I think all of us have been interested in at one time and other in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed such as the Maya classic Meyer in the Yucatan these two Islanders the Anasazi Fertile Crescent Society Angkor Wat Great Zimbabwe and so on and within the last decade or two archeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses but there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse such as Japan Java
Tonga and takea so evidently societies and sunny areas are more fragile than in other areas how can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies the problem is obviously one relevant to our situation today because today as well there are some societies that have already collapsed such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia they're also societies today that may be close to collapse such as Nepal Indonesia and Colombia what about ourselves what is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way
that so many past societies have obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor if anyone tells you that there's a single factor explanation for societal collapses you know right away that they are an idiot this is a complex subject but how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject in analyzing societal collapses I've arrived at a five-point framework a checklist of things that I go through and trying to understand collapses and I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland North Society this is a
European society with literate records so we know a good deal about the people and the motivation in 89 84 Vikings went out to Greenland settled Greenland and 14:50 they died out the society collapsed and every one of them ended up dead why do they all end up dead well in my five-point framework the first item on the framework is look for human impacts on the environment people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend and in the case of the Viking Norse the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation which was a particular problem
for them because they required forests to make charcoal to make iron so they ended up an Iron Age European society virtually unable to make their own iron a second item on my checklist is climate change climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter in the case of the Vikings in Greenland the climate got colder in the late 1300s and especially in the 14 hundreds but a cold climate isn't Austin isn't necessarily fatal because the inuit the Eskimos inhabiting greenland at the same time did better rather than worse with cold climate so why didn't
the Greenland Norse as well the third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society and if that friendly support is pulled away that may make a society more likely to collapse in the case of the Greenland Norse they had trade with a mother country with Norway and that trade dwindled partly because Norway got weaker partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway the fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies in the case of North Greenland the hostiles were the Inuit the Eskimos sharing Greenland
with whom the north got off to bad relationships and we know that the Inuit killed Norse and Polly of greater importance may have blocked access to the outer fjords on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of year and then finally the fifth item on my checklist is the political economic social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems in the case of the Greenland NORs factors cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were
their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals there being a competitive ranked chiefly Society and their scorn from the Inuit for the inward from whom they refused to learn so that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland NORs what about a society today for the past five years I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwest Montana where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest and Montana at first sight seems like the most pristine environment in the United States but scratch the surface and
Montana suffers from serious problems going through the same checklist human environmental impacts yes acute in Montana toxic problems from mine wastes have caused damage of billions of dollars problems from weeds weed control costs Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year Montana's lost agricultural areas from salinization problems of forest management problems of forest fires second item on my checklist climate change yes the climate in Montana is getting warm and drier but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snowpack and as the snow is melting for example as the glaciers and Glacier National Park are disappearing
that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture third thing on my checklist relations with friendlies that can sustain the Society in Montana today more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana but it's derived from out-of-state transfer payments from social security investments and so on which makes my Tanev vulnerable to the rest of the United States fourth relations with hostiles Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans in being sensitive to problems created by hostels overseas affecting our oil supplies and terrorist attacks and finally last item on my checklist of how
political economic social cultural attitudes play into this Montanans have long-held values which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems long-held devotion to logging and to mines at agriculture and to no government regulation those that work well in the past but that don't seem to be working well today so I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies are there any general conclusions that arise in a way just like toast or a statement about every unhappy marriage being different every collapsed
or endangered society is different they all have different details but nevertheless there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threaten societies today one interesting common thread has to do with in many cases the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak there are many societies that don't wind down gradually but they build up get richer and more powerful and then within a short time within a few decades after their peak they collapse for example the class and classic low and lie of the
Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800 literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments and Maya population was greatest or again the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades maybe within a decade of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power an analog would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish these rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption or mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential in a petri dish bacteria grow say they
double every generation and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15 16s empty and then the next generation is three-fourths empty in the next generation half empty within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty it is full there's no more food in the bacteria have collapsed so this is a frequent theme the Society's collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power what means to put it mathematically is that if you are concerned about a society today you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function the wealth
