Rethinking Civilization– Plunging Earth Into Sixth Extinction

May 5, 2013

Rethinking Civilization– Plunging Earth Into Sixth Extinction; Daniel Quinn Interview Transcript Part 2

By Rob Kall

Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, about a telepathic gorilla, won a Ted Turner award for book with a hopeful vision of the future. It’s become a bestseller translated into many languages and I recommend it as must reading if you’ve never read it. This portion of the interview discusses the book AND his thoughts on civilization, beyond civilization, the Sixth Extinction and the disaster that hierarchy is…

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I interviewed Daniel Quinn on April 5^th, 2013.  This is part two of a two part interview. Here is a link to the audio podcast. This is part 2 of the interview transcript.  Part one is here.

Thanks to Don Caldarazzo   for doing the transcript.

Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, about a telepathic gorilla, won a Ted Turner award for book with a hopeful vision of the future. It’s become a bestseller translated into many languages and I recommend it as must reading if you’ve never read it. This portion of the interview discusses the book AND his thoughts on civilization, beyond civilization, the Sixth Extinction and the disaster that hierarchy is…

Rob Kall:   This success doesn’t seem like such a good thing /

Daniel Quinn:   (laughs)

Rob Kall:   – to most of the people.
by Yinghai

Daniel Quinn:   Yeah, that’s probably true, but what I’m trying to direct them to is: to look at the foundations instead of picking at individual things.  Saying, “We’ve got to stop being dependent on petroleum.  We’ve got to develop alternative renewable resources for power.  We’ve got to get rid of gasoline powered automobiles.  We’ve got to stop polluting the air, the greenhouse gases.  We’ve got to stop doing the things that are causing climate change.”  These things, these particulars – rather than to look at the underlying organization – that says, “This is the way.  It may be terrible, but this is the way people were meant to live.  There is no other way.  There is nothing beyond civilization.”

Rob Kall:   Can I read the final two paragraphs that you sent me on this?

Daniel Quinn:   Yeah.

Rob Kall:   You wrote:  “The success of our civilization is prodigious, and it’s success has never been more spectacular than it is right now.  It has plunged us into a sixth extinction that, unless checked, will bring an end to humanity as surely as the fifth extinction brought an end to the great dinosaurs.  But it must continue at any cost and never be abandoned under any circumstance, even if it kills us.

Our civilization is a cloud that darkens the entire living community of out planet; but by God it stays up in the sky, and it doesn’t fall to earth.  This is it’s success, and we know in our bones that it must continues at any cost and never be abandoned under any circumstance, even if it kills us and all life on this planet.”  Whew!

Daniel Quinn:   (laughs)  Something to think about.

Rob Kall:   Well you know, I call my show the Bottom Up Radio Show.  I believe we’re transitioning from a top down world to a more bottom up world.  The top down world was catalyzed by agriculture, and the creation of cities and civilization, and slavery and domination, and hierarchy and centralization – and that it’s the internet, this huge new communication method that is changing the way our brains work, particularly among the young, that’s shifting us a to a bottom up mode.  And it’s really got me thinking about civilization, and if it has been a mistake: a detour on the human path on the biological path of Gaia, the Earth.

Daniel Quinn:   Yes.  Well, all of them began as experiments; and people, humans are prone to experiments, so the tendency is admirable — sure, try something out!  But then our civilization became obsessed with the  idea that there was no other was to live, and everybody had to live this way.  The other civilizations that I’ve talked about, they didn’t have that idea.  They didn’t conquer the people around them and make them live the way they lived.  They didn’t spread out all over North America and South America.  We are unique in that, and that uniqueness is terrible!  And it’s something that we have to think about.  I think everybody should be aware of it.

Rob Kall:   What about religion?  It seems to me that one of the factors that moves civilization to evangelize and convert is religion.

Daniel Quinn:   Yes.  Well, I have this theory that there have been hundreds of more religions than the ones we know about, and the ones that survived are the ones that fit in with our cultural mythology: that fit in with the vision of humanity as the most important thing in the universe, that endorses the idea that humans are here to rule the rest of the living community.  The ones that didn’t, for example, Animism, which was the practically the universal religion of Leaver Peoples, and still is, wherever they are still found, does not support it [our cultural mythology], and so it is not one of our religions.  It’s hardly known, but it doesn’t say anything about that.  Animism is a religious world view rather than a religion, a world view that sees the world as a sacred place, and humans as belonging in a sacred place.  This is not an idea that fits with our civilization’s, our culture’s vision of the world and humanity, and so it doesn’t appear as a religion to us.

Rob Kall:   So, we’ve got this idea, “The Invisibility of Success,” and it’s really describing a problem.  It’s describing the inability, because of the meme about the inevitability, of people to say, “No.  This is not working.”

Daniel Quinn:   Yes.  I think the only way to get people to start saying “No” is to show them how they are saying “Yes,” see what they are saying “Yes” to.  It’s only then they can say “No.”  It’s like the recent general realization that there is really something fundamentally wrong with our economic system, and something that needs to be said “No” to.  But before that, it was always “Yes!  What’s wrong?  Everything’s cool.”  But now, in recent decades, people have begun to say “What, no.  Maybe not.  Maybe this is really corrupt.  Maybe it’s working for that one percent [1%], but what about the rest of us?”  People are now ready to say “No” to that, because they’ve been made aware of what they’ve been saying “Yes” to for so long.  I’ve added a paragraph to this essay.  (laughs)

Rob Kall:   Go ahead. Read it.

Daniel Quinn:   No, I mean I just said it.

Rob Kall:   Oh.  OK, OK.  Yes, well, this essay – who knows, maybe it’ll turn into your next book.  What are you going to do with it?

Daniel Quinn:   I am thinking of collecting all of my essays and making this the title essay, making this the title of the book.  I’m going to propose it to my agent and see what she thinks, and if she doesn’t think it will fly, I’ll publish it myself.

Rob Kall:   OK.  Do you think there’s a future for humanity beyond civilization?

Daniel Quinn:   I think there is, yes – if we can get beyond civilization.  Of course, I wrote a whole book called Beyond Civilization trying to point with a wavering hand toward the possibility of there being something beyond civilization.  The people of the Middle Ages couldn’t imagine anything beyond what they had.  It was the final state of humanity.  And then came the Renaissance.  They couldn’t have predicted the Renaissance, and we can’t predict anything beyond us;  but there better be something beyond us, or we’re finished on this planet.

Rob Kall:   Do you think there’s a possibility that the next stage beyond civilization could be a spiraling evolution up towards another bottom up way of being?

Daniel Quinn:  It has to be.  Hierarchy is the disaster.  So i”m pointing to the — oh, what is it called, the Marcora law in Italy – which makes it possible for a group of ten people who want to get together to work – basically as a tribe, work cooperatively – unemployed people, who will be given three years worth of dole payments as capital to start a new venture.  It’s an amazing idea, very much a bottom up idea.  It’s been a tremendous success in Italy, and I hope it will get more attention in the United States.

Rob Kall:   What’s it called?

Daniel Quinn:   I think it’s  Marcora Law
.  I’ve got it written down.

Rob Kall:   I’ll get the spelling from you after we’re done the interview.  So. going back.  You’ve described how early on you’d spent an awful lot of time looking at anthropology, and archeology, and aboriginal cultures; we still have aboriginal cultures on this planet now.  I personally believe that they should be protected to the point where anybody attempting to reach them is shot.

Daniel Quinn:   (laughs)

Rob Kall:   I really believe that.  I believe that we need them desperately because they provide a connection to our past that is totally unavailable once a tribe becomes civilized or gets touched by culture.  But I wonder from you, what have you learned looking at aboriginal culture?  There’s a new book out now by Jared Diamond called The World Until Yesterday, where he discusses some of the ideas about aboriginal culture and what we can learn from them.  What are some of the things you learned from aboriginal culture?

Daniel Quinn:   Basically that each tribe had it’s own identity, had it’s own laws, which were very bottom up.  They were not laws that punished people, they were laws that helped to make things right, rather than punishing what was wrong.  They were not the same from tribe to tribe: the Sioux didn’t think that everybody should have their laws, or should live the way the Sioux lived, and the Pueblos didn’t think that everybody should live the way they lived.  And the fact that, in a tribe, you’re never sick all by yourself; you’re never dying all by yourself, you’re never poor all by yourself.  The bringing up of children is not all your problem, it’s the problem if the whole tribe.  All of these things, the function of the tribe, is to make life work for everyone.  If food is scarce, everyone is hungry.  There aren’t a few at the top who get to keep on eating.  And if there’s a lot of food, everybody gets more food.

So it’s a much friendlier, (laughs) God knows, way of life than our,s where each of us is isolated, each of us, everyone for himself.  That just doesn’t work as a principle for people.  It’s very hard on people.  And people think we’re rich, but what I saw in studies of aboriginal peoples was how rich they were; not in toys, but in their lives, in the security they had.  They had no jobs to lose, they couldn’t become poorer unless they were all poorer.

Rob Kall:   I know that, in the 1800s, the theory about early humans was that they were brutal people who suffered and struggled; and what we now know from studying the Bushmen, the San people of the Kalahari, is that their average workday is two or three hours, and they’ve got a great life, and it’s not hard at all, and we work profoundly harder than them.

Daniel Quinn:   Oh yeah.  It’s incredible.  If you pick up a can of peas, and you think of the incredible amount of work that went into putting that can of peas on your shelf – it took thousands of people to do that! (laughs)  It’s just amazing; everything we have represents that kind of output of energy and calories, and then everybody thinks they had a hard life, primitive people have a hard life.  We’re the ones who have a hard life.

Rob Kall:   So this is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by Opednews.com .  You don’t even need to remember Opednews.com .  Just do a Google search for “Progressive Opinion” or “Liberal News,” and we’ll come up at the very top of the search, although we’re really kind of Left of Liberal.  I’ve been speaking with Daniel Quinn.  He’s an author, a person who is a cultural critic who has explored the bigger picture of the relationship of man with the planet.  And Daniel, I have a question for you that I think you’ll be able to answer.  While we were talking before I started recording the conversation, you mentioned to me that Oprah asked you a question that you weren’t ready to answer at the time.

Daniel Quinn:   Yes.

Rob Kall:   What was the question and what’s the= answer?

Daniel Quinn:   The question was:  “Your book is all about “Leavers” and “Takers.”  What are Leavers and Takers?”  (laughs) I was thinking, oh my God, how in the world can I answer that?  And years later I would have been able to say, I define them this way: Leavers are people who leave the rule of the world in the hands of the Gods, and takers who’ve taken the rule of the world into their own hands.  Da dah!  Finished.

