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illustrate the five main themes of this book: human impacts on the environment; climate change; a society’s relations with neighboring friendly societies (in the case of Montana, those in other U.S. states); a society’s exposure to acts of other potentially hostile societies (such as overseas terrorists and oil producers today); and the importance of a society’s responses to its problems.
more than a thousand years. Some modern Hopis and Zunis, looking at the extravagance of American society around them, shake their heads and say, “We
were here long before you came, and we expect still to be here long after you too are gone.”
good. We forget that conditions fluctuate, and we may not be able to anticipate when conditions will change. By that time, we may already have become attached to an expensive lifestyle, leaving an enforced diminished lifestyle or bankruptcy as the sole outs.
1): the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions
are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity. We shall return to this dilemma in
Living in a stable society without input of foreign ideas, Japan’s elite and peasants alike expected the future to be like the present, and future problems to have to be solved with present resources.
failed. That is, not only the environment, but also the proper choice of an economy to fit the environment, is important. The remaining
Rights Watch, “this genocide was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by a people consumed by ‘ancient tribal hatreds.’…This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power. This
When one compares crime rates for people of age 21–25 among different parts of Rwanda, most of the regional differences prove to be correlated statistically with population density and per-capita availability of calories: high population densities and worse starvation were associated with more crime.
the clearest illustrations that a society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.
itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
16: the challenge of deciding which of a society’s deeply held core values are compatible with the society’s survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.
What I’m going to propose instead is a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making. I’ll divide the factors into a fuzzily delineated sequence of four categories. 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. While all this discussion of reasons
Tuchman put it succinctly, “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as ‘the most flagrant of all passions.’” As a result of lust for power, Ester Island chiefs and Maya kings acted so as to accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it: their status depended on their putting up bigger 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
Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most
“crowd psychology.” 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. As the German dramatist
under stressful circumstances, the stress and the need for mutual support and approval may lead to suppression of doubts and critical thinking, sharing of illusions, a premature consensus, and ultimately a disastrous decision. Both crowd
Yet it calls for a leader with a different type of courage to anticipate a growing problem or just a potential one, and to take bold steps to solve it before it becomes an explosive crisis. Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule for acting before it becomes obvious to everyone that some action is necessary. But
establishment of the FSC, Unilever teamed up with World Wildlife Fund to found a similar organization termed the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Its goal was to offer credible eco-labeling to consumers, and to encourage fishermen to solve their
own tragedies of the commons by the positive incentive of market appeal rather than the negative incentive of threatened boycotts. Other companies and foundations,
to recognize that, throughout human history, in all politically complex human societies in which people encounter other individuals with whom they have no ties of family or clan relationship, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be necessary for the enforcement of moral principles. Invocation of moral principles is a necessary first step for eliciting virtuous behavior, but that alone is not a sufficient
plant and animal species. Deforestation was a or the major factor in all the collapses of past societies described in this book. In addition, as discussed in Chapter 1 in
rather than less farmland. Like deforestation, soil problems contributed to the collapses of all past societies discussed in this book.
World. On the average, each citizen of the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants of the Third World (Plate 35).
impossibility: the unsustainability of a world in which the Third World’s large population were to reach and maintain current First World living standards. It is impossible
ancient Maya. An outcome less drastic than a worldwide collapse might “merely” be the spread of Rwanda-like or Haiti-like conditions to many more developing
backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed. Just think of the
instance, the value of “one statistical life” in the U.S.—i.e., the cost to the U.S. economy resulting from the death of an average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national economy—is usually estimated at around $5 million. Even
illustrates why the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, although its cleanup measures do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings (benefits in excess of costs)
of about $1 trillion per year, due to saved lives and reduced health costs.
some of the time. Over the last 30 years a sustained effort by the U.S. government has reduced levels of the six major air pollutants nationally by 25%, even though our energy consumption and population increased by 40% and our vehicle miles driven increased by 150% during those same decades. The governments of Malaysia,
