The end of civilization
By Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist, 5 April 2008
We believe our global, technological society is immune to collapse. If only it were true. As the networks that connect us become ever more intricate and finely-tuned, modern civilization is becoming increasingly vulnerable. In this article, Debora MacKenzie reports on whether a devastating pandemic could have knock-on effects serious enough to bring the entire system down. In “Are we doomed?,” we consider an even more disturbing question: does the very nature of civilization make its collapse inevitable?
For years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will die. As terrible as this will be, on an evermore crowded planet, you can’t help wondering whether the survivors might be better off in some ways. Wouldn’t it be easier to rebuild modem society into something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer of us.
Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their nightmare scenarios – a plague like ebola or smallpox – as “civilization ending”. Surely they are exaggerating. Aren’t they?
Many people dismiss any talk of collapse as akin to the street-corner prophet warning that the end is nigh. In the past couple of centuries, humanity has innovated its way past so many predicted plagues, famines and wars – from Ma to Dr. Strangelove – that anyone who takes such ideas seriously tends to be labeled a doom-monger.
There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale, complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse. “It’s an argument so ingrained both in our subconscious and in public discourse that it has assumed the status of objective reality,” writes biologist and geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, author of the 2005 book Collapse. “We think we are different.”
A growing number of researchers, however, are coming to the conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society is becoming ever more vulnerable (see page 30). In a severe pandemic, the disease might only be the start of our problems.
No scientific study has looked at whether a pandemic with a high mortality could cause social collapse – at least none that has been made public. The vast majority of plans for weathering a pandemic all fail even to acknowledge that crucial systems might collapse, let alone take it into account.
There have been many pandemics before, of course. In 1348, the Black Death killed about a third of Europe’s population. Its impact was huge, but European civilization did not collapse. After the Roman empire was hit by a plague with a similar death rate around AD 170, however, the empire tipped into a downward spiral towards collapse. Why the difference? In a word: complexity.
In the 14th century, Europe was a feudal hierarchy in which more than 50 per cent of the population were peasant farmers. Each death removed a food producer, but also a consumer, so there was little net effect. “In a hierarchy, no one is so vital that they can’t be easily replaced,” says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute In Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Monarchs died, but life went on.”
The Roman empire was also a hierarchy, but with a difference: it had a huge urban population – not equaled in Europe until modem times – which depended on peasants for grain, taxes and soldiers. “Population decline affected agriculture, which affected the empire’s ability to pay for the military, which made the empire less able to keep invaders out,” says anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter at the University of Utah. “Invaders in turn further weakened peasants and agriculture.”
A high-mortality pandemic could trigger a similar result now, Tainter says. “Fewer consumers mean the economy would contract, meaning fewer jobs, meaning even fewer consumers. Loss of personnel in key industries would hurt too.”
Individuals matter
Bar-Yam thinks the loss of key people would be crucial. “Losing pieces indiscriminately from a highly complex system is very dangerous,” he says. “One of the most profound results of complex systems research is that when systems are highly complex, individuals matter.”
The same conclusion has emerged from a completely different source: tabletop “simulations” in which political and economic leaders work through what would happen as a hypothetical flu pandemic plays out. “One of the big ‘Aha!’ moments is always when company leaders realize how much they need key people,” says Paula Scalingi, who runs pandemic simulations for the Pacific Northwest economic region of the US. “People are the critical infrastructure.”
Especially vital are “hubs” – the people whose actions link all the rest. Take truck drivers. When a strike blocked petrol deliveries from the UK’s oil refineries for 20 days in 2000, nearly a third of motorists ran out of fuel, some train and bus services were canceled, shops began to run out of food, hospitals were reduced to running minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, and bodies went unburied. Afterwards, a study by Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, predicted huge economic losses and a rapid deterioration in living conditions if all road haulage in the UK shut down for just a week.
What would happen in a pandemic when many truckers are sick, dead or too scared to work? Even if a pandemic is relatively mild, many might have to stay home to care for sick family or look after children whose schools are closed. Even a small impact on road haulage would quickly have severe knock-on effects.
One reason is just-in-time delivery. Over the past few decades, people who use or sell commodities from coal to aspirin have stopped keeping large stocks, because to do so is expensive. They rely instead on frequent small deliveries.
Cities typically have only three days’ worth of food, and the old saying about civilizations being just three or four meals away from anarchy is taken seriously by security agencies such as MI5 in the UK. In the US, plans for dealing with a pandemic call for people to keep three weeks’ worth of food and water stockpiled. Some planners think everyone should have at least 10 weeks’ worth. How long would your stocks last if shops emptied and your water supply dried up? Even if everyone were willing, US officials warn that many people might not be able to afford to stockpile enough food.
