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COPYRIGHT 2005 Geological Association of Canada
Collapse By Jared Diamond 2005, Viking
A Short History of Progress By Ronald Wright 2004, Anansi Press
"You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a pane of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn."
John Buchan, 1916.
Opulent materialism can only be sustained for the relatively few in society --the king and his court, the tyrant and his favourites, the president and his bag-men. The eighteenth century radical, Tom Paine, believed that the prototype of them all was the thief and his gang. The rest of us aspire to the more modest version of opulence called affluence. The problem is that the most fortunate part of the human population has now attained an affluence that approaches historical opulence. The affluence of a Canadian or American for example, is roughly the equivalent of 10 to 15 inhabitants of the third world, in terms of life-time consumption and waste generation (Zen, 2000). All 10 to 15 hope to enjoy our level of luxury someday, and indeed the Brundtland report states its goal to be exactly that (WCED, 1987). If achieved, it would scar the biosphere so badly that the downfall of the civilization we currently enjoy would be assured. Ten thousand years of trial and error, reaching back before Sumer, would simply be another failed experiment. And even if the goal is not achieved, as seems more likely, the stress between the haves and the have-nots would leave little chance for the development of a stable world community.
People who contemplate the downfall of society are commonly criticised as pessimists, and labeled as being too negative to deserve a hearing. However, pessimism as much as optimism has survival value or natural selection would have removed it from our heritage long ago. In any case civilizations have collapsed in the past, so it is no more than prudent to consider the possibility of a collapse in the future. It is part of the due diligence we must exercise if we wish to sustain any but the most brutish existence over the long term. The authors of both books under review perform their due diligence, and both believe that there are important lessons to be learned from history.
Civilizations, says Ronald Wright (Progress p. 33), are "a special kind of culture: large, complex societies based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings". They "vary in their makeup but typically have towns, cities, governments, social classes, and specialized professions." It's what we pay taxes for, and I am grateful to Wright for exhuming a quotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Progress p. 127): "I don't mind paying taxes, they buy me civilization."
Wright's reference to domestication in the previous paragraph (with its sly inclusion of Homo sapiens) is an allusion to farming and to the fundamental importance of the farmers' surplus in support of a civilized existence. Look a little deeper and you find that the real basis of civilization is geological. We use a geological substrate, the soil, to grow out food; we rely on geological delivery systems--the water, weathering and erosional cycles--to keep our crops irrigated and supplied with nutrients; and we exploit geological resources, particularly...
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