The Collapse of Human Civilization as we Know it – Scenarios and Potential Solutions

[Time for change]

Human civilization as we know it will come to an end in the foreseeable future. We don’t know exactly when or how. It may be soon. It will most certainly be well underway within the next two generations.

One of the most comprehensive explanations I’ve ever read how societies fail 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.

After describing the reasons for the collapse of several ancient civilizations, in the last chapter of his book Diamond describes the twelve most serious environmental problems that humanity faces today – including the new ones of worldwide energy depletion, chemical pollution of our water, air, and soil, and global warming. He notes that of the twelve environmental problems he described, many of them exacerbate each other, thus producing a vicious cycle. He then 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.

I discuss his book in much more detail in this post.


SCENARIOS FOR THE DISRUPTION OF WORLD-WIDE CIVILIZATION

Nobody who has made an informed and honest assessment of our looming environmental crises believes that we will get out of it without major disruption of our civilization. But different observers have different takes on how it might play out. What almost all have in common is that there is a wide range of possibilities, and the sooner we begin seriously addressing the problems the better off we’ll be.


Jared Diamond

Diamond stresses the need to resolve these problems consciously, rather than waiting for them to overtake us. The whole thrust of his book is devoted to showing how some civilizations have managed to come through major crises without being totally destroyed, by taking preemptive action, whereas those that refuse to see the light have totally collapsed. Here is how he paints the coming scenario, near the end of his book:

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.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben’s approach to the subject is in some ways similar to Diamond’s, in that he notes that our present and future actions will tremendously impact how well we come through this crisis. The main difference in approach between Diamond’s “Collapse” and McKibben’s book, “Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”, is that “Collapse” focuses primarily on past crises, whereas “Eaarth” focuses almost solely on the present and the future.

McKibben emphasizes that major catastrophic changes in the physical characteristics of our planet have occurred in recent years, primarily resulting from a rise in global temperatures, including among other things: 22% less Arctic sea ice than ever previously observed, so that the North Pole could be circumnavigated for the first time in human history; rapidly melting glaciers that constitute reservoirs of water for billions of people; a 17 cm rise in sea level during the 20th century resulting in the disappearance beneath the sea of an uninhabited island (Kiribati) in 1998, an inhabited island (Lohachara) in 2006, and the submerging of several more islands since that time; acidification of our oceans; four times the number of weather disasters in the last thirty years as in the first 75 years of the 20th Century; drying up of large rivers, and; major droughts in Australia, the American Southwest, China, India, Brazil and Argentina.

He notes that if we continue on our present course we are facing the high likelihood of world-wide catastrophe. Because of deteriorating vital resources such as water, according to some recent models as many as 700 million of the world’s 9 billion people will be climate change refugees by 2050. And a Pentagon-sponsored report forecasts:

possible scenarios a decade or two away, when the pressures of climate change have become “irresistible – history shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid… As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.”

Thus it is that we can’t undo the damage we’ve done to our planet any time soon, nor can we totally prevent additional catastrophic damage from taking place in the coming years. The best we can do is limit further damage as best we can, and plan for how to live on our greatly changed planet – what many refer to as a “soft landing”. In the last paragraph of his book, Mckibben summarizes those thoughts:

It’s true that by some measures we started too late, that the planet has changed and that it will change more… The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it can’t be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit that damage. And in the process, with many others fighting similar battles, we’ll help build the architecture for the world that comes next, the dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent. Eaarth (that is, the drastically changed planet that we have created) represents the deepest of human failures. But we still must live on the world we’ve created – lightly, carefully, gracefully.

Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin’s book, “The Empathic Civilization – The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis”, is primarily about the wonders of human empathy. Consequently, with regard to our looming crises he seems considerably more optimistic than McKibbin or Diamond, and unlike them he doesn’t do much to address the problem other than to note that our fate hinges largely on whether or not human empathy can help us to transcend our many failings. Nevertheless he recognizes the crises that we face and he knows that his book wouldn’t be complete without noting them. Here are some of the things he says about our crises in his book:

Every great civilization has had its fair share of holocausts… Lamentably, the empathic drive is often shunted aside in the heat of the moment when social forces teeter on disintegration. We may be approaching such a moment now…

May be??

