Collapse

— How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Not environmental determinism, a Single-Factor Determinism: Haiti vs Dominican

Human environmental destruction

• Deforestation
• Soil erosion
• Overhunting/fishing
• Introduced species
• Water management
• Over population

Non-human environmental changes

• Sun
• Volcanic
• Land and ocean
• Rotation axis

People in the past vs today

• Same: neither ignorant nor all-knowing conscientious environmentalists
• Different: (below) we have the gift of hindsight

Why group decisions fail

• Fail to anticipate problems
  • No prior experience
  • Forgotten (no records)
  • False analogy
• Fail to perceive it when they arrive
  • Imperceptible (soil nutrient)
  • Distant managers
  • Slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations (creeping normalcy, amnesia)
• Not try to solve
  

  In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles.

  Link to original

• Deeply held values
  • Short-term vs long-term
  • Selfish minority getting away with it
  • Elite (sometimes competitive with no choice)
  • Tragedy of the common (the prisoner’s dilemma)
  • Crowd Psychology
• Fail to solve it
  • beyond capacities to solve
  • solution prohibitively expensive
  • too little and too late

Select Quotes

Epigraph

The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.

Past peoples were neither ignorant bad managers who deserved to be exterminated or dispossessed, nor all-knowing conscientious environmentalists who solved problems that we can’t solve today. They were people like us,

climate may become hotter or colder, wetter or drier, or more or less variable between months or between years, because of changes in natural forces that drive climate and that have nothing to do with humans. Examples of such forces include changes in the heat put out by the sun, volcanic eruptions that inject dust into the atmosphere, changes in the orientation of the Earth’s axis with respect to its orbit, and changes in the distribution of land and ocean over the face of the Earth.

In many historical cases, a society that was depleting its environmental resources could absorb the losses as long as the climate was benign, but was then driven over the brink of collapse when the climate became drier, colder, hotter, wetter, or more variable. Should one then say that the collapse was caused by human environmental impact, or by climate change? Neither of those simple alternatives is correct.

Hence a full title for this book would be “Societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses.”

While these relationships with big businesses have given me close-up views of the devastating environmental damage that they often cause, I’ve also had close-up views of situations where big businesses found it in their interests to adopt environmental safeguards more draconian and effective than I’ve encountered even in national parks.

My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems.

Science is often misrepresented as “the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.” Actually, science is something much broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

There is a large scientific literature on the obvious pitfalls of that comparative method, and on how best to overcome those pitfalls.

Lest one suppose that this book preaches environmental determinism, the latter country illustrates what a big difference one person can make, especially if he or she is the country’s leader.

Chapter 2 - Twilight At Easter

Historians used to assume that all those Polynesian islands were discovered and settled by chance, as a result of canoes full of fishermen happening to get blown off course. It is now clear, however, that both the discoveries and the settlements were meticulously planned. Contrary to what one would expect for accidental drift voyages, much of Polynesia was settled in a west-to-east direction opposite to that of the prevailing winds and currents, which are from east to west. New islands could have been discovered by voyagers sailing upwind on a predetermined bearing into the unknown, or waiting for a temporary reversal of the prevailing winds. Transfers of many species of crops and livestock, from taro to bananas and from pigs to dogs and chickens, prove beyond question that settlement was by well-prepared colonists, carrying products of their homelands deemed essential to the survival of the new colony.

In 1999 the reconstructed Polynesian sailing canoe Hokule’a succeeded in reaching Easter from Mangareva after a voyage of 17 days.

To extraterrestrial-enthusiast Erich von Däniken and others, Easter Island’s statues and platforms seemed unique and in need of special explanation. Actually, they have many precedents in Polynesia, especially in East Polynesia.

We don’t know for sure what the pukao represented; our best guess is a headdress of red birds’ feathers prized throughout Polynesia and reserved for chiefs, or else a hat of feathers and tapa cloth. For instance, when a Spanish exploring expedition reached the Pacific island of Santa Cruz, what really impressed the local people was not Spanish ships, swords, guns, or mirrors, but their red cloth. All pukao are of red scoria from a single quarry, Puna Pau, where (just as is true of moai at the moai workshop on Rano Raraku) I observed unfinished pukao, plus finished ones awaiting transport.

