No Light at the End of the Tunnel

The New York Times had a great op-ed yesterday by Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
Diamond writes:


When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case.

You really should read the whole article but below are the primary lessons that Diamond teaches:

1. Take environmental problems seriously.
If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today.

2. Beware of bad group decision making.
There are a multitude of reasons why societies make bad decisions, and thereby fail to solve or even to perceive the problems that eventually destroy them. It sometimes involves conflicts of interest, where one group can profit by engaging in practices to detriment of the society as a whole. Another is focusing on short-term gain at the expense of long-term survival such as overfishing or irrigation to the point of salinization and sterile land.

3. Don't let the elite insulate itself from the consequences of its actions.
"That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies, they themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape."

4. Be willing to re-examine core values in the face of changing conditions.

Diamond brings all of these points together in an assessment of the U.S today:

Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world.
Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last minute.
But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk - particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops.

A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect American lives.

I think it is pretty obvious that we've lost our status as "leader of the free world," a position we still held when Bill Clinton was president. I really don’t think the rest of the world is thinking George Bush is going to lead us forward. You can look at the “dance of the aid promises” this week and see the evidence of that.

We can’t honestly say we are a super power anymore with our forces so stretched and demoralized.

We can’t point to a robust economy any longer and virtually every non-political economist of any worth is actually saying that the U.S. economy is going to crash soon.

In the last election, 49 percent of us voted for peace and sustainability; 51 percent voted to self-destruct.
The only thing that can save us now is a revolution and I don’t see that coming anytime soon. As they, get ready to hold on to your ass ‘cause the ride is going to be wild.