasured values must instead be jettisoned
and replaced with different approaches? The Greenland Norse refused to jettison part of their identity as a European, Christian, pastoral society, and they died as a result. In contrast, Tikopia Islanders did have the courage to
eliminate their ecologically destructive pigs, even though pigs are the sole

large domestic animal and a principal status symbol of Melanesian soci
eties. Australia is now in the process of reappraising its identity as a British
agricultural society. The Icelanders and many traditional caste societies of
India in the past, and Montana ranchers dependent on irrigation in recent
times, did reach agreement to subordinate their individual rights to group
interests. They thereby succeeded in managing shared resources and avoid
ing the tragedy of the commons that has befallen so many other groups.
The government of China restricted the traditional freedom of individual
reproductive choice, rather than let population problems spiral out of control. The people of Finland, faced with an ultimatum by their vastly more
powerful Russian neighbor in 1939, chose to value their freedom over their
lives, fought with a courage that astonished the world, and won their gam
ble, even while losing the war. While I was living in Britain from 1958 to
1962, the British people were coming to terms with the outdatedness of cherished long-held values based on Britain's former role as the world's
dominant political, economic, and naval power. The French, Germans, and
other European countries have advanced even further in subordinating to
the European Union their national sovereignties for which they used to fight so dearly.

All of these past and recent reappraisals of values that I have just mentioned were achieved despite being agonizingly difficult. Hence they also
contribute to my hope. They may inspire modern First World citizens with
the courage to make the most fundamental reappraisal now facing us: how
much of our traditional consumer values and First World living standard
can we afford to retain? I already mentioned the seeming political impossi
bility of inducing First World citizens to lower their impact on the world.
But the alternative, of continuing our current impact, is more impossible.
This dilemma reminds me of Winston Churchill's response to criticisms of democracy: "It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of govern
ment except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our
future
—except for all other conceivable scenarios.

Actually, while it won't be easier to reduce our impact, it won't be impossible either. Remember that impact is the product of two factors: popu
lation, multiplied times impact per person. As for the first of those two
factors, population growth has recently declined drastically in all First
World countries, and in many Third World countries as well
—including
China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, with the world's largest, fourth largest,
and ninth largest populations respectively. Intrinsic population growth in