Rob Kall:   All right.

Daniel Quinn:   (laughs)

Rob Kall:   And this is a big part of Ishmael, and I have to say again as we wrap up this conversation: Ishmael is an amazing book that will make you think of the world in a very different way, and make you think of yourself and civilization as well.  Daniel, I wonder — it has to be that there are people who have attacked Ishmael and the ideas in it.  Who have been your attackers?

Daniel Quinn:   They haven’t really brought themselves to my attention.

Rob Kall:   Really!

Daniel Quinn:   Really, yeah. (laughs)  Some people sort of tentatively said, “Oh, you’re idealizing aboriginal peoples,” which is nonsense.  I make a point of saying that they’re absolutely no different from us, they’re no more noble, or anything like that.  They’re just exactly like us, they just happen to have a way of life that works for them.  That’s about as far as anyone has gone.  The book is used in hundreds of classrooms in all sorts of subjects: archaeology, anthropology, history, religion, psychology – on, and on, and on.  Teachers really love the book, but scholars have not accepted it into their library yet.  I’m not a scientist, I’m not a scholar, and so I don’t come wearing the right clothes to visit their library.

Rob Kall:   You’ve certainly brought a light into this world that has made a difference that I think will continue to make a difference.  I believe Ishmael was one of the most important books of the last century.  In wrapping up, I just want to thank you.  You’ve done something really important, and given us all a gift of a way to think; and now this new idea, The Invisibility of Success, it’s a powerful concept.  Basically what you’re saying is, you have to see how something is successful in order to deal with it, I think.

Daniel Quinn:   Yes.  I want to say that my conversation with you has been great, and as I told you, I was a little nervous in the beginning, since I’d never talked about this before; but I managed to plow right ahead, and I’m very pleased by the outcome.

Rob Kall:   All right.

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Invisible Success, Civilizations that Die or Quit and Memes We Live By

May 3, 2013

Invisible Success, Civilizations that Die or Quit and Memes We Live By; Transcript of an Interview with Daniel Quinn

By Rob Kall

Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, about a telepathic gorilla, won a Ted Turner award for book with a hopeful vision of the future. It’s become a bestseller translated into many languages and I recommend it as must reading if you’ve never read it. This interview discusses the book AND an essay on invisible success and civilizations that die or quit– one he wrote specifically for this interview.

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Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio   

I interviewed Daniel Quinn on April 5^th, 2013.  This is part one of a two part interview. Here is a link to the audio podcast: Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael, on Invisible Success, Civilization and Memes We Live By Thanks to Don Caldarazzo   for doing the transcript.

Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, about a telepathic gorilla, won a Ted Turner award for book with a hopeful vision of the future. It’s become a bestseller translated into many languages and I recommend it as must reading if you’ve never read it. This interview discusses the book AND an essay on invisible success and civilizations that die or quit– one he wrote specifically for this interview.
by Friends of Ishmael

Rob Kall:   And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored  by Opednews.com .  Tonight, I’m very excited to have as my guest Daniel Quinn.  “Daniel Quinn (and this is from Wikipedia) is an American writer popularly described as an environmentalist, and best for known his novel Ishmael, published in 1992, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991.  Quinn does not, however, identify himself as an environmentalist, criticizing the term for ‘creating a false dichotomy that frames the environment somehow separate from human life.’”  So.  Welcome to the show, Daniel!

Daniel Quinn   Oh, I’m glad to be with you.

Rob Kall:   So tell me: that’s Wikipedia’s take on you.  How would you like people to think about you?

Daniel Quinn   Well that’s a question I’ve never been able to answer, and people have tried all sorts of things.  I’ve been called a primitive anarchist, and, as you say, I’ve been called by ‘environmentalist.’  I suppose the closest is “Cultural Critic,” whatever in the world that might be,.

Rob Kall:   That’s pretty wide and open.  That’ gives you lots of room to do whatever you want.

Daniel Quinn   Yeah.

Rob Kall:   OK.  I contacted you because I’ve been a fan ever since you came out with Ishmael, a brilliant book that everybody should read.  Let me repeat that again: Ishmael is an incredible book that gets you to think about the world in different ways; that, I believe every person should read this.  How would you describe Ismael?

Daniel Quinn   You mean the book?

Rob Kall:   Yes.

Daniel Quinn One of the great puzzles that people have is that when they tell someone about the book, they say “Well, what’s it about?” (laughs), and that’s really a difficult one.  What people have told me is that it changed their life.  Yeah, I’ve heard this a thousand times, I’m not making it up.  And they thank me for showing them that they’re not crazy, because the people around them have been telling them for years that they’re crazy.  Some people thank me for giving them hope, because it is a message that has a kernel of hope when I think hope is very desperately needed.

Rob Kall:   Well, you wrote the book, and it won Ted Turner’s Tomorrow Fellowship Award, and the funny thing is, I remember ripping the ad announcing the contest out of the New York Times.  I’ve had some fantasies of being a Science Fiction writer at different times in my life; I’ve never really done it, but then the next thing I know, you won that award.

Part of the requirements of that award was that it be a hopeful vision of the future.  Did you write it thinking, “I’m going to write this for this contest,” or — how did it come about that you wrote it?

Daniel Quinn   It began twelve years before that.  I knew I had something to write, and that was desperately important.  ‘Important’ means “What I was born to write.”  And I wrote a book; it wasn’t what I wanted, and I wrote another one — call it ‘versions.’  Over the next twelve years, I wrote eight versions, each one striving to be the book that I wanted it to be, and I left behind all seven of them.  The eighth one was Ishmael.

Ishmael was the first one that had a telepathic gorilla in it.  All of the others were different.  Oh, yeah — about the Turner Tomorrow Award: that was definitely a nudge in a direction that I hadn’t had before.  My wife had been telling me for years that I should write it as a novel, and I’d resisted that, thinking that people wouldn’t take it seriously if I wrote it as a novel.  But the Turner Tomorrow Award was looking for a book that described my book very well.  So I wrote it for the first time as a novel, and that’s when Ishmael was born.

Rob Kall:   Did you have contact with Ted Turner in response to this book?

Daniel Quinn   Yes, some contact; a bit on to odd contact.  He was not comfortable with me.  I think it was partly because first, Ted set out on this thing, he wanted to do this thing, because he wanted to make a movie.  He was looking for a novel he could use as the basis for a movie.  And the first thing his advisers told him:  “You can’t write a movie out of this book” – which is what the judges had given him.  So he had spent two million dollars basically getting something that he couldn’t use.  Of course, he wouldn’t say that to me at the time we met; and it’s funny that the person that I was most in contact with, who was the head of Turner Publishing, said “We’re sort of playing down the gorilla thing, you know – not talking about the gorilla.”

And I said “Well, OK…”

And so when I met Ted, the first thing he said to me was, “Why a Gorilla?”  (laughs)  And I burst out laughing!  And I’m sure he thought I was laughing at him, whereas I was laughing at this other person, who had said “We are trying to keep this quiet!”  And of course, “Why a gorilla?” has been a question that’s been asked of me almost everywhere ever.  Everywhere I’ve ever been, someone has asked that question.

Rob Kall:   Why a gorilla?

Daniel Quinn   Why a gorilla?  Because what was needed was a voice from the living community, but not a human voice, and the gorilla was the first thing that came to mind.  It couldn’t have been a pelican, or a shark, or a deer.  It had to be a figure that would be believable, and carry weight;.and of course, a gorilla carries a lot of weight.

Rob Kall:   What was your goal in writing this book?  What was the message, or the feeling, or the idea that you wanted your reader to come away with?

Daniel Quinn   I would say from my late twenties, I have been puzzled by things I’ve seen that didn’t make sense to me in the world around us, the world we’ve created; and I went looking for answers.  I was not thinking of writing a book or anything like that.  I wanted answers for myself.  I was puzzled by the fact that humans have been around for three or four million years, but no one talks about anything but the last ten thousand years; and the first three or four million years they just ignore, they are of no importance.  I found this difficult to believe, and I went back, and I studied, and I read everything I could get my hands on – about our ancient ancestors, and their modern day descendants, aboriginal peoples.

So I’ve read a lot of archeology, a lot of anthropology, and I gradually saw something about how we came to be this way, how things came to be this way– the way that they are right now in the world.  And I thought this was something I needed to share, but I didn’t know how to go about it.  And that’s when I set out, after I finally quit educational publishing, and I was out on my own. I started then to write this book, some book.  I thought it would be easy, but of course it wasn’t easy.  The first edition, the first version, was easy.  The second version was easy, the third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth, and so on.  But each one was a disappointment and a struggle.

Rob Kall:   So, what was the message that you wanted to convey in this book, distilled from all of your research and reading?

Daniel Quinn   OK.  I guess I would say this: that Joseph Campbell is famous for saying that we have no mythology; and I challenged that in Ishmael, saying that we do have a mythology.  Not an anthology of Gods and Heroes; rather, it’s the story about the world and our place in it.  And this mythology is that the world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it.  The world is a human possession, something that belongs to us to be used as we please.  This is still more of the mythology: there is only one right way for people to live, and that’s our way; and everyone in the world must be made to live the way we live.  This is something we’ve been pursuing for thousands of years.  A s we swept over the world, we arrived in a new world, and we found all these ‘savages’ living the ‘wrong way.’  We told them very clearly that that is not the way God meant for people to live.  And they were misusing the land, so we took it away from them.  And, like Cain, we started tilling the soil, and killing off our brothers who did not measure up to our standards: killing them off, pushing them into reservations, things like that.  That’s what we’ve been doing for centuries before that, and then we’ve continued to do it in Australia for example, and in Africa.  Turn forward, our message, that there is one right way to live, the way that humans were meant to live from the beginning of time.  We were meant to live this way.  Part of our mythology is that we are the apex of evolution, the very top.

 

…we do have a mythology.  ……that the world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it.  The world is a human possession, something that belongs to us to be used as we please…. that we are the apex…

 

Rob Kall:   Your book, Ishmael, gives a different message than what you just described is the message that is what you consider the myth of modern humanity.  What is the message that Ishmael gives?

Daniel Quinn   Well, it isn’t a myth of ‘modern humanity,’ it’s the myth that has driven us forward for thousands of years.  My message, I guess you would say, is: We should look at this mythology realistically, and think about our position in the world.  Are we really the rulers of the world?  Were we put here, assumedly by God, to rule the world?  Does that make sense?  We’re behaving that way.  Do we really have the way that humans were meant to live from the beginning?  Is our the one right way?  Must everyone in the world be made to live the way we live?  We’ve done a very good job of making everyone in the world live the way we live.  But: look at where it’s put us.

