I've come to kibitz with you again. Because I've been having these visions lately, and none of them are exactly "softly creeping." It's more like they're harshly pouncing on me, usually about 4 AM when my ability to shed fear is at its weakest, leaving me sweating and staring at the dark ceiling.
Blame it on my own pessimistic tendencies. Blame it on my bedtime reading. Blame it on all the rather depressing essays I've been writing. Blame it on Bush (that's my favorite). But I keep visualizing our whole world balanced on a tightrope, and that rope is starting to sway.
Geologic Law
Aeons ago, when I was in college, we learned some nice little guidelines. There are few physical laws in the study of geology. This isn't math, though it certainly uses math. It's not physics, though it makes good use of that, too. And chemistry. And biology. But in geology you're often dealing with structures many miles in lengths, with a variety of physical and chemical properties. The whole nature of the beast means that you're often called on to apply your best educated guess. Instead of precise mathematical equations, you often get... guidelines.
Take that hoariest of geological chestnuts, The Law of Superposition. Danish proto-geologist Nicolas Steno thought this one up back in the 17th century. What does it say? The stuff at the bottom of the stack tends to be older than the stuff on top. Sounds simple, I know, but realizing the implications can still set off light bulbs today.
Superposition has been critical in establishing the relative age of stratigraphic units, which means it's also been critical in showing how evolution shaped life over time. Superposition has been important to archeology, as well, sorting out various civilizations that camped in the same spot, but not at the same time.
There's another old geologic tip that was passed on from days of yore hasn't always enjoyed the sterling reputation that superposition has among all but the most "Noah's flood flipped it over" extreme among the creationists.
Writing back in 1795, James Hutton, one of the fathers of modern geology, wrote these words.
"In examining things present, we have data from which to reason with regard to what has been; and, from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter."
Later on, this would be simplified for generations of geology students as "if you want to understand the past, look to the present." And this helpful tip would be given a name much more weighty than the underlying advice: the Law of Uniformitarianism.
Uniformitarianism is undoubtedly extremely useful in geology, and as vital in interpreting the history of the world as superposition. Want to know how that odd structure was formed in that ancient sandstone? Look to a modern beach and see how something similar is forming today. How did thousands of dinosaur bones end up piled together on a Cretaceous sandbar? Watching herds of buffalo trying to ford a river in Africa provides a critical clue. The Law of Uniformitarianism was the link that extended geology from a study of interesting things in the Earth, to a study of the Earth. Superposition tells us which pages of the book come first, but it took Uniformitarianism to teach us how to read.
There have been some knocks against uniformitarianism over the years, chiefly because it's often been conflated with that long-admired, but now rather disreputable tenet, gradualism. Gradualism, the idea that all Earth processes happen at a slow and steady clip, waged a long and ugly academic war with its polar opposite, Catastrophism. As the name implies, catastrophism holds that most features of the Earth were shaped by past "catastrophies" or "discrepant events." The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. Many processes on Earth are gradual and consistent, but floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and objects coming in hot and heavy from space can all play an important role.
Catastrophism was viewed with suspicion, because it turned geology from deductive reasoning (I can see this happening now, and I can extrapolate to how this worked before) to a realm where almost anything could happen. It was scary. In early days, catastrophism became tied solidly to the "all those rocks got laid down in one enrmous flood" school while gradualism first introduced the notion of deep time. Those now looking that battle over "intelligent design" are seeing an echo of the fight against that original version of catastrophism. It left such a sour taste in many academic mouths, that scientsts were loathe to argue that catastrophies had anything to do with the formation of the Earth. For a long time, even to admit that an asteroid might have played a role in the extinction of the dinosaurs was seen as a kind of heresy, because it opened a crack in the wall of gradualism. You will still find adherents to a more pure form of gradualism, even among geologists who might otherwise be seen as rebels, but they've become quite rare.
All these "isms" show again that geology is often harder to describe by the strict measures that are applied to other sciences. Geology is sometimes affected so greatly by philosophies, that it takes a revolution in thought before people can interpret the evidence that's been staring them in the face for decades. (Of course, something very like this happened in physics with both relativity and quantum, and sciences don't come much harder than physics.)