What are the red clothes that impress us modern people

Given the widespread distribution over Polynesia of platforms and statues, why were Easter Islanders the only ones to go overboard, to make by far the largest investment of societal resources in building them, and to erect the biggest ones? At least four different factors cooperated to produce that outcome. First, Rano Raraku tuff is the best stone in the Pacific for carving: to a sculptor used to struggling with basalt and red scoria, it almost cries out, “Carve me!” Second, other Pacific island societies on islands within a few days’ sail of other islands devoted their energy, resources, and labor to interisland trading, raiding, exploration, colonization, and emigration, but those competing outlets were foreclosed for Easter Islanders by their isolation. While chiefs on other Pacific islands could compete for prestige and status by seeking to outdo each other in those interisland activities, “The boys on Easter Island didn’t have those usual games to play,” as one of my students put it. Third, Easter’s gentle terrain and complementary resources in different territories led as we have seen to some integration of the island, thereby letting clans all over the island obtain Rano Raraku stone and go overboard in carving it. If Easter had remained politically fragmented, like the Marquesas, the Tongariki clan in whose territory Rano Raraku lay could have monopolized its stone, or neighboring clans could have barred transport of statues across their territories—as in fact eventually happened. Finally, as we shall see, building platforms and statues required feeding lots of people, a feat made possible by the food surpluses produced by the elite-controlled upland plantations.

We know that some of the biggest canoes that the Hawaiians moved over canoe ladders weighed more than an average-size Easter Island moai, so the proposed method is plausible.

The name “Terevaka” for Easter’s largest and highest mountain means “place to get canoes”: before its slopes were stripped of their trees to convert them to plantations, they were used for timber, and they are still littered with the stone drills, scrapers, knives, chisels, and other woodworking and canoe-building tools from that period.

Andesite Line,

Chapter 4 - The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi And Their Neighbors

a series of good years, with adequate rainfall or with sufficiently shallow groundwater tables, may result in population growth, resulting in turn in society becoming increasingly complex and interdependent and no longer locally self-sufficient. Such a society then cannot cope with, and rebuild itself after, a series of bad years that a less populous, less interdependent, more self-sufficient society had previously been able to cope with.

Chapter 6 - The Viking Prelude And Fugues

All of those Viking colonies were derived from the same ancestral society: their differing fates were transparently related to the different environments in which the colonists found themselves. Thus, the Viking expansion westwards across the North Atlantic offers us an instructive natural experiment, just as does the Polynesian expansion eastwards across the Pacific

the Viking expansion is a good example of what is termed an autocatalytic process. In chemistry the term catalysis means the speeding-up of a chemical reaction by an added ingredient, such as an enzyme. Some chemical reactions produce a product that also acts as a catalyst, so that the speed of the reaction starts from nothing and then runs away as some product is formed, catalyzing and driving the reaction faster and producing more product which drives the reaction still faster. Such a chain reaction is termed autocatalytic, the prime example being the explosion of an atomic bomb when neutrons in a critical mass of uranium split uranium nuclei to release energy plus more neutrons, which split still more nuclei. Similarly, in an autocatalytic expansion of a human population, some initial advantages that a people gains (such as technological advantages) bring them profits or discoveries, which in turn stimulate more people to seek profits and discoveries, which result in even more profits and discoveries stimulating even more people to set out, until that people has filled up all the areas available to them with those advantages, at which point the autocatalytic expansion ceases to catalyze itself and runs out of steam.

Perhaps the most important consequence of the colonists’ conversion to Christianity involved how they viewed themselves. The outcome reminds me of how Australians, long after the founding of Britain’s Australian colonies in 1788, continued to think of themselves not as an Asian and Pacific people but as overseas British, still prepared to die in 1915 at far-off Gallipoli fighting with the British against Turks irrelevant to Australia’s national interests. In the same way, Viking colonists on the North Atlantic islands thought of themselves as European Christians. They kept in step with mainland changes in church architecture, burial customs, and units of measurement. That shared identity enabled a few thousand Greenlanders to cooperate with each other, withstand hardships, and maintain their existence in a harsh environment for four centuries. As we shall see, it also prevented them from learning from the Inuit, and from modifying their identity in ways that might have permitted them to survive beyond four centuries.

