My April 5-11 issue of 'New Scientist' had a cover article on "The Collapse of Civilization". There were actually two separate articles on this topic, but the second article, I believe, might be of special interest to Bottom Line readers. Here are some (extensive) excerpts:
Are We Doomed? The very nature of civilization may makes its demise inevitable, says Debra MacKenzie.
Doomsday. The end of civilization. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilization in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?
Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic. Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilization means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
Some say we have already reached that point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can---and must---act now to keep disaster at bay.
History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt, and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller "Collapse", Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilization and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental life support systems.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's about saving civilization," he says.
Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and author of the 1988 book "The Collapse of Complex Societies".
If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organize dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the amounts paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organization imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realized, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labor--or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare--diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.
To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle--and ultimately, less bang for your buck.
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organized on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.
Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilizations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city-state of Mycenae. These civilizations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart.
Western industrial civilization has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and diseases--the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable."
Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organizations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighboring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organized.
"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, utlimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point. [Leroy will make extensive commentary on this paragraph at some point!]
This shift to decentralized networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision-making." This, he says, makes modern Western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision-making was centralized.
Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book "The Upside of Down". "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't."
As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood."
The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together--and move people, materials, information, money and energy--amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilizing effects, from one side of the world to the other."
For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective power grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where a "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere." This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the U.S. The consequences could be enormous."
"A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping off a chunk of a sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear--it may not even be predictable--which chunks of our densely networked civilization are critical, until it's too late.
"When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilization is very vulnerable."
So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we can respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep does not get injured in the first place--something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources dwindle."
Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system.
"It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions--an insect outbreak, fire or drought--can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.
Globalization is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximize profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximizes efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimizes resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits."
Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilization that managed to decline but did not fall. "After the Byzantine Empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetized, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia."
Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralized production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action."
The electricity industry in the U.S. has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments should encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidize inefficiency in the public interest. [Leroy: an arresting thought that goes against the grain of 'conventional' economic thinking, to say the least.]
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls 'tectonic' stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns--just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy.
"This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what will happen in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonized and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse. [Leroy: In a similar vein, I think America has been trying so very hard to avert a recession for the last eight years that the one we are facing now could prove to be a catastrophic one.]
Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilization, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points--which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?"
Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilization in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society invigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits. [Very reminiscent of the arguments that Tundra used to make, and probably still does.--Leroy]
Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.
The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture," says Tainter. "Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome to think about."
If industrialized civilization does fall, the urban masses--half the world's population--will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to lose are subsistence farmers," Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.
Leroy: I am going to let folks read this and ponder it before I make any extensive commentary on it. Clearly, it relates very directly to the vigorous debates that Tundra and I were having before I left a bit more than a year ago. For now, I will point out that we recently established a Doomsday Vault in the remote island of Spitsbergen, an endeavor which I applaud and think should be expanded. The Spitsbergen Doomsday Vault is primarily a seed-bank, to preserve vital agricultural resources that could be retrieved in the aftermath of some global calamity. I would strenuously argue that we should, as of yesterday, be pursuing a similar project to preserve the hard-won scientific and technological knowledge that the human race has accumulated over the past few centuries. I am thinking along the lines of a Doomsday Vault to preserve critical books, on both acid-free paper and on optical discs, so that future generations could recover this knowledge. This is not a new idea: I stole it from Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Trilogy', where he set up the Foundation to preserve human knowledge in the face of a collapsing galactic empire.
I will leave it there for now.
