PART I

WAVES OF CHANGE

Chapter 1

Waves of Change

Those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s will probably have little trouble recognizing the roots of this work. In 1980 Alvin Toffler wrote a book called The Third Wave. It developed an analytical view of the world based on the concept of waves of change transforming society in fundamental ways as they washed over the earth.

The book was highly popular and became part of the culture of the time along other works such as E.F. Schumacher's (1974), Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, which argued that smaller-scale technologies and operations were better because of their lower impact on the environment relative to the earth's power to heal itself.

Toffler's First Wave

Some 10,000 years ago, humans were organized in small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their diet consisted of the animals they managed to kill as well as edible plants such as roots, nuts, grains, and berries. They would move on to a new area once the old one had been depleted of its food resources.

Their tools were very basic. They included such things as hand axes, flint cutters and scrapers, bone needles, etc. (Beers, 1986, p. 21). Even today, that way of life still exists in some tribes in the forests of New Guinea and Brazil. Toffler refers to that era as the Pre-First Wave (500,000 BCE to about 10,000 BCE).

People were often on the brink of starvation, at least compared to today's standards. Of course, some groups of hunter-gatherers were better off, especially if the land was generous and the food supply, abundant. However, as they moved around constantly, they could not gather huge stores of food to help them survive through droughts, harsh winters, and other vagaries of the weather. They were at the mercy of the elements and the climate. Life in general was precarious.

Then the First Wave hit. It started about 10,000 years ago. People began uncovering some of nature's secrets, such as how to grow food. They learned to gather seeds, till the ground, plant, and harvest. Many of their early crops were the same as today's staples. Beans and maize (corn) were grown in Central and South America. Rice was cultivated in Asia, and wheat and barley, in the Middle East and Africa (Beers, 1986, p. 22). People also began herding certain types of animals, for example, sheep and goats. Progressively, the new knowledge and tools were shared and spread around the world. That was the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution.

Agriculture had a tremendous impact on how people lived. Firstly, it increased the supply of food as the new practices were more efficient than simple gathering. Crops were more plentiful and could be grown more reliably. Domesticated animals were a readily available supply of proteins. Once a herd was built to the point where people could live off the surplus cattle, it became a fully sustainable source of food.

Agriculture forced people to alter their way of life. It took a lot of time and work to prepare the soil for cultivation. Suitable land had to be found and cleared. Seeds had to be gathered and stored over the winter. Because of this, people became increasingly sedentary and began settling around the most fertile areas.

In turn, it allowed them to build storage structures and start accumulating a surplus of food, which would help them get through winters and difficult times and significantly increase their odds of survival. Over time, settlements grew into cities which in turn gave rise to various civilizations.

The ability to accumulate surpluses resulted in another change within society: the concentration of power. As extra food could be amassed, it could also be passed on to the next generation. Stores of grains and herds of cattle could be handed down from parents to children. At birth, humans were no longer starting on an equal footing. Those inheriting huge surpluses had major advantages over others. They could trade surpluses for better tools or additional land and become even more successful. Over time, that process concentrated power and eventually led to the appearance of hierarchies and social classes.

There were obviously the rich (the nobility) and the poor (the peasantry and the slaves), but other classes also evolved. As agricultural practices intensified, tools became more elaborate and demanded more expertise in their fabrication. As well, as some people became wealthy, they no longer needed to make things or do the work themselves. They could just buy them or hire someone. As a result, a certain amount of specialization developed and a new class emerged, the artisans.

Two other groups also came into being from the fact that societies were better off economically and could afford to support more people not directly involved in food production. The military was one of them. The priesthood was the other one.

The First Wave ran its course over a 10,000-year span. It took society from dispersed small bands of humans roaming the land in constant search of food—often just one step ahead of starvation and death—to the vast civilizations and empires of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. Then the Second Wave hit.

Toffler's Second Wave

The Second Wave is closely associated with the Industrial Revolution. Toffler discussed some of its precursors, for example, the extraction of petroleum on a Greek island around 400 BCE. Large population centers were emerging in Asia and South America. Currency systems and trade routes became established in Europe. However, the Second Wave did not really take off until other developments occurred.

In general, agricultural economies were mostly based on self-sufficiency. Eventually, that began changing. Trade expanded. People started concentrating on the production of fewer goods and exchanged them for what they needed. Specialization increased and the division of labor was born. That was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the Second Wave.

Specialization was good in many ways. People were able to do what they could do best. This allowed them to acquire more experience and knowledge relating to their work. Quality and production levels increased. This process culminated with the invention of the assembly line (first implemented by Henry Ford in 1914), in which each worker in a factory specializes in very few steps of a job that is otherwise fairly elaborate.

Specialization and the assembly line led together to mass production, or the fabrication on a large scale of goods that are identical. It gave rise to enormous efficiencies and cost reduction and transformed the agricultural society of the time. Mass production made many of the luxuries reserved for the rich affordable to the masses but rendered factory work somewhat mindless and alienating.

Medieval Markets and Price

Today, we live in a lowest-bidder world. On the one hand, governments, organizations, and companies will generally pick the lowest bids for the contracts they award, assuming everything else is equal. On the other, consumer prices are determined by demand and competition between suppliers in the marketplace.

This was not the case in medieval times, at least in Europe. Prices were fixed by Church authorities and quality—as opposed to quantity—was prioritized. Production standards had to be met and selling a given product for higher than the set price was deemed immoral. So was underpaying for it.

Artisans were organized in guilds, which worked in cooperation with other authorities to set standards. They did not compete against one another—which was viewed as subversive by Church ideology—but cooperated (Baillargeon, 2002, p. 39-40, 68). Religious authorities were heavily involved in shaping economic activities. St. Thomas Aquinas (1235-1274), an influential Catholic theologian (author of Summa Theologica), was a well-known advocate of the just price.

Obviously, society has changed immensely in that respect. Everything nowadays is about efficiency and profits, rather than quality. Where prices are not fixed, consumers haggle in order to pay producers the lowest possible price, and vendors try to get as much as they can for their goods. Companies compete against each other.

Toffler's Third Wave

Toffler places the Third Wave's origins in the 1970s with the first oil crisis. Up until that time, industrialization had reigned supreme. Economies were growing, unemployment was low, and everybody reaped the benefits of the assembly line and mass production. When the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) almost quadrupled the price of oil in 1973, all the euphoria came to a screeching halt.

According to Toffler, this is when industrialization met its first significant challenge, forcing economies to alter their course. They would move away from single and concentrated sources of energy such as fossil fuels to smaller-scale, more varied and dispersed alternatives such as solar and wind power. This is now beginning to take place.

The essence of the Third Wave itself was not about fossil fuels but rather an information age that would change the world in more ways than one. Its influence would extend to all areas of human activity. Rapid communications would enable the decentralization of businesses into satellite offices and eventually lead to the rise of the electronic cottage, the home office. This would reduce unnecessary commuting, therefore decrease pollution and the dependency on foreign sources of energy.

These are just some of the topics covered by Toffler in 1980. The Information Age has transformed just about every aspect of our lives, from the home environment, to the way we learn in school, to access to information, to how we buy the goods and services we need everyday. Unfortunately, it has had little effect on reducing dependency on fossil fuels.