Icelanders became conditioned by their long history of experience to conclude that, whatever change they tried to make, it was much more likely to make things worse than better.

Chapter 7 - Norse Greenland’S Flowering

Similar climate fluctuations with consequent changes in prey abundance may have contributed to the first settlement by Native Americans around 2500 B.C., their decline or disappearance around 1500 B.C., their subsequent return, their decline again, and then their complete abandonment of southern Greenland some time before the Norse arrived around A.D. 980.

Chapter 8 - Norse Greenland’S End

“Farm Beneath the Sands,” which became almost perfectly preserved under frozen river sands,

a more immediately fatal consequence was that, by losing iron, the Norse lost their military advantage over the Inuit.

The end of the Greenland Norse colony is often described as a “mystery.” That’s true, but only partly so, because we need to distinguish ultimate reasons (i.e., underlying long-term factors behind the slow decline of Greenland Norse society) from proximate reasons (i.e., the final blow to the weakened society, killing the last individuals or forcing them to abandon their settlements). Only the proximate reasons remain partly mysterious; the ultimate reasons are clear.

Chapter 9 - Opposite Paths To Success

The maximum distance from the center of the island (Tikopia) to the coast is three-quarters of a mile. The native concept of space bears a distinct relation to this. They find it almost impossible to conceive of any really large land mass … I was once asked seriously by a group of them, ‘Friend, is there any land where the sound of the sea is not heard?’ Their confinement has another less obvious result. For all kinds of spatial reference they use the expressions inland and to seawards. Thus an axe lying on the floor of a house is localized in this way, and I have even heard a man direct the attention of another in saying: ‘There is a spot of mud on your seaward cheek.’

Much commoner than such explicit suicide was “virtual suicide” by setting out on dangerous overseas voyages, which claimed the lives of 81 men and three women between 1929 and 1952.

peace, political stability, and well-justified confidence in their own future encouraged Tokugawa shoguns to invest in and to plan for the long-term future of their domain: in contrast to Maya kings and to Haitian and Rwandan presidents, who could not or cannot expect to be succeeded by their sons or even to fill out their own term in office.

Centralization

Privatization

Chapter 10 - Malthus In Africa: Rwanda’S Genocide

Africa’s population to have leveled off long ago. In fact, it has been exploding recently for many reasons: the adoption of crops native to the New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and manioc, alias cassava), broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond that previously possible with native African crops alone; improved hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibiotics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening to settlement some areas that were formerly no-man’s lands fought over by adjacent smaller polities.

The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is not nearly as sharp as often portrayed. The two groups speak the same language, attended the same churches and schools and bars, lived together in the same village under the same chiefs, and worked together in the same offices. Hutu and Tutsi intermarried, and (before Belgians introduced identity cards) sometimes switched their ethnic identity. While Hutu and Tutsi look different on the average, many individuals are impossible to assign to either of the two groups based on appearance. About one-quarter of all Rwandans have both Hutu and Tutsi among their great-grandparents. (In fact, there is some question whether the traditional account of the Hutu and Tutsi having different origins is correct, or whether instead the two groups just differentiated economically and socially within Rwanda and Burundi out of a common stock.)

We cannot avoid asking ourselves: how, under those circumstances, were so many Rwandans so readily manipulated by extremist leaders into killing each other with the utmost savagery? Especially puzzling, if one believes that there was nothing more to the genocide than Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic hatred fanned by politicians, are events in northwestern Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually everybody was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killings still took place—of Hutu by other Hutu.

Because all land in the commune was already occupied, young people found it difficult to marry, leave home, acquire a farm, and set up their own household. Increasingly, young people postponed marriage and continued to live at home with their parents. For instance, in the 20-to 25-year-old age bracket, the percentage of young women living at home rose between 1988 and 1993 from 39% to 67%, and the percentage of young men rose from 71% to 100%: not a single man in his early 20s lived independently of his parents by 1993. That obviously contributed to the lethal family tensions that exploded in 1994,

Paradoxically, off-farm income was earned disproportionately by owners of large farms: the average size of farms that did earn such income was 1.3 acres, compared to only half an acre for farms lacking such income. That difference is paradoxical because the smaller farms are the ones whose household members have less farmland per person to feed themselves, and which thus need more off-farm income.

