Yesterday, late in the afternoon, Gwyn heard a noise from just outside the house. The weather was clear, but hot and muggy, no thunderstorm (yet). I was sitting in the very spot I am now, in our sun room plinking away on my laptop PC, writing this month's edition of The CE4 Corner. She called the noise to my attention and the two of us went outside to investigate. There, we saw a rather large branch from the maple tree over our house had broken off. It had fallen in the neighbor's driveway, barely missing his pickup truck. I guess that just as they were five years ago, the tree-felling spirits were kind to us.
Five years ago, during a big storm, we lost two of the four maples in our back yard when some horrendous straight-line winds uprooted them. One dropped squarely between the house and garage - it couldn't have been aimed any better - in such a way that it did not do significant damage. Now, today, the tree-felling spirits or random chance (use your own discernment), again dropped the branch only a few feet from our neighbor's truck. It could have been a fiasco, but it wasn't.
The collapsing branch fit right in. I have been thinking a fair abount about disaster, lately - ever since finishing the book Collapse, by Jared Diamond. The book explores the collapse of various civilizations such as the Maya, the Anasazi, Easter Island, the norse colonies on Greenland, etc. It also explores the long-term survival of civilizations such as Japan, Iceland, some long-lived societies in the south Pacific, etc., and asks what constitutes the difference between the two. And the biggest reason he offers is the societies' management of its resources.
Basically, Diamond lists five factors that determine whether a civilization will survive
- Relations with the neighbors: Do the neighbors become enemies at the gates, or do they become trading partners, allies, etc...
- Dependence upon trade with vital trading partners, such as Greenland depending upon imports of iron and wood from Scandanavia
- Management of natural resources, such as land and fertility of the soil: Is the agriculture and land use of the society conducted sustainably, such that it can continue indefinitely?
- Stable social instutions: Are the government and religious institutions of the society structured so as to provide a sustainable (and presumably, at least reasonably equitable) framework for the on-going life of the poeple.
- Adaptabliity to change: Any civilization must be able to adapt to changes in the environment such as climate change, drought, etc. Such things DO happen, and for many civilizations, such as the Greenland norse and the Anasazi, they have brought about doom. Yet for others, such as Japan, Iceland and those long-lived island societies in the Pacific, the people and social institutions were able to adapt - and so those civilizations are still here.
He then applies these five factors to our present civilization.
1) How are our relations with our neighbors?
So far, western civilization has managed to eliminate any neighbors that might pose a threat to it. These have constituted rival civilizations during its earlier history, indigenous populations, etc. So in the short term, there would seem to be little military threat (unless you count the current tide of friction between the Christian and Islamic worlds).
Yet, the other side of the coin is how much a civilization learns from its neighbors - and in that we have probably fared rather poorly. From what I've observed, we westerners have not learned too much from the societies we have replaced. While we are now taking lessons from them - increasingly learning about shamanic spiritual practices and journeys, etc., it has taken a long time. Diamond describes how we have adopted a few of the ways of various eastern and indigenous cultures (mostly technologies - though can't think of any examples at the moment). Yet they remain a precious few.
We are a still a society based upon individualism - each person is considered to be separate from his/her neighbors, and thus does not form a common experience with them. Actions are (at least somewhat) separated from consequences and people are separated from spirit. These things are changing but not very fast. We have a lot of learning to do, myself included.
2) Dependence upon trade with outsiders
In our society now, there really are no outsiders, so we don't have much of an issue there. However, as we become more globalized, a danger exists that the transportation system could break down - fuel becomes too expensive, some problem with the technology, economic factors change, etc... Still, the issue is no where near as dicey as, say, the Greenland norse who were dependent upon imports for their very existence.
3) Management of resources
I am not very knowledgeable about agricultural issues, so I have very little to say about our land use policy, farming practices, etc. But I do know a fair amount (and only that) about energy use. This is already a widely discussed topic, so I don't think I need to say too much. Enough to say that our current energy use is unsustainable, yet we understand that enough that we are working to solve the issues. Whether we succeed or not is an open question, probably the most urgent question facing our civilization.
4) Stable social institutions
I believe that this is probably where our society is most vulnerable. In our society, those who make the decisions - such as CEOs and entrenched politicians - are largely removed from the consequence of those decisions. As I write this, the BP oil spill is reeking havoc with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. There could (and will) be much written about this disaster. In many ways, it is one of the classic engineering disasters of all time - technology at its limits, coupled with a decision making in which a conflict of interest is built into the system. In this case, the conflict of interest is the profit motive of the company - wanting to squeeze as much money from operations as they can while minimizing the cost of those operations. History is rife with examples of how this results in cutting corners - frequently on safety. And these decisions are made by managers who are rewarded for the short term gain of improved profits, often regardless of the resulting risk.
Other fiascos such as the credit and home mortgage crunch, the current recession, the ballooning budget deficit, etc... all point to similar structural conflicts of interest. Those in leadership are rewarded for results which are not optimal for the long term longevity of our civilization.
5) Adaptability to change
Is our society adaptable to fundamental changes such as climate shifts? Are we able to adjust to fundamental economic and technological shifts such as are inherent in 21st century world politics? I guess that remains to be seen. So far we have done OK, yet according to global warming forcasts, climate change is just beginning. We'll have a lot of tests before this is all done.
So how does this all relate to a falling tree branch? To me, the branch is symbolic. In this tree branch, the failure point has been present for many years. The danger was present yet we didn't know it. As I was chain-sawing the branch, I noted several major cracks in the branch - probably from the storm we had five years ago - that would have brought it down eventually. How many other aspects of life have similar potential failure points?
In this case, the consequence were minor. The branch missed our neighbor's car. It could have been much worse. Any number of things could have happened, yet very little did. We were lucky. How lucky? Was this the extent of the problem, or is this the tip of the iceberg? I guess a tree trimmer will have to tell us that in the near future.
Meanwhile, a many-orders-of-magnitude greater disaster continues to unfold. And like cracks in a tree branch, oil slicks and tar balls appear on beaches all over the Gulf of Mexico. Fish and birds are dying or fleeing to habitats where they have never been observed before, etc. Oil is being found in places along the Florida coast. And one of the biggest dangers apparently is that the spill could get into the gulf stream and be carried far and wide in the Atlantic. In short, there are myriad warning signs that an already bad catastrophe could get much worse.
Could this whole BP-oil-leak scenario bring about our downfall? I doubt it. Yet I wonder how many Mayan priests said that as another corn field dried up. Did any chieftanis on Easter Island say the same thing as the next tree was felled - perhaps the one that pushed their civilization past the tipping point and on to the glideslope to oblivion?
Like the tree branch in our driveway, could tarballs on a Florida beach be the sign of even bigger problems ahead? Or, like our branch dropping in just the right spot to cause minimum damage, will we get lucky and see consequences far less than the worst-case scenario? I guess only time will tell - that and a lot of hard work by folks who (we hope) know what they are doing.
