The Holocene Extinction
by Jason GodeskyIn 1833, Charles Lyell introduced the name “Holocene,” or “Recent Whole,” for our current geological epoch, stretching back only 10 or 12 thousand years. This makes the Holocene an incredibly young geological epoch, the shortest by far. The International Geological Congress in Bologna adopted the term in 1885, and it has been the accepted terminology ever since. The preceding geologic epoch was the last ice age, the Pleistocene. It lasted for two million years, and while it was marked by significantly advanced glaciation, this was not the unremitting state of affairs. The Pleistocene had regular interglacial periods, during which the weather would turn warmer and the glaciers would temporarily recede. These interglacials typically lasted an average of 10 - 20 thousand years. In short, the “Holocene” is a perfectly typical interglacial. The Pleistocene–the “last ice age”–never ended. We’re still in it; a warm spell, yes, but in it.
If anything, our current interglacial is most remarkable for its brevity. If it ended this week and the glaciers returned, it would be marked as the shorter side of normal. In fact, it would have ended some 5,000 years ago–an interglacial of just 5,000 years–were it not for the ecological devastation of the Agricultural Revolution. It was the threatened return of the glaciers, and the concommitant ecological changes, that pushed the first farmers in the Fertile Crescent to adopt their sedentary way of life. They were responsible for massive deforestation, and raising huge herds of livestock polluting the atmosphere with incredible amounts of methane–enough to hold the glaciers in check. For 5,000 years, our civilization has lived on borrowed time, extending our “Holocene” by balancing the earth’s natural cooling trend against our reckless environmental abuse.
Yet, in that short time, the “Holocene” has joined the Cambrian-Ordovician, the Ordovician-Silurian, the Late Devonian, the Permian-Triassic, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene for the dubious distinction of contributing its name to a mass extinction event.
Until recently, the term “Holocene Extinction” referred to a rather minor spate of extinction which took place at the beginning of the Holocene, with the end of the megafauna–woolly mammoths, North American horses, sabertooth cats, and other large mammals. This occured at the beginning of the Holocene, as humans were first moving into many new environments, like the Americas and Australia. This has led to a long-standing debate between “overkill” and “overchill.” Were the megafauna wiped out by climate change? Or by rapacious, brutal bands of overhunting human foragers? Both sides have their evidence, of course.
Nor is this merely an academic argument without reprecussion for the present. The “overkill” theory is routinely cited by some groups as if it were already a proven fact, and used as evidence that humans are an inherently destructive species. So we needn’t worry ourselves with the environmental destruction we wreak. We can’t help it. It’s our nature.
As you might expect, the truth lies somewhere between overkill and overchill. Human populations were almost certainly too small to wreak such havok all by themselves, and the same climate changes that opened the way for humans into Australia and the Americas also had to affect the other large mammals living across the globe. Even more instructive, however, is the modern case of the wolves of Yellowstone. Alpha predators–like wolves, and like humans–play important, keystone roles in any ecology. The introduction of a new alpha predator can have dramatic effects, even causing cascades of extinction. This is not necessarily because the alpha predators overhunt or are even in the least bit maladaptive; this is simply the nature of alpha predators and how they relate in any given ecology. When humans came to Australia and the Americas, they were as harmless as wolves, lions, or any other big mammalian predator. Their presence caused cascades of changes throughout the ecosystem. Given that it was also a period of major climate change, a great number of species that were already under stress adapting to the new climate were tipped over the edge into extinction by the further ecological changes created by the adaptation of a new alpha predator. Our ancestors were hardly noble savages; but neither were they bloodthirsty killers bent on the destruction of all life on earth. They were animals, like any other.
While Australians and Americans established a new equilibrium in their given environments, the same climate changes that allowed them to cross the Bering Land Bridge and shortened the boat ride between the islands of Oceania and ultimately Australia, were having other effects, as well. In the Middle East, some foragers had come to rely increasingly on cereal grains. Their lives became more sedentary as they established static resources necessary for their food source, like granaries and mills. As the weather turned, they were forced to intensify their food production–and agriculture was born. The weather was already turning colder, causing the glaciers to expand, the sea levels to drop, and the ways to America and Australia to reveal themselves from the ocean floor. But the agriculturalists of the Fertile Crescent were seeing hard times with the colder, drier climate. They intensified their production, which gave them more food. More food increased their population, which naturally needed more food. The Food Race was off to a running start.
To refer to the “Fertile Crescent” today is a cruel joke, but this was not always the case. Once, this region was abundant. The arid desert we see today is the result of agriculture. Monday night, the first episode of Guns, Germs & Steel, a three-part documentary version of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, aired on PBS. Near the end, it featured archaeologist Mohammed Najjar at the site of an ancient agriculturalist village in Jordan, looking out over the desert landscape.
People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is what when, when, when you, when you face the, the end, I mean you are facing the wall. You will end with landscape like that, mean with, with few trees, with no grass, and with less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of over-exploiting the environment.
It is a frightening thought: we made the deserts of the Fertile Crescent. The first farmers stripped it of all life, and then spread out to the east and west to consume the next region, like the alien invaders of some clichéd science fiction movie. Yet it was not malice or greed that drove them; they were locked into an endless cycle of exponential growth. Their way of life required constant expansion. Good or evil, nice or mean, they were compelled to conquer, whether they liked it or not.
