Author: Ronald Wright's Concerns:
"Our civilization, which subsumes most of its predecessors, is a great ship steaming at speed into the future. It travels faster, further, and more laden than any before. We may not be able to foresee every reef and hazard, but by reading her compass bearing and headway, by understanding her design, her safety record, and the abilities of her crew, we can, I think, plot a wise course between the narrows and the bergs looming ahead.
And I believe we must do this without delay, because there are too many shipwrecks behind us. The vessel we are now aboard is not merely the biggest of all time; it is also the only one left. The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years. Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes."
Detailing amongst other things how four historical civilizations in particular — those of Easter Island, Sumer, the Maya and Rome — self-destructed from a combination of lack of foresight and poor choices that lead to overpopulation and irreparable environmental damage. From his reading of the "flight recorders in the wreckage of crashed civilizations" (p. 129) such as these there follows the persistent concern that "each time history repeats itself, the price goes up", and the lessons our now global civilization should therefore have learnt from them in order to become sustainable today with reference to natural resource depletion and exacerbating effects on biodiversity loss from global warming and climate change.
Wright notes that Easter Island and Sumer failed due to depletion of natural resources: "their ecologies were unable to regenerate". Whereas the Maya and Rome failed in their heartlands, "where ecological demand was highest," but left remnant populations that survived. He asks: "Why, if civilizations so often destroy themselves, has the overall experiment of civilization done so well?" For the answer, he says, we must look to natural regeneration and human migration (p. 102).
Wright argues that while most ancient civilizations depleted their ecologies and failed, few thrived. Large expanses of our (now shrinking) planet remained unsettled and available for migration. And a handful of civilizations — as evidenced by Egypt and China (pp. 103–4) — experienced greater longevity for atypical reasons:
• an abundance of resources, particularly topsoil, with alluvial deposits from annual Nile River flooding and wind-blown glacial loess that was exceedingly deep, respectively
• farming methods that worked with, rather than against, natural cycles
• settlement patterns that did not exceed, or permanently damage, the carrying capacity of the local environment
Wright borrows from Joseph Tainter in identifying three models of societal collapse — the "Runaway Train", the "Dinosaur", and the "House of Cards"[2] (p. 107, 128) — emphasizing that they usually operate in combination and going further in suggesting that civilization itself "is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps" (p. 108). "Material progress creates problems that are — or seem to be — soluble only by further progress ... the devil here is in the scale: a good bang can be useful; a better bang can end the world" (p. 7). In addition to describing in detail these sorts of technological "progress traps" throughout the book — including even the invention of agriculture itself — Wright labels such cultural beliefs and interests that act against sustainability — and hence civilizational survivability as a whole — the very worst kind of "ideological pathology":
Think about it and name some that were / are relevant to you....
"We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet’s natural capital. We’re logging everywhere, building everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. The twentyfold growth in world trade since the 1970s has meant that hardly anywhere is self-sufficient. Every Eldorado has been looted, every Shangri-La equipped with a Holiday Inn. Joseph Tainter notes this interdependence, warning that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. ... World civilization will disintegrate as a whole."
Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.
Wright's concluding exhortation.
"The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees’ seeds to plant out of reach of the rats.
We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.
Now is our last chance to get the future right."