Ecological Suicide

Many a past and present society has imperiled itself through inadvertant destruction of its habitat. In the worst cases whole civilizations have collapsed, leaving behind decaying and abandoned monuments. Jared Diamond's Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed examines several examples. He uses Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous sonnet Ozymandias as an epigraph:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

One of the few examples I have visited is the Chaco Canyon site in Northern New Mexico where a busy urban culture thrived a thousand years ago. Their stone buildings were the tallest built in North American until the advent of the steel skyscraper in the late nineteenth century. Looking over this barren and treeless desert today, one marvels at how a civilization of thousands could have lived here.

Diamond tells the story, the main points of which are now known. The Native Americans who settled in this canyon a little more than a millenium ago found a forest containing abundant game and a high water table in the valley where corn and other crops could grow. Their population expanded and technological solutions were found to permit irrigation and larger areas of cultivation. The forests were cut down for firewood and to build their stone and log monuments. Poltical and economic organization increased, permitting importation of timber from considerable distances, and of luxury goods from as far away as Mexico.

The end fits a pattern with much in common with other collapses. Deforestation led to erosion, arroyo cutting and consequent drop in the water table, and exhaustion of the soil. As the population reached a maximum, the fragility of the environment neared the critical point. The coupe de grace was probably delivered by a period of draughtought, a draought no worse than others that the culture had survived handily. At this point though, the forests and game were gone, the soil exhausted, and the wealthy and unproductive (agriculturally speaking) elite was large. Famine and starvation led to war, cannibalism, and the destruction of the political and economic system.

The site was abandoned, and 900 years later remains treeless. Crawling through the remains of the huge stone structures, it's easy to start thinking about what the priests and chiefs must have thought as the hordes of starving peasants gathered outside for the final assaults. It's only a slight stretch to imagine something vaguely similar happening to the gated communities of the modern elite when gasoline hits $12/gallon and the economy collapses.