I couldn’t have said this is in Ishmael, but it was coming: here we are in the midst of what biologists are calling the sixth extinction, as catastrophic as the fifth extinction that destroyed seventy five percent [75%] of all species, including, of course, the great dinosaurs.  Because of our impact on the environment, it’s estimated that as many as fifty thousand species a year are becoming extinct.  This is where our vision, our mythology, has taken us.  This is where our rule of the world has brought us.  That’s my message, I guess.

Rob Kall:   And you’ve given this message in Ishmael, your book, in a way that is very engaging, and entertaining, and fascinating, which is not an easy thing to do.

Daniel Quinn   (laughs)

Rob Kall:   So I contacted you a few weeks ago, and I asked for an interview, and we went back and forth a bit, and you ended up sending me an essay that came out of our discussions – that you’d been mulling over and – that felt great!  You titled it The Invisibility of Success, and — what’s that about?  Can you talk about it?

Daniel Quinn   Yes, I will try to talk about it. First I have to talk about “The Invisibility of Success,” what I mean by that.  When I was probably in my mid-teens, my older brother (who was then in college himself) said that he’d often wondered why it was that clouds – these big, solid objects in the sky — what kept them up, why they didn’t fall to earth like every other big, heavy object, solid object.  That sort of a question is the kind of question I’ve been asking ever since about the things around me: Why don’t those clouds fall down?

And then I asked about other things.  The laws of the universe are very much invisible to us.  It took a genius to see why a ball rolling off the top of a table falls to earth to understand and formulate it as a law, and see that the universe is a giant success story written in invisible ink.  I wanted to know, specifically of you, why civilization is hierarchical – why all civilizations (and there have been several) have been hierarchies?  Again, it’s like the clouds: you look at the clouds and say, “What else could they do?  So they don’t fall down.  Well, you know, they’re clouds.”  And looking at the civilizations, people say, “Well, yeah.  They’re civilizations.  What else would they be except hierarchies?”  I can’t stop there.

So I go back and look at the beginnings, how civilizations begin; and they all begin the same way: with people deciding to try a new way of life, deciding to live off all of their own food, instead of living off just the food that grows naturally all around them.

Rob Kall:   Hunting and foraging, you mean, right?

Daniel Quinn   Yeah.  So they give up the hunting and gathering life, and become agricultural as farmers, and very quickly gather together into farming villages.  The reason that they could settle, the reason that hunting gatherers cannot settle, is that if they stay in one place, they will quickly exhaust all of the resources around them.  The game will all be hunted down.  All the collectable food will be collected, and they’ll starve.  So they have to move on, they have to keep moving forever.

The reason that agriculturalists can stay in one place, can settle into a village, is that agriculture gives them surpluses, so that when the seasons change, they don’t have to move on.  They can stay there and live off the surpluses.  And when surpluses get low, the grow more.  No problem.  This is what enables them to stay in one place.

But once the surpluses are there, they can’t just leave them around in the open sitting around in piles.  They have to store them.  They have to keep them away from other animals, and they have to keep them away from other people.  Perhaps initially, just initially, they were just open to anyone in the village, anyone can go and get what they want from the stores.  But you can imagine how long a supermarket would last if all the food on he shelves was free.  Of course it wouldn’t last, and I think it would quickly become apparent that the stores, the whatever they were, had to be under lock and key.

Rob Kall:   Although — in the hunter-gatherer world, there are no locks and keys, and all the food that’s out there is free for the taking by anybody.

Daniel Quinn   Absolutely.  That’s why they are not hierarchies: it’s that there is no one holding the key to the lock; Anyone can go and get whatever they want.  But in the village, someone had to organize the storage of the food, organize the guarding of the food.  Once the food was there, the village was a target for peoples around them.  If you think of Seven Samurai, the Japanese film about the Samurai who came to a village to show them how to defend themselves against the barbarians that wanted to come in and take their stuff.

So they needed to have armed guards, and the whole village had to be armed.  And by this time, of course, the division of labor was an established thing.  People made pots, and cloth, and weapons; and the holder of the keys were their royalty (would be considered their royalty, would become their royalty).  The armed forces that protected the storage (and them!) were the nobles, the king’s nobles.  The artisans became the middle class.  and at the bottom, of course, were the peons, the peasants who did all the drudge work, did all the lifting and carrying, tilled the fields, planted the crops, harvested the crops, and so on.  And so, from the beginning, there very quickly appeared a necessary hierarchy.  It wouldn’t work for them if they didn’t have the hierarchy.  It would quickly become an anarchy.

Rob Kall:   You know, it seems to me, from what I’ve read and what you’ve said so far, that basically, the reason that hierarchies developed is because there were thieves.  There were greedy people who were unwilling to contribute their responsible role and allow sharing properly.  If those kind of people weren’t around, it might not have been necessary to have a hierarchy.

Daniel Quinn   I’m not sure I — maybe if you say that again, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.

Rob Kall:   What you’re saying is the reason hierarchies had to be formed was because you need to secure the extra food.

Daniel Quinn   Yeah.

Rob Kall:   And if you didn’t secure it, somebody would take it, and that was the reason that there had to be the creation of people with more power, and it was conceivably — or, based on the idea that you had to protect the food.  But, you know, in my readings, I think it’s also the land.  I think that it’s the land as well, that part of the problem that leads to hierarchy is also the fact that people get attached to land, they feel ownership, and they feel the need or desire to fight for and protect the land.

Daniel Quinn   I suppose that’s an aspect of it.  I don’t know what they would be protecting it from.  The nomads around them don’t want land; they’ve got plenty of land.  They’re not interested in taking over the land, they just want to take over the stuff.

Rob Kall:   OK.  I’m sorry I interrupted you.  Keep going.

Daniel Quinn   That’s alright.  The villages became towns, the towns became cities, cities became city-tates, then nations, then empires.  And that brings us to the present, where we came to the New World, the world that was new to us about five hundred [500] years ago.  Moving in from the Eastern seaboard, we found traces of a civilization: mounds.  But not a very impressive civilization, and the mound builders were nowhere, they were gone.  And moving still further in, and moving South into Central America, they found something that completely surprised them, which were the Incas and the Aztecs, who had civilizations that were actually richer than anything they’d ever seen — but not powerful.  And the Spanish overran them, took down their power structure, and replaced it with their own; wiped them out.

As it went on, they found traces of extinct civilizations: the Maya, the Olmec, and the city state of Teotihuacan.   What they saw there was a puzzle, because our civilization has lived for ten thousand years, if you start from the beginning, the villages; and these civilizations went on for a few thousand years, and then were, apparently, abandoned.  Why in the world would such a thing happen?  They might have been invaded and conquered; but when the Romans invaded Britain, they didn’t leave it behind as a ruin, they just took over Britain for a time.  And when the Spaniards came to the Incas and the Aztecs, they didn’t leave those behind as ruined civilizations.

So what happened to these civilizations, the Maya and the Olmec and the people of Teotihuacan?  It was a puzzle that remained a puzzle for hundreds of years.  It still is a puzzle for many.  They came up with all sorts of theories to explain it.  [searching through notes]

There’s one theory that explains the Olmec abandonment: “Environmental changes that might have rendered the region unsuited for large scale.”  There’s another: “Changes triggered by tectonic upheavals.” Another: “The silting up of rivers.”  Another: “Volcanic eruptions “

Here are some theories to explain the Mayan abandonment:  overpopulation, foreign invasion (by whom, no one has any idea, not even a theory), peasant revolt, environmental distasters, epidemic disease, climate change, a drought,

The theories for the city Teotihuacan: droughts again, nameless (again) unknown invaders, maybe from outer space, /

Rob Kall: (laughs)

Daniel Quinn - who sacked and burned the structures and dwellings associated primarily with class, the elite class.  Some people think that this suggests an internal uprising that forced an executive decision to quit.  But think: our civilization suffered all of this, whole regions rendered unfit for farming, countless earthquakes, countless rivers silting up, countless volcanic eruptions, countless peasant revolts, droughts, epidemics.  But we’re still here!

So think about this: imagine two guys, two guys on an airplane.  One falls out, and then a second later so does the other one.  The first guy splatters on the ground like a ripe tomato, the second lands on his feet and walks away.  It’s obvious that the first had something that the first didn’t; and what he had is also obvious: a parachute.

So, we’ve got these two civilizations, two kind of civilizations: ours, and these and extinct, ruined civilizations.  One experiences all sorts of catastrophes and quits.  Another quits after just a few thousand years, a few hundred years in some cases.  And our civilization, facing the same catastrophes, over and over again, terrible catastrophes, never stopping.  It kept on for ten thousand years, and never once did anyone think of quitting.  So just like the parachute, the people of the Maya and the Olmec, they lacked something we have; and what they lacked was a meme.

A meme is a constituent element of culture or of cultural heredity, just the way a gene is a constituent element of biological heredity.  A pelican receives a complete set of the genes that make it a member of the pelican species; it receives this set of genes from it’s parents, who received it from their parents, and who received it from their parents, and so on, back through time.  Much the same way, each member of a culture receives a complete set of memes of that culture that are constituent elements of that culture, that they received from their parents, their teachers, their neighbors, the kids they play with, and so on, who received them from their parents, their teachers, their friends, and so on, and who received them from their parents, and on, and so on, and so on, back through time.

Here’s an example of one of our memes:”People’s behavior needs to be governed by laws.”  Here’s another: “The planet earth belongs to us.  It’s one of our possessions to be used like any other.”  I’m not putting these up as something to criticize, just as something that do(sp) represent constituent elements of our cultural heredity, our cultural identity.

To us, this meme, the meme that separated us from the Olmec and the Maya is this: “Civilization is the way humans were meant to live from the beginning of time.  It must be preserved at all cost, whatever the circumstances, no matter what.“

This kept us going.  We always knew it had to be continued, it had to be continued.  And the Maya and Olmec did not have that meme, and so when things got a way they didn’t care for anymore, they could walk away.  And they did walk away.  All of the things that were cited as theories, none of them were the people at the bottom, on whom everyone else depended, the people who did all the work, they said “No more,” and walked away.  And they could walk away, because they were surrounded by land that was completely usable for hunter-gatherers.  They went back to living the old way, and left behind the ruins, left behind the edifices and the pyramids.  And the ruling class, who now had no option except to join them — we couldn’t do that.  We couldn’t do that, we never had any temptation to do that.

