The Long Descent (35 page)

Human societies and nonhuman species cannot be equated in a simplistic manner, but the radical differences that exist in subsistence and production strategies among human societies allow them to be compared to distinct biotic groups in certain contexts. Human societies enter into common ecological relationships such as symbiosis, commensality, parasitism, predation, and competitive exclusion with other societies. Thus processes by which human societies are replaced by others may be usefully compared to succession to see if common features emerge.

The model of catabolic collapse suggests one such common feature. As outlined above, societies differ in their response to changes in resource availability and maintenance costs. Some societies succeed in maintaining a steady state through timely adjustments; others experience a history of repeated maintenance crises and partial breakdowns followed by recoveries; still others undergo severe depletion crises followed by total collapse. These differences, according to the model presented here, unfold from differing relationships among resources, capital, production, and waste, especially the relationships between capital production and maintenance, C(p)/M(p), and between use and replenishment rates of resources, d(R)/r(R).

These variations among human societies parallel differences between R-selected and K-selected nonhuman species. A society that maximizes its production of capital, like an R-selected species, prospers in an environment with substantial uncaptured resources, but falters once these are exhausted. Its successors are likely to be societies that, like K-selected species, use key resources more sus-tainably at the cost of decreased production of capital. Nonhuman climax communities also typically display a higher diversity of species — but a lower population per species — than earlier seral stages, and they produce notably lower volumes of biomass than do earlier stages over equal time frames (Odum 1969).

Broadly similar changes often distinguish precollapse and post-collapse societies. Thus the collapse of the western Roman Empire, for example, could be seen as a succession process in which one se-ral stage, dominated by a single sociopolitical “species” that maximized capital production at the cost of inefficiency, was replaced by a more diverse community of societies, consisting of many less populous “species” better adapted to their own local conditions, and producing capital at lower but more sustainable rates. Analyses that portray this transformation as pure tragedy miss something important; the Roman collapse enabled other societies to emerge from Rome's shadow, launching major cultural initiatives such as vernacular literatures in the ancestors of today's Celtic, Germanic, and Romance languages (Wiseman 1997). As with any succession process, there were gainers as well as losers. If a lapse into fantasy may be excused, were nonhuman biota literate and interested in their past, a history of lake eutrophication written by meadow grasses would differ sharply from one written by fish.

Since humans have capacities for change that most species lack, the same human individuals can change from fish to grass, so to speak, composing an R-selected production-maximizing society at one time and its K-selected sustainability-maximizing replacement at a later time. The example of the Kachin cited above shows that this is not merely a theoretical possibility. However, as other cited examples and the general evidence of history suggest, such a change is not inevitable. Whenever a society shows signs of being unable to maintain its existing capital, a maintenance crisis may follow, and whenever capital production depends on the use of resources at rates significantly above their rate of replacement, a depletion crisis followed by catabolic collapse is a significant possibility.

Such assessments of past and present societies, in order to achieve a high degree of analytic or predictive value, require careful quantitative analysis of a sort not attempted here. Since each element in the conceptual model presented here stands for a diverse and constantly changing set of variables, such analysis offers significant challenges; in many historical examples it may be impossible to go beyond proxy measurements of uncertain value for crucial variables. However, general patterns corresponding to the catabolic collapse model may be easier to extract from incomplete data. Any society that displays broad increases in most measures of capital production coupled with signs of serious depletion of key resources is a potential candidate for catabolic collapse.

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