The Fourth Wave

The Fourth Wave might be a little bit more difficult to pin down as it is much broader in scope than the earlier three. Toffler argued that change was happening at a faster pace as time went on. His First Wave took some 10,000 years to run its course before being challenged by the second, which ran for about 350 years. The Third Wave is only about four decades old, but already the world has been entering a new era.

For a few years now, we have been feeling the effects of global warming. Babies in most developed countries are now born with dozens of toxic chemicals and carcinogens in their tissues. Some of the world's renewable resources, for example fisheries, are being lost to overexploitation, environmental damage, and toxicity. Worse, we seem incapable of averting any of it. For decades these problems grew mostly silently, but only now are we really starting to feel their effects.

The Fourth Wave is partly the cumulation of environmental problems and their destructive effects, and partly the potential for reversing those in a dramatic way with targeted changes to the economic system, changes which could translate into an environmental revolution in as little as a decade.

The first book of the Waves of the Future series, The 21st Century Environmental Revolution, argues that we have the means today to bring about an environmental revolution and that it can be done in a financially feasible way. The knowledge already exists, and the economic instruments needed for it are well known and have been tried and tested.

The strategy proposed, the Green Economic Environment (GEE), is essentially revenue neutral, meaning that neither governments nor businesses or taxpayers would have to pay the bill. This would ensure support from all sectors of society and make the approach both economically feasible and politically viable.

The Fourth Wave could transform the world as we know it and lead to a much greener planet and eventually to a sustainable economy, but our failure to act, and to do so decisively with a strategy like the GEE, will result in a continued accumulation of problems and our children living in an increasingly polluted and harmful environment.

The Fifth Wave

While the current situation regarding pollution and greenhouse gases is serious, the depletion of nonfuel minerals (metals) is acutely critical. Unlike fossil fuels, which have alternatives that are fully renewable and available at relatively low prices, metals are generally not substitutable. Once they run out, it is the end of the road. Economically exploitable reserves of nonfuel minerals are not counted in centuries, but in years and decades. Some metals are already in short supply, and most will become scarce, undergoing stiff price increases in a few decades.

To make things worse, the world population is growing rapidly and would continue to do so for decades even if we tried to stop it. It now stands at almost 7 billion people and, according to UN estimates, will not peak until it reaches over 10 billion, assuming a moderate fertility variant (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2010).

Population growth will increase the demand for, among other things, non-renewable resources. Its effect will be to propel us towards a depletion wall, a point at which most minerals will run scarce and see doubling and tripling in prices over very short periods of time. Because metals are non-renewable and not readily replaceable, there will be no way out, only acute shortages getting worse and worse. The Depletion Wall will likely be the worst crisis that the international community has ever faced and could result in a world collapse in the second half of the century.

Resources and the Economy—A Historical Perspective

Humanity has faced many challenges in the past. Centuries ago, wars and epidemics were probably the main sources of concern. In the last few decades, conflicts have remained an issue, but mineral resources have played an increasing role on the world scene. Islamic terrorism makes headlines everyday, but the issue is intimately related to minerals. Oil has played a role in funding it and is an underlying cause of war in the Middle East.

Crashing the World Economy

It is really in 1973—when the first oil crisis hit—that mineral resources began playing a major role in the international arena. The huge increases in the price of petroleum driven by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sent shock waves through the world economy. The rise in the cost of energy meant that not only gasoline but also consumer goods became more expensive.

In response to the hardships created by rising oil prices, governments began borrowing. Trying to catch up or stay abreast with the increasing cost of living, labor unions negotiated contracts that called for wage hikes sometimes in the double digits, which lead to equally high inflation rates.

Many of us will remember this as a time of economic hardships. Interest rates were kept high to reduce inflation but worsened unemployment, which was already at an elevated level. In the 1980s and 1990s, governments ran huge deficits on account of the high interests they paid on their national debts, which, as a result, often mushroomed and even put some countries on the brink of bankruptcy. To bring budgets back into the black, they reduced many of the services, programs, and social benefits.

Crashing the World Economy Again

In 2008, thirty-five years after the first oil crisis, the world economy crashed again. While bankers were generally held responsible for it, some people put a large part of the blame on high oil prices and OPEC. Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets and author of Why Your World Is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller, argued that the rise to unprecedented levels of the price of oil bore a significant part of the blame for the crash. In 2009, he wrote:

Between 2005 and 2007, soaring oil prices transferred roughly a trillion dollars from consumers' wallets throughout the OECD to OPEC producers. And when gasoline prices were $4 per gallon last Memorial Day weekend (or as much as $1.50 per liter in Canada), many North American households found themselves paying more to fill their gas tanks than feed their families. (2009, June 02)

On the one hand, massive amounts of money were taken out of Western and other economies—and the pockets of homeowners— and shipped out express to the Middle East as opposed to being used for mortgage payments or the purchase of local goods which would have created jobs and increased wealth domestically. On the other hand, excessive oil prices drove inflation up, which in turn resulted in significantly higher mortgage rates and caused many homeowners to default on their payments.

While bankers were certainly at fault in managing risks, OPEC's greed in terms of oil prices does bear some of the responsibility for the recent banking crisis. As such, OPEC and resource speculation were at least partly involved in crashing the world economy once again.

In the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis, the environment continues to take a backseat to everything else. World hunger has now passed the one-billion person mark (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2009). The problem gained intensity with the rise in the cost of food from peak oil prices in 2007 and 2008 and then with the subprime mortgage crisis. OPEC has every intention of raising oil prices back up as soon as the current recession is over.

In the last four decades alone, resource shortages and speculation have had a dramatic impact on the world economy and poverty. How much more of this can we take? What happens when most metals start running scarce and speculation kicks in?

We are already decades down the depletion road, with the world economy having crashed twice already on that account. Yet, nobody seems to notice or heed the lessons of the past.

The Baby Boomers' Debt

Since the 1970s, governments have been borrowing heavily to pay for a variety of programs and infrastructural projects. While the North American general government gross debt dropped somewhat in the mid 1990s and early 2000s, it reached over 80% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product, an approximate measure of a country's total annual production) in Canada and stood above 90% of it in the US in 2010. It was also high for most European countries and Japan, for which it reached over 200% (International Monetary Fund, October, 2010, World economic and financial surveys. World economic outlook database).

For decades baby boomers have not been paying their way. Countries started borrowing heavily in the 1970s to solve their financial problems and, with few exceptions, have never stopped doing so since. The idea is to simply pass national debt down to our children. Borrowing money and paying it back is called a loan. Borrowing and not paying back is commonly referred to as theft.

Not only have we, baby boomers, accumulated massive debts at the national level, but we are also responsible for a huge amount of environmental destruction, resulting in the loss and degradation of many resources as well as a huge cleanup bill for, again, our children. Some believe that the world population needs to keep increasing—resulting in further environmental destruction, cleanup bills, depletion of non-renewable resources, and hunger—in order to support the increase in healthcare costs associated with the aging of the baby boomer generation.