In other words, the end of those civilizations was bottom up.  The beginning of them was top down, but we have — our civilization’s hierarchy is grotesque, with the top ten percent [10%] of our population being millionaires and billionaires, and the bottom twenty percent [20%] living on less than a dollar and a quarter a day [$1.25] for food, clothing, and shelter.  Twenty percent: more than a billion, almost two billion.  But the two billion are not at all tempted to say “Enough!  We’re walking away from this.”  Where they would walk, I don’t know.

But everyone, including everyone in the poor, a hundred years ago, they were the poor, two hundred years ago they were the poor; they didn’t walk away either, because they knew:  this is the way people were meant to live, and had to live that way even if it kills them.  And we have to keep on going with this civilization even if it kills us, even if it destroys the planet, we must keep going.

So we are the most outstanding success in human history, the most powerful by any standard in the world.  We are like a cloud up in the sky, a huge black cloud overshadowing all life on the planet, but we don’t fall down.  And that’s my story of The Invisibility of Success.

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Archeologists Unearth New Information On Origins of Maya Civilization

Apr. 25, 2013 — The Maya civilization is well-known for its elaborate temples, sophisticated writing system, and mathematical and astronomical developments, yet the civilization’s origins remain something of a mystery.

A new University of Arizonastudy to be published in the journal Science challenges the two prevailing theories on how the ancient civilization began, suggesting its origins are more complex than previously thought.

Anthropologists typically fall into one of two competing camps with regard to the origins of Maya civilization. The first camp believes that it developed almost entirely on its own in the jungles of what is now Guatemala and southern Mexico. The second believes that the Maya civilization developed as the result of direct influences from the older Olmec civilization and its center of La Venta.

It’s likely that neither of those theories tells the full story, according to findings by a team of archaeologists led by UA husband-and-wife anthropologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan.

“We really focused on the beginning of this civilization and how this remarkable civilization developed,” said Inomata, UA professor of anthropology and the study’s lead author.

In their excavations at Ceibal, an ancient Maya site in Guatemala, researchers found that Ceibal actually predates the growth of La Venta as a major center by as much as 200 years, suggesting that La Venta could not have been the prevailing influence over early Mayan development.

That does not make the Maya civilization older than the Olmec civilization — since Olmec had another center prior to La Venta — nor does it prove that the Maya civilization developed entirely independently, researchers say.

What it does indicate, they say, is that both Ceibal and La Venta probably participated in a broader cultural shift taking place in the period between 1,150-800 B.C.

“We’re saying that the scenario of early Maya culture is really more complex than we thought,” said UA anthropology graduate student Victor Castillo, who co-authored the paper with Inomata and Triadan.

“We have this idea of the origin of Maya civilization as an indigenous development, and we have this other idea that it was an external influence that triggered the social complexity of Maya civilization. We’re now thinking it’s not actually black and white,” Castillo said.

There is no denying the striking similarities between Ceibal and La Venta, such as evidence of similar ritual practices and the presence of similar architecture — namely the pyramids that would come to be the hallmark of Mesoamerican civilization but did not exist at the earlier Olmec center of San Lorenzo.

However, researchers don’t think this is the case of simply one site mimicking the other. Rather, they suspect that both the Maya site of Ceibal and the Olmec site of La Venta were parts of a more geographically far-reaching cultural shift that occurred around 1,000 B.C., about the time when the Olmec center was transitioning from San Lorenzo to La Venta.

“Basically, there was a major social change happening from the southern Maya lowlands to possibly the coast of Chiapas and the southern Gulf Coast, and this site of Ceibal was a part of that broader social change,” Inomata said. “The emergence of a new form of society — with new architecture, with new rituals — became really the important basis for all later Mesoamerican civilizations.”

The Science paper, titled “Early Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization,” is based on seven years of excavations at Ceibal.

Additional authors of the paper include Japanese researchers Kazuo Aoyama of the University of Ibaraki, Mito and Hitoshi Yonenobu of the NarutoUniversity of Education, Tokushima.

“We were looking at the emergence of specific cultural traits that were shared by many of those Mesoamerican centers, particularly the form of rituals and the construction of the pyramids,” Inomata said. “This gives us a new idea about the beginning of Maya civilization, and it also tells us about how common traits shared by many different Mesoamerican civilizations emerged during that time.”

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The above story is reprinted from materialsprovided by University of Arizona. The original article was written by Alexis Blue.

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Journal Reference:

1. T. Inomata, D. Triadan, K. Aoyama, V. Castillo, H. Yonenobu. Early Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization.Science, 2013; 340 (6131): 467 DOI:10.1126/science.1234493

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Researchers are challenging the two prevailing theories on how the ancient Maya civilization began. (Credit: Photo by Takeshi Inomata, University of Arizona)

Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?

AlterNet / By Noam Chomsky

 COMMENTS

Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy.

March 5, 2013  |

There is “capitalism” and then there is “really existing capitalism.”

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”

The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.

There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy – RECD for short – the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible.

It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. But could functioning democracy make a difference?

Let’s keep to the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces: environmental catastrophe. Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Researcher Kelly Sims Gallagher finds that “One hundred and nine countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set targets forrenewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”

It is not public opinion that drives American policy off the international spectrum. Quite the opposite. Opinion is much closer to the global norm than the U.S. government’s policies reflect, and much more supportive of actions needed to confront the likely environmental disaster predicted by an overwhelming scientific consensus – and one that’s not too far off; affecting the lives of our grandchildren, very likely.

As Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis report in Daedalus: “Huge majorities have favored steps by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utilities produce electricity. In 2006, 86 percent of respondents favored requiring utilities, or encouraging them with tax breaks, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Also in that year, 87 percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind or sunlight  [ These majorities were maintained between 2006 and 2010 and shrank somewhat after that.

The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.

One current illustration of their concern is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” proposed to state legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth.

The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.

Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking – a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits.

Media reports commonly present a controversy between two sides on climate change.

One side consists of the overwhelming majority of scientists, the world’s major national academies of science, the professional science journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.

The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown – which means that things might not be as bad as thought, or they might be worse.

Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who see the IPCC’s regular reports as much too conservative. And these scientists have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately.

The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on U.S. public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system, in an effort to counter the public’s dangerous tendency to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research.

At the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting a few weeks ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party … We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”

Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.

These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

The official doctrines suffer from a number of familiar “market inefficiencies,” among them the failure to take into account the effects on others in market transactions. The consequences of these “externalities” can be substantial. The current financial crisis is an illustration. It is partly traceable to the major banks and investment firms’ ignoring “systemic risk” – the possibility that the whole system would collapse – when they undertook risky transactions.

Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be.

Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.

(Noam Chomsky’s new book is “Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. Conversations with David Barsamian.” Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including Hegemony or Survival and Failed States. A professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, he is widely credited with having revolutionized modern linguistics. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.

New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed Civilizations

 

By Lester R. Brown

08 February, 2013
Inter Press Service

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.

This new era is one of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts.

On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system.

Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilization, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilizations whose archeological sites we now study?

This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled under US farm programs to avoid overproduction.

When the world harvest was good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned world crop shortfalls.

When India’s monsoon failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price.

When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has seven billion.

From 1950 to 2000 there were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the US Midwest. But their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this period one of the most food-secure in world history.

But it was not to last. By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside program.

Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be quickly brought into production when needed are over.

Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to make it to the next harvest but to do so with a comfortable margin. From 1986, when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the annual world carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption.

This safety cushion was not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply as world consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. Within two decades, the world had lost both of its safety cushions.

In recent years, world carryover stocks of grain have been only slightly above the 70 days that was considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock levels must take into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures, more extensive drought, and more intense heat waves.

Although there is no easy way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a stock reserve equal to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security.

The world is now living from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth in demand. Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with the accelerated growth in demand, but they are having difficulty doing so.

Food shortages undermined earlier civilizations. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilizations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable.

For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise well-engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and thus their civilization. For the Mayans, soil erosion was one of the keys to their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilizations.

We, too, are on such a path. While the Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating record losses of soil from erosion.

While the decline of early civilizations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends such as deforestation and soil erosion that undermined their food supply, we are now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion in human history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally advanced countries, and rising temperature.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the United Nations reports that food prices are now double what they were in 2002-04. For most U.S. citizens, who spend on average nine percent of their income on food, this is not a big deal. But for consumers who spend 50-70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise simply by spending more.

Closely associated with the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of 792 million in 1997. After that it began to rise, climbing toward one billion. Unfortunately, if we continue with business as usual, the ranks of the hungry will continue to expand.

The bottom line is that it is becoming much more difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain stocks were drawn down a decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot do so, we can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will intensify, and food unrest will spread.

We are entering a time of chronic food scarcity, one that is leading to intense competition for control of land and water resources – in short, a new geopolitics of food.

Lester Brown is the president of Earth Policy Institute. For further reading on the global food situation, see Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton: October 2012).

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/02/new-era-of-food-scarcity-echoes-collapsed-civilisations/

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

1. Paul R. Ehrlich†⇓ and
2. Anne H. Ehrlich

+Author Affiliations

1. 
   
   Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

1. e-mail: pre@stanford.edu

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Abstract

Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.

1. Introduction

Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse, a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size [1]. Some, such as those of Egypt and China, have recovered from collapses at various stages; others, such as that of Easter Island or the Classic Maya, were apparently permanent [1,2]. All those previous collapses were local or regional; elsewhere, other societies and civilizations persisted unaffected. Sometimes, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, new civilizations rose in succession. In many, if not most, cases, overexploitation of the environment was one proximate or an ultimate cause [3].

But today, for the first time, humanity’s globalcivilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources [6,7], including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas [8]; and resource wars [9]. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptivesystems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’ [10], and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps theforemost challenge confronting humanity.

The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to serviceHomo sapiens’ aggregate consumption [11–17]. How far the human population size now is above the planet’s long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis [18–20]. It shows that to support today’s population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. with business as usual, including current technologies and standards of living) would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization’s life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses [11,21–23], in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. Of course, the claim is often made that humanity will expand Earth’s carrying capacity dramatically with technological innovation [24], but it is widely recognized that technologies can both add and subtract from carrying capacity. The plough evidently first expanded it and now appears to be reducing it [3]. Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us [25] or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use [26].

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2. Do current trends portend a collapse?

