The World’s Environmental Crisis, Looming Collapse of World Civilization, and the Need for Democracy

[Time for change]

Contrary to the claims of many of our corporations, almost the whole U.S. Republican Party, and the uninformed, the current world-wide environmental crisis presents a grave threat to world civilization, everything we hold dear, and life itself.

Perhaps the most comprehensive explanation I’ve ever read about the world-wide environmental situation that now confronts us was written by Jared Diamond in “Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” (Chosen as “Best Book of the Year” by The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and others). Diamond’s book describes the environmental causes of past and present failed societies, such as the collapse of the ancient Easter Island civilization, and compares them with other societies that have succeeded, in order to identify the causes of failed societies. The theme of his book can be summarized as:

Environmental crisis + failure of society to address it ==> societal collapse

Diamond’s reason for writing his book is to make the point that we humans have it within our power to either fail to address the problem, which will lead to world-wide catastrophe, or to avoid catastrophe by addressing the problem while we still can. In making this point, Diamond identifies eight environmental causes of the collapse of past societies, and he adds four more that are additionally relevant to our current world.

He defends the relevance of his analogies to the past in many ways. In doing so he notes two extreme and opposite points of view that attempt to minimize the relevancy of those analogies. One is the racist point of view that holds that past failed societies deserved their fate because of their inherent failings as people. The opposite and equally invalid point of view holds that “past indigenous peoples were gentle and ecologically wise stewards of their environment, intimately knew and respected Nature, innocently lived in a virtual Garden of Eden…”

Diamond identifies five general factors that contribute to the equation of whether or not societies succeed or fail in response to the environmental crises they face:
 Inadvertent environmental damage caused by the human inhabitants of a society
 Climate change (the natural type)
 Hostile neighbors
 Friendly trade partners (or allies)
 Society’s response to its environmental problems

The fifth factor is emphasized as the key, since it is the one that we humans have the most control over. The most striking example that Diamond presents to make that point is that of two Greenland societies who shared the same environment, where one thrived and the other became extinct because of different responses to their environmental problems.

Note that the title of this post identifies three related issues. The first two, which I describe in more detail below, comprise the major theme of Diamond’s book. The third one is my interpretation of how the current political situation relates to the issues that Diamond describes.

Diamond’s book is almost devoid of present day political content – as illustrated by the fact that George Bush is not mentioned once as a contributing cause to today’s environmental crisis. It’s not that he doesn’t recognize the importance of political factors to the state of our environment. He ends his book by giving an overview of our current situation and concluding that it can go either way, that he is “cautiously optimistic” that we will succeed in addressing our environmental problems, and that it all depends on whether or not we have the “political will” to do so. My saying that Diamond does not adequately address the salient political issues is in no way meant as a criticism of him or his book. One book can accomplish only so much. I’m sure that Diamond believed, and he is probably correct, that by maintaining a neutral stance to today’s political situation, the scientific aspects of his book would thereby be given more credence.


Some brief examples of failed societies

Most of Diamond’s book describes examples of how past or current civilizations have coped with environmental challenges, and how their coping mechanisms contributed to success or failure. Here are five examples of failure:

Easter Island
It is estimated that the first human settlement of Easter Island occurred around A.D. 900. The estimated maximum population was 6,000 to 30,000. Easter Island is perhaps best known for its huge stone statues, 887 which have been identified, weighing as much as 9,000 tons (including the base).

The primary reason for the demise of Easter Island society was deforestation, which was virtually complete somewhere between the start of the 15th and the 17th Century. Without trees a major source of wild food disappeared; fuel for warmth virtually disappeared; fish consumption substantially declined because of the absence of canoes; and agriculture was severely disrupted because of soil erosion. Easter Islanders had to turn to cannibalism to survive. Europeans, who began frequenting Easter Island at least by 1722, no doubt contributed to their final demise by spreading disease and kidnapping them. By 1872, only 111 Easter Islanders remained.

Diamond describes several natural adverse environmental conditions on Easter Island (such as relatively high latitude with consequent relatively low temperatures, lack of rainfall, low altitude, and geographically remote location that contributed to a paucity of volcanic ash fallout) that explain why that island became so extremely deforested, while so many other Polynesian islands did not.

Other than that, the massive amounts of statue construction, fueled by competition between clans, contributed greatly to resource depletion on Easter Island in two respects: the work required vast amounts of rope and wood products (ladders, sleds, levers, etc.), which led to the deforestation; and it also required huge additional amounts of food for the people who built the statues. In sum, a very fragile environment, combined with a culture that was characterized by massive consumption of vital resources, led to the demise of Easter Island society. In addition, its remoteness precluded the possibility of people emigrating to relieve population pressure.