The 20th Century's Environmental Record

The 20th century has seen many successes. Medicine, knowledge, and technology have advanced by leaps and bounds. However, environmental contamination and degradation have increased at an alarming rate. Pollutants are found just about everywhere, from newborns' tissues to polar regions.

Mercury is harming the oceans' fisheries. The flesh of beached whales is so toxic that it cannot be disposed of in regular dump sites. A lot of our freshwater systems are also contaminated. And it is only getting worse. Babies are born with dozens of harmful chemicals already in their bodies.

The toxicity of some substances has been common knowledge for centuries. Anne Nadakavukaren (2000), an author and lecturer in environmental health, reported that the harmful effects of lead poisoning were discovered well over two thousand years ago. Mercury was also a known cause of death during the Roman Empire, slaves in Spain suffering the lethal consequences of its fumes in mines (p. 225).

But, we, in the 20th century, were smarter than people in those times. Fuel companies added lead to gasoline to boost its performance, spreading the toxic metal thinly everywhere in our living environment. The practice has been regulated and stopped. However, that it occurred in the first place is aberrant.

As far as mercury is concerned, there is still very little regulation. It is used in many industrial processes, in the pulp and paper industries among others. It is a major problem as the liquid metal evaporates into the atmosphere and spreads around the world. It bioaccumulates (i.e. does not get eliminated through the digestive system) in fish and animals. Native populations in northern Canada—an area that most would think in pristine condition and pollution free—are seriously affected by the problem as their diet depends on fish and ocean mammals, many of which now have significant concentrations of mercury in their tissues.

Despite having known about the danger of mercury for centuries, little has changed. If anything, things are getting worse. Over the decades, its concentration in the environment has increased. The toxic metal is now found in tuna fish—an ocean species that has supported and fed many for centuries—in concentrations high enough to be harmful to pregnant women and young children.

PCBs, a range of toxic compounds, are now pervasive in the environment all around the world, and still being used in closed systems despite their production having been banned in the US in 1976. Nadakavukaren (2000) reported that by that time the contaminant was being detected in almost all the breast milk samples of American women tested (p. 232, 234).

Recent research in the US has shown brominated fire retardants—a known thyroid toxin—to also be present in mothers' milk in surprisingly high concentrations and in all the samples examined (Lunder and Sharp, 2003, September 23).

This is just a snapshot of what is going on. Even more shocking than the data is that we are doing very little about these things. Only the worse issues are addressed. We deal with the tip of the tip of the iceberg, only taking action after much damage has been done.

The conservation of non-renewable resources is even lower down on the priority list. Saving trees is on the news regularly, but who has heard of the depletion crisis? It is not on any government's agenda. On the contrary, the faster we mine metallic resources, the more jobs are created.

The planet has been around for about five billion years and needs to sustain the thousands of generations to come. We do not want to wipe out the world's non-renewable resources on top of the harm we have already done to the environment. The Depletion Wall is perhaps the biggest challenge that this generation and its children will face.

This is what the Fifth Wave is about. Either we will take preemptive action—although time may have already run out for this—and change the very nature of the world economy in order to soften up the impact ahead, or we will hit the Depletion Wall at full speed and reap the consequences of our inaction. One way or the other, the Fifth Wave will transform the world we live in.

Chapter 2

The Green Economic Environment

The first book of the Waves of the Future series, The 21st Century Environmental Revolution, focused on a strategy for the environment and the conservation of non-renewable resources: the Green Economic Environment (GEE).

This chapter will briefly review the approach and discuss its underlying logic, solid economic foundation, and political justification, all of which make the difference between brushing it off as an idealistic plan and realizing that it would be much cheaper and more feasible than other approaches. Unlike most other environmental strategies it addresses the problem of resource depletion in a meaningful way.

The GEE's First Pillar: Resource Conservation

Every ounce of ore that we dig out of the ground every year ends up in the environment. As per the basic law of physics that states that nothing is created nor destroyed, one ton of ore eventually equals one ton of garbage in the environment as metals do not magically disappear after they have been used. Some, such as lead and mercury, are toxic and contaminate land and water. Others are not harmful in themselves but still pose a problem as they eventually end up in landfill sites, when not in the environment at large.

In addition, the mining and transformation of metals into finished goods requires energy—which means the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—and involves a battery of chemicals, many of which are highly toxic. Finally, the disposal of garbage is often a source of pollution as well.

A logical conclusion from this is that reducing our consumption of non-renewable resources would also significantly decrease pollution. As such, conservation would yield a double dividend by reducing our environmental impact and saving resources for future generations.

In other words, we can achieve twice as much as we currently do with the funding and social support that exist at the moment. Conservation must be central in a comprehensive environmental strategy, rather than a secondary goal or a minor issue as it is often the case.

This is the first pillar on which the approach developed in The 21st Century Environmental Revolution is based. If we were able to decrease our consumption of non-renewable resources by 50% over the next decade, garbage would drop by dozens of percentage points and pollution would be significantly reduced. The positive impact on the environment would be staggering in terms of reduced pollution and the massive cut in the amount of garbage produced every day.

The Second Pillar: Revenue Neutrality

The second pillar has to do with funding. Money is always the main stumbling block for many socioeconomic issues, including the environment. Nothing gets done due to a lack of financial support. People do not want to pay more taxes, and governments will not raise those of corporations for both political and economic reasons.

The only way for a comprehensive and effective environmental strategy to ever be implemented is to ensure that nobody has to pay for it, i.e. that it is revenue or cost neutral. This is one of the cornerstones of the Green Economic Environment and what makes it a serious contender in terms of environmental strategy as we go forward.

Designing an approach based on conservation is easy. Developing one that does not cost anything is a different story. Under a GEE system, money would be taken with one hand and given back with the other, taxpayers essentially breaking even in the end. The approach rests on deterrence taxation, such as exists on cigarettes and alcohol in many countries, but handled in a revenue-neutral way.

The underlying principle of the strategy is that, one way or another, taxes have to be collected to pay for social services, roads, the army, and government operations. When income is taxed, only one benefit is derived: the filling of the government's coffers. One million dollars' worth of taxation produces one million dollars' worth of services.

However, if taxes were to come from environmental sources (deterrence levies on toxic chemicals, unenvironmental goods, etc.), two benefits would be derived from the same tax: money to fill the government's coffers and an incentive to protect the environment. One million dollars' worth of taxation would produce one million dollars' worth of services plus one million dollars' worth of deterrence to pollute and waste.

In essence, the strategy would create a new landscape for businesses and people, making unenvironmental goods and behaviors more expensive, therefore acting as a deterrent for what is harmful to the environment and bad for society. Consumers would see themselves compensated for the new levies—which would be charged at the producer level to maximize efficiency—through lower taxation on income and on general retail sales. Revenue neutrality makes the GEE much more politically viable than any other strategy currently available.

Creating a green economic environment has several advantages in addition to revenue neutrality. Deterrence taxation is currently used in many countries. It is well understood and does not conflict with the economy in general. In other words, the GEE is a system that has essentially been tried and tested already.

In terms of firepower for the environment, the potential of the Green Economic Environment is just massive. In 2000, governments' tax take in the US and Canada alone was over two trillion dollars. A significant part of that could easily have come from environmental levies instead of taxes on income and not cost anyone an additional penny.