Deforestation, desertification and the herding of methane-producing livestock increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere–enough to halt the world’s cooling trend. The two balanced each other, cancelling one another out, to unnaturally extend the “Holocene” interglacial. All the while, the massive ecological devastation wrought by the spread of agriculture perpetuated new cascades of extinctions–often, as a matter of policy.
Wolf species were systematically hunted down by farmers, until they became extinct, in both Japan and Europe. Such hunting has endangered wolf populations in North America, as well. Such hunts were conducted because wolves would prey on livestock. Agricultural societies often circulate tales demonizing wolves and other predators that prey on livestock, providing a cultural basis for such hunts. It is a unique strategy in the animal kingdom: no other species wastes its efforts trying to systematically eliminate its competition.
But more often, extinction has simply been the unforeseen side effect of our expanding agricultural way of life. These continuing extinctions have led to some confusion, and argument about an “on-going” Holocene extinction. In fact, there are two seperate phenomenon going on here, unfortunately obscured because both began with a common cause–the changing climate of 12,000 years ago. The first was simply the product of a readjustment in ecologies, to a changing climate and a new large mammalian predator migrating in. This was relatively benign. The second phenomenon is what makes the Holocene extinction such a pressing concern. It is far more devastating, and because it is a systemic consequence of agricultural society, it will never “iron itself out” as the first one did, except with the end of agricultrual life–and civilization with it.
This, the real Holocene extinction, has been a significant problem for the entire history of civilization. Even all by itself, it would have eventually reached crisis proportions and still marked agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
Yet, this process has recently seen an incredible intensification, forcing us to face a crisis of unprecedented proportions now. This intensification began with the Industrial Revolution, which did not change the nature of agriculture nearly so much as it exponentially increased its scale. The intensification of cultivation had long before crossed a point of diminishing returns, where more calories of work were expended in cultivation than were returned in yields. This shortfall had previously been made up by animals, which could leverage energy sources that were otherwise unusable–for example, they could graze in fields too rocky for food crops. With first the Industrial Revolution, and then the Green Revolution, other energy sources–like petroleum–allowed us to push even further beyond the point of diminishing returns, to significantly increase yields simply by making the process unthinkably inefficient. Today, on average, every calorie of food we consume requires ten calories of work–primarily stored in fossil fuels–to cultivate, package and ship. Very little of the earth remains naturally arable; nearly all of it requires intense fertilization and irrigation. On the other end, the average piece of food an American eats has traveled 1,500 miles to the dinner plate.
The Green Revolution raised our carrying capacity to–essentially, wherever we want it to be. Human population jumped up in response, with growth slowing only now as we begin to approach a new asymptote somewhere near 9 billion. There are, at the time of this writing, only 6.5 billion people on earth, yet just that many requires 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. That is how much energy is required to support so many people, and the food that so many people require–and, as is often the case, the food that food requires. 40% of the total energy available to the entire planet is wrapped up in a single species; only 60% is currently portioned out among all the other millions of species on earth.
This is the essential reason for the Holocene extinction. Deforestation, desertification, climate change and other climatological and ecological disasters are often the immediate causes, but these are themselves symptoms of the ultimate cause–that we are, essentially, starving the world out. We are taking everything for ourselves, and laying siege to all life on earth.
The effects have been catastrophic. Extinctions are always happening, just like people are always dying. But like an explosively high death rate, an extinction rate far beyond the background rate is catastrophic. The normal background rate of extinctions is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Normal background extinction would end one mammalian species every 200 years, on average. Some centuries might see two or three mammalian species lost; other times, several centuries may pass with no mammalian extinction whatsoever. Yet in the past 400 years, 89 mammalian species have gone extinct, and another 169 species are critically endangered–45 times the normal rate of background extinction, just among mammals. The total current extinction rate is difficult to calculate, since we don’t know precisely how many species there are on earth, but the most conservative estimates indicate that we are seeing 147 extinctions per day. Most scientists estimate that we are now seeing extinction rates that are anywhere between a thousand and ten thousand times the normal, background rate.
This is unprecedented. None of the previous extinction events were this lethal, or this quick. We are doing more damage than when a comet carved out the Yucatan and blotted the sun out of the sky! In 2002, E.O. Wilson predicted that at current rates, one half of all species on earth will be gone in a century. Previously, the Permian-Triassic was the worst extinction event in our planet’s history; it ended 95% of all species that then existed, but it took nearly a million years to unfold. We are seeing half of that in mere centuries.
In my previous life, I would have found this unfortunate, but little more. Ultimately, what do we humans care what happens to the environment? It might be nice to protect–we may even be morally obliged–but it is, at best, charity, is it not? Like most civilized men of good breeding, I was an exceptionalist. As E. O. Wilson described the position:
T’he first, exemptionalism, holds that since humankind is transcendant in intelligence and spirit, so must our species have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. No matter how serious the problem, civilized human beings, by ingenuity, force of will and-who knows-divine dispensation, will find a solution. Population growth? Good for the economy, claim some of the exceptionalists, and in any case a basic human right, so let it run. Land shortages? Try fission energy to power the desalting of sea water, then reclaim the world’s deserts. (The process might be assisted by towing icebergs to coastal pipelines.) Species going extinct? Not to worry. That is nature’s way. Think of humankind as only the latest in a long line of exterminating agents in geological time. In any case, because our species has pulled free of old-style, mindless Nature, we have begun a different order of life. Evolution should now be allowed to proceed along this new trajectory. Finally, resources? The planet has more than enough resources to last indefinitely, if human genius is allowed to address each new problem in turn, without alarmist and unreasonable restrictions imposed on economic development. So hold the course, and touch the brakes lightly.
