As the world slowly begins accepting the scientific evidence for climate change, we are already seeing evidence of climate injustice at work as poorer societies are
hit hard by the effects of the warming climate. We are seeing fragile
societies in Bangladesh battling against rising sea levels,
the traditional way of living of the Inuits threatened by the melting ice,
and societies in the Sahel region crumbling due to extreme drought.
When we look to the past, we see many examples of societies across the world that
have diminished in power, pushed to the brink of existence and then… collapsed.
Well-developed, largely populated civilisations, who developed innovative
technologies, literacy, arts and form sophisticated armies, have been susceptible to collapse with classic examples being the Mayan civilisation in
the Yucatan Valley and the Roman Empire (future blogs will touch on these further). In terms of the challenges facing
societies today as they try to adapt to a warming climate, learning from past
societal collapses can provide vital evidence enabling us to identify which societies are fragile
today based on factors which influenced past societies, comparing and
reflecting on our current social behaviour, and considering the environmental
and climate implications of our actions. This could provide a means necessary to encourage societies
to plan, prepare and change their ways of living. With consideration to the challenges facing societies today, this
blog will explore the extent at which environmental and climatic changes have
contributed to the collapse of past societies.
An attempt at summarising the main reasons for why societies
collapse was made by Diamond (2005) in his book titled ‘Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’. A summary of his findings can be found in the above video. Diamond uses an extraordinary diversity of cases from the
past and present to support his five-factor framework including the New Guinea
highlanders to the Inuits in Greenland, from Haiti and China to Rwanda and the
Mayas. His five-factor framework for why societies collapse are: 1) Human
impact on their physical environment, 2) Climatic changes, 3) Relations with friendly
neighbours, 4) Relations with hostile neighbours, and 5) Political, social and
cultural factors. Diamond admits that every collapse is different, as different
factors contributing more or less to different collapse stories, but there also
exists common threads between each story.
Collapse is defined by Diamond as ‘A
drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social
complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time’ (page 3). The first common thread Diamond identified
is that very often societies collapse soon after peak population is reached due
to a mismatch in resource availability and resource consumption. This collapse is
referred to by Diamond as ‘ecocide’ which occurs as societies destroy the environment
upon which they rely on, ensuring their own demise. Page (2006) questions our ability to compare the environmental changes occurring today to
the environmental changes by past societies. Strengthening Diamond’s argument, he suggests that human interactions with our environment
today is far more complex and intense than in the past. Cutting down trees and
exhausting soils cannot be compared to such an extent as polluting watersources
with manmade chemicals and reorganizing the distribution of species across the
world, and this questions the simplicity of Diamond’s five-factor framework and the extent that we can rely the past.
A second general theme identified by Diamond is that environmental
and climatic factors such as volcanic eruptions, latitude and rainfall make
some societies more fragile than other societies facing similar challenges. In today’s
contexts, this would be like saying that Bangladesh is failing to adapt to the
rising sea level because their tropical monsoon climate is suppressing their
ability to develop. An article
in The Economist written by Sachs (1999) supports the work of Diamond reporting that ‘the fundamental cause of
persisting poverty is the difference in ecological zones which mean that
societies face different health conditions and must overcome different
limitations’. Diamond’s statement has been heavily criticized. Correia (2013) accuses Diamond of promoting environmental determinism,
a concept regarding social inequality which shifts the blame from wealthy nations
solely onto geographical and environmental reasons. In light of the present day
challenges, Correia (2013) sees the views of both Diamond and Sachs as shedding the responsibility of wealthier nations in tackling an
issue of their own making and allowing them the freedom to continue blaming the
inequality in the world on an ‘unfavourable climates’.
Correia (2013) criticizes that environmental determinism has re-established itself
among historical climate change scientists. Often dry or wet climatic periods are identified in palaeoclimatic studies which correlate strongly with key events in human history and hence it is easy to labelled climate change as the key driver. This is similarly reflected in Diamond’s third common thread whereby societies
often fail to see what it is they are doing and/or fail to act if they do face a
challenge. Conflicts between the short-term interests of elites and long-term
interest of the society as a whole is prominent in many of the collapse case
studies explored. Today, we are seeing our country’s key decision makers
isolating themselves from the rest of the population by living in gated
communities, drink bottles water and continuing to invest money in the oil and
gas industry despite clear scientific evidence show a negative effect on the
climate. A failure to admit, acknowledge and anticipate future changes could
have devastating consequences.
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| A US solider providing aid after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. Unlike societies in the past, today aid is provided across the world (source) |
Page (2006) notes that the role of climate and environmental change as factors contributing to societal collapse work different in a modern context. Today, as a result of globalisation and the development of technology, natural events such as droughts, hurricanes, volcanic eruption rarely cause societal collapses due to the response of aid from across the globe. Secondly, we see that that past societies collapse as they consume their main resources i.e cut down all their trees, but today, we do not face the same issue. Page (2006) argues that since the price of oil reduces its demand, 'no rational seller of oil will let it run out', and that this it will create an incentive to invent new alternatives to oil and avoid total depletion in our energy source. Hence, a direct comparison between factors influencing past societies and factors influencing present day societies is complex.
Now that we have clear scientific evidence in favour of a changing climate, it is time for society to respond. To further this, the story depicted by Diamond in his book is not one of despair for he examines the efforts of the Netherlands; a country which has chosen to act against environmental and climatic change by reclaiming land from the sea. As Diamond puts it – ‘this is an example of a society which has chosen to avoid collapse through a combination of solidarity and smart engineering’. We must remember when we look at the collapses of past societies, that today’s society has come a long way historically, culturally and socially. As written by Brooks (2013), today ‘our assumptions about time and space, our moral intuitions about killing and individual dignity, events of our written history, all the ideas of our thinkers, all the teachings of our religions’ have helped to shape us and to make us distinctive in comparison to past societies. Looking ahead at the challenges facing us today regarding global environmental and climatic changes, we must learn from examples of past societal collapse with an open mind in the hope of avoiding a similar fate.