Modern geologists have learned to be a bit more agnostic than their intellectual forbearers when it comes to adhering to any of these geologic religions. These days, papa uniformitarianism, and the squabbling siblings of gradualism and catastrophism are all part of the family. Of course, there's probably some other "ism" that's afflicting us now, and blinding us to potential revelations. We won't know till someone knocks down that wall.
Just as superposition has application to archeology (and in determining the relative age of the various memos on my desk), uniformitarianism has also proven to be useful outside the geologic realm. Whether it's biologists researching the relationship between an animal's food source and its physiology, or historians looking at how trade routes shape a civilization, examining at the current examples, then extrapolating into the past, is one of the best tools we have.
And, perhaps even more importantly, uniformitarianism doesn't just apply to the past. If you can project from the present into the past, then why not draw that line the other direction? Why not look at the past, and the present, as a way to peer into the future? It's far from a perfect time-telescope, but compared to other methods of scrying, it works quite well. To put it in terms that would be understood by Starbuck and Dr. Baltar, "all this has happened before, all this will happen again."
Uniformitarianism can work across scale as well as time. Forces that can generate structures and results on a small scale, can often reproduce those results on a larger scale. Scale and time can even be connected in a kind of neo-gradualism, where looking at the results of limited actions over a short period, can be used to predict effects on larger systems over a longer period of time.
With that in mind, I present to you our future summed up in two words: Rapa Nui.
Little, Big
The settlers called it first te pito o te henua -- the navel of the world, before immigrants from the Bass Islands tagged it Rapa Nui. We know it better as Easter Island. By whatever name, this little speck in the eastern Pacific is the most isolated chunk of inhabited land on Earth. In every direction, there is more than a thousand miles of unbroken blue-grey Pacific. The island was populated by the greatest explorers the planet has ever seen, the Polynesians. Most history books list the colonization of Rapa Nui as starting somewhere around 300AD, but it's more likely that the nearly 1,300 miles of ocean that separates this speck from Pitcairn Island, the nearest inhabited land to the west, took much longer to breach. It may have been as late as 900AD before settlers arrived.
The people who settled the island brought with them the Polynesian agricultural "kit," which included bananas and root vegetables like taro and sweet potato. They also brought along chickens, pigs, and that perennial stowaway on every sea voyage, rats. They arrived on an island nearly covered in palm forests and ringed by good fisheries. Though the culture they developed on the island drew from elements that had been started at Pitcairn and other islands, it went on to extend these in weird and unique ways -- including the more than 900 giant statues -- that have made it popular to perch a UFO over shots of the island in tourist postcards.
Only it wasn't little green aliens at Rapa Nui, it was us. It was people. From the few that made their way to the isolated spot in oceangoing canoes, the population grew into the thousands. By the 15th century, there were an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people living on the island. They established a complex, sophisticated culture with its own rituals and patterns for living. It was right about then, that someone chopped down the last tree.
Within a matter of a few decades, the population of the island collapsed. The deforested land proved unable to hold its soil, its crops, or its people. Runoff from the eroding island poured silt into the surrounding waters, leaving the fisheries as devastated as the land. The islanders might have used their considerable seafaring skills to fish around some of the nearby islets, but then... canoes are made from trees. War broke out over the diminishing resources. When the Dutch arrived in 1722, there were around 2,000 people on the island -- perhaps 15% of the population that had been there before the trees went down -- and even that was likely a good deal more than the population at the nadir.
How bad did things get on Rapa Nui? You can find the answer in the language. Good Anglo-Saxon curses have to do with sex, excrement, and parentage. On Rapa Nui, the curses combine food and family in ways as unique and memorable as those statues. You get lines like "the flesh of your mother is in my teeth." That, ladies and gentlemen, is an eloquent curse. And it all too likely reflects the conditions during the worst of the island's collapse.
So... okay. You've likely heard some version of this before. Easter Island is the poster child for societies that collapsed after draining their available resources.
