Collapse?

The first volume of Jensen's magnum opus, Endgame, is dedicated primarily to documenting, metaphorically characterizing, and linking the manifold ills of civilization.  Civilization is so bad, we are told, that Jensen wishes it gone at nearly any cost.  Yet even he acknowledges that it would be infinitely preferable if the process of decivilizing were slow, occurring over generations, without abrupt disruptions in food supply, healthcare, education, etc.  A philosophy so driven by love of life as Jensen's does not easily condone what may amount to the (relatively) swift and gruesome deaths of potentially millions of people if not billions as civilization collapses and famine and disease become prevalent.

Jensen presents compelling arguments that show that this question is a red herring - that this is not the choice we face.  He asserts that "Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living." This is more or less obvious depending on what you think that transformation must look like, but it is clear that the rising prominence of "green" values is somewhat superficial and is certainly not yet on track to bring down civilization. The UN can't even agree on a decent framework to combat climate change, despite the massive purely financial intelligence of a mitigation strategy.  

Jensen goes further, to assert that a collapse of some sort is inevitable given expanding destruction and pollution coupled with growing affluence and population on a finite earth. This proposition is intuitive and widely accepted in some form, including by thinkers as seemingly mainstream as Lester Brown. It is defended very well by Huesemann and Huesemann here, who further point out that collapse is only avoidable through a reversal or stabilization of both affluence and population, and a contemporaneous increase in technological efficiency. This is essentially the "voluntary transformation" Jensen refers to above, and again, it seems increasingly unlikely. Again, Jensen seems to be well within at least one portion of the mainstream environmental movement with this prediction, hearkening back to such mainstays as the Club of Rome.

Integrating these two assumptions, Jensen reaches the reasonable conclusion that "the longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after." Thus, the best thing we could do for everyone who will be negatively impacted by collapse is the same thing as the best thing we could do for everyone presently negatively impacted by civilization. Accelerating collapse is a win-win! While I don't mean to imply that this is some intentional rhetorical ploy, it is clear that thus clearing the moral hurdle of collapse's consequences makes it far, far easier for readers to buy into Deep Green Resistance. It certainly made the idea much more ethically palatable to me, and I suspect I'm not unusual in that respect. Without the "stick" of impending doom, anti-civilization activism would attract a far smaller audience than it has. It has bitter carrots.  

While I agree with Jensen insofar as accelerating ecological destruction must have drastic consequences for civilization, and insofar as no political path is likely to avert them, in my investigation, I came to have some qualms with the narrative DGR presents. These are focused on the historical precedents and anthropological basis for arguments about collapse, and about the substantial uncertainties and lurking apocalypse-style thinking that haunt them.

I'll begin with the anthropological and historical questions. I mentioned in my "Civilization?" post that Jensen's failure to consider the origins and causes of civilization is an unfortunate oversight with negative consequences for his analysis of the present situation.  In designing a plan to accelerate and shape collapse, the first step must necessarily be to understand collapse – what it is, how it has worked in the past, and how it might happen in the future. And as Joseph Tainter puts it, “[c]ollapse may not be understood except in the context of how complex societies function and operate, and that cannot be divorced from the question of how they have come into being.” (Tainter, 1998) Since Jensen et al. fail to adequately address how civilization emerged in the first place, their ideas about its collapse are sometimes strange and misguided. They seem to believe that the implicit and explicit dominating force wielded by those in power is the only reason people don’t rise up and create a just society. That is, they ignore the functioning social contract that is civilization, the reciprocal relationship in which, no matter how bad a deal it is, those who work and pay taxes to support civilization do so because they still perceive this as a better deal than failing to do so – their alternative still seems worse.

However, in this case, the flaw may be purely intellectual. When discussing specific narratives of collapse and making his plans, McBay cites Tainter’s "The Collapse of Complex Societies" and uses its insights to frame the tasks of a Deep Green Resistance. Tainter’s thesis is that collapse represents an often-rapid change in the cost-benefit ratio of civilization (caused by diminishing marginal returns on complexity), particularly as experienced by those who support civilization in their day to day lives. McBay translates this into a simple recipe for DGR: “part of the job of the resistance movement is to increase the costs and decrease the benefits of empire-scale complexity. . . . aboveground activists facilitate . . . collapse by developing alternatives that will ease the pressure and encourage people to leave industrial capitalism by choice.”

