The Ends of the World as We Know Them

Los Angeles — NEW Year's weekend traditionally is a time for us to reflect, and to make resolutions based on our reflections. In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now, or even next year?

Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal.

When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case.

For instance, in the collapse of the Polynesian society on Easter Island three centuries ago, environmental problems were dominant, and climate change, enemies and trade were insignificant; however, the latter three factors played big roles in the disappearance of the medieval Norse colonies on Greenland. Let's consider two examples of declines stemming from different mixes of causes: the falls of classic Maya civilization and of Polynesian settlements on the Pitcairn Islands.

Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America developed the New World's most advanced civilization before Columbus. They were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local origins around 2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year A.D. 250, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century.

Thereafter, societies in the most densely populated areas of the southern Yucatan underwent a steep political and cultural collapse: between 760 and 910, kings were overthrown, large areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of the population disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The last known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?

A major factor was environmental degradation by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.

Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving.

What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve.

Whereas Maya societies were undone by problems of their own making, Polynesian societies on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean were undone largely by other people's mistakes. Pitcairn, the uninhabited island settled in 1790 by the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers, had actually been populated by Polynesians 800 years earlier. That society, which left behind temple platforms, stone and shell tools and huge garbage piles of fish and bird and turtle bones as evidence of its existence, survived for several centuries and then vanished. Why?

In many respects, Pitcairn and Henderson are tropical paradises, rich in some food sources and essential raw materials. Pitcairn is home to Southeast Polynesia's largest quarry of stone suited for making adzes, while Henderson has the region's largest breeding seabird colony and its only nesting beach for sea turtles. Yet the islanders depended on imports from Mangareva Island, hundreds of miles away, for canoes, crops, livestock and oyster shells for making tools.

Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson, their Mangarevan trading partner collapsed for reasons similar to those underlying the Maya decline: deforestation, erosion and warfare. Deprived of essential imports in a Polynesian equivalent of the 1973 oil crisis, the Pitcairn and Henderson societies declined until everybody had died or fled.

The Maya and the Henderson and Pitcairn Islanders are not alone, of course. Over the centuries, many other societies have declined, collapsed or died out. Famous victims include the Anasazi in the American Southwest, who abandoned their cities in the 12th century because of environmental problems and climate change, and the Greenland Norse, who disappeared in the 15th century because of all five interacting factors on the checklist. There were also the ancient Fertile Crescent societies, the Khmer at Angkor Wat, the Moche society of Peru - the list goes on.

But before we let ourselves get depressed, we should also remember that there is another long list of cultures that have managed to prosper for lengthy periods of time. Societies in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands and Central and Northwest Europe, for example, have all found ways to sustain themselves. What separates the lost cultures from those that survived? Why did the Maya fail and the shogun succeed?

Half of the answer involves environmental differences: geography deals worse cards to some societies than to others. Many of the societies that collapsed had the misfortune to occupy dry, cold or otherwise fragile environments, while many of the long-term survivors enjoyed more robust and fertile surroundings. But it's not the case that a congenial environment guarantees success: some societies (like the Maya) managed to ruin lush environments, while other societies - like the Incas, the Inuit, Icelanders and desert Australian Aborigines - have managed to carry on in some of the earth's most daunting environments.

The other half of the answer involves differences in a society's responses to problems. Ninth-century New Guinea Highland villagers, 16th-century German landowners, and the Tokugawa shoguns of 17th-century Japan all recognized the deforestation spreading around them and solved the problem, either by developing scientific reforestation (Japan and Germany) or by transplanting tree seedlings (New Guinea). Conversely, the Maya, Mangarevans and Easter Islanders failed to address their forestry problems and so collapsed.

Consider Japan. In the 1600's, the country faced its own crisis of deforestation, paradoxically brought on by the peace and prosperity following the Tokugawa shoguns' military triumph that ended 150 years of civil war. The subsequent explosion of Japan's population and economy set off rampant logging for construction of palaces and cities, and for fuel and fertilizer.

The shoguns responded with both negative and positive measures. They reduced wood consumption by turning to light-timbered construction, to fuel-efficient stoves and heaters, and to coal as a source of energy. At the same time, they increased wood production by developing and carefully managing plantation forests. Both the shoguns and the Japanese peasants took a long-term view: the former expected to pass on their power to their children, and the latter expected to pass on their land. In addition, Japan's isolation at the time made it obvious that the country would have to depend on its own resources and couldn't meet its needs by pillaging other countries. Today, despite having the highest human population density of any large developed country, Japan is more than 70 percent forested.