What is the likelihood of this set of interconnected predicaments [27] leading to a global collapse in this century? There have been many definitions and much discussion of past ‘collapses’ [1,3,28–31], but a future global collapse does not require a careful definition. It could be triggered by anything from a ‘small’ nuclear war, whose ecological effects could quickly end civilization [32], to a more gradual breakdown because famines, epidemics and resource shortages cause a disintegration of central control within nations, in concert with disruptions of trade and conflicts over increasingly scarce necessities. In either case, regardless of survivors or replacement societies, the world familiar to anyone reading this study and the well-being of the vast majority of people would disappear.

How likely is such a collapse to occur? No civilization can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population. The world’s success so far, and the prospective ability to feed future generations at least as well, has been under relatively intensive discussion for half a century [33–40]. Agriculture made civilization possible, and over the last 80 years or so, an industrial agricultural revolution has created a technology-dependent global food system. That system, humanity’s single biggest industry, has generated miracles of food production. But it has also created serious long-run vulnerabilities, especially in its dependence on stable climates, crop monocultures, industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides, petroleum, antibiotic feed supplements and rapid, efficient transportation.

Despite those food production miracles, today at least two billion people are hungry or poorly nourished. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that increasing food production by some 70 per cent would be required to feed a 35 per cent bigger and still growing human population adequately by 2050 [41]. What are the prospects that H. sapiens can produce and distribute sufficient food? To do so, it probably will be necessary to accomplish many or all of the following tasks: severely limit climate disruption; restrict expansion of land area for agriculture (to preserve ecosystem services); raise yields where possible; put much more effort into soil conservation [3]; increase efficiency in the use of fertilizers, water and energy; become more vegetarian; grow more food for people (not fuel for vehicles); reduce food wastage; stop degradation of the oceans and better regulate aquaculture; significantly increase investment in sustainable agricultural and aquacultural research; and move increasing equity and feeding everyone to the very top of the policy agenda.

Most of these long-recommended tasks require changes in human behaviour thus far elusive. The problem of food wastage and the need for more and better agricultural research have been discussed for decades. So have ‘technology will save us’ schemes such as building ‘nuclear agro-industrial complexes’ [42], where energy would be so cheap that it could support a new kind of desert agriculture in ‘food factories’, where crops would be grown on desalinated water and precisely machine fertilized. Unhappily, sufficiently cheap energy has never been produced by nuclear power to enable large-scale agriculture to move in that direction. Nor has agriculture moved towards feeding people protein extracted from leaves or bacteria grown on petroleum [43, pp. 95–112]. None of these schemes has even resulted in a coordinated development effort. Meanwhile, growing numbers of newly well-off people have increased demand for meat [44], thereby raising global demand for feedgrains.

Perhaps even more critical, climate disruption may pose insurmountable biophysical barriers to increasing crop yields. Indeed, if humanity is very unlucky with the climate, there may be reductions in yields of major crops [45], although near-term this may be unlikely to affect harvests globally [46]. Nonetheless, rising temperatures already seem to be slowing previous trends of increasing yields of basic grains [45,47], and unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced, dangerous anthropogenic climate change [48] could ravage agriculture. Also, in addition to falling yields from many oceanic fish stocks because of widespread overfishing [49], warming and acidification of the oceans threaten the protein supply of some of the most nutritionally vulnerable people [50], especially those who cannot afford to purchase farmed fish.

Unfortunately, the agricultural system has complex connections with all the chief drivers of environmental deterioration. Agriculture itself is a major emitter of greenhouse gases and thus is an important cause of climate disruption as well as being exceptionally vulnerable to its consequences. More than a millennium of change in temperature and precipitation patterns is apparently now entrained [51], with the prospect of increasingly severe storms, droughts, heat waves and floods, all of which seem already evident and all of which threaten agricultural production.

Land is an essential resource for farming, and one facing multiple threats. In addition to the serious and widespread problems of soil degradation, sea-level rise (the most certain consequence of global warming) will take important areas out of production either by inundating them (a 1 m rise would flood 17.5% of Bangladesh [52]), exposing them to more frequent storm surges, or salinizing coastal aquifers essential for irrigation water. Another important problem for the food system is the loss of prime farmland to urbanization, a trend that seems certain to accelerate [53] as population growth steadily erodes the per capita supply of farmland.

The critical importance of substantially boosting the inadequate current action on the demographic problem can be seen in the time required to change the trajectory of population growth humanely and sensibly. We know from such things as the World War II mobilizations that many consumption patterns can be altered dramatically within a year, given appropriate incentives [54]. If food shortages became acute, then a rapid reaction would ensue as hunger became much more widespread. Food prices would rise, and diets would temporarily change (e.g. the number of meals consumed per day or amount of meat consumed) to compensate the shortage. Over the long term, however, expanding the global food supply and distributing it more equitably would be a slow and difficult process. Even though a major famine might well provoke investment in long-needed improvements in food production and distribution, they would take time to plan, test and implement.

Furthermore, agriculture is a leading cause of losses of biodiversity and thus of the critical ecosystem services supplied to agriculture itself (e.g. pollination, pest control, soil fertility, climate stability) and other human enterprises. Farming is also a principal source of global toxification, as has been clear since the days of Carson [55], exposing the human population to myriad subtle poisons. These pose further potential risks to food production.

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3. What needs to be done to avoid a collapse?

The threat from climate disruption to food production alone means that humanity’s entire system for mobilizing energy needs to be rapidly transformed. Warming must be held well below a potential 5°C rise in global average temperature, a level that could well bring down civilization [56]. The best estimate today may be that, failing rapid concerted action, the world is already committed to a 2.4°C increase in global average temperature [57]. This is significantly above the 2°C estimated a decade ago by climate scientists to be a ‘safe’ limit, but now considered by some analysts to be too dangerous [58,59], a credible assessment, given the effects seen already before reaching a one degree rise. There is evidence, moreover, that present models underestimate future temperature increase by overestimating the extent that growth of vegetation can serve as a carbon sink [60] and underestimating positive feedbacks [61].

Many complexities plague the estimation of the precise threats of anthropogenic climate disruption, ranging from heat deaths and spread of tropical diseases to sea-level rise, crop failures and violent storms. One key to avoiding a global collapse, and thus an area requiring great effort and caution is avoiding climate-related mass famines. Our agricultural system evolved in a geological period of relatively constant and benign climate and was well attuned to twentieth-century conditions. That alone is cause for substantial concern as the planet’s climates rapidly shift to new, less predictable regimes. It is essential to slow that process. That means dramatically transforming much of the existing energy mobilization infrastructure [62] and changing human behaviour to make the energy system much more efficient. This is possible; indeed, sensible plans for doing it have been put forward [63,64], and some progress has been made. The central challenge, of course, is to phase out more than half of the global use of fossil fuels by 2050 in order to forestall the worst impacts of climate disruption, a challenge the latest International Energy Agency edition of World Energy Outlook makes look more severe [65]. This highlights another dilemma. Fossil fuels are now essential to agriculture for fertilizer and pesticide manufacture, operation of farm machinery, irrigation (often wasteful), livestock husbandry, crop drying, food storage, transportation and distribution. Thus, the phase-out will need to include at least partial substitution of non-fossil fuels in these functions, and do so without greatly increasing food prices.

Unfortunately, essential steps such as curbing global emissions to peak by 2020 and reducing them to half of present levels by 2050 [66] are extremely problematic economically and politically. Fossil fuel companies would have to leave most of their proven reserves in the ground, thus destroying much of the industry’s economic value [67]. Because the ethics of some businesses include knowingly continuing lethal but profitable activities [68], it is hardly surprising that interests with large financial stakes in fossil fuel burning have launched a gigantic and largely successful disinformation campaign in the USA to confuse people about climate disruption [69,70] and block attempts to deal with it [71].

One recurrent theme in analyses of the food problem is the need for closing ‘yield gaps’ [72–74]. That means raising yields in less productive systems to those typical of industrial agriculture. But climatic conditions may change sufficiently that those industrial high yields can themselves no longer be sustained [45]. Thus, reducing the chances of a collapse calls for placing much more effort into genetic and ecological research related to agriculture [75] and adopting already known environmental-friendly techniques, even though that may require trading off immediate corporate profits for social benefits or long-term sustainability [3].

Rationalizing energy mobilization alone may not be enough to be enough to maintain agricultural production, let alone allow its great expansion. Human water-handling infrastructure will have to be re-engineered for flexibility to bring water to crops in an environment of constantly changing precipitation patterns [51]. This is critical, for although today only about 15 per cent of agricultural land is irrigated, it provides some 40 per cent of the grain crop yield. It seems likely that farming areas now rain-fed may someday need to be irrigated, whereas irrigation could become superfluous elsewhere, and both could change more or less continually. For this and many other reasons, the global food system will need to quickly evolve an unprecedented flexibility, never before even contemplated.

One factor making the challenges more severe is the major participation in the global system of giant nations whose populations have not previously enjoyed the fossil energy abundance that brought Western countries and Japan to positions of affluence. Now they are poised to repeat the West’s energy ‘success’, and on an even greater scale. India alone, which recently suffered a gigantic blackout affecting 300 million people, is planning to bring 455 new coal plants on line. Worldwide more than 1200 plants with a total installed capacity of 1.4 million megawatts are planned [76], much of that in China, where electricity demand is expected to skyrocket. The resultant surge in greenhouse gases will interact with the increasing diversion of grain to livestock, stimulated by the desire for more meat in the diets of Indians, Chinese and others in a growing global middle class.

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4. Dealing with problems beyond food supply

Another possible threat to the continuation of civilization is global toxification. Adverse symptoms of exposure to synthetic chemicals are making some scientists increasingly nervous about effects on the human population [77–79]. Should a global threat materialize, however, no planned mitigating responses (analogous to the ecologically and politically risky ‘geoengineering’ projects often proposed to ameliorate climate disruption [80]) are waiting in the wings ready for deployment.

Much the same can be said about aspects of the epidemiological environment and the prospect of epidemics being enhanced by rapid population growth in immune-weakened societies, increased contact with animal reservoirs, high-speed transport and the misuse of antibiotics [81]. Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg had great concern for the epidemic problem, famously stating, ‘The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary program’ [82, p. 40]. Some precautionary steps that should be considered include forbidding the use of antibiotics as growth stimulators for livestock, building emergency stocks of key vaccines and drugs (such as Tamiflu), improving disease surveillance, expanding mothballed emergency medical facilities, preparing institutions for imposing quarantines and, of course, moving as rapidly as possible to humanely reduce the human population size. It has become increasingly clear that security has many dimensions beyond military security [83,84] and that breaches of environmental security could risk the end of global civilization.

