Knock Down the Gates on the Gated Communities or We Are All So Screwed

Interesting article in this month’s Sierrra, the magazine of the Sierra Club. Carl Pope, the executive director or the Sierra Club, writes in “Fuel Folly” that, “We’re better off without cheap gas.” Pope references Jared Diamond’s recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, noting that societal collapses often “spring from outdated notions of past abundance.” He suggests that “Greenland once had enough grass to support cattle, so Viking settlers stubbornly stuck with pasturage even when the Little Ice Age drastically cooled the climate.” Pope then argues that, “Our own folly is cheap fuel,” suggesting that American society is based upon unending supplies of cheap fuel and that, unless we realize that we no longer live in a world of cheap fuel, we’re headed for collapse. Thus, “our governing folly paralyzes us, and we continue to focus on price instead of waste and inefficiency. Last year, Congress threw billions of dollars in new subsidies at the oil industry, but gas still rose to $3 a gallon. Airlines went bankrupt. Homeowners chose between paying for heat and buying food.” His argument reminds me of the old axiom that, whoever first discovered water, we know it wasn't the fish. It also got me thinking about the Japanese, who seem to have incorporated the idea of being resource-poor into their national psyche to the same extent that Americans have incorporated the notion of unending abundance into ours. Which may explain why conserving energy is now a mania in Japan, while Americans continue to act as if our only problem is building more roads for all of our Hummers.

Pope’s article has also got me thinking more seriously about Diamond’s work. You can like Diamond -- he won a Pulitzer -- or you can dislike him. But he’s asking interesting questions. The one I love is: “What was the Easter Islander who chopped down the island’s last tree saying as he chopped it down? Was he saying, ‘What about our jobs? Do we care more for trees than for our jobs?’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘What about my private property rights? Get the big government chiefs off my back.’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘You’re predicting environmental disaster, but your environmental models are untested, we need more research before we can take action.’ Or perhaps he was saying, ‘Don’t’ worry, technology [or more statues?] will solve all our problems.’”

What I find most important about Diamond’s work is that it shows that societies don’t always pull back from the brink. Another of America’s “governing follies” may be our optimism, our notion that somehow we’ll find a way and things will work out, that we can keep on using more than our share of the Earth's resources and it will go on being ok. Sometimes, people don’t change, even in the face of evidence that they need to change and sometimes, they pay the ultimate price for it. The difference between societal collapses of the past and the environmental crisis that faces our society today is that, this time, the collapse threatens to be planet-wide. We’re all living on Easter Island now.

Diamond has a checklist of five factors that play a role in societal collapse. The first four certainly apply to us, and, I’m afraid the fifth one may, as well. It’s perhaps ironic that Diamond chooses my ancestors, the Vikings, as an example of a culture where all five factors were evident.

Check out Diamond’s factors:

1. Environmental damage, inadvertent damage to the environment through means such as deforestation, soil erosion, salinisation, over-hunting, etc.
2. Climate change, such as cooling or increased aridity.
3. The society’s relations with hostile neighbors.
4. The society’s relations with friendly neighbors and whether or not those friendly neighbors run into problems of their own (e.g., we depend upon Middle Eastern countries for oil imports; those countries are politically unstable, dependent upon a dwindling resource, are situated in an environmentally less-than-friendly location, etc.)
5. The society’s cultural response. Why do the people in the society fail to perceive or to solve the problems that would eventually cause collapse? Why are some societies able to perceive and recognize their problems while others don’t?

Discussing the fifth factor, Diamond says: ”Finally, why would people perceive problems but still not solve their own problems? A theme that emerges from Norse Greenland as well as from other places, is insulation of the decision-making elite from the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in societies where the elites do not suffer from the consequences of their decisions, but can insulate themselves, the elite are more likely to pursue their short-term interests, even though that may be bad for the long-term interests of the society, including the children of the elite themselves.” Diamond contrasts Norse Greenland (where the chiefs and bishops were isolated from the consequences of their continued insistence upon raising cattle and focusing on the trade of walrus ivory in order to build big churches even though the climate of Greenland favored sheep over beef and the walrus ivory trade became less and less profitable due to both the Little Ice Age and the re-opening of the Mediterranean which allowed Europeans access to more-desirable elephant ivory), with Holland. Holland, Diamond says, has the highest environmental awareness of any “modern counties.” He attributes this to the fact that all Dutch, rich and poor alike, depend upon the dykes.

You know, we could be screwed.