There is a similar story from Iceland. When the island was first settled by the Norse around 870, its light volcanic soils presented colonists with unfamiliar challenges. They proceeded to cut down trees and stock sheep as if they were still in Norway, with its robust soils. Significant erosion ensued, carrying half of Iceland's topsoil into the ocean within a century or two. Icelanders became the poorest people in Europe. But they gradually learned from their mistakes, over time instituting stocking limits on sheep and other strict controls, and establishing an entire government department charged with landscape management. Today, Iceland boasts the sixth-highest per-capita income in the world.

What lessons can we draw from history? The most straightforward: take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today.

Other lessons involve failures of group decision-making. There are many reasons why past societies made bad decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even to perceive the problems that would eventually destroy them. One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society. Another is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend.

History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.

Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.

In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan, as in modern Scandinavia and the Netherlands, could not ignore or insulate themselves from broad societal problems. For instance, the Dutch upper class for hundreds of years has been unable to insulate itself from the Netherlands' water management problems for a simple reason: the rich live in the same drained lands below sea level as the poor. If the dikes and pumps keeping out the sea fail, the well-off Dutch know that they will drown along with everybody else, which is precisely what happened during the floods of 1953.

The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense. The medieval Greenland Norse lacked such a willingness: they continued to view themselves as transplanted Norwegian pastoralists, and to despise the Inuit as pagan hunters, even after Norway stopped sending trading ships and the climate had grown too cold for a pastoral existence. They died off as a result, leaving Greenland to the Inuit. On the other hand, the British in the 1950's faced up to the need for a painful reappraisal of their former status as rulers of a world empire set apart from Europe. They are now finding a different avenue to wealth and power, as part of a united Europe.

In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world.

Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last minute.

But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk - particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops.

A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect American lives.

Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they contemplate the world's growing population and human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity's biggest problems today are ones entirely of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond our control don't figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save ourselves, we don't need new technology: we just need the political will to face up to our problems of population and the environment.

I also draw hope from a unique advantage that we enjoy. Unlike any previous society in history, our global society today is the first with the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of societies remote from us in space and in time. When the Maya and Mangarevans were cutting down their trees, there were no historians or archaeologists, no newspapers or television, to warn them of the consequences of their actions. We, on the other hand, have a detailed chronicle of human successes and failures at our disposal. Will we choose to use it?

Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," is the author of the forthcoming "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."

It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools.

Increased secularism, affirmative action, and irrational concerns about criminal rights have all contributed to the collapse of cities. The courts prevent law-abiding citizens from doing anything about it -- so people create their own communities.

It is folly to try to relate the fall of the Mayans to the United States or any other western country. The threat to the world right now is the refusal of a large part of the world to emerge from the days of the Mayans. There is an unsustainable tension between the people that are in the 21st century and those of the 7th century that continue to demand their right to live their primitive lives while at the same time asking the rest to provide the aid required to sustain their every day needs. There is no excuse for countries like Indonesia that is tremendously wealthy in natural resources and population to not have the infrastructure required to withstand a disaster even as large as this one. When 2/3 of the worlds population is dependent on the other third for just their every day existence then that is the threat to all of the western world NOT the environment.

Sounds like another Paul Ehrlich to me.

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"In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world."

With

"In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. Five years is all we have left if we are going to preserve any kind of quality in the world." Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day 1970.

It's all baloney, all of it.

The NYT was very kind to provide a well-timed editorial page book plug. Perhaps I am too generous -- it does fit the NYT political agenda.

I have not read Collapse. Guns, Germs and Steel was a good book. but Diamond seemed woefully ignorant of the cultural and societal basis of modern western advance.

Here I suspect the same. The Anasazi and Maya were undermined by regional drought over a small area in inherently marginal environments, and single-track economies which couldn't adapt.

The modern US is no less dependent on natural underpinnings, but with a deversified economy, global trade, and a huge landmass, as well as a highly adaptable culture, we are well-hedged against short-term climate changes.

Not so with regard to longer-term energy supplies, hence the attention to the middle east in our foreign affairs.

With properly functioning market signals we can easily adapt to this as well.

Diamond seems to suffer from the common scientific hubris that one's area of study is all-important. He skates very close to environmental determininsm in my opinion, and fails to appreciate the forces behind American supremacy, and the fact that our economy is capable of remaking itself as quickly as nature deals challenges.