It is an unexamined bit of recieved wisdom, ridiculous once examined. Humans are animals like any other, and subject to the same laws and dictates. No extinction occurs in a vacuum. All species exist in an ecosystem, and with each species lost, the ecosystem becomes weaker. If sharks go extinct, so too do remoras. Each extinction triggers a cascade of extinctions through its dependencies, running their course through the complex web of life on earth. The complex is too great to predict where those cascades will end, or what will be extinguished in its course. We are as dependent on our planet as every other species, and our willful blindness to this, our deluded, alienating fantasy of being higher and nobler than mere nature, does not change that basic fact.
The Holocene extinction, left unchecked, will ultimately claim us as well. All it will take is the wrong cascade, or simply weakening the earth’s ecosystems to a tipping point that can no longer support our way of life. Cereal grains are fickle; a temperature change of a few degrees might kill them all off. With 90% or more of our diet coming from just a few, closely-related grasses, our entire, global population is essentially in the same precarious boat as the Irish of 1845.
Diversity is strength; diversity ensures survival. The human population is growing, while the number of species takes an unprecedented nose-dive. The amount of life is not changing, but biodiversity is plummeting. We are, pound by pound, replacing every single lifeform on this planet with a corresponding unit of human flesh. We are reducing the planet’s biodiversity to a single species.
Taken to its extreme end-point, the insanity of this policy becomes evident. Humans will choke on their own breath and fall on each other in cannibalistic slaughter. We cannot survive all on our own. The general principle is more complex; long before we are alone in the world, this course will mean the end of our species. Therein lies the great irony of the Holocene extinction. It is the worst mass extinction in the history of the earth, and it is the only extinction ever driven forward by organisms themselves. But ultimately, those organisms–us, human beings–will be among the dead, if we do not soon wake up from our ten-thousand-year madness, and stop this before it’s too late.
In the article cited above, E. O. Wilson considers the question, “Is humanity suicidal?” Like Wilson, I do not believe that it is. Humans are omnivores, making them incredibly adaptable to new environments. They are also alpha predators. They can be as harmless and well adapted as wolves, lions, or hawks. When humans found themselves in a new environment–such as the Americas or Australia–there were some changes that took place, but these were well within the normal bounds of ecological change. What we have seen since, however, is something entirely different. It is not humanity that is maladapted to life on earth; it is agriculture that is maladapted to humanity. We are still Pleistocene animals, no matter how many stories we spin about our vaunted “Holocene,” and the agricultural life simply does not suit us. It forces us to grow exponentially, and wreak havoc on the earth.
It has left us with a stark choice: we can cling to our civilization to the bitter end, or we can survive. Civilization is maladapted to life on earth, and will not–cannot–go on much longer. The only question–and only we can answer it–is whether or not it will be the end of humanity, as well. The choice is ours to make, but it’s a choice we need to make soon–or it, too, will be made for us.
Brilliant post.
As I briefly explored in my response to The Meaning of Civilization, the Holocene Extinction seems to be rooted in a bit more than simply agriculture. The resource consumption comes from pretty much all angles of civilization. I would argue that even if a civilization were to be bound by a centralizable means of food production, that a. was sustainable (i.e. one that was not able to expand and one that did not cause desertification or loss of biodiversity), and b. that did not allow population growth, that even THEN, the civilization would still consume all of the resources in the area and would either have to relocate or collapse. I think this is due to the cultural structures of hierarchy and civilization and their subsequent memes. Mass production (centralization) would still occur, the hierarchy would still demand ever-increasing wealth and material from the area around them, and the ecological balance of nature would still be disrupted.
So it seems that civilization no matter WHAT is unsustainable, if we define it as including the intensifying feedback loops of centralization and hierarchy. I think the time frame is relevant, however — civilization PLUS agriculture is one bloody nightmare of a resource consuming, constantly expanding, tag-teaming destructive duo.
Essentially, though, this argument is superfluous, intended to counter the possible argument of “Well, what if a civilization had a different food source other than agriculture?” and the follow-up focus on just switching to another mode of food production. To those who would think this: as difficult as it would be to transition from our food production as is to another one, it’s still not that simple. There are many, many factors that go into the ridiculous rate of resource consumption that have caused the above, and agriculture is but one of them. There is no way around this. A comprehensive solution to the matter is required.
Note: The dire and precarious state of our world systems has been overwhelmingly documented. The powers that be, the media, and most of the general public have largely ignored the numerous warnings given to us by our most respected biologists, ecologists, and geologists. An article in The Guardian summarizes the recent Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (popularized version here):
The supreme disregard shown by The Powers That Be to all of the many warnings forces one uncomfortable conclusion: “They” are not going to save us. We cannot rely on “Them” to do anything about this. We must do this work on our own.