Geopolitics has always been based on the assumption that the environment is a giant battleground – a war of all against all – where we fight with one another to secure resources to ensure our individual survival. There is simply nowhere any longer for any of us to escape or to hide, because the entropic bill (Rifkin’s phrase for the many environmental and social crises that we face today) our species has created has now enveloped the Earth and threatens our mass extinction…

We are entering a new phase in which the “real-time” impacts of climate change are beginning to impinge on whole regions of the world, affecting large segments of humanity. The first reactions coming in are fear and anger on the part of the early victims and feigned interest among those not yet affected.

Derrick Jensen

Jensen exhibits one of the most pessimistic approaches to our looming catastrophe. He does not talk of “soft landings” because he seems to be convinced that those who currently hold power will never allow it. He makes that point in his book, “Endgame – Volume II – Resistance”:

You and I both know that the civilized (Here he’s lumping together the U.S. elites and the mass of the U.S. citizenry who accept the status quo and don’t challenge their leaders) will not give up their golf and their lawns and their swimming pools and their cheap cotton, no matter the cost to humans, no matter the cost to the planet. We can say the same for many other vital resources… The U.S. military consumes more than 50 percent of the oil used in the United States. Imagine how different the crash might play out if that oil were used to soften our landing, or if it were not burned at all. The military’s use is not essential for keeping people alive. It is, however, essential for the ongoing theft of resources we call civilization…

I have absolutely no doubt that when those who run the United States feel their power slipping, whether through oil shortages, external invasion, internal revolt, or ecological collapse, they will have no moral qualms about nuking anywhere they feel necessary, including places in the United States…

So this is how Jensen sees the crash playing out:

As demand for cheap energy continues to outstrip supply, the United States and other industrialized nations will continue to invade regions containing oil. Environmental regulations will be systematically gutted or ignored. Those who effectively oppose oil extraction will be bought off, silenced, or killed. But no matter how many regions the industrialized nations invade… supply for oil will never again exceed demand. Oil prices will continue to rise, leading to the eventual strangulation of the entire economy… Rising energy costs will undoubtedly hasten the consolidation of the already mammoth conglomerates that control the economy… and they will drive prices up and wages down. Unemployment will continue to rise. The gap between rich and poor will continue to widen. Spending on the military, police, and prisons will continue to climb. Starvation will continue to increase, as the poor continue to be denied access to land and water…

As an ever-greater percentage of governmental spending is aimed toward security… for those who steal resources and security from those whose lives and landbases are ruined, less money will be available to provide basic maintenance for infrastructure. This is already happening. The infrastructure will continue to degrade. The more the infrastructure degrades, the more the stockpiles of food, oil and gas… will be controlled by the military, police, and other warlords. We see this already in U.S. – occupied Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The already faint line between corporations and governments will fade… Mussolini’s definition of fascism – the merger of state and corporate power – will be complete. We see this already… Forced labor and slavery will become ubiquitous… People will be worked to death… Portions of cities may be sealed off to prevent those inside from escaping or getting food… Most cities will become effectively uninhabitable, and industrial civilization as we know it will be over…

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

Derrick Jensen

Consistent with Jensen’s view that those in power will never relinquish it without taking everyone else down with them, he believes that we have to use whatever means necessary to save our planet and the life that it supports. He believes that those in power, through their greed and recklessness leading to an unsustainable civilization, have sown the seeds of their own demise. It would be better to take them down sooner, but if we can’t, this is how he sees it playing out:

The breakdown of the infrastructure will reduce the effectiveness of the military and police, who rely partly on high-tech communications and energy-intensive mobility to kill or capture their targets. This reduced effectiveness will lead to a gradual return of power to the local level as it becomes impossible to maintain distant control without massive inputs of cheap energy… There will be those who attempt to seize power. There will be fights over resources… Soon cars will sputter to a stop… There will be only the sounds of living beings. No machines… Local battles are eminently winnable… Without the full power of the state, the rich are no longer rich. They are simply people in big houses with big swimming pools and big piles of paper claiming they own big plots of land. Big deal. Cut these people off from their support by the colonizers, and the poor will be able to take back the land that is currently used to produce nonfood crops… What, at its essence, does military technology do? It allows one person to kill many. That has always been the point. With the technology in place you have thousands of starving people being held back by mobile police forces with guns. But without an industrial infrastructure, soon enough a gun is nothing but a metal pipe attached to a piece of wood. Take away these technologies – take away the full power of the state – and you have thousands of starving people with machetes up against a rich guy and the people he used to pay holding guns that will soon run out of bullets. I’ll put my money with the starving people. I’ll stake my life with them.

Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin notes that a shift to an economy based on renewable energy, rather than on fossil fuels, will facilitate a much more conflict-free world. He explains:

Because renewable energies are more or less equally distributed around the world, every region is potentially amply endowed with the power it needs to be relatively self-sufficient and sustainable in its lifestyle, while at the same time interconnected via smart grids to other regions across countries and continents… When every community is locally empowered… it can engage directly in … global trade without the severe restrictions that are imposed by the geopolitics that oversee elite fossil fuels and uranium energy distribution…

The European Union is already beginning to put in place the infrastructure for a European-wide energy regime… Asian, African, and Latin American continental political unions are also in the making and will likely be the premier governing institutions on their respective continents by 2050…

Because of that and because our current reliance on fossil fuels is destroying our society and our planet, Rifkin talks about the need to shift to an economy based on renewable energy sources. He says that we need to:

rethink the conventional wisdom that has brought us to this dangerous impasse in human history and to prepare a powerful new narrative for the generations that will follow and in whose hands will rest the awesome responsibility of re-healing the Earth and creating a sustainable planet… Climate change is forcing us, as never before, to recognize our shared humanity and our common plight…My sense is that while the initial response to climate change has teetered somewhere between disinterest, denial, and, at best, weak acceptance – that is, without commensurate emotional and political commitment – that is going to change rapidly in the coming decades as the effects of climate change ripple out and impinge on larger pools of humanity…

As I said before, Rifkin’s view of this issue is considerably more optimistic than most. His book was published in 2009, before the utter failure of the Copenhagen Summit and before the topic of climate change pretty much dropped out of public discourse in the United States. He has it right that we need a major shift to renewable energy, but he doesn’t give much thought to the obstacles involved in accomplishing that. That isn’t the subject of his book. Nevertheless, Rifkin shows on the last page of his book that he doesn’t consider it a foregone conclusion that our society will adequately address this issue:

At some critical point, the realization will set in that we share a common planet, that we are all affected, and that our neighbors’ suffering is not unlike our own… Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future… But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction…

Jared Diamond

The premise of Diamond’s book is that we need to learn the lessons of the failures of past societies that collapsed and became extinct, as well as that of those that successfully overcame the environmental crises they were faced with. He points out that there is one major difference between these past crises and the one we face today. Those past crises involved localized areas of the world. When societies collapsed, the inhabitants at least had some options of moving on to other geographical areas. Today’s environmental crises involve the whole planet. The possibility for escape is much more limited.

Yet we have much more information today about the collapse of past societies than those societies had about the previous ones. Their primary error was that despite a number of clues that they could have picked up, they gave too little thought for the future. In their zeal to live for the present they depleted their resources and polluted their environment to the point that it became unsustainable. Diamond concludes his book with:

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.

Bill McKibben

McKibben devotes the whole of the last chapter of his book – 62 pages – to recommending how we can live through our crisis in the best way possible.