But they're far from alone. In his latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, professor Jared Diamond deals not only with little Rapa Nui, but with other societies that have fallen -- and with those on their way to failure. The author of the bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond has shown a terrific knack for synthesis. There's rarely a fact in his books that makes you sit up and say "hey, I didn't know that." Instead, he puts the facts you already know together in a "wow, I never thought of that way" order that makes you wonder why you never quite assembled the big picture.
The Hand of Man
In Guns Diamond explained how accidents of geography, and the placement of certain species of plants and animals around the world, led to the early development of advanced civilization in Europe and Asia, and ultimately allowed the Europeans to subjugate other societies. It's a fascinating, and ultimately convincing view, but it's also missing any role for human action. Collapse puts mankind's guilty fingers back on the tiller and shows how societies have chosen to steer their own course -- often right into the rocks.
In Collapse, Diamond examines not just the factors that lead societies to fall (factors that include not only overexploitation of resources, but also underlying environmental and societal causes). He looks at the fall of such ancient American cultures as the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Cahokians. He looks at cases like the Norse occupation of Greenland (which was much more extensive and longer lasting than most people suspect) and modern examples like the horror of Rwanda.
Perhaps even more interesting is Diamond's analysis of societies that haven't yet collapsed, but which are showing signs of rot at their core. He starts the book with a look into an unlikely candidate for collapse -- Montana. He looks at an area of the state, an area that by most measures of the day -- average income, housing prices, population growth -- is thriving. However, the area also contains exhausted mines leaking heavy metals and chemicals into the environment. It has an aging infrastructure of roads and hydroelectric dams that are becoming ever more expensive and difficult to maintain. Prion diseases -- relatives of mad cow -- affect local populations of deer and elk, and no one quite knows why. Vast as the space is, the area can't actually support all that many people. And still the area is logged. And still the population grows.
At the Edge of the Ocean
Veering away from Diamond for a moment, I'd like to give my own example of a society in danger of collapse from forces other than those usually fingered -- Ocracoke Island. Unlike Easter Island, Ocracoke is not isolated by a thousand miles of open ocean. In fact, it's only a few miles off the coast of North Carolina, separated from the mainland by the placid waters of the Pamlico Sound. From the north, a ferry ride of only a few minutes connects Ocracoke to the multimillion dollar shorefront homes of Cape Hatteras.
Other communities of the Outer Banks are often made up from nothing but clusters of strip malls and expensive condos (Roanoke Island, home of the famous lost colony, now looks like a fortress when spied from the sea -- the tall condos so tightly packed they nearly form an unbroken wall). Ocracoke was spared this fate by a resolution that made much of the island into National Seashore more than half a century ago. Because of this, the beaches of Ocracoke are among the most beautiful in the nation. You can hike for miles along white sand without a building in sight. Sometimes, even in the heart of summer, you can tromp along collecting shells and skirting turtle breeding grounds and not see another person in half a day's walk. Development on the island was restricted by law to those areas already built on when the area was taken under federal control. This also helped to keep the island's character intact. Ocracokers even developed their own variant language. To this day, there are no large chain stores, hotels, or restaurants on the island, and nearly every business is owned by a local.
Even so, Oracoke is in trouble. Why? Over the last couple of decades, tourism has increasingly served as the sole engine for the island's economy. With each passing year, there are more little inns and B&Bs. More surf shops and T-shirt stores. And each year there are fewer working fishermen dropping their catch at the town pier. How do I know? Because I've made many trips to the island. I'm one of those people who are loving it to death. Tourism is making the island far richer than it ever was in the past, but it's coming at a bitter cost.
While the island can't be overbuilt in the usual sense, those out to nab a bit of Ocracoke are increasingly knocking down the old stone and cinderblock homes that have weathered many Atlantic hurricanes, and replacing them with summer homes of two, three, four or more stories. The same plot of ground that once held a twelve hundred square foot home, now supports a 15,000 square foot vacation castle complete with observation deck. These new homes often house far more people than the smaller buildings the replaced, meaning that they place a far greater drag on the island's resources. On an island where water has to be brought in from the mainland, that's a very serious problem. All the infrastructure of the island is becoming strained.
