Contemplating the demise of civilization is not for
the faint of heart. At least it is fair to say we
live in interesting times.
DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. 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
civilisation 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 (see "Will a pandemic bring down
civilisation?"). Yet there is another chilling
possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation
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 this 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 - we must - act now to keep disaster at
bay.
Environmental mismanagement
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 civilisation
and others, and warned that we might be heading the
same way unless we choose to stop destroying our
environmental 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 civilisation," 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
Utah State University, Logan, 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, organise 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 sums
paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
Diminishing returns
There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra
layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of
energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from
building canals to educating scribes. And increasing
complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing
returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of
labour - 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 organised 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 civilisations,
from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city
state of Mycenae. These civilisations 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.
An ineluctable process
Western industrial civilisation 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 organisations become steadily more
complex as they are required to deal both with
environmental problems and with challenges from
neighbouring societies that are also becoming more
complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a
fundamental shift in the way the society is organised.
"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, ultimately 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.
This shift to decentralised 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 centralised.
Increasing connectedness
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
destabilising 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 electricity 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.
Credit crunch
Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production
system has now reached the point where "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 US. The
consequences could be enormous."
"A networked society behaves like a multicellular
organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping
a chunk off 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 civilisation 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 civilisation is very
vulnerable."
So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we
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.
Tightly coupled system
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, Gainesville.
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.
Globalisation 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 maximise profits. Some products
are produced by only one factory worldwide.
Financially, it makes sense, as mass production
maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises
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 civilisation that
managed to decline but 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 monetised, and they switched from
professional army to peasant militia."
Staving off collapse
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 decentralised 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 US has already started
identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy
available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon
points out. Governments could encourage other sectors
to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of
fierce competition, private companies will always
increase efficiency unless governments subsidise
inefficiency in the public interest.
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 happens 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 recolonised 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.
Tipping points
Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time.
"The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need
a Great Mobilisation, 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 civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think
of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he
says. Even a society reinvigorated 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.
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 industrialised civilisation 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.
Steve Kurtz
Read the companion article about pandemics
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05 April 2008: From issue 2650 of New Scientist
magazine, 02 April 2008, page 32-35