He notes that our society currently favors corporate domination over most aspects of our economy, and he discusses ways in which we can and must shed our perceived and real reliance on corporations (and their rule over us) for the necessities of life. For example:

We need to stop thinking of farming in abstract terms, as a “low rung on the ladder of economic development”, and remember again what it involves: using water and sunshine to grow plants… In the last ten years academics and researchers have begun figuring out what some farmers have known for a long time: it’s possible to produce lots of food on small farms with little or nothing in the way of synthetic fertilizer or chemicals…

He notes the political difficulties involved:

If our farming is really going to shift back in time to let us deal with the new conditions we’ve unleashed here on the planet Eaarth it will take dramatic change… The biggest shifts required will be political. There are “farms” in the United States with hundreds of thousands of swine, producing more sewage each day than big cities. The animals are miserable, the pollution is intense, and it’s all utterly unsustainable – by some estimates, as much as half of global warming gases can be tied to the livestock industry… But it makes a few big corporations rich, and it keeps the price of food incredibly low, and that bargain – enshrined in one federal farm bill after another – has prevailed for two generations. We’d need to challenge the power of those companies, and we’d need to be willing to pay our neighbors enough to grow our food so that they could lead decent lives…

McKibben describes the basics of what we need to accomplish to save our planet: 1) We need to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of 20 over the next few decades, in order to return atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 ppm; 2) It would be a lot easier for us if we replace fossil fuels with practical renewable energy sources (He notes that one day’s use of fossil fuel by the average American today represents enough energy for 2 years worth of manual labor); and 3) We need to conserve much more energy than we do today.

He notes that the Internet can be a crucially useful tool towards decentralizing our economy and our lives and helping us get through this crisis:

About 1% of the world’s electric supply goes to operating the data network… You can make a thousand Google searches with the same amount of fossil fuel it takes to drive a car 0.6 miles. Which is important, because often those searches serve the same purpose… you’re engaging with the world, finding something new… The Internet can take waste and convert it into something useful… People just keep figuring out more ways to use a medium much more pliable than anything that came before. For one thing, it’s cheap… And it’s oddly meritocratic… Most, though, it’s decentralized… All of a sudden it’s possible to have the cultural equivalent of farmers’ markets… That decentralization will be crucial, because all of a sudden we need vast amounts of information… For instance, far more people are going to need to grow food…

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS IN PERSPECTIVE

Each of the four authors discussed in this post contribute much value in our efforts to find a way to address our looming environmental crisis, which will undoubtedly result in more widespread suffering and death and could lead to the extinction of our species and many other species as well.

Jensen’s ideas are the most radical. Since some of his solutions could be construed as bordering on illegality I won’t advocate for them, as doing so is against DU rules and could get me in trouble with the U.S government. And furthermore, I have no plan for challenging the rich and powerful in the ways that Jensen suggests. However, I will say that I believe his book is well worth reading. And I will note that the Declaration that founded our country specifically says that his recommendations could be construed as being morally justified:

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends (i.e. life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government… as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Rifkin’s statement that “Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future” appears to be right on target. However, standing in the way of our “collective sense of affiliation” are a group of very wealthy, powerful, and influential individuals and corporations that seek primarily to increase their wealth and power, with little thought to the future consequences of our planet. We need to give a lot of thought to how to deal with that.

Diamond’s extensive study of the collapse of past civilizations should be of great value in helping us to recognize the immensity of the problem we face and how we might deal with it. A society that is unable or unwilling to learn from the past sets itself up for ultimate failure.

McKibben’s book is the best of any I have read on discussing solutions to the vast and dangerous environmental problems that we face today. There are myriad technical issues, relating to how we can convert to an economy based on renewable energy; there are the political issues of how to overcome the resistance of the wealthy and powerful to any diminution of their wealth and power; and there are the psychological issues of how billions of people can learn to adjust to great changes in their life-style before it is too late. McKibben addresses all of these issues in much more detail than I’m able to relate here, and I would highly recommend his book to anyone who thinks they might have a role to play in this effort. I will also note that Al Gore wrote a book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis”, which goes into much more technical detail than McKibben did in his book – though it’s not at all easy to read, because of the intensity of technical detail.

These issues are crucially important to the health of our planet and the survival of our species, and yet they have been largely ignored by our corporate media and only marginally addressed by our government. Failure to do better will result in unimaginable human catastrophe.