The Anasazi
The Anasazi resided in current day Southwestern U.S., including parts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. This area first became populated with humans around 11,000 B.C., though agricultural societies in that area did not arise until about A.D. 1. Anasazi civilization lasted from about A.D. 600 to 1200.

Their environment was very fragile, owing mainly to the lack of water and the related problem of deforestation, which was due to slow re-growth of trees because of the paucity of water. That environment could have supported a very thinly populated society, but as the population grew the environmental pressures rose. Most important, a larger population required more water, so water tables became depleted, resulting in a dangerous scarcity. Droughts periodically resulted in widespread starvation.

Chaco Canyon was the capital of Anasazi civilization. The Anasazi were a highly hierarchical society, such that a well fed elite living in luxury came to occupy Chaco Canyon, while the peasantry did all the work and produced the food that supported the elite. Diamond notes that “Chaco Canyon became a black hole into which goods were imported but from which nothing tangible was exported. Into Chaco Canyon came those tens of thousands of big trees for construction…”

The final blow was a drought in about A.D. 1130. Chaco Canyon became abandoned as many probably starved, people killed each other, and others fled the region. Diamond sums up what happened:

Over the course of six centuries the human population of Chaco Canyon grew, its demands on the environment grew, its environmental resources declined, and people came to be living increasingly close to the margin of what the environment could support. That was the ultimate cause of abandonment. 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… The initial conditions of abundant nearby trees, high groundwater levels… had disappeared.

Mayan civilization
The Maya were the most advanced civilization in pre-Columbian America, and the only one with extensive preserved writing. They occupied parts of Mesoamerica, which extended from present day central mid-Mexico to Honduras. The so-called Classic period of Mayan civilization began around A.D. 250. The Mayans were a highly hierarchical society. Diamond explains:

There was a tacitly understood quid pro quo: the reason why the peasants supported the luxurious lifestyle of the king and his court… and built his palaces was because he had made implicit big promises to the peasants… Kings got into trouble with their peasants if a drought came, because that was tantamount to the breaking of a royal promise.

Though the Mayan environment was much less fragile than the environment in which the Anasazi resided, the collapse of Mayan civilization has much in common with that of the Anasazi. Deforestation exacerbated water scarcity problems because of the role that trees have in maintaining the water cycle. Perpetual wars among the Mayan people also exerted a heavy toll. A severe drought starting in the early tenth century was the proximate cause of the fall of Mayan civilization, as between 90 to 99% of the former Mayan population disappeared. With regard to the Mayan response to its environmental crises, Diamond has this to say:

We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long term problems…

The Greenland Norse
While 99% of Greenland is uninhabitable, there are patches of it that are suitable for agriculture. A settlement from Norway was established in A.D. 984, which lasted approximately 500 years before completely dying out. The fate of the Greenland Norse is especially instructive because another society, the Inuit (Eskimos), who occupied Greenland before the Norse arrived, continue to live there today.

Greenland’s very cold climate, with very short summers, makes agriculture a precarious undertaking. But the Greenland Norse inherited a farming culture from Norway, and they stuck with it. Unlike the Inuit, they never learned to hunt whales, and they had a cultural taboo against eating fish. Thus, when their cows and sheep overgrazed their pastures, farming became an even more precarious undertaking, and lacking adequate alternative food sources, the Norse starved in the midst of plenty. Like many other medieval European Christians, the Greenland Norse scorned pagan non-European peoples and refused to learn from them. Furthermore, the Greenland Norse was a very hierarchical society. Diamond explains:

Power in Norse Greenland was concentrated at the top… They owned most of the land… and controlled the trade with Europe. They chose to devote much of that trade to importing goods that brought prestige to them: luxury goods for the wealthiest households, vestments and jewelry for the clergy, and bells and stained glass for the churches. Among the uses to which they allocated their few boats were… to acquire the luxury exports… with which to pay for those imports. Chiefs had two motives for running large sheep herds that could damage the land by overgrazing… independent farmers on overgrazed land were more likely to be forced into tenancy, and thereby to become a chief’s followers… Innovations could have threatened the power, prestige, and narrow interests of the chiefs…. Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short term interests of those in power, and the long term interests of the society as a whole… Ultimately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. The last right that they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve.

The Rwandan genocide
Rwanda and Burundi have long been Africa’s two most densely populated countries, and two of the most densely populated countries in the world.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was initiated following the shooting down of a plane that carried the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists then immediately initiated a genocide that killed within six weeks about 800,000 Tutsi, which was about three quarters of the Tutsi population of Rwanda.