But much uncertainty about the human ability to avoid a collapse still hinges on military security, especially whether some elements of the human predicament might trigger a nuclear war. Recent research indicates that even a regional-scale nuclear conflict, as is quite possible between India and Pakistan, could lead to a global collapse through widespread climatic consequences [32]. Triggers to conflict beyond political and religious strife easily could include cross-border epidemics, a need to gain access to food supplies and farmland, and competition over other resources, especially agricultural water and (if the world does not come to its energy senses) oil. Finding ways to eliminate nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction must move even higher on civilization’s agenda [85], because nuclear war would be the quickest and surest route to a collapse [86].

In thinking about the probability of collapse, one must obviously consider the social disruptions associated with elements of the predicament. Perhaps at the top of the list should be that of environmental refugees [87]. Recent predictions are that environmental refugees could number 50 million by 2020 [88]. Severe droughts, floods, famines and epidemics could greatly swell that number. If current ‘official’ predictions of sea-level rise are low (as many believe they are), coastal inundations alone could generate massive human movements; a 1 m rise would directly affect some 100 million people, whereas a 6 m rise would displace more than 400 million [89]. Developing a more comprehensive system of international governance with institutions planning to ameliorate the impacts of such catastrophes would be a major way to reduce the odds of collapse.

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5. The role of science

The scientific community has repeatedly warned humanity in the past of its peril [90–102], and the earlier warnings [93,103–107] about the risks of population expansion and the ‘limits to growth’ have increasingly been shown to be on the right track [108–111] (but see Hayes [17]). The warnings continue [109,112–119]. Yet many scientists still tend to treat population growth as an exogenous variable, when it should be considered an endogenous one—indeed, a central factor [120]. Too many studies asking ‘how can we possibly feed 9.6 billion people by 2050?’ should also be asking ‘how can we humanely lower birth rates far enough to reduce that number to 8.6?’ To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth [121], is obvious but too much neglected or denied. There are great social and psychological barriers in growthmanic cultures to even considering it. This is especially true because of the ‘endarkenment’—a rapidly growing movement towards religious orthodoxies that reject enlightenment values such as freedom of thought, democracy, separation of church and state, and basing beliefs and actions on empirical evidence. They are manifest in dangerous trends such as climate denial, failure to act on the loss of biodiversity and opposition to condoms (for AIDS control) as well as other forms of contraception [122]. If ever there was a time for evidence-based (as opposed to faith-based) risk reduction strategies [123], it is now.

How can scientists do more to reduce the odds of a collapse? Both natural and social scientists should put more effort into finding the best ways of accomplishing the necessary re-modelling of energy and water infrastructure. They should develop better ways of evaluating and regulating the use of synthetic chemicals, a problem that might abate somewhat as availability of their fossil fuel sources fades (even though only about 5% of oil production flows into petrochemical production). The protection of Earth’s remaining biodiversity (especially the crucial diversity of populations [124,125]) must take centre stage for both scientific specialists and, through appropriate education, the public [126,127]. Scientists must continually call attention to the need to improve the human epidemiological environment, and for control and eventual elimination of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Above all, they should expand efforts to understand the mechanisms through which cooperation evolves [128], because avoiding collapse will require unusual levels of international cooperation.

Is it too late for the global scientific community to collect itself and start to deal with the nexus of the two complex adaptive systems [129] and then help generate the necessary actions to move towards sustainability? There are certainly many small-scale science-based efforts, often local, that can provide hope if scaled up [121]. For example, environmental non-govenmental organizations and others are continually struggling to halt the destruction of elements of biodiversity (and thus, in some cases, of vital ecosystem services [7]), often with success. In the face of the building extinction crisis, they may be preserving nuclei from which Earth’s biota and humanity’s ecosystem services, might eventually be regenerated. And some positive efforts are scaling up. China now has some 25 per cent of its land in ecosystem function conservation areas [130] designed to protect both natural capital and human well-being. The Natural Capital Project [131] is helping improve the management of these areas. This is good news, but in our view, many too few scientists are involved in the efforts needed, especially in re-orienting at least part of their research towards mitigating the predicament and then bringing their results to the policy front.

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6. The need for rapid social/political change

Until very recently, our ancestors had no reason to respond genetically or culturally to long-term issues. If the global climate were changing rapidly forAustralopithecus or even ancient Romans, then they were not causing it and could do nothing about it. The forces of genetic and cultural selection were not creating brains or institutions capable of looking generations ahead; there would have been no selection pressures in that direction. Indeed, quite the opposite, selection probably favoured mechanisms to keep perception of the environmental background steady so that rapid changes (e.g. leopard approaching) would be obvious [132, pp. 135–136]. But now slow changes in that background are the most lethal threats. Societies have a long history of mobilizing efforts, making sacrifices and changes, to defeat an enemy at the gates, or even just to compete more successfully with a rival. But there is not much evidence of societies mobilizing and making sacrifices to meet gradually worsening conditions that threaten real disaster for future generations. Yet that is exactly the sort of mobilization that we believe is required to avoid a collapse.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in avoiding collapse is convincing people, especially politicians and economists, to break this ancient mould and alter their behaviour relative to the basic population-consumption drivers of environmental deterioration. We know that simply informing people of the scientific consensus on a serious problem does not ordinarily produce rapid changes in institutional or individual behaviour. That was amply demonstrated in the case of cigarettes [68], air pollution and other environmental problems [69] and is now being demonstrated in the obesity epidemic [133] as well as climate disruption.

Obvious parallels exist regarding reproduction and overconsumption, which are especially visible in what amounts to a cultural addiction to continued economic growth among the already well-off [134]. One might think that the mathematics of compound interest would have convinced everyone long ago that growth of an industrialized economy at 3.5 per cent annually cannot long continue. Unfortunately, most ‘educated’ people are immersed in a culture that does not recognize that, in the real world, a short history (a few centuries) of exponential growth does not imply a long future of such growth.

Besides focusing their research on ways to avoid collapse, there is a need for natural scientists to collaborate with social scientists, especially those who study the dynamics of social movements. Such collaborations could develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on the predicament. Unfortunately, awareness among scientists that humanity is in deep trouble has not been accompanied by popular awareness and pressure to counter the political and economic influences implicated in the current crisis. Without significant pressure from the public demanding action, we fear there is little chance of changing course fast enough to forestall disaster.

The needed pressure, however, might be generated by a popular movement based in academia and civil society to help guide humanity towards developing a new multiple intelligence [135], ‘foresight intelligence’ to provide the long-term analysis and planning that markets cannot supply. Foresight intelligence could not only systematically look ahead but also guide cultural changes towards desirable outcomes such as increased socio-economic resilience. Helping develop such a movement and foresight intelligence are major challenges facing scientists today, a cutting edge for research that must slice fast if the chances of averting a collapse are to be improved.

If foresight intelligence became established, many more scientists and policy planners (and society) might, for example, understand the demographic contributions to the predicament [136], stop treating population growth as a ‘given’ and consider the nutritional, health and social benefits of humanely ending growth well below nine billion and starting a slow decline. This would be a monumental task, considering the momentum of population growth. Monumental, but not impossible if the political will could be generated globally to give full rights, education and opportunities to women, and provide all sexually active human beings with modern contraception and backup abortion. The degree to which those steps would reduce fertility rates is controversial [137–139], but they are a likely win-win for societies [140].

Obviously, especially with the growing endarkenment, there are huge cultural and institutional barriers to establishing such policies in some parts of the world. After all, there is not a single nation where women are truly treated as equal to men. Despite that, the population driver should not be ignored simply because limiting overconsumption can, at least in theory, be achieved more rapidly. The difficulties of changing demographic trajectories mean that the problem should have been addressed sooner, rather than later. That halting population growth inevitably leads to changes in age structure is no excuse for bemoaning drops in fertility rates, as is common in European government circles [141]. Reduction of population size in those over-consuming nations is a very positive trend, and sensible planning can deal with the problems of population aging [142].

While rapid policy change to head off collapse is essential, fundamental institutional change to keep things on track is necessary as well. This is especially true of educational systems, which today fail to inform most people of how the world works and thus perpetuate a vast culture gap [54]. The academic challenge is especially great for economists, who could help set the background for avoiding collapse by designing steady-state economic systems [107,134,143], and along the way destroying fables such as ‘growth can continue forever if it’s in service industries’, or ‘technological innovation will save us’. Issues such as the importance of comparative advantage under current global circumstances [144], the development of new models that better reflect the irrational behaviour of individuals and groups [145], reduction of the worship of ‘free’ markets that infests the discipline, and tasks such as making information more symmetrical, moving towards sustainability and enhancing equity (including redistribution) all require re-examination. In that re-examination, they would be following the lead of distinguished economists [146–148] in dealing with the real world of biophysical constraints and human well-being.

At the global level, the loose network of agreements that now tie countries together [149,150], developed in a relatively recent stage of cultural evolution since modern nation states appeared, is utterly inadequate to grapple with the human predicament. Strengthening global environmental governance [151] and addressing the related problem of avoiding failed statehood [152] are tasks humanity has so far refused to tackle comprehensively even as cultural evolution in technology has rendered the present international system (as it has educational systems) obsolete. Serious global environmental problems can only be solved and a collapse avoided with an unprecedented level of international cooperation [122]. Regardless of one’s estimate of civilization’s potential longevity, the time to start restructuring the international system is right now. If people do not do that, nature will restructure civilization for us.

Similarly, widely based cultural change is required to reduce humanely both population size and overconsumption by the rich. Both go against cultural norms, and, as long feared [153], the overconsumption norm has understandably been adopted by the increasingly rich subpopulations of developing nations, notably India and China. One can be thrilled by the numbers of people raised from poverty while being apprehensive about the enormous and possibly lethal environmental and social costs that may eventually result [154,155]. The industrial revolution set civilization on the road to collapse, spurring population growth, which contributed slightly more than overconsumption to environmental degradation [136]. Now population combined with affluence growth may finish the job.

Needless to say, dealing with economic and racial inequities will be critically important in getting large numbers of people from culturally diverse groups [156] to focus their minds on solving the human predicament, something globalization should help [157]. These tasks will be pursued, along with an emphasis on developing ‘foresight intelligence’, by the nascent Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (the MAHB; http://mahb.stanford.edu). One of its central goals is to try to accelerate change towards sustainability. Since simply giving the scientific facts to the public will not do it, among other things, this means finding frames and narratives to convince the public of the need to make changes.

