The Long Descent (33 page)

That recognition offers views at least as sweeping as the one over Caernarfon I described in the opening lines of this book. From such a vantage point, as from the Welsh hill, the approaching Long Descent of industrial civilization can be seen in the light of earlier examples of decline and fall, and the arrival of the successor civilizations that will build on the ruins of today's proud towers can be sensed, if not yet seen, in the context of past equivalents. Still, the awareness of historical change has an even more precious gift to offer.

With a clear sense of the differences that separate one age and civilization from another, it's possible to compare the many ways that cultures of the past have responded to their own declines. This sort of comparison does not reflect particularly well on industrial civilization's claim to superior rationality, as many cultures of the past have done far better at managing their own declines than ours has accomplished so far. Yet the possibility of learning from the past, and using the resulting knowledge to prepare for an uncertain future, remains open — at least for the time being.

One much-repeated lesson history offers is that in the twilight years of a civilization, the shape of reality itself is open to question. The industrial world's own fundamental certainties came to birth in the bitter cultural struggles of the Renaissance, marking the twilight of a medieval civilization with its own sharply different ways of looking at the world. Behind the medieval world, in turn, lay the cultural and spiritual chaos of the last years of classical Greco-Roman–civilization. Trace that civilization back to its origins, in turn, and you'll find another time of social disintegration in the terrible dark ages that followed the fall of Knossos and Mycenae in the 14th century bce.

The choices we make in our turn, the insights we achieve, and the stories we choose to tell in the twilight of our own civilization have the potential to build foundations for the cultures of an age not yet born. At this point in the trajectory of industrial society, as our resource base falters and our political, economic, and religious leaders keep on following the path of least resistance toward a head-on collision with ecological reality, the chance to turn aside from the Long Descent lies back among the missed opportunities of past decades. Much can still be done, though, to cushion the way down, to preserve cultural and natural resources for the future, and to hand on to the builders of future societies the ideas and tools they will need to help build a more humane and sustainable world.

The hilltop view in Caernarfon, after all, held its own ambiguities. Standing in the sun and wind over the gray roofs of the town, I could see enough of the past to sense the fate waiting for the civilization that left its mark on the shores of the Menai Strait in the last few decades. What remains hidden is the shape of the civilization that will replace it, turning old structures to new uses and leaving its own unique imprint on the world. When other travelers climb up to the same hilltop a thousand years from now, what will they see below? Our own actions here and now have the power to help shape the answer.

Appendix
How Civilizations Fall:
A Theory of Catabolic Collapse

Introduction

The collapse of complex human societies, while a subject of perennial scholarly and popular fascination, remains poorly understood. Tainter (1988), surveying previous attempts to account for the demise of civilizations, noted that most proposed explanations of collapse failed to adequately describe causative mechanisms, and relied either on ad-hoc hypotheses based on details of specific cases or, by contrast, essentially mystical claims (e.g., that civilizations have lifespans like those of individual biological organisms). In another recent survey of collapses in history (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988), contributors proposed widely divergent explanatory models to account for broadly similar processes of decline and breakdown.

Tainter (1988) proposed a general theory of collapse, in which complex societies break down when increasing complexity results in negative marginal returns, so that a decrease in sociopolitical complexity yields net benefits to people in the society. This theory has much to offer students of collapse, and it models many features of the breakdown of civilizations, but it fails to account for other factors, especially the temporal dimensions of the process. Tainter

Table 1: Timescales of collapse

Note: all dates from Tainter 1988)

defines collapse as a process of marked sociopolitical simplification unfolding on a timescale of “no more than a few decades” (Tainter 1988, p. 4); in this process an unsustainably high level of complexity is replaced with a lower, more sustainable level. Many of the examples he cites, however, fail to fit this description because they occurred over centuries rather than decades (see Table 1) and involved an extended process of progressive disintegration rather than a rapid shift from an unsustainable state to a sustainable one.

The best documented examples of collapse, such as the fall of the western Roman empire, show a distinctive temporal pattern even more difficult to square with Tainter's theory. Thus, during the collapse of Roman power, each of a series of crises led to loss of social complexity and the establishment of temporary stability at a less complex level. Each such level then proved to be unsustainable in turn, and was followed by a further crisis and loss of complexity (Gibbon 1962; Tainter 1988; Grant 1990). In many regions, furthermore, the sociopolitical complexity remaining after the empire's final disintegration was far below the level that had existed in the same area prior to its inclusion in the imperial system. Britain in the late pre-Roman Iron Age, for example, had achieved a stable and flourishing agricultural society with nascent urban centers and international trade connections, while the same area remained depopulated, impoverished, and politically chaotic for centuries following the collapse of imperial authority (Snyder 2003).

An alternative model based on perspectives from human ecology offers a more effective way to understand the collapse process. This conceptual model, the theory of catabolic collapse, explains the breakdown of complex societies as the result of a self- reinforcing–cycle of decline driven by interactions among resources, capital, production, and waste. Previous work on the human ecology of past civilizations (e.g., Hughes 1975; Sanders et al. 1979; Ponting 1992; Elvin 1993; and Webster 2002) and attempts to project the impact of ecological factors on present societies (e.g., Catton 1980; Gever et al. 1986; Meadows et al. 1992; Duncan 1993; and Heinberg 2003) have yielded data and analytical tools from which a general theory of the collapse of complex societies may be developed. This will be attempted here.