This is an unheard of amount of deterrence, one that could be used for the environment and one that is available year after year without increasing overall taxation. In fact, most environmental issues are ones of deterrence: we want to deter the use of toxic chemicals, the consumption of non-renewable resources, etc.

In many cases, environmental problems can be addressed by increasing either funding or deterrence. While raising taxes is unpopular, deterrence can be generated at no cost (as a second dividend) simply by shifting taxation. The real beauty of the system and why it would work is that deterrence is essentially free. The GEE would be the first large-scale environmental strategy that could be afforded by both developed and developing countries.

One of the most powerful aspects of the approach is that it works with the economic system and private sector. It does not call for higher taxation or massive spending. Businesses and markets would continue to operate normally, if with slightly modified rules. The levies charged to producers would be passed down to consumers and would not affect the competitiveness of individual businesses within a given industry as they would be charged equally to all.

In a green economic environment, pollution and the depletion of natural resources would no longer be rewarded with profits. What would become lucrative is the conversion to cleaner energy and processes, the elimination of toxic chemicals and their replacement with green alternatives, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the use of environmentally friendly products, the conservation of non-renewable resources, etc.

Under the new structure, the more companies do this, the higher the profits would be. The GEE would transform the worst enemies of the environment and resources—the market system and the industry—into their best allies. The incentive for companies to do better would be continuous (unlike regulations) and move businesses to make the world greener not only up to the minimum standard but beyond it, and do so year after year.

An otherwise destructive economic system would become a large part of the solution to today's environmental problems, a massive and powerful force for the betterment of the world. The strength and spirit of the GEE lies in the idea of restructuring the economy so that there is profit in preserving resources and the environment rather than in destroying them.

The Third Pillar: Depopulation

There is another pillar to the environmental strategy discussed above: depopulation. Fewer people on the planet would result in lower consumption levels and yield triple benefits: less garbage, less pollution, and reduced use of natural resources. As such, depopulation should be as central to an environmental strategy as the conservation of non-renewable resources.

Of course, this does not mean that regulations regarding toxic or harmful chemicals should not be part of an environmental strategy. In fact, they are a component of the GEE but not its mainstay. The conservation of non-renewable resources and depopulation are center stage because they offer respectively two and three times the impact of other strategies. This is an extremely significant factor since national initiatives and international environmental accords often fail over costs and financial matters.

The Failure of the Economic System

It always seems that the world is perpetually hanging on the hopes of an economic recovery or faster growth. If only we had more money, the world's problems could be solved. While this avenue might have been helpful in the past, we have reached a point in history where even economic growth will not help.

Remember the summer of 2008 when the economy was going full steam ahead? The production of biofuels started to compete with food for land. The news headlines talked of food riots on account of a tripling of the price of rice. There are just too many people to feed, and statistics are fairly explicit on the issue. Almost 15% of the world's population doesn't have enough food to meet its nutritional requirements.

In addition to this, economic growth accelerated the depletion of non-renewable resources, resulting in higher mineral prices and inflation. While it might have been the solution in times of plenty, economic expansion will make things worse in a future of diminishing resources.

Everything that we do and consume has an environmental impact. Organic food, for example, may appear to have no negative effect on nature, no environmental footprint. However, the machinery used to harvest crops, whether they are organic or not, is primarily made of metal, the extraction and processing of which has a significant environmental footprint. Goods have to be transported to markets, again with vehicles being made primarily of metal and generally powered by fossil fuels. The farmers that produce organic foods have to live in houses that are made of a number of components that are not always environmentally friendly.

The point is, nobody and nothing is perfectly green although some types of products do have a much smaller environmental footprint. As such, both continued economic expansion and population growth are bad for the environment even in the greenest of worlds.

An aspect of the growth debate is that people in developed countries consume a lot more goods and resources and have a much higher impact on the environment than do individuals in poorer parts of the world. On the other hand, developing countries have some of the largest and fastest-growing populations on the planet.

As such, in either case, rising standards of living will result in a significant increase in consumption levels and have disastrous consequences for both the environment and the depletion of resources. In turn, this will mean higher mineral prices, which will eat away at potential improvements in standards of living. Growth will increasingly be limited in its ability to alleviate problems in the future.

Let's now take a closer look at the past—and a possible future—and see how other societies have collapsed or dramatically declined as a result of their own actions.

PART II

THE ROAD TO SELF-DESTRUCTION

Chapter 3

Causes of the Collapse of Societies

As discussed in the previous chapter, growth in itself is a double-edged sword. It has helped alleviate world problems in the past, but as far as the future is concerned, it will accelerate the depletion of non-renewable resources and lower standards of living.

Oil has shown us what happens to resources when they become scarce: prices increase and standards of living go down. The world economy has already crashed twice on account of petroleum politics. We have already left the era of plenty and begun marching down the road to depletion. Like oil, other minerals will become the object of speculation, international politics, and wars.

We may not feel the pain for a decade or two. But we already live in times of relative scarcity with respect to oil. In 2008, just before the subprime mortgage crisis and under very good economic growth conditions, we experienced high gasoline prices and the fear of food shortages in many countries.

Ironically, the recent recession did provide relief in the price of oil (as well as that of many other minerals), and greenhouse gas emissions decreased as a result of slower economic activity. It looks like the answer to our prayers is now the r word: recession.

Throughout the 20th century, economic expansion was generally synonymous with a betterment of the human condition. The fact that growth is now associated with problems and that recessions offer relief, signals that the world has started on a road of decline, one where traditional solutions will increasingly become ineffective and new ones, desperately needed.

How Societies Collapse

In 2005, Jared Diamond, a professor of Geography at UCLA and award-winning author, wrote a book titled, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It describes how different people in the planet's past and present have knowingly or unknowingly taken actions that have had disastrous consequences, led to a massive decline, or resulted in the collapse of their society.

Diamond reviewed over a dozen cases—including the Maya in Central America, the Anasazi tribes in southern US states, the Greenland Norse, Easter Island, and the Rwandan Genocide—and drew conclusions as to the reasons for their collapses or successful adaptations. He tried to determine the patterns that led to declines so as to make it possible for us to not repeat them in the future.

As the reserves of certain minerals have already passed their peaks and many others are not far behind, perhaps his work will help provide the answers that we need.

Causes of Social Decline and Collapse

Diamond (2005) lists eight causes that have contributed to the decline or collapse of societies in the far and recent past. Three of them have to do with the depletion of natural resources: deforestation (including habitat destruction), overhunting, and overfishing. Three are related to environmental management practices: soil issues (fertility, erosion, salinization), water supply, and the introduction of non-native species. Two are human related: population growth and per capita environmental impact (p. 6).

Below is a review of each of the causes and concrete examples from both the past and the present.

Deforestation and Destruction of Habitats

Most of Diamond's eight causes of decline or collapse are well known issues today, but they are also old foes. For example, hundreds of years ago the depletion of natural resources led to the collapse of Easter Island societies. In this case, massive deforestation, among other things, resulted in soil erosion and the destruction of habitat for many of the species on which they depended for food.

