[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable

[Bill Totten]

by Debora MacKenzie

New Scientist (April 02 2008)


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.