The Human Ecology of Collapse

At the highest level of abstraction, any human society includes four core elements: resources, capital, waste, and production. Resources (R) are factors naturally present in the environment that can be exploited by a particular society, using methods and technologies available to the society, but which have not yet been extracted and incorporated into the society's flows of energy and material. Resources include material resources such as iron ore not yet mined, naturally occurring soil fertility that has not yet been exhausted, human resources such as people not yet included in the workforce, and information resources such as scientific discoveries not yet made. While the resources available to any society, even the simplest, are numerous and complex , this conceptual model treats resources as a single variable. This radical oversimplification is acceptable solely because it allows certain large-scale patterns to be seen clearly, permitting one model to be applied to the widest possible range of societies.

Capital (C) consists of all factors (derived from any source) incorporated into the society's flows of energy and material that can be put to further use in other applications. Capital includes physical capital such as food, fields, tools, and buildings; human capital such as laborers and scientists; social capital such as social hierarchies and economic systems; and information capital such as technical knowledge. While a market system is a form of social capital, and currency and coinage are forms of physical capital, it should be noted that money as such is a mechanism for allocating and controlling capital rather than a form of capital in its own right. While the capital stocks of every society are diverse and complex, again, for the sake of exposition, this model treats all capital as a single variable.

Waste (W) consists of all factors incorporated into the society's flows of energy and material that are already fully exploited and have no potential for further use. Materials used or converted into pollutants, tools and laborers at the end of their useful lives, and information garbled or lost — all become waste. All waste is treated as a single variable for the purpose of this conceptual model.

Production (P) is the process by which existing capital and resources are combined to create new capital and waste. The quality and quantity of new capital created by production are functions of the resources and existing capital that go into the production process. Resources and existing capital may be substituted for one another in production, but the relation between the two is nonlinear and complete substitution is impossible. As the use of resources approaches zero, in particular, maintaining any given level of production requires exponential increases in the use of existing capital, due to the effect of decreasing marginal return (Clark and Haswell, 1996; Wilkinson 1973; Tainter 1988). For the purpose of this model, all production is treated as a single variable.

In any human society, resources and capital enter the production process; new capital and waste leave it. Capital is also subject to waste outside production — uneaten food spoils, for example, and unemployed laborers still grow old and die. Thus maintenance of a steady state requires new capital from production to equal waste from production and capital:

C(p) = W(p) + W(c) —> steady state (1)

where C(p) is new capital produced, W(p) is existing capital converted to waste in the production of new capital, and W(c) is existing capital converted to waste outside of production. The sum of W(p) and W(c) is M(p), maintenance production, the level of production necessary to maintain capital stocks at existing levels. Thus, Equation 1 can be more simply put:

C(p) = M(p) —> steady state (2)

Societies which move from a steady state into a state of expansion produce more than necessary to maintain existing capital stocks:

C(p) > M(p) —> expansion (3)

In the absence of effective limits to growth, this expansion can become a self-reinforcing process, because additional capital can be brought into the production process, where it generates yet more new capital, which can be brought into the production process in turn. The westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century offers a well-documented example: in a resource-rich environment, increases in human capital stemming from immigration and increases in information capital that came with the development of new agricultural technologies increased production; this drove increases in physical capital derived from geographical expansion, settling of arable land, manufacturing, etc., which in turn increased production again and drove increases across the spectrum of capital (Billington 1982). This process may be called an
anabolic
cycle.

The self-reinforcing aspect of an anabolic cycle is limited by two factors that tend to limit increases in C(p). First, resources may not be sufficient to maintain indefinite expansion. (Here the use of “resources” as a single variable must be set aside briefly.) Each resource has a replenishment rate, r(R), the rate at which new stocks of the resource become available to the society. For any given resource and society at any given time, r(R) is a weighted product of the rates of natural production, new discovery of existing deposits, and development of alternative resources capable of filling the same role in production. Over time, since discovery and the development of replacements are both subject to decreasing marginal returns (Clark and Haswell 1996; Wilkinson 1973; Tainter 1988), r(R) approaches asymptotically the combined rate at which the original resource and replacements are created by natural processes.

Each resource also has a rate of use by the society, d(R), and the relationship between d(R) and r(R) forms a core element in the model. Resources used faster than their replenishment rate, d(R)/ r(R) >1, become depleted; a depleted resource must be replaced by existing capital to maintain production, and the demand for capital increases exponentially as depletion continues. Thus, unless all of a society's necessary resources have an unlimited replenishment rate, C(p) cannot increase indefinitely because d(R) will eventually exceed r(R), leading to depletion and exponential increases in the capital required to maintain C(p) at any given level. Liebig's law of the minimum suggests that for any given society, the essential resource with the highest value for d(R)/r(R) may be used as a working value of d(R)/r(R) for resources as a whole.

Resource depletion is thus one of the two factors that tends to overcome the momentum of an anabolic cycle. The second is inherent in the relationship between capital and waste. As capital stocks increase, M(p) rises, since W(c) rises proportionally to total capital; more capital requires more maintenance and replacement. M(p) also rises as C(p) rises, since increased production requires increased use of capital and thus increased W(p), the conversion of capital to waste in the production process. All other factors being equal, the effect of W(c) is to make M(p) rise faster than C(p), since not all capital is involved in production at any given time, but all capital is constantly subject to conversion to waste. Increased C(p) relative to M(p) can be generated by decreasing capital stocks, thus decreasing W(c); by slowing the conversion of capital to waste, thus decreasing W(c) and/or W(p); by increasing the fraction of capital involved in production, thus increasing C(p); or by increasing the intake of resources for production, thus increasing C(p). If these are not done, or prove insufficient to meet the needs of the situation, M(p) will rise to equal or exceed C(p) and bring the anabolic cycle to a halt.