At the same time, the social fabric is also tearing at the seams. When an island is populated by nothing but "summer people," who mans the volunteer fire department? Who runs for the school board? Who acts as the glue that makes the place a community, and not just a housing development? How involved do you become in a town where you may just be renting a home for a week? In many ways, the Ocracoke that existed just a decade ago is already dead -- though I'm sure some of those who lived there and who carried on the backbreaking work that came before the sharp rise of tourism miss that old Ocracoke far less than I.
It's quite possible that Ocracoke could actually prosper itself to death. The population of those summer homes could become too much for the water system to support. The infrastructure, built to handle a 750 person fishing village, could wilt under a hundred thousand visitors. And, oh yeah, hurricanes are a lot less friendly to those towering glass monsters the newcomers have been building.
Can't happen? You think that someone will step in to keep developers from putting up homes before the water system fails? Or maybe that the infrastructure will expanded before it falls? Then you haven't been paying attention.
There's collapse, and there there's...
If what's going on in Montana or Ocracoke seem pretty mild, if neither seems likely to lead to insults involving family cannibalism, that doesn't mean Diamond wouldn't recognize both as in danger of collapse. In his book, the term applies to several different kinds of radical social restructuring. There's collapse that's triggered by (or is the trigger for) civil war, as in Rwanda. There's a breakdown of all political structures leading to a reign of criminals and chaos (see Somalia and Haiti). You can have a cultural collapse that leads to the fall of local traditions. Or you can see a severe population collapse as experienced at Rapa Nui. At the most extreme end of the scale you get the kind of collapse experienced by the Greenland Norse, and by Rapa Nui's neighbors on Pitcairn Island. That kind of collapse is also known as extinction.
The biggest lesson to take away from Diamond's book is: the people of the failed societies were not stupid, and they were not blind. The people of Rapa Nui didn't fail to notice they were cutting down the last forest. They knew it was the last, and they cut it down anyway. The people of Haiti did the same, and got the same results.
All too often, people failed to steer away from collapse, even when they were staring it in the face. They charged head on, propelled by habit, stubbornness, and a kind of cultural irrationality. It's this same kind of irrational behavior that makes us, when confronted with the imminent failure of oil and gas reserves, seek to remedy this by peeking under a few more rocks or drilling in a few more parks.
We know this won't fix the problem. We know. It's not a matter of contention. Yet, we run headlong toward the cliff. Make no mistake, we are making no substantive steps to turn our course away from collapse. In fact, we're running faster The edge of the cliff may yet be miles away, but that's not likely. We are traveling in the dark, so we can't tell, but any moment now, our foot could land on nothing but air.
When the fall comes, it will be swift, long, and as unpleasant as plunging from the rocks that surround Rapa Nui.
The Glass All Empty
So is it all bad news? Dr. Diamond doesn't think so. He points out that not all societies have been such spendthrifts with their resources. The Dominican Republic sits cheek to jowl with Haiti, sharing the same island, but where Haiti has essentially destroyed the ability of their end of the island to sustain the population, the Dominican Republican is a net exporter of food.
You also have societies that once nearly destroyed their habitats -- like the Icelanders -- who suffered centuries of poverty as an aftereffect of wrecking their tiny homeland, but who have since nurtured their fragile ecologies back to something approaching health and in the process brought their own societies back from the brink.
However, neither of these cases says anything particularly good for us, either as a nation or as a world. Yes, there are societies which have learned to curb their appetite for expansion and consumption. We are not one of those societies. Instead, we (both in the US, and increasingly in the world) are a society that places the short term above the long, and individual gain above benefit to the group.
Diamond goes through the factors that have kept some societies alive while others have fallen. Few, if any, of the survival factors are in our favor.