We know that societies can evolve fundamentally and unexpectedly [158, p. 334], as was dramatically demonstrated by the collapse of communist regimes in Europe in 1989 [159]. Rather than tinkering around the edges and making feeble or empty gestures towards one or another of the interdependent problems we face, we need a powerful and comprehensive approach. In addressing climate change, for instance, developing nations need to be convinced that they (along with the rest of the world) cannot afford (and do not need) to delay action while they ‘catch up’ in development. Indeed, development on the old model is counterproductive; they have a great opportunity to pioneer new approaches and technologies. All nations need to stop waiting for others to act and be willing to do everything they can to mitigate emissions and hasten the energy transition, regardless of what others are doing.

With climate and many other global environmental problems, polycentric solutions may be more readily found than global ones. Complex, multi-level systems may be better able to cope with complex, multi-level problems [160], and institutional change is required at many levels in many polities. What scientists understand about cultural evolution suggests that, while improbable, it may be possible to move cultures in such directions [161,162]. Whether solutions will be global or polycentric, international negotiations will be needed, existing international agencies that deal with them will need strengthening, and new institutions will need to be formed.

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7. Conclusions

Do we think global society can avoid a collapse in this century? The answer is yes, because modern society has shown some capacity to deal with long-term threats, at least if they are obvious or continuously brought to attention (think of the risks of nuclear conflict). Humanity has the assets to get the job done, but the odds of avoiding collapse seem small because the risks are clearly not obvious to most people and the classic signs of impending collapse, especially diminishing returns to complexity [28], are everywhere. One central psychological barrier to taking dramatic action is the distribution of costs and benefits through time: the costs up front, the benefits accruing largely to unknown people in the future. But whether we or more optimistic observers [17,163] are correct, our own ethical values compel us to think the benefits to those future generations are worth struggling for, to increase at least slightly the chances of avoiding a dissolution of today’s global civilization as we know it.

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Authors’ profile

Paul Ehrlich is a Professor of Biology and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. His research interests are in the ecology and evolution of natural populations of butterflies, reef fishes, birds and human beings.

Anne Ehrlich is a Senior Research Scientist in Biology at Stanford and focuses her research on policy issues related to the environment.

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Acknowledgements

We are especially grateful to Joan Diamond, Executive Director of the MAHB, for her ideas on foresight intelligence, and to the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics for two decades of provocative discussions on topics related to this paper. This paper has benefited from comments from Ken Arrow, Scott Barrett, Andy Beattie, Dan Blumstein, Corey Bradshaw, Greg Bratman, Paul Brest, Jim Brown, Bob Brulle, Gretchen Daily, Lisa Daniel, Timothy Daniel, Partha Dasgupta, Nadia Diamond-Smith, Tom Dietz, Anantha Duraiappah, Riley Dunlap, Walter Falcon, Marc Feldman, Rachelle Gould, Larry Goulder, John Harte, Mel Harte, Ursula Heise, Tad Homer-Dixon, Bob Horn, Danny Karp, Don Kennedy, Michael Klare, Simon Levin, Jack Liu, David Lobell, Doug McAdam, Chase Mendenhall, Hal Mooney, Fathali Moghaddam, Dennis Pirages, Graham Pyke, Gene Rosa, Lee Ross, Jose Sarukhan, Kirk Smith, Sarah Soule, Chris Turnbull and Wren Wirth. Two of the best and most thorough anonymous reviewers we have ever encountered helped us improve the manuscript. The work was supported by Peter and Helen Bing and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

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Footnotes

• ↵† An invited Perspective to mark the election of the author to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 2012.

• Received November 28, 2012.
• Accepted December 7, 2012.

• © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.

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The Myth of Human Progress

January 14, 2013

 

By Chris Hedges

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. The difference this time is that when we go down, the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The struggle will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

::::::::

Cross-posted from Truthdig

Illustration by Mr. Fish

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth — intellectually and emotionally — and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth — as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury — as well as unrivaled military and economic power — for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down, the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada…

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’

“We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today — about 2 billion — is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”"If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel, “A Scientific Romance,” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book, “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around.

If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations;  if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said…

“It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have over-run the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we — like past societies in distress — will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said…

“There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable–the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun–would disappear.”

Wright says we all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring…

“It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”

According to Wright…

“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”

Submitters Bio:

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay “One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.”

Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.

Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times’ investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010)

Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.

 

The Science of Genocide

August 6, 2012

By Chris Hedges

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science.

::::::::

This article cross-posted from Truthdig

Illustration by Mr. Fish

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men, women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was strategically and militarily indefensible. The Japanese had been on the verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance. It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions, which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of death.

“In World War II Auschwitz and Hiroshima showed that progress through technology has escalated man’s destructive impulses into more precise and incredibly more devastating form,” Bruno Bettelheimsaid. “The concentration camps with their gas chambers, the first atomic bomb … confronted us with the stark reality of overwhelming death, not so much one’s own — this each of us has to face sooner or later, and however uneasily, most of us manage not to be overpowered by our fear of it — but the unnecessary and untimely death of millions. … Progress not only failed to preserve life but it deprived millions of their lives more effectively than had ever been possible before. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, after the second World War Auschwitz and Hiroshima became monuments to the incredible devastation man and technology together bring about.”

The atomic blasts, ignited in large part to send a message to the Soviet Union, were a reminder that science is morally neutral. Science and technology serve the ambitions of humankind. And few in the sciences look beyond the narrow tasks handed to them by corporations or government. They employ their dark arts, often blind to the consequences, to cement into place systems of security and surveillance, as well as systems of environmental destruction, that will result in collective enslavement and mass extermination. As we veer toward environmental collapse we will have to pit ourselves against many of these experts, scientists and technicians whose loyalty is to institutions that profit from exploitation and death.

Scientists and technicians in the United States over the last five decades built 70,000 nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.5 trillion. (The Soviet Union had a nuclear arsenal of similar capability.) By 1963, according to the Columbia University professor Seymour Melman, the United States could overkill the 140 principal cities in the Soviet Union more than 78 times. Yet we went on manufacturing nuclear warheads. And those who publicly questioned the rationality of the massive nuclear buildup, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who at the government lab at Los Alamos, N.M., had overseen the building of the two bombs used on Japan, often were zealously persecuted on suspicion of being communists or communist sympathizers. It was a war plan that called for a calculated act of enormous, criminal genocide. We built more and more bombs with the sole purpose of killing hundreds of millions of people. And those who built them, with few exceptions, never gave a thought to their suicidal creations.

“What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everyone except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?” Oppenheimer asked after World War II.

Max Born, the great German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics, in his memoirs made it clear he disapproved of Oppenheimer and the other physicists who built the atomic bombs. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote his old teacher back. “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.” But of course, by then, it was too late.

It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century’s industrial killing. These forces magnified innate human barbarity. They served the immoral. And there are numerous scientists who continue to work in labs across the country on weapons systems that have the capacity to exterminate millions of human beings. Is this a “rational” enterprise? Is it moral? Does it advance the human species? Does it protect life?

For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science. Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress also are cumulative. Science is for us what totems and spells were for our premodern ancestors. It is magical thinking. It feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction.

The 17th century Enlightenment myth of human advancement through science, reason and rationality should have been obliterated forever by the slaughter of World War I. Europeans watched the collective suicide of a generation. The darker visions of human nature embodied in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Frederick Nietzsche before the war found modern expression in the work of Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, along with atonal and dissonant composers such as Igor Stravinsky and painters such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Human progress, these artists and writers understood, was a joke. But there were many more who enthusiastically embraced new utopian visions of progress and glory peddled by fascists and communists. These belief systems defied reality. They fetishized death. They sought unattainable utopias through violence. And empowered by science and technology, they killed millions.

Human motives often are irrational and, as Freud pointed out, contain powerful yearnings for death and self-immolation. Science and technology have empowered and amplified the ancient lusts for war, violence and death. Knowledge did not free humankind from barbarism. The civilized veneer only masked the dark, inchoate longings that plague all human societies, including our own. Freud feared the destructive power of these urges. He warned in “Civilization and Its Discontents” that if we could not regulate or contain these urges, human beings would, as the Stoics predicted, consume themselves in a vast conflagration. The future of the human race depends on naming and controlling these urges. To pretend they do not exist is to fall into self-delusion.

The breakdown of social and political control during periods of political and economic turmoil allows these urges to reign supreme. Our first inclination, Freud noted correctly, is not to love one another as brothers or sisters but to “satisfy [our] aggressiveness on [our fellow human being], to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.” The war in Bosnia, with rampaging Serbian militias, rape camps, torture centers, concentration camps, razed villages and mass executions, was one of numerous examples of Freud’s wisdom. At best, Freud knew, we can learn to live with, regulate and control our inner tensions and conflicts. The structure of civilized societies would always be fraught with this inner tension, he wrote, because “… man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this program of civilization.” The burden of civilization is worth it. The alternative, as Freud knew, is self-destruction.

A rational world, a world that will protect the ecosystem and build economies that learn to distribute wealth rather than allow a rapacious elite to hoard it, will never be handed to us by the scientists and technicians. Nearly all of them work for the enemy. Mary Shelley warned us about becoming Prometheus as we seek to defy fate and the gods in order to master life and death. Her Victor Frankenstein, when his 8-foot-tall creation made partly of body pieces from graves came to ghastly life, had the same reaction as Oppenheimer when the American scientist discovered that his bomb had incinerated Japanese schoolchildren. The scientist Victor Frankenstein watched the “dull yellow eye” of his creature open and “breathless horror and disgust filled his heart.” Oppenheimer said after the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexican desert: “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, in one way or another.” The critic Harold Bloom, in words that could be applied to Oppenheimer, called Victor Frankenstein “a moral idiot.”

All attempts to control the universe, to play God, to become the arbiters of life and death, have been carried out by moral idiots. They will relentlessly push forward, exploiting and pillaging, perfecting their terrible tools of technology and science, until their creation destroys them and us. They make the nuclear bombs. They extract oil from the tar sands. They turn the Appalachians into a wasteland to extract coal. They serve the evils of globalism and finance. They run the fossil fuel industry. They flood the atmosphere with carbon emissions, doom the seas, melt the polar ice caps, unleash the droughts and floods, the heat waves, the freak storms and hurricanes.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Submitters Bio:

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay “One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.”

Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.

Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times’ investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010)

Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.