If Tainter’s analysis is correct, then this is a positive case in which DGR writers used the anthropological literature to hone their strategy. On the other hand, Tainter’s thesis is not well tested (it is difficult to find case studies with sufficient data to track marginal returns over time) nor is it uncontested. The historical record of collapse is fraught with complications that seem to increase at every turn (see, for instance, the befuddlement surrounding Chaco Canyon and new evidence emerging at Easter Island that challenges the neat and tidy deforestation story told by Jared Diamond). There is certainly no case analogous to the plan of Deep Green Resistance, in which a group of individuals within a society deliberately sets out to accelerate its collapse. Thus, there is not necessarily any reason to think that it will be possible for activists to affect the cost-benefit balance of civilization. That, however, is probably not of itself a sufficient reason that we shouldn’t try.

I've read several good arguments that left me convinced that Aric's assertion that "the history of civilizations is defined by collapse . . . collapse is the typical, not exceptional, outcome for a civilization."  In "Topsoil and Civilization," Vernon Gill Carter asserts that only the alluvially-recharged soils of the major floodplain civilizations have managed to stave off death by soil erosion for more than a thousand years.  David Montgomery's "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations" is an excellent modern update of that story.  John Perlin's "A Forest Journey" tracks erosion's partner-in-crime, deforestation, through the rise and fall of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Europe.  Diamond's "Collapse" is an incomparable grand survey of historical collapses.  

All these sources use historical and archaeological evidence to make their point.  However, it's clear that anthropologists are not undivided on these issues, and it's possible that the authors here are overemphasizing the ecological component of collapse and decline, to the exclusion of important alternative factors, and more importantly to the exclusion of exceptions that might disprove the rule.

Insofar as collapse is the inverse of increasing complexity, it has as many explanations and shows as much local, case-by-case variation as that process (documented in Earle and Johnson's The Evolution of Human Societies).  Thus while collapse always occurs in the context of environmental conditions, and these conditions often add to the hardship causing collapse even when environmental degradation is not the primary cause, it is not the only explanation for historical collapses and declines. 

Much of this discussion is a question of definitions: anthropologists recoil at McBay's use of the term collapse for such a wide array of very different social changes that are not always negative (a qualification McBay would of course not hesitate to agree with, and vociferously at that).  For instance, new evidence reinterprets the collapses of the Mayan and Angkor Wat civilizations as bureaucracies that had outlived their usefulness, and which were abandoned without substantial demographic suffering.  Anthropologists point out that collapse is easy to find at the scale of individual cities, but is much more ambiguous when applied to larger cultural groups and political systems.  This is perhaps relevant to academics, but in this case McBay's area of interest is importantly different: if a city is buried in silt, its environmental management efforts failed.  To anthropologists, the culture and often the state can move to another city without any relevant discontinuities.  Of course, this process, added up over regions and larger timescales, can perhaps (partially) explain, for instance, the gradual shift in power away from Mesopotamia and into Europe.  And it allows collapse to be both a defining trait of civilization, as McBay would have it, and a process that is truly relevant only in isolated, marginal cases, as some anthropologists argue. 

Thus, the archaeological record makes it clear that collapse is an important process in history, one that is not necessarily inevitable but that certainly happens more often than not to complex, state-level societies.  However, the implications for modern global system are ambiguous.  It seems hard to argue that collapse isn't coming, but it is an open question what precisely will collapse (the UN, the global food market, the American empire, etc) and how.  It is even more uncertain what we can and should do about it.  I'll explore these questions further in a future post.

References

            Carter, Vernon G. Topsoil and Civilization. University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, Print.

            Diamond, Jared. Collapse, How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

            Huesemann, M, and Huesemann, J, 2008. Will progress in science and technology avert or accelerate global collapse? A critical analysis and policy recommendations.  Environmental Development and Sustainability, Vol. 10, pp. 787-825.

            Jensen, Derrick. Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization. Seven Stories Press, 2006. Print.

            Johnson, A. W., and T. Earle. The evolution of human societies. California: Stanford University Press, 1987. Print.

McBay, A, Keith, L, and Jensen, D. Deep Green Resistance. Seven Stories Press, 2011. Print.   

            Meadows, Donella H. Limits To Growth. Signet, 1972. Print.

            Montgomery, D. Dirt : the erosion of civilizations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Print.

            Perlin, John. A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization. Countryman Press, 2005, Print.

            Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse Of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.