Going all the way back to he beginning of this essay (remember that?) the line drawn using the geologic idea of uniformitarianism can be extended from Rapa Nui to Haiti to the world. The past is our best indicator of the future. Processes that worked on a small scale can also work on the large. We're knocking down our last rain forests, eliminating our final wild places, and slurping up our final gallons of fuel. One of these days, some future civilization is going to print postcards of a modern city with a UFO hovering overhead. They won't believe we built them on our own. After all, how could we have possibly constructed all those massive skyscrapers and elegant bridges, and still be so ignorant that we willfully brought on our own downfall?
Doom, Despair, and Agony on Me
Not only am I using this article to lay on a thick layer of depression, my other recent articles have included one titled "Playing Chicken with the Apocalypse" and another called "The End of... Everything." Both of these spoke to the idea that there is trouble ahead, and the mechanisms we're counting on to save us may not work. Together, they have made me seem like a gloomy, introspective, every-silver-lining-has-a-cloud, sort of guy. They seem to indicate that, though I am far too old to wear Goth makeup and the only reason I put on black these days is to make me look at least a little thinner, still I have not excised my inner teen angst.
Guilty.
However, in the immortal words of Sarah Vowell (who is both immortally talented and just so darn cute), "Though I am obsessed with death, I am against it." Stick with me for a minute. Let me try to convince you that there's more to all this than just a bunch of hand-wringing and hysterics.
The Cliff
Diamond has his own factors that lead to collapse, which don't perfectly align with my own. That's okay. We'll go with mine.
For a quick recap, the point behind The End of Everything was that it's getting harder and harder to extract big new ideas from science and technology. Like kids at an apple tree, we've grabbed all the juicy red ones close to the ground, and are left making ever more hazardous climbs into the upper branches, just to come back with bitter little fruit. Making advances these days takes increasing investments of time, money, and technology, and the resulting returns are small.
Playing Chicken with the Apocalypse hits that ever worrisome trigger for collapse, the impending end of cheap and plentiful energy. We've built a society that's complex and often horrendously inefficient. What's propped us up as we've adding ever more mousetraps and bowling balls to the Rube Goldberg machine that is our world, has been cheap energy. Now cheap energy is on the outs, and everything from our food distribution network to our sacred right to drive a 8-cylinder hemi at 80 MPH is under threat.
Sticking these two factors together, you get an implication that very bad things are likely to happen. In fact, you can review Diamond's list of the various types of collapse and take your pick. We're in danger of any and all.
A Terrible Confession
If you're not up for it, just stop reading now.
If you're still here, you asked for it: I consider myself an optimist. In fact, I really do expect us to get through this without facing the Rapa Nui (or Greenland Norse) type of collapse. I've got a kid just starting out in college, and I don't expect him to end his days raising pigs in Bartertown. Nope, I expect to see wonders. I expect to visit him someday in a clean, self-guided electric vehicle (flying is optional) that has the decency to let me read while I'm on a trip. I expect to see miracles of medicine, marvels of engineering, and a better society for everyone. I expect us to get to Mars and cure cancer. I'm that much of a Pollyanna.
Besides, I'm a science fiction writer. It's kind of in the contract that I believe in advances in technology and how they can drag society out of messes like this. Otherwise, sci fi gets kind of... nonexistent.
So why all the doom and gloom? The not so hidden point of these articles is not to take a toot on Gabriel's trumpet, but to sound an alarm clock.
If we're going to learn from Rapa Nui, let's skip the massive population die off and charming period of cannibalism, and go right to what came afterwards. The story of Rapa Nui isn't completely one of tragedy. By the time the Dutch arrived, not only had the island's population began to recover, they had changed their culture. A whole new set of rituals had been developed that centered on a means of rationing and distributing the island's limited resources. The Rapanui people went through the crucible of collapse, but they emerged much better aligned with conditions of their little "world."
I'm willing to bet quite a bit that we can make that transition without the flesh of anyone in our teeth. We can rebuild our society to respect the environment. We can limit our growth within the boundaries of the available resources. We can make actual sacrifices to lift us onto new technologies that can operate without either polluting the planet, or binding us to short term solutions.
We can do all this, because we have to. I really believe this -- except around 4AM.