Lower crop yields and reduced animal food sources strained communities and eventually led to wars pitting one tribe against another as well as people against their own ruling elites. Tens of thousands died in what is referred to as an ecocide, a massive number of deaths resulting from an ecological collapse. This case is looked at in more details in the next chapter.

Today, deforestation is a continuing problem in many countries. India, for example, has already lost most of its wooded areas. All over the country, trees were cut down for fuel and other purposes. As a result, most people have had to switch to oil, which, as we know, is problematic in itself.

Nepal's experience with deforestation was even more disastrous as the country's hilly landscape was stripped of its trees. In addition to losing an important economic resource, deforestation resulted in an enormous amount of erosion because the root systems that held the soil on inclines were destroyed. Consequently, trees could not reestablish themselves and grow back. A renewable resource was simply wiped out for good.

Bangladesh is currently facing the same problem, except that in its case, the clear cutting of forests has had much more dire consequences. The deforestation of hillsides prevents the greenery from absorbing the water from the downpours during the monsoon season. The country, already prone to flooding, is being hit much more frequently and severely by floods, resulting in major losses of lives.

The disappearance of the Amazon forest is in the news on a regular basis. Despite decades of warning and advocacy by environmentalists, it continues on unabated. In addition, the Amazon is a huge reserve of biomass. Destroying it not only adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere but also decreases the planet's ability to absorb the gas from the air, worsening global warming problems. Of course, there is also soil erosion, the destruction of animal habitats, and the permanent loss of many plant species unique to the area, many of which could have potential medical uses.

Overfishing and Overhunting

Overfishing and overhunting are contributing factors in many of the cases of societal collapse studied by Jared Diamond. They sometimes lead directly to starvation and death. However, most often they do so indirectly as the result of wars breaking out over diminishing food supplies and resources. Technically, animal food sources should last forever as they are renewable, but they do not when they are overexploited.

For centuries, the Grand Banks off the eastern coast of Canada was one of the richest fishing grounds on the planet. Its cod fishery has now practically been destroyed despite all the modern science and knowledge available relating to species management.

Canada is one of the richest countries in the world. Yet, it was unable to prevent the collapse of one of the most plentiful—and normally fully renewable—resource on the planet, one that was once believed to be inexhaustible. A huge asset and source of economic revenue was lost in but a few decades. If one of the richest countries in the world is unable to manage a resource that is renewable and should normally be plentiful forever, what does that spell for the future of the planet?

As the world population continues to grow, resources will come under even more pressure than they do today. If we are unable to manage them under current economic conditions, how will we be able to do so in the future as the price of many resources increases as a result of scarcity? Is there any reason to believe that governments will do better tomorrow?

Soil and Water Management

Soil, like any other resource, must be managed to maximize its continued productivity. Overuse will result in smaller harvests and nutritionally deficient crops. Chemical fertilizers have made the loss of nutrients less of a critical issue, but we should remember that they are a depletable resource also. In fact, fertilizer prices have gone up significantly in the last decade as a result of increased demand from continued population growth.

All over the world, erosion is a major cause of loss of arable land. Deforestation, clearcutting, and certain farming practices can result in the degradation of cultivable land. Up until the 1970s, the ploughing of fields in the North American prairies often resulted in a significant amount of soil erosion. Fields were left exposed to the elements without root systems to hold the soil in place and prevent it from washing away with every rainfall. The notorious prairie winds blew away top soil, creating dust storms reminiscent of Saudi Arabia's.

Today, many prairie farmers use a number of strategies to prevent their livelihood from being washed away. These include no-till farming practices, the use of special seeding drills that disturb only minimal amounts of soil, and a number of low- or mulch-tillage practices.

Another means by which arable land can be ruined is salinization. This can occur as a result of many factors. A major cause of the problem is when farmers use ground water for irrigation. Unlike rainwater, ground water contains dissolved salts which can build up in soil and make it unsuitable for agriculture.

This ties into the next topic, water management issues. On account of scarcity, population growth, increased industrial usage, as well as quality issues, many countries have to closely monitor their water resources.

Recreational use and both commercial and sport fishing also depend on proper management of water resources, more specifically their protection. Fertilizers and contaminants are probably the main threats in this respect. The large-scale use of chemical nutrients and pesticides in agriculture has greatly increased food production around the world. However, it has also created a number of problems, among them, the contamination of fish from pesticide runoffs and the choking off of rivers and lakes from excess fertilizer draining into waterways and fostering the growth of aquatic vegetation which consumes the oxygen in the water which, in turn, makes it unlivable for fish.

Population Growth

Population growth is discussed at length in chapter 5. As such, the issue will only be briefly outlined here. The basic principle is simple: the more we are on the planet, the more we pollute and the more of its resources we consume.

On the one hand, population growth stresses existing renewable resources—such as land for food production, forestry, and fisheries. On the other hand, a higher demand for manufactured goods increases the depletion rates of non-renewable resources such as metals and shortens the periods of time for which they will last.

The depletion of both renewable and non-renewable resources has played an important role in the decline or collapse of many societies in the past. Little is gained from increasing the world's population. Yet, the numbers keep going up.

Both Canada and the US are actually on a tear to boost their own multitudes in an attempt to offset the impact of the approaching baby boomer retirement wave. It is a questionable direction with undesirable consequences. Russia, whose birthrate has fallen below replacement level, is currently proposing a range of incentives to boost natality.

The Introduction of Non-Native Species

The introduction of foreign species into new environments can have major unintended and destructive consequences. Most of the danger lies in the fact that many non-native plants and animals do not have natural enemies in a new environment, making it possible for them to grow or reproduce out of control, destroying local flora and fauna and creating billions of dollars in damages.

Many of these introductions are unintentional and have occurred simply as a result of the increased trade and traffic between countries over the last few centuries. For example, the zebra mussel, a freshwater mollusk that originates from southeast Russia, spread to European countries in the 1800s and 1900s and has been found in North America—the Great Lakes—more recently. Its introduction is believed to have been accidental, probably through foreign ship ballasts.

The non-native species has proven to be highly destructive, causing ecosystem disruption, harm to native unionid mussels, and damage to harbors, boats, water treatment facilities, and power plants. It is believed to have already cost billions of dollars to the North American economy and is spreading from the Great Lakes to, among others, the Mississippi and Hudson rivers (Zebra mussel, 2006, March 27).

Purple loosestrife is a plant species that has also probably been introduced accidentally to North America and that is causing an enormous amount of damage to the environment. It made the journey from Europe to the east coast of the continent a few centuries ago and has now succeeded in crossing all the way to the other side, California.

The plant actually produces beautiful purple blooms and has been sold as an ornamental for home gardens. However, it is invasive and quickly populates and destroys the habitats of wild birds in marsh lands all over North America. Being non-native, it has very few natural enemies on the continent and is very difficult to control.

Little can be done when new animal or plant types are introduced accidentally. However, some species have been brought into new environments entirely intentionally. A famous example of this is in the 1800s when rabbits were introduced in Australia for hunting purposes. The country's outback turned out to be an ideal environment for them. They bred—like rabbits—as they were intended to, and soon their numbers reached epidemic proportions.