itself but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function that's one general theme a second general theme is that there are many often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others and many of those factors are not well understood for example why is it that in the Pacific of those hundreds of Pacific Islands why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation it turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors some rather subtle ones that were against working against
the Easter Islanders and they involve fallout of volcanic temper latitude rainfall perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects Island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from Central Asia east Rabaul Pacific Islands has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its oils but that's something that a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999 so some societies for subtle environmental reasons more fragile than others and then finally another generalization because I'm now teaching a course at
UCLA to UCLA undergraduates on these collapses of societies what really bugs my UCLA undergraduate student says how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing how could the Easter Islanders have de forests to their environment what do they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree didn't they see what they were doing how could societies not perceive the impacts on the environment and stop in time and I would expect that if our if human human civilization carries on then maybe in the next century people will be asking why on earth
to these people today in the year three Nazi the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action it seems incredible in the past in the future will seem incredible what we are doing today and so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies failed to solve their problems why they failed to perceive the problems or if they perceive them why they fail to tackle them or if they fail to tackle them why they fail to succeed in solving them I'll just mention two generalizations in this area one blueprint
for trouble making collapse likely is where there is a conflict of interest between the short term interests of the decision making a leads and the long term interests of the society as a whole especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions we what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole there's a real risk of the elite doing things that will bring the society down in the long run for example among the Green Lenore's a competitive ranked Society what the Chiefs
really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to out-compete the neighboring Chiefs and that led the Chiefs to do what's called flogging land overstocking land forcing tenant farmers into dependency and that made the Chiefs powerful in the long run but led to the society's collapse in the short run but led to the society's collapse in the long run those same issues are of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated
compounds by drinking bottled water and so on and it is within the last couple of years it's been obvious that the a lead in the business world correctly perceived that they can advance their short-term interests by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and on other businesses they are quite correct that what's good that these things are good for them in the short term although bad for society in the long term so that's one general conclusion about why societies
make Dada decisions conflicts of interest and the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quotes good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but a poor in other circumstances for example the Green Lenore's in this difficult environment were held together by foreign for four and a half centuries by their shared commitment to religion and by their strong social cohesion but those two things commitment to religion and strong social cohesion also made it difficult for them to change
at the end and to learn from the unit or today Australia one of the things that enable to Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years was has been their British identity but today their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in the need to adapt to their new their situation in Asia so it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength what's going to be the outcome today well all of us know
the Dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to all not more than 50 years and any what with any one of which can do us in the time bombs of water of soil of climate change invasive species the photosynthetic ceiling population problems toxics etcetera etc list about 12 them and while these time bombs none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years and most of them have fuses of a few decades some of them in some places have much shorter fuses at
the rate of which we are going now the Philippines will lose all its accessible unloggable forests within five years and the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their lockable forest which is their major export and as can be spectacular for the Yukon me of the Solomons people often ask me Jared what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems and my answer is the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need
to do instead there are a dozen things any one of which could do us in and we've got to get them all right because if we solve 11 we fail to solve the 12 we are in trouble for example if we solve our problems of water and soil and population but don't solve our problems of toxics then we are in trouble the fact is that our present course is a non sustainable course which means by definition that cannot be maintained and the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades that means that those
of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution but our children and grandchildren certainly will the resolution is going to achieve either of two forms either we will resolve these non sustainable time fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial remedial action or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice named by war disease or starvation but what for
sure is that a non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades in other words since the theme of this session is choices we have a choice does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed I draw the reverse conclusion the big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us something we can do nothing about instead all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own shoe of our own making
and since we made the problems we can also solve the problems that then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems this will in particular what can all of us do for those of you who are interested in these choices there are lots of things you can do there's a lot that we don't understand and that we need to understand and there's a lot that we already do understand but aren't doing and that we need to be doing thank you