That genocide is usually portrayed as being due to ancient ethnic hatreds, fanned by opportunistic politicians. However, the fact that the Hutu and the Tutsi speak the same language, attended the same schools, lived together, worked together, and frequently inter-married, casts serious doubt on that idea.

Rather, one of the major reasons for the genocide was a densely populated country living on land that was barely adequate to support the population. Misery was widespread in Rwanda before the genocide, and chaos and killings were becoming the order of the day. In putting forth this cause of the Rwandan genocide, Diamond explains:

Any “explanation” of why a genocide happened can be misconstrued as “excusing it. However, regardless of whether we arrive at an over-simplified one-factor explanation or an excessively complex 73-factor explanation for a genocide doesn’t alter the personal responsibility of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide… 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… Other factors did contribute… One should not misconstrue a role of population pressure among the Rwandan genocide’s causes to mean that population pressure automatically leads to genocide… Countries can be over-populated without descending into genocide…

Today’s World’s most serious environmental problems

In the last chapter of his book, Diamond lists the twelve most serious environmental problems that our world faces today. The first 8 were also common to ancient civilizations:

1. The destruction of natural habitats, especially forests, wetlands, coral reefs and the ocean bottom
Over half of the world’s original forests have been converted by humans to other uses, and at the present rate another quarter will be converted within the next half century. An even larger fraction of the world’s original wetlands have been converted, as have one third of its coral reefs.

2. Wild foods, especially seafood
About two billion people today, mostly poor, depend upon the oceans for protein. If wild fish populations were appropriately managed they could be maintained indefinitely. But instead they are exploited.

3. Genetic diversity
Diamond explains how the increasing loss of genetic diversity on our planet harms us in many different ways.

4. Soil erosion
Soil is being eroded on farmlands at about 10 to 40 times the rate at which it is being re-formed, and between 500 and 10,000 times the rate on forested land. Thus, between 20% and 80% of the world’s farmland has become severely damaged.

5. Loss of freshwater
Most of the world’s freshwater is already being used, and those that are not are mostly far from population centers. Freshwater from underground aquifers is being depleted faster than it can be replenished, and over a billion people lack access to safe drinking water.

6. Alien species
There are hundreds of examples of alien species crowding out or killing native populations of species, causing billions of dollars worth of damage.

7. Human population growth
There is disagreement as to whether the world’s population will ever stabilize before it causes massive world-wide catastrophe.

8. The environmental impact of the average person
The adverse environmental effects of large populations of humans are dependent not only on the number of humans but on the average impact per person. If all third world inhabitants adopted first world living standards, that would result in 12 times the current human environmental impact – which the earth cannot support.

Then there are 4 new environmental problems that are unique to today’s world:

9. Depletion of energy sources, especially oil, natural gas, and coal
The prevalent view is that current reserves of readily accessible oil and natural gas will last a few more decades.

10. Photosynthetic ceiling
I don’t understand this one, but Diamond says that there is a limit to the Earth’s capacity to use sunlight, and that by 1986 humans were already using about half of it. His conclusion is that by the middle of the 21st Century, “most energy fixed from sunlight will be used for human purposes, and little will be left over to support the growth of natural plant communities, such as natural forests.”

11. Air, soil, and water pollution from toxic chemicals
Many toxic chemicals persist in the environment for long periods of time, and cleanup costs of many polluted sites are measured in billions of dollars.

12. Global warming from greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and methane from animals
Both are rising at rates that are certain, if continued, to result in rising sea levels that cause catastrophic coastal flooding.


Sustainability

Of the twelve problems noted above, many of them exacerbate each other, thus producing a vicious cycle. Diamond summarizes our current situation:

Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years…. Any of the dozen problems if unsolved would do us grave harm… If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble… We have to solve them all.

Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another within the lifetime of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.

Parallels between ancient and current civilizations

There are those who say that consideration of the collapse of ancient civilizations has little relevance to today’s world. They claim that with today’s modern technology there is almost no limit to what we can achieve, and that we are far more intelligent than ancient civilizations. Diamond counters that argument by making several points:

There are far more people in today’s world and today’s civilizations than ancient societies had to cope with.

Our advanced technology not only has the potential to help us out of this crisis, but at least as likely, it has the potential to cause far more damage than what was available to ancient societies.

Just as in the past, political chaos and severe environmental problems go hand in hand. Diamond comments on the most obvious parallel between past and present:

In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. That question is settled, because such collapses have actually been happening recently, and others appear to be imminent. Instead, the real question is how many more countries will undergo them.