The introduction had unintended consequences. Their burrows undermine farmland, making it difficult to cultivate and causing soil erosion. They damage vegetation, among other things by chewing bark rings at the base of trees and eating seedlings, and outcompete many native species of small animals for the limited amount of food available—especially during droughts and after wildfires.

Four Modern Causes of Social Decline or Collapse

In addition to the eight causes discussed above, Diamond (2005) described four modern ones that may lead to the decline or collapse of societies: climate change as a result of human activity, toxic chemical buildup, shortages of energy, and reaching maximum photosynthetic capacity (p. 7).

With global warming making news on a regular basis, most of us are already familiar with climate change issues. Unusual weather patterns, higher tornado activity, and the many disasters—including the destruction of New Orleans—that are increasingly being blamed on climate change. While societies of the past were largely victims of weather occurrences that had nothing to do with them, the current phase of climate change is believed to be the result of human activity(anthropogenic climate change).

The list of man-made and other chemical compounds entering our waterways everyday is endless. Some are highly toxic, others slowly accumulate in the environment. Some eventually breakdown, a few bioaccumulate in living organisms and concentrate up the food chain to come back to haunt us. Mercury, for example, is toxic to the human nervous system. It evaporates and, for that reason, is found in most lakes, rivers, and oceans where it metabolizes into organic form and concentrates in fish.

In North America, most predatory fish in rivers and lakes contain a certain quantity of mercury. Over time, the amount will only continue to increase—along with other chemicals—and eventually destroy the sport and commercial fisheries of many species. We are already a long way down that road. Today, most North American states and provinces have advisories recommending limits on the consumption of certain types of fish. Tuna made news headlines in 2005. It was found to contain levels of mercury high enough for governments to recommend that pregnant women avoid or limit its consumption.

There is still very little regulation affecting mercury. And, we keep adding a lot of it to the atmosphere every year through mining activities and the burning of medical waste and coal, among other things. The problem will only grow. More fish species will be affected if nothing is done, and major economic resources on which many communities depend are going to be lost.

The slow buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment is a reality that we have to deal with. The road we are currently on ultimately leads to the destruction of many world fisheries and the process has already started. This is not an extreme scenario; it is very real.

Energy shortages are old news. We have seen the consequences of scarcity: price hikes, speculation, economic crashes, the shift of power to unstable parts of the world, wars fought to secure continued supply, etc.

The shift to renewable and generally cleaner energies has already started. However, countries have different abilities to make it happen. These depend on the local availability of alternative energy sources, the finances to purchase the technology, etc. As such, for some of them, energy shortages will remain a possible cause of decline.

As we gradually shift to renewable supplies, how will economies change? Some types of energy will have implications for our future. Biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) come from the agribusiness sector—desirably or not—and compete for acreage with food production. We already saw what that translated into in 2008 with respect to the price of rice.

Most countries only have a certain amount of arable land. Bioengineering will also come to the rescue, but science has its own limits. Eventually, the photosynthetic capacity of the earth (the capacity of plant life to transform sunlight into vegetal matter) and our ability to derive energy and food from the land will reach a ceiling: we will no longer be able to increase production to meet demand. This is Diamond's fourth threat to modern societies.

Obviously, this is not going to happen tomorrow and will depend to a large extent on the size of the world's population. The photosynthetic capacity is one resource among others. As we deplete it, we will run into shortages. Competition and conflicts over it will develop as they do for other resources.

The Combination of Multiple Causes

Most of the causes or factors discussed above do not occur alone or in isolation. Rarely is one going to be the single reason for the collapse of a society. They generally combine, often in unexpected ways.

A resource-rich region may have been able to face a significant amount of adversity—for example, the loss of an important source of food as a result of a forest fire—and survive. However, one that was barely able to make a living off the land would have collapsed under the same circumstances.

In the same way, as related by Diamond (2005), a society having significantly depleted its resources could sustain itself under benign climate conditions, but collapse when those became less favorable (p. 13). In such a case, adverse or erratic weather patterns would not be the cause of disaster but rather the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

Different factors can combine together and have disastrous consequences. Think, for example, in the summer of 2008 when economic growth was high, oil prices were skyrocketing—affecting not only energy but also the cost of food—and land was being converted to biofuel production. Many feared widespread famine. Of course, the worst did not happen but only because a glitch in the system, the subprime mortgage crisis, saved the day by rapidly cooling off economies around the world?

Victims of Our Own Successes and Tainted Solutions

One could add to Diamond's arguments that societies are also often the victims of their own successes and the use of tainted solutions. Without the Green Revolution which greatly boosted agricultural production in the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s, food shortages would have increased and countries would have been forced to address the issue of population growth. However, scientific advances (chemical fertilizers and pesticides) resulted in a huge increase in agricultural output, which decreased the need for addressing it.

The world population went from three billion in 1960 to almost seven billion in but a few decades. Now, instead of three billion people with full stomachs and ample surpluses, there are fears of famine again... despite all the scientific and technological advances. In many ways, we are victims of our own successes.

The Green Revolution, although heralded as a success, failed in many respects. It did not address the root cause of the problem, population growth, and was based on a number of tainted solutions: the dependency on depletable fertilizers, the use of chemical pesticides, and non-organic farming practices which have resulted in the loss of arable land, all of which are now coming back to haunt us.

At this point in time, many countries have little choice but to resort to even more tainted solutions in order to alleviate the hunger problem, for example, the use of bioengineered crops or products whose long-term effects are still unknown.

Ironically, the one thing that has remained intact through the Green Revolution is population growth. History has shown time and again a pattern of people in denial and refusing to recognize a new reality. They fail to properly address problems, but eventually these come to a head.

Diamond (2005) provides several examples in which a combination of factors, environmental and otherwise, led to the total collapse of entire societies, a recent example of this being the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (see chapter 8). While total collapse or a massive number of deaths may not be in the cards for most countries, declines can be very dramatic. Just think of the fall out from the subprime mortgage crisis and of the teetering of the EU economy on account of mounting national debts.

Societies are generally perceived as having long lives with progressive slowdowns towards the end. However, Diamond (2005) challenged that idea, arguing that many of them have actually lived through very rapid declines after having reached their climaxes and that the experience must have been dramatic and shocking to them, the worst cases leading to everybody leaving a community or dying if that was not an option (p. 6).

Problems are piling up and are starting to combine. The world population has more than doubled since 1965, pressuring resources. Chemical fertilizers and oil have gone up in price substantially, increasing the cost of food. Land continues to be lost to erosion, and contaminants are degrading food sources like fisheries. Is the perfect storm brewing? Will the Green Revolution ultimately result in more people starving? Or, has it already?

What Does the Future Hold?

Diamond (2005) does not suggest that we are heading for a total collapse of the contemporary world. In his view, globalization (mutual support), modern medicine, and technology put us at a significantly lower risk than societies of the past. However, some of the same factors—technology in its unintended destructive applications and globalization in its mutual dependency aspect—as well as others, such as population growth, simultaneously put us at greater risks (p. 8).

