Collapse

Some critics view the collapse of ancient societies as evidence that past peoples simply didn’t have the wisdom or know-how to solve their problems. Critics admit that modern nations have environmental issues but assert that superior technology and information will solve them. The problem with this theory is that many areas in the world already are suffering massive failures, and ecological dislocations are getting worse, not better.

Examples are many and widespread. The over-farmed, overpopulated, starving people of Rwanda in 1994 endured civil war and a mass genocide. Haiti, a land of endemic governmental corruption, has completely deforested its land and now is one of the poorest nations on Earth. China, the most populous country in the world with well over a billion people, suffers from severe and growing environmental insults, including large-scale air pollution, degradation of land and water from industrial chemicals, and giant piles of trash that surround many of its cities.

These problems aren’t limited to developing nations. Australia has long since deforested much of its land, over-farmed its fragile soils, and over-used its marine and river fisheries; droughts from climate change further punish the continent. In America seemingly pristine regions like Montana also struggle with loss of forests and farmlands, while mining operations pollute hillsides and rivers.

Far from solving these problems, the much-vaunted modern technology has instead worsened them. Environmental issues are often much more complex than they appear; it’s no wonder the ancients struggled to deal with them, and sadder still that today’s nations have just as much trouble, if not more, in reckoning with them.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and other scientists have gleaned a great deal from the remains of collapsed civilizations. This information can prove useful to current societies as they cope with environmental problems that are remarkably similar to the dilemmas faced by the ancients. The failures serve as a guide and a warning, but it is up to today’s peoples to heed those warnings, adjust their behavior, and better harmonize with the world around them.

Diamond asserts that both bottom-up and top-down processes can help fix environmental problems. Bottom-up, community-based actions respond to local problems, while top-down national administration takes into consideration all the interactions between locally stressed ecosystems and accordingly makes big-picture adjustments.

An example of successful bottom-up, community-based decision-making is the island of Tikopia, whose 1,100 citizens participate in community decisions about major issues and cooperate to protect their island’s ecosystems. At the other end is the top-down administration of medieval Japan’s Tokugawa era, when a ruling shogun issued fiats that preserved and revived the island nation’s long-suffering forests, so that today Japan is the most forested nation on Earth.

Each environmental situation is different, and combinations of local and national decision-making will vary; if one process can’t or won’t respond, the other can fill in. Having two approaches, and not merely one, strengthens societies’ ability to respond and adapt to ecological problems, which in turn increases the odds that the world can mend its environmental damage and survive into the future.