Peace,
Devin
Comment by Devin — 14 July 2005 @ 5:31 AM
Here is a classic exercise in cultural materialism from the man himself, Marvin Harris. In “India’s Sacred Cow,” Harris takes a look at something that seems, on the surface, purely memetic, just one of those arbitrary cultural tabboos all around us: namely, the Hindu injunction against eating beef.
As it turns out, India’s ecology is such that cows are absolutely essential as beasts of burden. Iff Indians went around eating their cows, it would render their way of life impossible. Cows are sacred to Hindus because, if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be any Hindus.
To a cultural materialist like me, every tabboo, meme or other cultural trapping ultimately comes down to material factors. There are no simple, arbitrary things in any culture. If we have an environmentally unfriendly attitude and centralized authority and control, it’s because we need those things in order to continue our way of life.
Consider the day-to-day life of your average pre-industrial farmer. You go out every day, under the hot sun, to till the dirt in the hopes of making seeds sprout. At the edge of your land might be some untamed wilderness; land that’s going to waste uncultivated, and even worse, it harbors all the birds and vermin that steal away your hard-earned crops–often meaning your own starvation. Nature is constantly fighting you on all side. You have to wrestle your livelihood out of dirt and rocks by taking a blade into the earth and forcing your food out of her; you live in fear of rain, wind and weather, whether too much or too little; you must fight a constant battle against encroaching plants and animals of all kinds trying to take away your livelihood. This is the day-to-day existence of a pre-industrial farmer. Such a person must believe they are at war with nature. It supports their daily existence, and strengthens them with an attitude of defiance to keep at it, against the predations of “the enemy.” They cannot believe they are part of the natural order under any circumstances, though. Such a concept is so far removed from their daily existence that it cannot be sustained, and it undermines a very difficult way of life.
By the same token, a forager must believe he is part of the natural order. Foragers cannot afford to ignore the relationships between living things. They are well aware of these complex relationships, as they must be, and it is impossible for them to disentangle themselves from it. After all, they depend on all the life around them just as much as any other animal. They cannot, under any circumstances, believe that they are at war with the natural world, though, because it is too far removed from their daily existence. They are part of the natural world, how can they be at war with it?
In short, the memes of “Takers” and “Leavers” are not independent variables that determine how they live; they are, themselves, determined by their differing material reality. Quinn uses cultural materialism to great effect in his initial critique, but then sets it aside once it becomes inconvenient–when he gets to proposing a solution. I do not believe that ideology can change material reality any more than water can flow up. The flow of water is determined by the shape of the pipes it’s running through; ideology is determined by the material reality of its adherents.
Centralized control, too, is a consequence of agriculture. Agriculture cannot be separated from it. The caloric imbalances require a large pool of dependent specialists, meaning there must always be an unequal exchange of “what you want” for “what I need.” This can be shifted about in the population–threats of force from military specialists, or coercion from religious specialists, et cetera. There’s also the issue of population–large population require hierarchy.
But does centralized control cause agriculture? Does an ideology of dominating the earth lead to agriculture? I would say no, as there seems to be ample evidence that neither existed prior to the first farmers.
So, yes, I “blame” agriculture. You’re right that now, there are many factors involved–yet all those factors are, themselves, products of agriculture. It’s akin to saying that it’s not just the spread of influenza virus through my body I need be concerned with, because I also have a fever, a cough and a stuffy nose. Things don’t go wrong all by themselves very often, but when something does go wrong in a complex system, it causes a cascade of other attendant problems, just like symptoms of a disease.
Recently, I’ve preferred to put these issues in the context of simply energy-in, energy-out. It helps to abstract these issues sometimes, so that we can get above the nitty-gritty–and ultimately meaningless–details of this technology versus that technology. Every species’ population will rise to its carrying capacity, being whatever amount of energy is available to it. There’s only so much energy available to the planet; it’s big, but it is a fixed amount. So the more we increase the energy available to us, the less the rest of the world has to share amongst itself. We are currently taking some 40% of that total energy, leaving only 60% for all other life on earth. This is driving the current mass extinction. Any technology that so much as sustains the current level of energy available to us is further driving that extinction. Any such technology will require its users to, at the very least, take an apathetic view of the earth–otherwise, they would not be able to continue their participation in its destruction, and they would have to either abandon their views, or their way of life. In that situation, almost everyone simply abandons their views.
In order to stop the current mass extinction, we must lower the total percentage of the earth’s energy we are using to something more in line with other species. In short, we must lower our carrying capacity. Drastically. Any reduction in carrying capacity is a reduction in population. Even at the minimal input required for human life, there is not sufficient resources for 6.5 billion to live sustainably.
Because humans are animals like any other, and the products of evolution like any other, no memetic solution can overcome this problem. People will not volunteer to die, or even to forego parenthood, in sufficient numbers. One person’s responsibility will simply be license for another, to say nothing of freeing the material resources needed. The overall effect will be the same population, but with even greater resilience against memetic solutions. As Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of that Charles Darwin) put it:
In short, it’s a systemic problem, and it requires a systemic solution.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 July 2005 @ 10:03 AM
I agree with everything you say here, although you presented it as though you disagree with me. I think that in the context of this particular civilization, you’re absolutely, 100% correct.
