Choosing to collapse

I'm nearing the end of Jared Diamond's excellent book "Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive". Diamond surveys many civilizations through history that have either collapsed (Easter Island, the Greenland Norse, the Maya) or managed to avoid doing so (the Iceland Norse, Tokugawa Japan). He identifies five sets of factors that can threaten a collapse: inadvertent environmental degradation by humans; climate change, whether natural or human-induced; hostile neighbours; the withdrawal of contact or support by friendly neighbours; and the society's own choice of response to those challenges. He finds that when they occur, collapses tend to be caused by several factors acting together, rather than by just one. But the society's choice of response always seems to be pretty important.

Near the end of the book, there is a chapter entitled "Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?". This time, he highlights four kinds of (overlapping) reason. Groups may not realise that what they are doing will be disastrous, for example the introduction of rabbits and foxes into Australia by nineteenth-century settlers. Secondly, when the problem does arrive, the group may initially fail to notice it, either because they lack the science to measure it (loss of soil nutrients, for example), or because it happens slowly and is masked by random variations (climate change). Thirdly, when they do notice it, they may not even try to solve it. This is typically a matter of "rational bad behaviour", or the tragedy of the commons, where lots of individuals or subgroups acting in their own self-interest combine to produce an effect that is against the interests of the whole; but it also sometimes involves "irrational bad behaviour", where people cling to attitudes and beliefs that lead them to act in ways that are not even in their own interests. And fourthly, when a society does try to solve the problems, it may fail: it may not have the know-how required, or it may simply be too late.

Of course, the reason all this is of much more than academic interest today is that Diamond's analyses apply in clear ways to today's global society. There have been several surveys recently that suggest that a majority of people believe that human activities do not cause climate change; and this is as true in Britain as it is in the US, so we can't (just) blame religious fundamentalism. That is, most of us are stuck at the "failing to notice" stage; and in our case, it is obviously not because the information is not available, but because we either refuse to look at it or refuse to believe it. Of those who do accept the evidence, I think the large majority are at the "not even trying to solve it" stage; it all seems too huge, so why should they bother to change their (rational) bad behaviour? Nearly all the people I know outside the environmental movement are in this camp. And perhaps they have a point; the minority of the minority, those who both accept the crisis and are determined to do something, may now find it's too late. Just today, the UK's Institute for Mechanical Engineers published a report saying that the Government's plans for an 80% CO2 reduction by 2050 were unachievable. And even if that report is wrong, it may be beside the point: the same week, it's been reported that China has now overtaken the US as the world's leading CO2 producer, with 20% of the global share; and neither they nor the Indians are proposing any reductions in the next decades. It will be a miracle if anything really substantial comes out of the Copenhagen conference starting in three weeks time. The richer countries (their politicians, anyway) are mostly ready to make some cuts, but the poorer ones understandably want to be able to catch up.

But my sense of outrage over all this is gradually being tempered by an acceptance that it was perhaps inevitable from the start. I'm more and more persuaded that the most important feature of the last few centuries of Western and, increasingly, global history has been the appearance of cheap energy: first, human energy, in form of slaves and conquered empires; then coal; and finally oil. The benefits of all this (to those who do benefit) are so major that as far as I'm aware, there has never been a large society in history that has not done its best to grab as much of it as possible. And now the fossil fuel bonanza is starting to end (oil production has peaked, while population is still rising), with consequences that people will not happily accept, while the challenge of voluntarily relinquishing the luxuries to which we have become accustomed, for the sake of the planet, is one to which very, very few people are anywhere near being willing to take on.

Alongside Diamond, I've also been reading the Archdruid Report systematically over the last few weeks. While I don't think anyone could truthfully say they exactly enjoy reading such gloomy stuff, I have nevertheless appreciated the author John Michael Greer's clarity of thought and particularly his unmasking of the tendencies most of us have either to place blind faith in "progress" or (more of a temptation in my case) to go to the other pole and expect imminent doom.

Against those in the "progress" camp, Greer argues that what we face is not a problem but a predicament. A problem has a solution, while a predicament does not, and can only be adjusted to. Up until about the 1970s, the environmental crisis was a problem which could have been solved, with some useful contributions towards a solution being pioneered in the way of developments in renewable energy production in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. But then the price of oil dropped again, partly as a result those very efforts, and what Margaret Thatcher used to call "our great car economy" roared off once more towards the edge of the metaphorical cliff.

But actually, unless runaway climate change sets in (and that's a big "unless"), the "cliff" metaphor may not be the right one. Against the "doomsters", what Greer argues (and Diamond also shows) from examination of the historical evidence is that what he calls "catabolic collapse" is much more likely: a sequence of partial collapses with periods of stability or partial recovery in between, occurring over a scale of perhaps a century or two, which in their cumulative effect are indeed catastrophic, but taken individually, or even taken over the course of a single human lifetime, are somewhat less than that. Life will go on; it will just be a very different kind of life, accompanied much more visibly by death in its traditional forms (famine, pestilence and war) than anything we fortunate First Worlders have ever known.

I was out delivering leaflets this morning for "The Green Party -- a party you can trust for fairness, honesty, and to build a healthy future for all." While I do think they can be trusted in the fairness and honesty departments, I hardly believe any longer that a "healthy future for all" is achievable. All the same, there are practical things we can do (growing our own food, traditional medicine, community building) to cushion the shock of the decline. The sooner we start doing those things, the more effective they will be (note to self: learn to grow vegetables), and political campaigning may be as good a way as any to wake people up.