Radiohead, Jude Law, and Greenpeace make a sad, sad polar bear video

 

By Sarah Laskow

Here are so many things that we like, all in one place. Greenpeace. Jude Law. Polar bears. RADIOHEAD.

Together, these forces for good made a video about a sad, sad polar bear who can no longer live in the Arctic.

Here it is:

Okay, now we are going to cry. Or at least sit around for the rest of the day and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence.

No, wait, we are going to listen to Thom Yorke’s words of wisdom and get inspired:

We have to stop the oil giants pushing into the Arctic. An oil spill in the Arctic would devastate this region of breathtaking beauty, while burning that oil will only add to the biggest problem we all face, climate change.

Yeah! Screw those people who made a polar bear so sad.

 

 

Source

• Radiohead team up with Jude Law for polar bear film, NME

 

 

Sarah Laskow is a reporter based in New York City who covers environment, energy, and sustainability issues, among other things. Follow her on Twitter.

 

12 Civilizations That Mysteriously Vanished

Sun Apr 29 2012 20:41

Why would a flourishing civilization, advanced for its time, suddenly cease to exist, its inhabitants gone and its architecture abandoned? Conspiracy theorists offer all manner of offbeat explanations including alien abduction, but in the case of these 12 societies, the causes were likely more mundane: natural disasters, climate change, invasions and economic irrelevance. Still, we don’t know – and likely never will – exactly what happened to bring about the end of the Khmer Empire of Cambodia, the Minoan society of Crete or two ancient civilizations right here in the United States.

The Indus Valley Civilization, Pakistan

Home to one of the greatest man-made architectural wonders of the ancient world, the Indus Valley Civilization (known at the height of its influence as the Harappan Civilization) was among the largest early urban settlements on any continent. Located in modern-day Pakistan, the Indus Valley Civilization thrived 4,500 years ago and was then forgotten but for local legends until ruins were excavated in the 1920s. Sophisticated and technologically advanced, this civilization, including the famous Mohenjo Daro, featured the world’s first urban sanitation systems as well as evidence of surprising proficiency in mathematics, engineering and even proto-dentistry. By the year 1500 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization was virtually abandoned, possibly after invasion by Indo-European tribes or a collapse in agriculture due to climate change.

The Khmer Empire, Cambodia

Once one of the most powerful empires of Southeast Asia, the Khmer civilization spread from modern-day Cambodia out into Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Malaysia and is best known today for Angkor, its capital city. The empire dates back to 802 CE. Other than stone inscriptions, no written records survive, so our knowledge of the civilization is pieced together from archaeological investigations, reliefs in temple walls and the reports of outsiders including the Chinese. The Khmers practiced both Hinduism and Buddhism and built intricate temples, towers and other structures including Angkor Wat, dedicated to the god Vishnu. Attacks from outsiders, deaths from the plague, water management issues affecting the rice crops and conflicts over power among the royal families likely led to the end of this empire, which finally fell to the Thai people in 1431 CE.

The Anasazi, New Mexico, United States

‘Anasazi’ is the modern name for the ancient Pueblo Peoples who inhabited the ‘Four Corners’ area of the southwestern United States at the junction of the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Their civilization emerged around the 12th century BCE, and remains best known for stone and adobe structures built along cliff walls including Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, the White House Ruins and Pueblo Bonito at the northern rim of Chaco Canyon. This architecture evolved into amazing multi-story dwellings that were often only accessible by rope or ladder.

The ancient Puebloans did not necessarily “vanish”; they did, however, abandon their homeland for reasons unknown in the 12th and 13th centuries CE. Many experts as well as modern Puebloans, who claim the ancient Puebloans as their ancestors, believe that deforestation and droughts caused internal conflict and warfare, causing these ancient people to disseminate.

The Olmec Civilization, Mexico

In what is now Veracruz and Tabasco in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico was once a grand Pre-Columbian civilization that constructed incredible ‘colossal heads’, practiced bloodletting and human sacrifice, invented the concept of the number zero and essentially laid the foundation for every Mesoamerican culture that was to follow. The Olmec civilization might even have been the first civilization in the Western hemisphere to develop a writing system, and possibly invented the compass and the Mesoamerican calendar. Dating to around 1500 BCE, the Olmec civilization wasn’t ‘discovered’ by historians until the mid-19th century. Its decline is blamed on environmental changes caused by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes or possibly damaging agricultural practices.

The Aksumite Empire, Ethiopia

A major participant in trade with the Roman Empire and Ancient India, the Aksumite Empire – also known as the Kingdom of Aksum or Axum – ruled over northeastern Africa including Ethiopia starting in the 4th century BCE. Theorized to be the home of the Queen of Sheba, the Aksumite Empire was likely an indigenous African development that grew to encompass most of present-day Eritrea, northern Ethiopia, Yemen, southern Saudi Arabia and northern Sudan. The empire had its own alphabet and erected enormous obelisks including the Obelisk of Axum, which still stands. It was the first major empire to convert to Christianity. Axum’s decline has been variously blamed on economic isolation due to the expansion of the Islamic Empire, invasions, or climate change which altered the flood pattern of the Nile.

The Minoans, Crete

Named after the mythical king Minos, the Minoan civilization of Crete wasn’t rediscovered until early in the 20th century, but since then we have uncovered fascinating puzzle pieces of an ancient civilization that began flourishing over 7,000 years ago, hitting its zenith around 1600 BCE. Centers of commerce appeared around 2700 BCE, and as the civilization advanced, palaces of greater and greater complexity were built and rebuilt following series of disasters – likely earthquakes and eruptions of the Thera volcano. One of these palaces was Knossos, the ‘labyrinth’ associated with the legend of Minos, which is now a major archaeological site and tourist attraction. But sometime around 1450 BCE, there was an unknown disaster that the Minoans apparently weren’t able to recover from, and the civilization met its downfall. In moved the Mycenaeans – who would later join the Minoans in the void of vanished empires. Fun fact: the Minoan script, known as Linear A, remains undeciphered.

The Cucuteni-Trypillians, Ukraine & Romania

The largest settlements in Neolithic Europe were built by the Cucuteni-Trypillians of modern-day Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. This mysterious civilization, which flourished between 5500 BCE and 2750 BCE, is characterized by its uniquely patterned pottery and by its bizarre habit of burning its own villages to the ground every 60 to 80 years. The villages were rebuilt again and again, on top of the ashes of the old ones. About 3,000 Cucuteni-Trypillian archaeological sites have been identified including what may be the world’s oldest saltworks. Like so many other civilizations, the Cucuteni-Trypillians may have been wiped out by climate change, but other theories suggest that they gradually blended with other groups until their own culture was lost.

The Nabateans, Jordan

The ancient Nabatean civilization occupied southern Jordan, Canaan and northern Arabia starting in the sixth century BCE, when the Aramaic-speaking Nabatean nomads began gradually migrating from Arabia. Their legacy is epitomized by the breathtaking city of Petra, carved into the solid sandstone rock of Jordan’s mountains, and they are remembered for their skill in water engineering, managing a complex system of dams, canals and reservoirs which helped them expand and thrive in an arid desert region. Little is known of their culture and no written literature survives. They were overtaken by the Romans in 65 BCE, who took full control by 106 CE, renaming the kingdom Arabia Petrea. Sometime around the 4th century CE, the Nabateans left Petra for unknown reasons. It’s believed that, after centuries of foreign rule, the Nabatean civilization was reduced to disparate groups of Greek-writing peasants who were eventually converted to Christianity before their lands were seized altogether by Arab invaders.

Cahokia, Illinois, United States

Few Americans realize that we have the remains of a lost ancient civilization right here in the United States – in Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. The Cahokia Mounds Historic Site is all that is left of an indigenous civilization of the Mississippian culture, settled around 600 CE. The inhabitants of Cahokia did not seem to keep written records, but preserved at this World Heritage Site are a series of grass-covered man-made ‘mounds’ as well as pottery and other artifacts. Cahokia was once the largest urban center north of the great Mesoamerican cities of Mexico and may have once been home to as many as 40,000 people – greater, in the year 1250 CE, than the population of London, England, or that of any American city that was to come until Philadelphia around the year 1800. Cahokia was abandoned around 100 years before Europeans arrived in North America, possibly due to environmental factors or invasion of outside peoples.

The Mycenaean Civilization, Greece

Unlike the Minoans before them, the Mycenae didn’t flourish by trade alone – they set out to conquer, and expanded into an empire that overtook much of Greece. Hitting its peak right around the time the Minoans disappeared, the Mycenaean civilization enjoyed five centuries of domination before vanishing sometime around 1100 BCE. Hellenic legend holds that the Mycenae defeated the possibly mythological Troy, and the empire’s artifacts have been found as far away as Ireland. In fact, this culturally and economically wealthy civilization has left behind a wealth of art, architecture and artifacts. What happened to the Mycenae? Natural disasters are possible, but most experts believe that it was either foreign invaders or internal conflict that brought about the end to this once-great empire.

Moche Civilization, Peru

More of a collection of peoples that shared a similar culture than an empire, the Moche civilization developed an agriculturally-based society complete with palaces, pyramids and complex irrigation canals on the north coast of Peru between about 100 and 800 CE. While they had no predominant written language, leaving us few clues as to their history, they were an extraordinarily artistic and expressive people who left behind incredibly detailed pottery and monumental architecture. In 2006, a Moche chamber was discovered that was apparently used for human sacrifice, containing the remains of human offerings. There are many theories as to why the Moche disappeared, but the most prevalent explanation is the effect of El Nino, a pattern of extreme weather characterized by alternating periods of flooding and extreme droughts. Perhaps this explains the Moche’s bloody efforts to appease the gods.

Clovis Culture, North America

Very little is known about the Clovis culture, a prehistoric Paleo-Indian people that were thought to have been the first human inhabitants of North America. Archaeologists have tentatively dated artifacts found at an archaeological site near Clovis, New Mexico at 11,500 RCYBP (radiocarbon years before present), equal to about 13,500 calendar years, but dating beyond 10,000 years is considered unreliable. The artifacts, bone and stone blades known as Clovis points, are among the only clues we have that this group – technically not a civilization – ever existed. In the last thirty years, remains of possibly older human activity have been discovered, calling the Clovis’ status into question, but whether or not they were first, they did disappear rather abruptly. Some speculate that the Clovis overhunted, compromising their own food supply, or that climate change, disease and predators took their toll. Others believe that the Clovis didn’t disappear at all, but simply dispersed into the beginnings of early Native American tribes.