To these, add the threats posed by arms of mass destruction—whether nuclear, biological, or other. Mutually assured self-destruction remains a significant issue despite the progress made in the recent past. While things are relatively quiet now, they could easily flare up again as a result of competition for dwindling resources and the prospect of increased starvation.

Terrorism remains a significant concern, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As well, Iran and North Korea stand out for their destabilizing influence on world peace. Pakistan will likely remain problematic into the future because of the threat of its nuclear arsenal falling into the wrong hands.

What is certain at this point in time is that there will have to be renewed and continued efforts on the part of governments and societies to minimize conflicts when they occur, foster stability, and promote tolerance and diversity.

Diamond (2005) himself argued that a collapse of modern society is improbable and that a worst case scenario would likely mean a significant economic decline, lower standards of living, growing insecurity, the propagation of diseases worldwide, and the spread of wars from competition over scarce resources. He also argued that some of our core values could be undermined as a result of eventual declines (p. 7).

While societies might not collapse, the reality of declines can still be very unpleasant. Resource scarcity would lead to price increases, interest rates would be raised by central banks, consumers would reduce spending, and governments would cut back services and social programs in order to prevent deficits from rising, both of which serving to push unemployment up.

The scenario is in part similar to what happened in the 1980s and 1990s. This time, however, there would be no light at the end of the tunnel because not only oil but also a range of other resources would become scarce. As well, governments' debts are now significantly higher than they were at that time, and most countries keep adding to them every year. The world would increasingly become polarized as a result of competition over dwindling resources. Alliances would shift, bringing instability to many areas. Regional disputes would occur here and there, especially in poorer parts of the world. Scarcity would also put wind in the sails of terror. Larger conflicts could develop out of it.

The massive and growing seven-billion-people consumption machine would continue to plough forward and progressively wipe out the planet's resources. Although there might be ups for short periods of time, the future would be one of difficult economics and decreasing prospects for world peace.

Some of the above is already happening on account of oil, which points to us the road we are currently on unless we change direction. What will happen when metals become scarce one after the other? Unlike oil, their depletion is a one-way process. A smooth incline to higher priced alternatives is not what awaits us at the end of that road: a brick wall is.

When we reach that point in time, world tensions as a result of scarcity and falling standards of living will peak and create a much more explosive situation. Will the planet survive a stress level 10 or 20 times higher than that created by oil scarcity? Will social capital (tolerance, cooperation, constructiveness, stability, etc.) match that increase? Could we avoid a collapse even today if we were hit by another world economic crash? Many systems are stretched to the breaking point.

The Human Factor

Jared Diamond used a set of five factors as framework for the analysis of his case studies. The first two have to do with the physical aspects of a particular situation: damage to the environment and climate change. The other three are human in nature.

In difficult times, neighboring communities can play either a hostile or amicable role in a developing crisis, potentially speeding up or averting disaster. Current world crises provide many examples of the two factors. For instance, many Muslim countries have supported the fight against Islamism and terrorism. Conversely, Pakistan was blamed on several occasions by both Afghanistan and the US for providing safe haven to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

The third human factor, and probably the most important, in analyzing how societies fail or succeed is the way they face problems. A lot can be done to avert disasters. Many of the cases of decline and collapse studied by Diamond were not caused solely by environmental factors. Certainly, these exacerbated and aggravated existing conditions but were only a part of the story. Many of the problems were initially caused by people themselves or could have been handled successfully had appropriate and timely action been taken.

Diamond (2005) did not only showcase declines and collapses but also showed examples of societies that have successfully adapted to unfavorable changes in their environment. For example, he compared the success of the Dominican Republic to the failure of Haiti, both countries being halves of the same island but having seen very different outcomes in terms of social and economic development.

He also studied and compared Norse Greenland—a society that totally collapsed through a complex set of factors, some of which environmental, others human, cultural, economic, and political—to the Inuit societies that survived in the same environment. That one collapsed and the other did not suggests that there is a definite human factor in the fate of societies, and declines or collapses are not entirely environmentally determined.

The fact that the success or failure of a society is not exclusively a factor of outside conditions implies that they could be averted through appropriate action and intervention. That was the whole point of Diamond's work: studying the mistakes of other societies in order to not repeat them ourselves and find out what has worked in the past and could be used in building the future.

The next chapter will take a close look at two of the cases studied by Diamond. The first, Easter Island, occurred centuries ago but is a perfect example of a society that depleted all of its resources and eventually collapsed into wars and overthrew its elites. The second, the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, is a very contemporary and poignant example. It is generally perceived as a racial and tribal-based conflict. However, there was much more to it than what came through the mass media, and many important lessons can be drawn for the future from that horrific occurrence.

Chapter 4

The Easter Island Road

Easter Island is probably better known for the mysterious, alien-looking, massive statues called moai carved out of its volcanic rock and once erected all over its landscape.

Another part of the mystery of Easter Island is that out of a total of slightly less than 900 statues, almost half were found left unfinished in the inner walls of the Rano Raraku volcano crater where they were sculpted. Much research has been done since the first European contact, and what may have happened is now better understood.

Easter Island as Discovered by Europeans

Easter Island belongs to Chile but is located at the eastern edge of the Polynesian group of islands and lies in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. Its size is relatively small, about 63 square miles, and the island is believed to have been first inhabited around A.D. 300-400 by Polynesians who migrated from other islands in the west in search of new land to inhabit.

Easter Island's current total population is slightly below 4,000 people (Easter Island, 2006, May 11). Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), is one of the better sources of historical information on it for those who may want to get more details. The following reviews some of his work and conclusions on the subject.

In 1722, Jakob Roggeveen was the first European to land in that strange and enigmatic place. Some 500 moai dotted a landscape that was bare of any large tree capable of providing the timber or ropes necessary to transport or erect the massive statues. Only saplings and small trees were found. They did not exceed 10 feet in height and were dispersed around the island.

The withered and scorched vegetation was initially mistaken for sand by Roggeveen and gave the island an air of desolation and aridity (Diamond, 2005, p. 81). It is estimated that the local population numbered between 2000 and 3000 at the time. There was no timber for construction or the making of sea-going canoes. There were no wild land birds and few, if any, animals to hunt to supply the islanders' diet. Chicken was the only species of domestic animals.

Without sturdy canoes, the tuna fish and porpoises available in the area could not supplement the islanders' diet as they did in other Polynesian islands. As a result, people subsisted mainly on “sweet potatoes, yams, taro, bananas, and sugarcane” (Diamond, 2005, p. 90) in addition to the chickens they raised and some fish and shellfish.

What Really Happened on Easter Island?

Diamond (2005) writes that a number of researchers tried to estimate the highest population level that Easter Island had ever been able to reach at any one point in time. The numbers they came up with were somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000 people.

The huge discrepancy comes from the fact that no official record exists in that respect. The estimates had to be calculated from other sources, for example, by looking at the number of house foundations over the island or the area of land under cultivation.

Diamond favors population estimates in the higher part of the range for a number of reasons, among them evidence of intensive agricultural practices (p. 91). The overall picture suggests that Easter Island had been able to support a much larger population than it did when Europeans first arrived.

