A Planet’s Worth of Ruins: Why Our Global Civilization Faces a Different Kind of Fall

Introduction to Dieback and Collapse part ii

In my previous Substack post, I introduced the idea of a 21st century dieback of the human population and the likely collapse of societies.

Although the scale of the collapse and the numbers of people affected will be unprecedented, collapse, itself, is not new to the human experience. History is littered with the collapses of societies, simple and complex, iconic and little known. From a cosmic perspective, history can be read as the book of stories chronicling the birth, life, and death of humanity’s many societies and civilizations—one account after the next in which a group of people became more populous and more prosperous.

Initially, greater complexity tended to be adaptive, and the societies became stronger. They grew more food, bred effective leaders, built powerful armies. And then eventually, whether it took decades or millennia, the society disintegrated. The people became too many or the soil too exhausted. The neighbors grew too powerful or suffered their own calamities, which ended the trade of crucial goods. Or the climate changed. Or the society became too complicated and inflexible to negotiate a world that is always changing and sometimes changes abruptly.

The list of those now in the dustbin of history reads like a who’s who of the great civilizations, empires, dynasties and of the small societies, as well: the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Hittite, Egyptian, Mayan, Olmec, Aztec, Inca, Wari, Tiwanaku, Minoan, Crete, Greek, Roman, Harrapan, Hopewell, Chou, Han, Khmer, Pagan, Mongol, Vijayanagar, Moghul, Anasazi, Hohokam, Rapa Nui, and so on.[1] These are but some of the civilizations and societies that have emerged from the background of humanity, flourished and then faded away.

Once filled with the lives of people who felt a similar mix of emotions, expectations, and hopes as you and I do today, they are now but the eroded remains of stone and rubble, inscribed with epic tales in languages long forgotten. They are food for vine and tree, or peek out as tiny rubble islands drowning in seas of desert sands. And surely the peoples of these now extinct societies expected their lives to continue on much as it had before and for their cities and cultures to live beyond them.

Indeed, collapse is no longer a fringe science or the purview only of religious doomsayers. Recent scholarship has found recurring instances in the historical record where climate shifts and famine led to violent conflict and revolution, “in line with,” as Jürgen Scheffran and his colleagues, writing in Science, put it, “…some narratives about the evolution and collapse of civilizations.”[2]

Whereas traditional interpretations of conflict and war tend to revolve around military and economic causes, rarely considering the underlying environmental factors, our own predicament is gradually awakening us to the role that environment plays in human affairs.

We—Civilization’s latest version—are repeating many of the past mistakes: overpopulation, deforestation, soil destruction, inequality, wasting wealth on luxuries and war, and so on. What is unprecedented about our predicament is its scale. Whereas in the past, societies, even those as large as empires, included but a few million inhabitants within a clearly bounded region, our global civilization encompasses billions impacting the whole of the planet.

Not only are our numbers unprecedented, so is the sophistication and power of our technology, the extremes of our affluence, and therefore the scale of our resource consumption and pollution. In the span of a century we have amplified our impact on the Earth at least twenty-fold.[3] That is, each year we now consume, pollute, and destroy twenty times more natural resources than we did in 1925.[4]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Civilization is a term that has about as many meanings as there are people using the term. In some great works, such as Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization, civilization is not even defined. Other renowned works, such as Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee’s twelve volume A Study of History, although brilliant and grand narratives, seem to have little acceptance in modern analysis (Tainter, 1988; Fernandez-Armesto, 2001). More recently, Quigley (1961), Said (1979), Braudel (1987), Tainter (1988), Fernandez-Armesto (2001), and Huntington (2003) discuss the difficulties in categorizing societies, given that criteria seem arbitrary and that there tend to be more differences between people within any one group than there are commonalities. Yet, even Said, who brilliantly deconstructs the use of the terms Oriental and Islamic, makes liberal use of such categories. Like all terms, labels, and categorizations, they become useful expedients when describing complex phenomena. Humans make sense of the multifarious universe by recognizing and giving names to patterns. Then we discuss and debate the legitimacy of our chosen patterns. One of the most controversial figures, Samuel Huntington (1996), defined civilization as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes people from other species.” In The Evolution of Civilizations, Carroll Quigley (1961) listed sixteen distinct civilizations that have existed through history. Although using different criteria than Quigley and even disagreeing with the notion that societies can evolve, Fernandez-Armesto (2001) ends up breaking up some of the more familiar societies into similar groups. For example, the Greek and Roman societies are considered empires within the larger Classical civilization, and the Aztecs were the last empire of the Mesoamerican civilization. Simply put, Civilization, for my purposes, is a product of farming cultures, not of hunter-gatherers, horticulturist, or herders. Cities, writing, specialization of occupation, social hierarchy, and accelerating innovations are products initially of the surpluses of agriculture and tend to be defining characteristics of civilization, although there are exceptions. The Highland American civilization, for instance, did not have a formal writing system.

[2] Quote from Scheffran et al. (2012) Climate Change and Violent Conflict. Science; 336: 869-71.

[3] It is difficult to actually measure humanity’s impact on the Earth, so we often approximate, using convenient proxies such as GDP, which is a measure of economic activity. In 1900, global GDP was estimated at $2 trillion; in 2000, it was about $39 trillion; which, according to IMF (2000) was about a nineteen-fold change in real dollars. Why “at least” a twenty-fold impact? Our impact on the Earth has been estimated to be some product of our population, affluence, and the technology we employ (for instance, Commoner, 1971; Holdren and Ehrlich, 1974; Harrison, 1992). So, for example, whereas technological efficiencies—such as replacing incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs—will diminish our impact, other technological innovations—such as disposal bottles, powerful insecticides, and air conditioners—have amplified it.

[4] To get some feel for the magnitude of this, imagine that you must live on a salary of $2000 a month, that is $24,000 a year, and that you spend every dollar of it. Likely, you will live frugally and spend most of your money on rent, groceries, and energy to heat the few rooms of your small home and to commute to work. Next, you land a job with a salary twenty times the previous. That is, $40,000 a month, $480,000 a year. The only condition is that you can’t save a dime. You must spend every bit of it. As it turns out, everyone in your town received a similar raise. Now, imagine the transformation of your material world. The houses would be larger and more luxurious, filled with expensive products, and the lawns would be lush. Imagine the cars you would drive, the planes you would fly, the restaurants you would frequent, the vacations you would take. This is what has happened globally in the past century—a 20-fold increase in the annual consumption and destruction of resources.

REFERENCES

Braudel, F. (1987) A History of Civilizations. Penguin, New York.

Commoner, B. (1971) The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. Knopf, New York.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2001) Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature. Simon and Schuster, New York.

Harrison, P. (1992) The Third Revolution: Environment, Population and a Sustainable World. I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, London, UK.

Holdren, J.P. and Ehrlich, P.R. (1974) Human Population and the Global Environment. American Scientist; 26(6): 282-92.

Huntington, S.P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations? in The Class of Civilizations? The Debate. Council on Foreign Relations, New York.

Huntington, S.P. (2003) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, New York.

Quigley, C. (1961) The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis.

Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York.

Tainter, J.A. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K.