However, I think I was classifying agriculture as one of a number of possible centralizable subsistence strategies… and not the only one. I mentioned seed balls (in my other post) as having a strong potential for centralization. The ratio of yield-to-effort is astonishingly high, and the complete lack of other input (plowing, irrigation, often no need for even fertilizer) makes for easy implementation on a wide scale. You’ve argued elsewhere that agriculture is the only means of food production that can support the population density necessary for civilization, but I don’t think this is true. It might be true that historically this is the way it has been, but desperation breeds innovation.
Now, don’t get me wrong, here. I’m not saying that OUR civilization will be able to implement this as a “solution” on the order of “we don’t need to change”. Far, far from it. Our carrying capacity must and will drop soon, this is no question. I was simply speaking of civilization as an entity containing certain specific criteria — centralization (including a centralized form of food production), hierarchy, and division of labor. This civilization’s mode of food production, we call “agriculture”. Another, future civilization’s might be “seed ball production”.
I was using this distinct definition to make the point that civilization even without agriculture would be unsustainable, because it still causes an increased consumption of non-food resources. This expanded definition of civilization I am proposing will be helpful for recognition of future civilizations, particularly those that may not use “agriculture” as we know it. As a cultural determinist, I think you are able to recognize that the structure of civilization facilitates resource consumption on multiple levels, and not just on the food level. Thus, civilization is unsustainable regardless of agriculture and constant expansion memes, due to its inherent properties of centralization and hierarchy.
Let me summarize, and say that this civilization (one based on agriculture) is entirely and wholly predicated on agriculture, and that it must not continue. But this type is perhaps only one of a number of civilizations that might not be so recognizably unsustainable — ones that have a lesser ability to expand population-wise or even ones that have a steady-state population. I posit that all of those other possibilities are unsustainable too. Ultimately, NO civilization anyone can devise is sustainable, given a definition of civilization that includes centralization and hierarchy. Which I think we can both agree on.
As I said earlier, this argument of mine is mostly superfluous to what’s been presented here already. No need for us to get into a row about it.
Peace,
Devin
Comment by Devin — 14 July 2005 @ 10:59 AM
Hi, all,
“It is a frightening thought: we made the deserts of the Fertile Crescent.”
We were only ONE factor, the other major one being the fact the temperate climate belt that had been there moved north as the ice did. The Sahara also became desert, and although there was a fairly high population in the Sahara before the rise of Egypt, no one has ever suggested humans caused THAT desertification (although farming does add to it at the southern edges). I suspect the same is true in the Fertile Crescent: the naturally-developing desert in the center (western Iraq, for example) gradually expanded toward the river valleys in three directions as farming salinated the soil.
Comment by Jay Denari — 14 July 2005 @ 5:04 PM
Desertification is a bit of a snowballing process. Once it gets started, it shifts other factors–like climate–in such a way as to further the process. In fact, it has been claimed that the Neolithic had something to do with starting this process in the Sahara. I’m not sure if I believe this or not, but it seems plausible to me. Consider the places where cereal grain agriculture started: the Fertile Crescent, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Gobi desert. With the notable exception of the Andes, they’re all deserts now. Is this mere coincidence, or could the salinization caused by agriculture start the desertification process?
Naturally, humans aren’t the only things on earth, so not every bit of global climate change is our fault. At the same time, there does seem to be some indication there that our agriculture has been transforming the earth’s climate on a global scale since the very beginning, in some very big, very bad ways.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 July 2005 @ 5:22 PM
Seedballs and … that other thing … I don’t know much about ‘em, but they sound rather like agriculture to me….
Anyway, let’s sidetrack for a moment and consider the case of the Kwakwaka’wakw, more commonly known among our people as “the Kwakiutl.”
The Kwakiutl lived in British Columbia, where they were amply supplied by enormous salmon runs. The runs were so bountiful that it really had less to do with hunting, than it did with, well, harvesting. This allowed the Kwakiutl to develop a full-blown chiefdom, based on competitive feasting and salmon runs. They had a strictly ranked society and all the oppressive earmarks of a civilization.
As Jared Diamond might ask, why didn’t the Kwakiutl take over the world?
Very simply, they had abundance–but they didn’t have control.
The salmon runs provided them the basis for, essentially, a small civilization. But they were dependent on those runs, and they couldn’t exactly take that with them. They were pegged to a specific place. It might have sucked to be a Kwakiutl, but the Kwakiutl were no threat to anyone but their most immediate neighbors.
Full-fledged civilizations, though, had a surplus they could take with them. Here’s where Diamond’s axes come into play. American civilizations were greatly hampered by their inability to go very far north or south; Eurasian civilizations could spread out to the east and west.
So, what does it take to fuel a civilization? A food supply that (a) can be increased to fuel exponential growth, and (b) can be exported to new regions. Anything that fits those two criteria can be the basis of a civilization. But it seems to me that anything that fits those two criteria would also be some form or other of agriculture. So we can shorten the statement to civilization needs agriculture.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 July 2005 @ 10:54 AM
I can certainly grant the theoretical possibility, but I just can’t see how you can build a hierarchy in the long term except by control of the food supply–which requires agriculture.
