A new
study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted
the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming
decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal
wealth distribution.
Noting
that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the
study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that
"the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle
found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due
to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been
quite common."
It finds
that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations
are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of
modern civilisation:
"The
fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan,
and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all
testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative
civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."
By
investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the
project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain
civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse
today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.
These
factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social
features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the
ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of
society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]"
These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in
the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five
thousand years."
Currently,
high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption
of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries
responsible for both:
"...
accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather
has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing
the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or
just above subsistence levels."
The study
challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by
increasing efficiency:
"Technological
change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise
both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so
that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for
the increased efficiency of resource use."
Productivity
increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from
"increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite
dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.
Modelling
a range of different scenarios, Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that
under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we
find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these
scenarios, civilisation:
"....
appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an
optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the
Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that
eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this
Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of
workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."
Another
scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that
"with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster,
while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse
completely, followed by the Elites."
In both
scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most
"detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than
the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual'
despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could
explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who
appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in
the Roman and Mayan cases)."
Applying
this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:
"While
some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards
an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in
order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these
changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of
doing nothing."
However,
the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means
inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could
avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.
The two
key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer
distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by
relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:
"Collapse
can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of
depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are
distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
The
NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments,
corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that 'business as
usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required
immediately.
Although
the study based on HANDY is largely theoretical - a 'thought-experiment' - a
number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and
the UK Government
Office of Science for instance - have warned that the
convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm'
within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could
be very
conservative.
- Why
do the researchers fear that modern industrial society could be heading
for a collapse?
- What
would Thomas Malthus or Karl Marx say about this article? Would they agree
or disagree? Why? Would solutions would they propose?
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