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December 14 - December 29, 2019
even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated.
The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on succeeding.
By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.
Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York’s skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?
unintended ecological suicide—ecocide—has
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.
Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again.
Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak.
The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies.
the real question is why only some societies proved fragile, and what distinguished those that collapsed from those that didn’t.
five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors— environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners—may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors—the society’s responses to its environmental problems—always proves significant.
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.
the factor whose change led to the collapse—will have been the factor that caused the weakening. Hence collapses for ecological or other reasons often masquerade as military defeats.
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.
cyanide heap-leaching, developed for extracting very low-grade gold ores requiring 50 tons of ores to yield one ounce of gold.
The leftover cyanide solution containing toxic metals is disposed of by spraying it on nearby forests or rangeland, or else is enriched with more cyanide and sprayed back on the heap.
Bitterroot irrigation districts the water is “over-allocated.”
sum of the water rights allocated to all landowners exceeds the flow of water available in most years, at least later in the summer when snowmelt is decreasing.
assumed fixed water supply is the value for a relatively wet year.
We do not know yet whether CWD can be transmitted from deer or elk to people, as can mad cow disease, but the recent deaths of some elk hunters from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease have raised alarms in some quarters.
we have a two-tiered society with lower-income families struggling to survive at the bottom, and the wealthier newcomers at the top able to acquire enough property that they can isolate themselves. In essence, we are zoning by money, not by land use!”
Each territory had its own chief and its own major ceremonial platforms supporting statues. The clans competed peacefully by seeking to outdo each other in building platforms and statues, but eventually their competition took the form of ferocious fighting.
unusual in that respect about Easter is that, again according to both oral traditions and archaeological surveys, those competing clan territories were also integrated religiously, and to some extent economically and politically, under the leadership of one paramount chief.
In back of an ahu are crematoria containing the remains of thousands of bodies. In that practice of cremation, Easter was unique in Polynesia, where bodies were otherwise just buried.
ahu are dark gray, but originally they were a much more colorful white, yellow, and red: the facing slabs were encrusted with white coral, the stone of a freshly cut moai was yellow, and the moai’s crown and a horizontal band of stone coursing on the front wall of some ahu were red.
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.
Easter Island architecture grew out of an existing Polynesian tradition.
The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.
Those were the immediate consequences of deforestation and other human environmental impacts. The further consequences start with starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism.
the collapse of Easter society followed swiftly upon the society’s reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmental impact.
For a time, all the lands prospered, and their populations multiplied. But the population of the rich land eventually multiplied beyond the numbers that even its abundant resources could support.
The starving populace of the rich land survived by turning to cannibalism. Their former overseas trade partners met an even worse fate: deprived of the imports on which they had depended, they in turn ravaged their own environments until no one was left alive.
Does this grim scenario represent the future of the United States and our trade partners? We don’t know yet,
just as Easter Island offered us our clearest example of a collapse due to human environmental impacts with a minimum of other complicating factors, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands furnish our clearest examples of collapses triggered by the breakdown of an environmentally damaged trade partner: a preview of risks already developing today in association with modern globalization.
exchanges of raw materials, manufactured items, and luxuries would not have been the sole motive for transoceanic trade and travel.
Even after Pitcairn’s and Henderson’s populations had grown to their maximum possible size, their numbers—about a hundred and a few dozen individuals respectively—were so low that people of marriageable age would have found few potential partners on the island, and most of those partners would have been close relatives subject to incest taboos. Hence exchanges of marriage partners would have been an additional important function of the trade with Mangareva.
Mangareva, it turns out, was the geographic hub of a much larger trade network, of which the ocean journey to Pitcairn and Henderson a few hundred miles to the southeast was the shortest spoke.
Just as Mangareva’s population of several thousand people dwarfed that of Pitcairn and Henderson, the populations of the Societies and Marquesas (around a hundred thousand people each) dwarfed that of Mangareva.
With too many people and too little food, Mangareva society slid into a nightmare of civil war and chronic hunger, whose consequences are recalled in detail by modern islanders. For protein, people turned to cannibalism, in the form not only of eating freshly dead people but also of digging up and eating buried corpses.
Instead of an orderly political system based on hereditary chiefs, non-hereditary warriors took over.
With the collapse of Mangareva at its hub, the whole East Polynesia trade network that had joined Mangareva to the Marquesas, Societies, Tuamotus, Pitcairn, and Henderson disintegrated,
Thus, environmental damage, leading to social and political chaos and to loss of timber for canoes, ended Southeast Polynesia’s interisland trade.
The Anasazi collapse and other southwestern collapses offer us not only a gripping story but also an instructive one for the purposes of this book, illustrating well our themes of human environmental impact and climate change intersecting, environmental and population problems spilling over into warfare, the strengths but also the dangers of complex non-self-sufficient societies dependent on imports and exports, and societies collapsing swiftly after attaining peak population numbers and power.
The proximate cause, the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back, was the drought that finally pushed Chacoans over the edge; a drought that a society living at a lower population density could have survived. When Chaco society did collapse, its inhabitants could no longer reconstruct their society in the way that the first farmers of the Chaco area had built up their society.
That type of conclusion is likely to apply to many other collapses of past societies (including the Maya to be considered in the next chapter), and to our own destiny today.
Climatologists and paleoecologists have recently been able to recognize several signals of ancient climate and environmental changes that contributed to the Maya collapse.
most of the Yucatán Peninsula consists of karst, a porous sponge-like limestone terrain where rain runs straight into the ground and where little or no surface water remains available.
reservoirs at the Maya city of Tikal held enough water to meet the drinking water needs of about 10,000 people for a period of 18 months.
For the elite as well as commoners, corn constituted at least 70% of the Maya diet,
the few animal bones at Maya archaeological sites suggest that the quantity of meat available to the Maya was low.