The monopoly of force is very useful for getting certain things, but as an overall basis of control it breaks down very quickly. Note that few totalitarian regimes last more than a century; nearly the sole exception, the Roman Empire, did so precisely by diversifying its basis of power to other means, a la panem et circencses.
Religious coercion, too, is easily broken down by the first hippie preacher that comes along talking about direct access to the divine.
Ultimately, as the Grand Inquisitor pointed out, the key to long-lasting control is bread.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 July 2005 @ 11:08 AM
So, condensed:
Something to watch out for — A centralized form of food production, one that can be controlled and scaled up and down at the will of those in the hierarchy. Effectively, civilization is a coercive scheme, the only really insipid and long-lasting civilizations have been the ones that have been able to use food as a coercive factor as well.
The other civilizations (remember, civilizations only have to have cities of 5,000 or more — they can be small) are much less stable, and are, as I pointed out, unsustainable even without agriculture. Hierarchy cannot be sustained for long, and neither can increasing centralization or increasing complexity. Limits are reached, the civilization becomes imbalanced, and ultimately collapses.
One of your hopeful premises is that after a crash, our civilization would have difficulty rebuilding. I would love to agree with you, here, but I’m not so certain that it won’t. I just pray that the cycle eventually stops.
I think I’ve got most of the background theory hammered out in my mind. Now, time to start working on compilation and presentation. And after that, working on building another way to live.
Peace,
Devin
Comment by Devin — 15 July 2005 @ 2:56 PM
Excellent lead post, Jason.
[I]Devin said: “One of your hopeful premises is that after a crash, our civilization would have difficulty rebuilding. I would love to agree with you, here, but I’m not so certain that it won’t. I just pray that the cycle eventually stops.”[/I]
I believe you’re mixing up Jason’s thoughts. Post-collapse, civ will most likely try to rebuild itself. It’ll be much smaller, localized and “contained”, and certainly still subject to growth-collapse sequence exhibited by all civs. What Jason is suggesting that these little civs simply won’t have the resources (or access to the resources) to become global in scale again. The limits of growth will be radically lower. At least for a few geological ages… (and assuming humans are still around.)
So praying that the cycle will end is foolhearty - if someone can, someone will try to build civs (even unconsciously or unintentionally). They just won’t have the means to conquer the planet again.
And that’ll leave plenty of room for the rest of us remaining living things…
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 15 July 2005 @ 6:07 PM
True, Jim. But maybe you misunderstood my interpretation, haha.
I don’t think a world-wide civilization is out of the question, several hundred (or thousand) years down the road. And I still think that civilizations are going to want to constantly expand, and will continue trying to enact that vision until the cycle ends. I do not feel like civilization has to expand to a global level for it to be destructive… several smaller, more contained civilizations (think city-states, or feifdoms) also do plenty of damage to the environment and the the people there. If these civilizations are anything remotely similar to how they were throughout history, they’ll still attempt to destroy all of the other ways of life around them.
Not to mention that the Native Americans, who had plenty of potential to build civilizations, did not do so. So whatever it was that made them unable to build civilizations, be it memes or culture, seems to work.
I just hope that it can be balanced — for the love of life, for the love of peace.
Comment by Devin — 16 July 2005 @ 4:29 AM
Forget thousands of years; try millions. To restart civilization, you’ll need all the same resources we had available the first time around. Plentiful surface deposits of coal that you can just bend over and pick up; the same for metal ores. Those provide a start, so that you can create an industrial infrastructure to dig for the rest. And we won’t see those things again until geological ages have passed–millions of years. With a gap that big, I stop worrying about it so much.
Civilizations, being what they are, constantly expand, by definition. Any civilization is destructive to the poor bastards trapped inside of it. And tiny city-states will seek to expand, creating a significant threat to their neighbors. But this is not unprecedented. Teotihuacan conquered an enormous empire, but eventually reached the limits of its possible expansion–due in part to the kind of geographical limitations that Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs & Steel, and in part by problems of scale in the resources and technology they had. In short, many of the same limitations our post-apocalyptic city-states will have. Teotihuacan will sound like a legend of bounty compared to the resources they will have.
These city-states will be limited to a kingdom no greater than week’s walk in any direction, and the earth will only have the resources to support a dozen or so such kingdoms. They’re small, they’re limited, and they’re contained. They’ll be a threat to their immediate neighbors, but foragers can move. It’s how foragers usually deal with threats. And they can easily move beyond their civilized neighbors’ ability to hurt them. Civilization will never again pose a global threat. And if that’s the case, then perhaps there can be a balance.
My mother once criticized my ideology, by saying that for all my protests otherwise, I was still dictating how people should live. I was telling people who were civilized they couldn’t do that anymore. There’s some truth in that. If it’s all ideology, then we cannot afford to allow a single civilized person to survive, or they’ll simply start growing again. But if what I’m saying is true, then they can live their way, too, without threatening us or the world. And if you happen to be one of the sorry unfortunates stuck inside civilization, just start walking. By week’s end, you’ll be so far away the king’s soldiers will never find you.