And as for the impact of globalization:

The problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated, distant countries become our own problems because of globalization… That’s why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us… Societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a worldwide decline… We in the U.S. (or else just affluent people in the U.S.) can no longer get away with advancing our own self-interests, at the expense of the interests of others.

We need to realize… that there is no other island/other planet to which we can turn for help, or to which we can export our problems. Instead, we need to learn, as they did, to live within our means.

Reasons for hope

In the last few pages of his book, Diamond notes some reasons for hope, as a way of explaining why he is “cautiously optimistic” that we can solve our problems before it is too late to avoid catastrophe. I must say that I was somewhat disappointed with this part of the book – as I was hoping for more hope. His reasons for hope can be boiled down to the following:

 Some past societies have solved their environmental problems and survived.
 There is an increasing awareness of environmental problems in today’s world.
 We know a lot more today about the risks we face than ancient societies did.
 Our environmental problems are solvable if only we have the political will to solve them.
 Some countries are making progress – e.g. in forming the European Union, several nations have forfeited some sovereignty to work together to solve their common problems.

Diamond ends his book with his bottom line reason for writing it:

Thus, we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples. That’s an opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a degree. My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference.

Why democracy is a crucial key to solving our environmental problems

It might seem that if democracy is a crucial key to solving the world’s environmental problems, then we should be in pretty good shape. After all, the world’s most powerful country is a “democracy”, and there are many more “democracies” in the world today than there have ever been.

Yet, not all is as it seems. The United States of America is a democracy today more in name than it is in fact. Our president may as well have declared himself king, and there has been far too little objection in our country to his gross abuse of power.

But our bottom line problem is not a problem of one or two men. Our underlying problem is that the underlying principle of democracy – one person, one vote – has been virtually destroyed in our country. The wealthy and powerful supply our voting machines, they insist on our using machines that count our votes in secret, and there is far too little protest about that; the wealthy and powerful own most of the sources from which Americans receive their news; and, with our system of legalized bribery, the wealthy and powerful in our country have a very disproportionate influence on our elections even without the assistance of their secret voting machines.

Although Diamond didn’t emphasize this as a general principle, many or most of his examples of failed societies were societies that were very hierarchical. In such societies a small proportion of the population tends to have control over a very disproportionate number of resources. In those types of societies, the rich and powerful often make decisions that benefit themselves to the great detriment of the vast majority of other people. Environmental degradation often means little to them, as long as it increases their wealth and power.

That is exactly what is happening in the United States of America today, with terrible consequences for the rest of the world. The rich and powerful have formed themselves into giant powerful corporations that have demanded and received all the rights of “persons”, with few or none of the responsibilities of ordinary persons. The result has been to substantially widen the gap between rich and poor and to give to the few the license to enrich themselves at the great expense of the many. And I fear that this situation could be fatal to the potential for us to solve our environmental problems.

The American people are concerned about our environment, and they very much want to take steps to solve it. I believe that they have enough political will that in a true democracy they would actually take the steps they need to take. But ordinary Americans today have limited political clout to make their voices heard on this and other matters of great importance to our nation and our world.

It is widely believe that the failure of the most powerful country in the world to participate in the world’s peacekeeping efforts following the 20th Century’s first Great War was largely responsible for the failure of those efforts and therefore sowed the seeds for the onset of the century’s second Great War. Now we have a situation where that same country, more powerful than ever (in the destructive sense), not only refuses to participate in the world-wide effort to solve our environmental crisis, but is actively hostile to it.

I think that of all our Senators, Barbara Boxer is the most on target on this issue. She was the only United States Senator to officially object to the sham of a presidential election that we had in 2004. And now, she is the only U.S. Senator who has dared to suggest that we need to remove the current cancer upon our nation. In particular, she has said (scroll up to top):

I've always said that you need to keep it (impeachment) on the table, and you need to look at these things, because now people are dying because of this administration. That's the truth. And they won't change course. They are ignoring the Congress. They keep signing these signing statements which mean that he's decided not to enforce the law. This is as close as we've ever come to a dictatorship. When you have a situation where Congress is stepped on, that means the American people are stepped on. So I don't think you can take anything off the table. Because in fact the Constitution doesn't permit us to take these things off the table.

The American people can’t leave it up to the good will of our rich and powerful elite and their corporations to solve our environmental problems. Nor should we allow two men who have no respect for democracy whatsoever to run our country. Democracy is all about challenging such outrages; democracy is about people throwing off the shackles of despotism; democracy is about people coming together to solve their problems.