The extra off-farm income of larger farms allowed them to buy land from smaller farms, with the result that large farms tended to buy land and become larger, while small farms tended to sell land and become smaller.

It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.” That last quote of what Rwandans themselves say about the genocide surprised me. I had thought that it would be exceptional for people to recognize such a direct connection between population pressure and killings.

As Gérard Prunier, a French scholar of East Africa, puts it, “The decision to kill was of course made by politicians, for political reasons. But at least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants in their ingo [= family compound] was feeling that there were too many people on too little land, and that with a reduction in their numbers, there would be more for the survivors.”

a misunderstanding that arises regularly in discussions of the origins of evil: people recoil at any explanation, because they confuse explanations with excuses. But it is important that we understand the origins of the Rwandan genocide—not so that we can exonerate the killers, but so that we can use that knowledge to decrease the risk of such things happening again in Rwanda or elsewhere.

Chapter 11 - One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic …

Part of our problem in understanding him may be our own unrealistic expectations. We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously “good” or “bad,” as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.

I arrived in Indonesian New Guinea after years of experience in the democracy of Papua New Guinea, and I expected to find environmental policies much more advanced under the virtuous democracy than under the evil dictatorship. Instead, I had to acknowledge that the reverse was true.

The struggle to understand Balaguer reminds me that history, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Chapter 13 - “Mining” Australia

In fact, in most of Australia’s farmlands the rainfall is sufficient to raise crops to maturity in only a fraction of all years:

Increasingly, most Australians don’t depend on or really live in the Australian environment: they live instead in those five big cities, which are connected to the outside world rather than to the Australian landscape.

Land overcapitalization resulting from British cultural values (monetary values and belief systems) has been a major contributor to the Australian practice of overstocking, which has led to overgrazing, soil erosion, and farmer bankruptcies and abandonments. More generally, high valuation on land has translated into Australians’ embracing rural agricultural values justified by their British background but not justified by Australia’s low agricultural productivity.

Orange Roughy are very slow-growing, they do not start to breed until they are about 40 years old, and the fish caught and eaten are often 100 years old.

Chapter 14 - Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed.

they may have had no prior experience of such problems, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility.

climate fluctuates up and down erratically from year to year: three degrees warmer in one summer than in the previous one, then two degrees warmer the next summer, down four degrees the following summer, down another degree the next one, then up five degrees, etc. With such large and unpredictable fluctuations, it has taken a long time to discern the average upwards trend of 0.01 degree per year within that noisy signal.

Politicians use the term “creeping normalcy” to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it’s difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one’s baseline standard for what constitutes “normalcy” shifts gradually and imperceptibly. lt may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards. Another term related to creeping normalcy is “landscape amnesia”: forgetting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50 years ago, because the change from year to year has been so gradual.

That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the falling of the last little palm sapling. By then, the memory of the valuable palm forest of centuries earlier had succumbed to landscape amnesia. Conversely, the speed with which deforestation spread over early Tokugawa Japan made it easier for its shoguns to recognize the landscape changes and the need for preemptive action.

some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior “rational” precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn’t effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back,

One particular form of clashes of interest has become well known under the name “tragedy of the commons,” in turn closely related to the conflicts termed “the prisoner’s dilemma” and “the logic of collective action.”

A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society.

Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kings, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of societal collapses,

statues and monuments than their rivals. They were trapped in a competitive spiral, such that any chief or king who put up smaller statues or monuments to spare the forests would have been scorned and lost his job. That’s a regular problem with competitions for prestige, which are judged on a short time frame.

Such irrational behavior often arises when each of us individually is torn by clashes of values: we may ignore a bad status quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling.

once again. It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival.

In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles.

Individuals who find themselves members of a large coherent group or crowd, especially one that is emotionally excited, may become swept along to support the group’s decision, even though the same individuals might have rejected the decision if allowed to reflect on it alone at leisure.

Surprisingly, though, after you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That’s because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst.

Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late.

As Irving Janis pointed out in his book Groupthink, the Bay of Pigs deliberations exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions, such as a premature sense of ostensible unanimity, suppression of personal doubts and of expression of contrary views, and the group leader (Kennedy) guiding the discussion in such a way as to minimize disagreement. The subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making, such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to be freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally leaving the room to avoid his overly influencing the discussion himself.