I have reached a point in life where I dismiss ALL leftist diatribes and "analyses" about the "coming collapse of America" as absolute, unadulterated, rank bulls**t. Including this one. There is no leftist on earth who can generate a meaningful critique of America, the greatest nation in the history of the planet, because they are immersed in asinine Marxist ideology that is fundamentally averse to recognizing the historical basis for America's rise to greatness. That is, a culture of freedom, reflected in our societal appreciation of individual liberty and property rights. No other nation on earth has such a history and tradition. The only thing that will destroy this country and undercut our position as "global hyperpower"is if the people here lose their minds and buy this leftist tripe enough to implement the Marxist policies pushed by the congenitally blind and terminally stupid "intellectual elites".

When 2/3 of the worlds population is dependent on the other third for just their every day existence

. OTOH, 4% of the world is dependent on resources from the other 96%. I'm not sure the U.S. (and the other richest nations) would be dominant if they lost access to those resources, or had to compete with the rest of the planet for them on a (hypothetical) even playing field.

Jared Diamond is alway interesting to read -- agree with him or not. His Guns, Germs, and Steel is a good and thoughtfull read.

Gun Germs, and Steel has interesting parts but the whole is standard left wing academic claptrap. Mr. Diamond attempts to claim the West dominates the world due to its happenstance of geography, domesticatable animals, indigenous plants, etc. He ignores culture and religion.

I don't mind academics claiming all peoples and cultures are equal but when Mr. Diamond claimed that New Guinea natives are more intelligent than Westerners because of their ability to survive in the jungle and not get lost or eaten by wild animals, I damn near through the book in the trash can. He is infected with the all too common disease of academics - antiwestern, anticapitalism, & antichristian bigotry.

Go back through history, what has killed off powerful civilizations is multiculturalism, and totalitarianism, making gods of men. We have a government that is happy to throw million and billions that we don't have to every worthless cause on the planet while ignoring the important things that need attention to.

Charge it, and pay the interest only on the debt leads to financial collapse eventually, especially when there is an on going war regarding the worth of the dollar world wide.

They had stone tools. They did wonders with them.

We have advanced stone tools. Silicon.
We have the ability to solve our main problems by sharing information, and sharing the responsibility.

The internet is a very powerful tool. One can research just about any subject, on a scale unavailable in the past.

One can participate in the responsibility for the government and the status of the land, and make a difference.

They say two heads are better than one, and I have been here on FR for some time, and there are about 2-3 other people actively discussing something, with probably hundreds lurking. Any postulation that something is fact, can and will be scrutinzed by many, including those who are deep into that particular field. The best way to get those who 'know' about a subject to share their wealth, is to ask.

CSI, wasn't it? "To get the right answer, you have to ask the right question".

I found it hard to devote time to reading all posts on a thread before commenting. Many never bother. Some only view posts-to-them. That is a waste of resources.

Science Fiction prompted me to read so much that I learned to speed read. If I couldn't read very fast, I would be challenged by trying to read everyone's comments. But I find that more information can be learned from everyone else, than I ever could using a library,sending off to verious sources for plans, documents, maps, etc.

AND THE COST. Woah.

You are so correct,BTW. The tools will never save one life. A person using the tool can.

If we don't use our tool well, then maybe the cavemen were 'smarter' than us, using their tools more wisely.

Long lasting societies are characterized by prudent governments. This means that Lefties are carefully kept from gaining power, amongst other things, of which religious uniformity is the most important.

The USA was built on the anglo-saxon protestants, and we all mine the ruins left by that long gone culture. Look what has happened to the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and now the Methodists if you can't agree with my first sentence.

Long lasting Republics have had very restricted franchises. The longest lasting Republic was Venice, maybe 800 years, which had something like ten voters. Uniformly Catholic, of course. Try that here.

The Swiss Canton system has lasted a long time. It is a development of the German clan system. Shows signs of decay and creeping Leftism (same thing).

The Japanese system is only post Meiji and post MacArthur, but has held together for perhaps a thousand years under various types of government because of ethnic uniformity and fear of Chinese invasion. The universal religion is Shinto with a little Buddist metaphor added, and is basically tribal.

The previous is greatly simplified but much better history than that Jared Diamond claptrap.

Yes, decadence and secularism are important determinants of societal destruction. Drug addiction and sexual practices which spread disease and sometimes cause the creation of new and vicious viruses also bring down societies. History has been altered many times through epidemics of disease. The pollutants which effect human behavior through the breakdown of basic morality are no less important than the erosion of the land and toxic pollutants in the air..

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