[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Unnoticed Technologies

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 18 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


When people talk about the role of technology in the future, most of the
time the technologies they have in mind are the flashy ones - that is,
those that haven't been around long enough to slip into the background
texture of everyday existence. Especially in periods of decline, though,
it's far more likely to be the technologies so common they're hardly
noticed that determine, by their survival or disappearance, the fate of
societies.

For the Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island, for example, deepwater
canoes had been part of daily life for thousands of years. This, I
suspect, is among the core reasons that nobody on Easter Island seems to
have anticipated the consequences of cutting down too many trees. The
resulting deforestation eliminated an essential resource - large tree
trunks - without which deepwater canoes could not be made, cutting off
the majority of the island's food supply and, at the same time, the only
way out of the trap the Easter Islanders set for themselves. The canoe
had been so omnipresent a part of life for so long that the possibility
of its absence very likely never entered into the islanders' darkest dreams.

A similar sort of inattention, according to the medieval Arab historian
ibn Khaldun, played a catastrophic role in the collapse and abandonment
of cities across the Middle East and North Africa in the centuries prior
to his own time. The Muqaddimah, ibn Khaldun's treatise on the forces
that shape history, paid close attention to the relationship between
settled agricultural civilizations and nomadic herding societies. It's a
relationship worth watching; as far back as ancient Sumer, which in
historical terms is pretty much as far back as you can go, the ebb and
flow of power between desert herdspeople and settled agriculturalists
sets the heartbeat of history. In Mesopotamia and many other places,
civilizations rise on the backs of new technologies, prosper and expand
at the expense of their nomadic neighbors, transmit their technical
skills to those same neighbors, and then falter and collapse beneath
nomad incursions.

What sets ibn Khaldun's analysis apart from those of the many other
historians who once tracked this cycle is his attention to the role of
background technologies in bringing the cycle to an end. From Sumerian
times onward, irrigation canals formed the backbone of settled life
across the Middle East. While irrigation in a desert setting can cause
salinization (the slow buildup of salts in the soil), this does not
happen as automatically or as disastrously as some current theorists
insist; it's rarely mentioned, for example, that Syria - where grain
agriculture was probably invented, and has certainly been practiced as
long as anywhere else in the world - is still a significant exporter of
wheat today. Two other factors less often discussed in modern studies of
ecological history played at least as large a role.

The first of these, and over the long term the most important, is
climate change. Over the ten thousand years or so since the end of the
last ice age, climates have shifted dramatically many times over large
areas of the world, and rarely so drastically as in the Middle East. The
ice age climate spread deserts over much of the world, including areas
that now receive plenty of rainfall, while a few regions that are now
barren - for example, the Great Basin deserts in North America - got
heavy rains and supported rich ecosystems and human societies. The
chaotic climates that followed the breakup of the glaciers, and likely
made the lives of our ancestors all too interesting, eventually gave way
to what paleoclimatologists call the Holocene Climatic Optimum, a period
of several thousand years in which global temperatures were much warmer
and wetter than they are today.

During those years, the winter rains that now fall north of the
Mediterranean swept across it to douse North Africa, and tropical
monsoons rolled north into today's deserts from Ethiopia to Pakistan. As
recently as 6000 years ago, as a result, hippopotami flourished in a
great chain of lakes across what is now the southern Sahara Desert, and
further north the lakes and marshes gave way to a vast savanna full of
giraffes, gazelles, lions, and elephants. Similar conditions prevailed
over large parts of the Arabian peninsula and across the band of deserts
that now stretch from Mesopotamia east to India.

What dried up the lakes and replaced savannas with sand dunes was the
gradual cooling of the Earth's climate, which shifted the rain bands
toward their present locations, leaving deserts in their wake. Whole
river systems vanished, along with the people who once lived beside
them, as the rain that once fed both went away. The process took time -
as late as the heyday of the Roman Empire, for example, North Africa
still received winter rains and remained the Mediterranean's major
grain-producing area - but by ibn Khaldun's time it was essentially
complete. This was where the third factor, central to his own analysis,
came into play.

The cyclic interaction between settled urban societies and desert nomads
depended on the maintenance of irrigation technologies first put into
place by the ancient Sumerians. The slow march of climate change made
irrigation more difficult and more necessary at the same time, and most
desert civilizations had to direct a fair proportion of their economic
output into maintaining the canals and waterworks on which survival
depended. This, as ibn Khaldun pointed out, became their Achilles' heel,
because the desert nomads who conquered the urban centers never quite
grasped the necessity of the irrigation systems, and starved them of
resources until they slid down the slow curve of failure. Like the
deforestation that doomed the people of Easter Island, the abandonment
of the irrigation canals was a one-way ticket to collapse; once farmland
turned into desert, the agricultural wealth that made canal building and
repair possible was no longer there to be spent, and regions that had
been settled for millennia turned into deserts spotted with crumbling ruins.

All this has more than a little relevance to the twilight of the
industrial age beginning around us today. Like the inhabitants of Easter
Island, we depend on the reckless exploitation of limited resources to
sustain our way of life; like the civilizations of the Middle East whose
fate was chronicled by ibn Khaldun, our survival depends on fragile
infrastructure systems that few of us understand and most of our leaders
seem entirely willing to starve of necessary resources for the sake of
short-term political advantage. The industrial system that supports us
has been in place long enough that most of us seem to be unable to
conceive of circumstances in which it might no longer be there.

One of the wrinkles of catabolic collapse - the process by which
societies in decline cannibalize their own infrastructure to meet
immediate needs, and so accelerate their own breakdown - is that it can
trigger abrupt crises by wrecking some essential technology that is not
recognized as such. We are already witnessing the early stages of
exactly such a crisis. What large trees were to the Easter Islanders and
irrigation canals were to the early medieval Middle East, the current
form of money economy is to modern industrial society, and the
speculative delusions that passed for financial innovation over the last
few decades have played exactly the same role as the invading nomads of
ibn Khaldun's history, by stripping a fragile system of resources in the
pursuit of immediate gain. The result, just as in the 1930s, is that a
nation still relatively rich in potential resources, and provided with a
large and skilled labor force, is sliding into crushing poverty because
the intricate social system we use to allocate labor and resources has
broken down.

Other unwelcome surprises along the same lines are likely events in the
future. Before we get there, however, those of us who are concerned
about the possible downside of history might be well advised to pay more
attention to the unnoticed technologies in our lives, and to start
thinking about how to make do without them, or get some substitute in
place in a hurry, if the unthinkable happens and one or more of them
suddenly goes away.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/02/unnoticed-technologies.html


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