Native Americans built several civilizations, but they were contained by geographical limitations. The Hopi and other southwestern tribes are actually an excellent example of what we might be some day soon; they were the survivors of a civilizational collapse.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2005 @ 9:08 AM
I’d like you expand on these questions, if you could: Didn’t civilization exist before the use of coal, and before the use of metal? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking a city of 5,000 or more could pretty easily exist before these materials were widely used. Even so, is ALL metal going to be unusable? Are you talking about industrial civilization not being able to return, or ALL civilizations? Is there such a thing as a “steady-state” civilization, where it follows a sine curve (or perhaps more like a tangent curve) of repeated expansion followed by a collapse of sorts? (Isn’t this how civilization DID constantly expand, by continually pushing the limits until it broke through and hit the next one?) That “civilization” will never be global again, I can allow for that. But wouldn’t hundreds or thousands of small localized civilizations have a global detrimental effect as well? What makes “civilizations” global — do they have to have international trade, or do they just have to cover a specific percentage of available land?
The point I’m trying to make is that there are a lot of questions, here, for further exploration. It’s something interesting to explore, and I’m not sure anyone has done the amount of research necessary to make definitive conclusions on the ability of civilizations to rebuild themself post-collapse. Probably because most people consider the question of a civilization crash absurd.
Anyway, this is all superfluous, in my mind. Something to argue about while we pass the time, I suppose. Details, details, eh? 
I still overwhelmingly agree with the big picture, so — don’t spend too much time on me.
Peace,
Devin
Comment by Devin — 19 July 2005 @ 9:07 AM
It did, but with significantly smaller populations. Growing a population is relatively orderly; a die-off is catastrophic, chaotic and violent. Such die-offs invariably swing well below the new carrying capacity, before rising back to it. Sometimes, the swing is so drastic it results in extinction.
Also, the original rise of these cities was largely dependent on the abundance that existed prior to our exploitation. Nearly all the land that was once abundantly, mind-bogglingly fertile, is now only arable at all with massive inputs of petrochemicals. We’ve sapped the agricultural capacity of the planet bone dry, and a great deal of time will pass before that changes. For the first several centuries after the collapse, the only way to do any kind of society-wide farmign will be with heavy, industrialized equipment and huge inputs of petrochemial fertilizers and other inputs. Neither of which will be available, as the interruption in industrial capacity will make it impossible to gain the raw materials necessary. We’ve picked clean all the easily available surface deposits of ores and fossil fuels. The only pockets still available are now buried so deeply that you need an industrial infrastructure to get to them. The only reason we have an industrial society today, is because we had an industrial society yesterday. If it is ever interrupted, for any reason, industrialism will not be possible until geological ages have passed.
The first generation will be able to recycle metal. But reworked metal grows more brittle with each iteration, andrusted metal is completely unusable in quality. Without any new ores coming in, metals will extinguish over the next 2-3 generations. Most likely, our grandchildren will never see iron or steel.
All civilizations. Maybe if the past ten thousand years hadn’t happened, there would still be enough naturally fertile land for civilization to continue at, say, a Roman level. But they did happen. There is very little naturally arable land left. Domestic crops tend to be the pickiest little bastards to ever sprout roots. They need everything to be just right. Growing them has obliterated the places they came from, but we continue to grow them in new locales that we very carefully control. That control saps their resources, making it more difficult with each passing year. Our industry has kept pace with that, and now the only thing keeping agriculture alive at all is a feeding tube of sweet, sweet crude. When that gets cut off, there will be very few places on earth that can be farmed, and even there the benefits will be vastly outweighed by the dangers. While individual, organic, subsistence farming might be possible in some pockets, agricultural society will not be possible.
No. Civilizations that ever stop growing, no matter the reason, collapse. If resources are still available to start a new civilization–if the last civilization didn’t wipe out quite everything–a new civilization will start up. The overlapping exponential growth curves, ending in sudden catastrophe can give the illusion of an overall sine curve, except for the fact that each iteration is a different civilization.
But there were times when the civilization did completely wipe out resources necessary for civilization. Like the Hohokam. There was never another civilization based there. Instead, the survivors became the Indians of the southwest. They became tribal not because their ideology changed, but because the alternative was annihilation.
So, too, with this collapse. We’re not leaving anything behind us for anyone to build on. We’ve sapped all the arable land, we’ve mined all the ores, we’ve drained all the fossil fuels. Past civilizations through away bones with scraps of meat on them; we’re breaking them open and sucking out the marrow. There won’t be anything left to build with. Just like the Hohokam.
There’s only about a dozen or so pockets left on the planet where wide-scale agriculture–the kind needed to support an entire society–is still possible without an industrial infrastructure. There’s a number of criteria to consider here. Fertility, arability, rockiness, climate, acidity of the soil, et cetera ad infinitum. Assuming that they all play host to a new civilization (and that’s a really big assumption), those dozen or so civilizations will face some very big problems.
They’ll still need to constantly expand, as they’ll be wiping out what little land they have. But there will be no where to expand to. All the land around them will be useless for agriculture. They’ll try to expand, no doubt, but you can’t get blood from a stone. They may trade with one another, but even all of them combined will constitute something far less than 5% of the earth’s total land surface.