The massive stone works—finished and in progress—also pointed to the same conclusion as well as at a fairly bountiful land rather than a desolate barrenness. In addition to the massive statues, the island also featured large numbers of ahu or huge stone bases on which moai were often erected.

Neither ahu nor moai were essential for survival. This indicated that Easter Islanders were able to produce significant surpluses from the land, enough to provide for basic needs as well as for the large number of people involved in the stoneworks. In other words, everything pointed to an island that was not the poorly populated wasteland Roggeveen had found upon his arrival.

One of the major puzzles with respect to the island was how the gigantic statues dotting its landscape had been transported. According to Diamond (2005), the most plausible way involved a traditional method called canoe ladders. Those were essentially two rails of heavy timber connected together with wooden rungs. They were laid flat on the ground, and trees, canoes, or any other heavy piece needing to be transported was simply dragged along it.

The theory was tested and proved that moai attached to wooden sleds and hauled on canoe ladders could be transported this way over long distances (Diamond, 2005, p. 100-101). With sloping ramps and leveraging techniques that were already part of the local tradition, a demonstration carried out by islanders themselves proved that erecting the heavy statues could be done without modern technology.

The theory above leaves us with one problem: the absence on the island of the large trees needed to produce the heavy timber for this type of operation. Because of the massive weights involved, a large number of sturdy and heavy pieces of lumber would have been needed to build all of the ladders on which statues were dragged as well as the wooden sleds to which they were attached.

Archaeological research helps us answer many of our questions.

Bone Studies

Archaeological studies of bones found on Easter Island explain many of its mysteries. The small land mass in the middle of the Pacific had apparently featured six native species of birds, two of them resembling chickens. Their bones having been found in the domestic garbage of early settlements indicated that they were a significant part of the islanders' diet.

The research also showed that another 25 species of seabirds nested on the island and contributed to the locals' food sources, “making it formerly the richest breeding site in all of Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific” (Diamond, 2005, p. 104).

That abundance is explained in part by the absence of predators on the island prior to its being settled, at which point humans and rats entered the picture with disastrous consequences. Today, 24 of these species have vanished from Easter Island.

In addition, over 30% of the bones studied were found to be of Common Dolphins, which are a relatively large species (up to 165 pounds or 75 kilograms) and usually live away from the coast, requiring to be fished or hunted with sea-going vessels. This, in turn, implied that Easter Island had once featured the large trees necessary to make them (Diamond, 2005, p. 105). What happened to them?

Pollen Studies

The study of pollen grains found in core samples drilled in swamps on Easter Island revealed other things. Individual geological layers were examined in order to identify the species of trees and vegetation that had existed in the past. According to Diamond (2005), studies found palm pollen grains to be plentiful in the samples collected.

Further discoveries in solidified lava revealed palm nuts and a fossilized palm trunk surpassing seven feet in diameter. Today, the biggest tree in the species—the Chilean wine palm—reaches only three feet across and 65 feet in height. None of those giant trees are left on the island today.

Palm trees would have been valuable not only for their timber but also for a number of other things as well. For example, the nuts of the Chilean species are edible. The sap of the tree can be collected and fermented into a drink or concentrated into sweet products. Its fronds can be used for many purposes, including roof thatching and the weaving of household goods such as baskets (p. 103).

Charcoal Studies

Another way that researchers approached the issue of plant species on Easter Island was through the study of coal fragments in core samples drilled into the middens and ovens that had once been on the island.

Their study showed another 16 species of plants having vanished from Easter Island since its early human occupation, many of which were believed to have had significant value for the islanders, for example, for making sturdy ropes and cloth, for their edible fruits, for construction material or combustible, etc. (Diamond, 2005, p. 104).

Research showed that the island had a diverse forest capable of sustaining a variety of species—of which almost all have now disappeared. It supplied the rope and timber for the statue-making industry as well as the food surpluses needed to support the large class of people (carvers, infrastructure builders, etc.) involved in the stoneworks.

The Easter Island Road

What happened exactly on Easter Island? Obviously, there is no absolute answer to that question because of the lack of written records. However, a lot can be ascertained or inferred with a fair degree of accuracy from the research that was done.

As coal fragments of the tree species discussed in the previous section were found in core samples from ancient ovens and garbage heaps, it can be concluded that one of their uses was for firewood. In addition, during a certain period of their history, Easter Islanders cremated the bodies of their dead as evidenced by the presence of crematoria and the human remains in them. A large quantity of wood would have been required as fuel for that purpose alone.

Research also suggests that many of the trees on the island had been cleared to make way for a number of crops. Larger ones would have been cut down to make the ropes and canoe ladders to support the stoneworks. They would also have been used in the fabrication of sea-going canoes as the abundance of porpoises in the islanders' diet suggests.

Over time, the heavy consumption of the resource and land clearing combined to bring about the extinction of many kinds of trees and of all the large ones in particular. Diamond (2005) qualified what happened on Easter Island as the “most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific” (p. 107).

With the devastation of their habitat, combined with overhunting and rats (introduced by newcomers to the island), some animal species disappeared. Others were greatly weakened. Overhunting and rats probably finished many of them off. All native land birds on Easter simply disappeared, while 24 out of the 25 seabird species having once nested on the island became extinct.

Without large trees to make sea-going canoes, more food sources were lost simply for their being out of reach. The deforestation also led to erosion and a decrease in soil fertility, both of which contributing to a reduction in crop yields at a time when other food resources were themselves dwindling.

Timeline

Most of the above is thought to have occurred roughly between A.D. 900 and 1722, when Roggeveen landed to find a sparsely populated land that was barren and desolate. More specifically, evidence places the extinction of the giant palms beginning around 1400 in the areas believed to have been deforested first and concluding by 1500. Most trees had vanished by 1640 as their disappearance—and subsequent replacement by grasses—in oven core samples indicates (Diamond, 2005, p. 106-107).

Population

From the housing densities in several digs, it was determined that Easter Island's population would have peaked some time between 1400 and 1600. In the following 300 years, a pretty dramatic scenario would have unfolded, the total number of people on the island dropping by 70%.

The population presumably became increasingly faced with starvation from the loss of food resources and eventually turned to cannibalism. Domestic garbage piles in that period frequently featured human bones having been cracked very likely to extract the marrow. Oral tradition also supports that turn of events.

It is believed that around 1680—only four decades after the completion of the deforestation—people finally revolted against their own leaders, and the whole island descended into chaos and civil wars. The statues that had hitherto been the pride of individual clans stopped being carved and erected. As the gods had failed to deliver the bounty that had come to be expected, people toppled their idols, placing slabs of stone at strategic weak points so that they would break in their fall (Diamond, 2005, p. 109-110).

In but a few centuries, the people of Easter Island simply self-destructed, not from their failure to settle the land but from their success at it—as testified by earlier high population levels and the development of luxury industries like the statue stoneworks—and the subsequent depletion of the natural resources that supported them.

The Road to Self-Destruction

Diamond (2005) lists a number of causes for the collapse of the societies he studied, “failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it” (p. 438).

Where do we fit in that list?

Copyright Waves of the Future, ©2012

More information: USGS Mineral Tables Degrowth Limits to Growth World Population Growth Alvin Toffler