And what happens to civilizations that can’t expand? These civilizations will have lifespans of little more than a few centuries before they come tumbling down, and it’s an open question as to whether they’ll leave their pocket useable to a succeeding civilization or not.
When I say there will never be a global civilization again, I’m including the prospect of globalization. Even with these dozen or so tiny kingdoms trading between each other, they’ll still only muster the land area and global threat of, say, Zimbabwe, Something the rest of us can easily skirt. I would consider a civilization “global” if you have trouble finding some place where you’re beyond its reach.
Don’t worry, I have. Really, I have. Do you think I’d make that abrupt and significant a change in my views without backing it up? No, the only thing I haven’t done sufficiently yet is sit down, organize my thoughts, and prepare them in a properly written format.
It changed everything for me. That’s why I researched it so intensively. If civilization’s going to kill itself, we just need to survive it. If it’s a memetic disease that simply needs minds, then we need to root it out. Everyone infected with it must be destroyed, down to the last man. There must be not one survivor. And then, we must stand constant vigil against it, lest it rise again. But if it’s a systemic suicide, then we just need to let it die and survive the fallout. I can even help my family live, “infected” with those memes as they are.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 July 2005 @ 9:49 AM
What’s interesting to me is that you contradict yourself - you say that civilization won’t be able to rebuild itself, and then you say that there are perhaps a dozen pockets in the world where civilizations CAN rebuild themselves, and even survive for a few centuries. Not to nitpick, but it seems that civilization will be able to continue to exist…
Regardless, the premise that the land that is arable only because of petrochemicals seems to hold up today… but what happens in 200-300 years (or more) after the land has laid fallow? Are you a soil agronomist, too? There are a number of possibilities for soil fertilization, as well… petrochemicals are just the cheapest way. Animals fertilize well, and so does mulch. That plus an innovation like seedballs (which has yields per acre equal to or greater than industrial agriculture, and is not labor intensive AT ALL) leads to a contradiction of this premise. People will be able to grow food still… and if the yields obtained through seedballs are any indication, civilization can continue to expand.
Let me come at this from another angle: humans have transformed the earth’s biomass into humans. That biomass isn’t GONE, it’s just converted. When lots of humans die, which for the purposes of this argument we will say is inevitable, that biomass is recycled by the natural processes of the earth. Without constant, active expansion, the “battle” of civilization vs. nature is going to be won by nature, which is a thesis we both agree on. Civilization wipes out “nature”, and must expand. If civilization doesn’t expand, the wipeout of “nature” turns around and wipes out civilization, at which point nature regenerates itself.
Your claim to foresee the future is hubris, Jason. You have a leg to stand on with your argument, but then so do I. Civilization might never be able to reach the “glory” it has reached today, because of the lack of fossil fuels and metal (accepting your premise that there is NO way to rework metal, which I’m not convinced of at the moment), but there is a strong potential for its regrowth to (and even perhaps continuation at) smaller levels. And if you don’t believe me, then you might believe Cuba.
Peace,
Devin
Comment by Devin — 19 July 2005 @ 1:15 PM
Don’t forget the Yucatan. Its lesson is extremely valuable, in that the Maya are still there, and the place is still forested. Moreover, the Mayans who are still there are still farming–using a system which very strongly resembles what we’d call permaculture.
One way any post-crash civilizations might be able to provide for themselves for a time is by mining landfills. And wouldn’t that be strange.
Devin: You could look at the Valley of Mexico civilizations as doing something sort of like following your sine-curve, in that after the Classic collapse civilization expanded and contracted, amalgamated and disintegrated, at a pretty rapid rate. So the closest you’re going to get to a steady-state is steady turmoil. This might continue in the valley of Mexico after we’re gone. Mexico City is going to be a very un-fun place during the Collapse, but chinampa agriculture (very, very productive–10 crops a year) is still being practiced there, and could continue to be in the future. It would still suck.
Comment by Steve — 21 July 2005 @ 2:42 PM
OK, let me refine that, then. After the crash, if you want to live in a civilization, you might be able to pull that off. However, after the crash, those of us who don’t want to live in civilization will have no problem avoiding it. There will be few civilizations, and they will be very tightly circumscribed into very small areas. No civilization, and no group of civilizations, will be capable of dominating the globe for at least the next 50 million years. How’s that?
Then 200-300 years have passed, living memory is gone, all the old equipment and all the old knowledge is gone, our domesticates have rewilded, and anyone who wants to take up the agricultural lifestyle has to do so, essentially, from scratch. So, the prospects for starting up agriculture are essentially the same as they were in the Mesolithic.
Except all the places that once had the climate to support autochthonous agriculture are now deserts, thanks to the first go-around. We burned all our bridges the first time through, and wheat doesn’t grow very well in sand.
So, what can support agriculture in 200-300 years? The same places that supported them in the Mesolithic: river flood plains between 40 degrees north, and 40 degrees south latitude, in grassland ecosystems, with ready access to some subset of the dozen or so domesticable cereal grains. With that many restrictions, there’s really not a very wide field of contenders. And without metals or fossil fuels, the size of those kingdoms are very circumscribed indeed.
The problem is not ability. The problem is scale. There are lots of things that we can do. We could send a person to Mars right now. You poo-poo petrochemicals because they’re simply the easiest way, but that’s the wh