Hospitals rely on daily deliveries of drugs, blood and gases. “Hospital pandemic plans fixate on having enough ventilators,” says public health specialist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who has been calling for broader preparation for a pandemic. “But they’ll run out of oxygen to put through them first. No hospital has more than a two-day supply.” Equally critical is chlorine for water purification plants.
It’s not only absentee truck drivers that could cripple the transport system; new drivers can be drafted in and trained fairly quickly, after all. Trucks need fuel, too. What if staff at the refineries that produce it don’t show up for work?
“We think that if we can make people feel safe about coming to work, we’ll have about 25 per cent staff absences if we get a flu pandemic like the one in 1918,” says Jon Lay, head of global emergency preparedness for ExxonMobil. If that happens, then by postponing non-essential tasks, and making sure crucial suppliers also hang tough, “we can maintain the supply of products that are critical to society”.
Some models, however, suggest absenteeism sparked by a 1918-type pandemic could cut the workforce by half at the peak of a pandemic wave. “If we have 50 per cent absences, it’s a different story,” says Lay, who says his company has not modeled the impact of absence on that scale. And what if a pandemic is worse than 1918?
All the companies that provide the critical infrastructure of modern society – energy, transport, food, water, telecoms – face similar problems if key workers fail to turn up. According to US industry sources, one electricity supplier in Texas is teaching its employees “virus avoidance techniques” in the hope that they will then “experience a lower rate of flu onset and mortality” than the general population. The fact is that the best way for people to avoid the virus will be to stay home. But if everyone does this – or if too many people try to stockpile supplies after a crisis begins – the impact of even a relatively minor pandemic could quickly multiply.
Planners for pandemics tend to overlook the fad that modern societies are becoming ever more tightly connected, which means any disturbance can cascade rapidly through many sectors. For instance, many businesses – including New Scientist’s parent company – have contingency plans that count on some people working online from home. Models show there won’t be enough bandwidth to meet demand, says Scalingi.
And what if the power goes off? This is where the complex interdependencies could prove disastrous. Refineries make diesel fuel not only for trucks but also for the trains that deliver coal to electricity generators, which now usually have only 20 days’ reserve supply, Osterholm notes. Coal-fired plants supply 30 per cent of the UK’s electricity, 50 percent of the US’s and 85 per cent of Australia’s.
The coal mines need electricity to keep working. Pumping oil through pipelines and water through mains also requires electricity. Making electricity depends largely on coal; getting coal depends on electricity; they all need refineries and key people; the people need transport, food and clean water. If one part of the system starts to fail, the whole lot could go. Hydro and nuclear power are less vulnerable to disruptions in supply, but they still depend on highly trained staff.
Powerless
With no electricity, shops will be unable to keep food refrigerated even if they get deliveries. Their tills won’t work either. Many consumers won’t be able to cook what food they do have. With no chlorine, water-borne diseases could strike just as it becomes hard to boil water. Communications could start to break down as radio and TV broadcasters, phone systems and the internet fall victim to power cuts and absent staff. This could cripple the global financial system, right down to local cash machines, and will greatly complicate attempts to maintain order and get systems up and running again.
Even if we manage to struggle through the first few weeks of a pandemic, long-term problems could build up without essential maintenance and supplies. Many of these problems could take years to work their way through the system. For instance, with no fuel and markets in disarray, how do farmers get the next harvest in and distributed?
As a plague takes hold, some countries may be tempted to close their borders. But quarantine is not an option any more. “These days, no country is self-sufficient for everything,” says Lay. “The worst mistake governments could make is to isolate themselves.” The port of Singapore, a crucial shipping hub, plans to close in a pandemic only as a last resort, he says. Yet action like this might not be enough to prevent international trade being paralyzed as other ports dose for fear of contagion or for lack of workers, as ships’ crews sicken and exporters’ assembly lines grind to a halt without their own staff, power, transport or fuel and supplies.
Osterholm warns that most medical equipment and 8 percent of US pharmaceuticals are made abroad, and this is just the start. Consider food packaging. Milk might be delivered to dairies if the cows get milked and there is fuel for the trucks and power for refrigeration, but it will be of little use if milk carton factories have ground to a halt or the cartons are an ocean away.
“No one in pandemic planning thinks enough about supply chains,” says Osterholm. “They are long and thin, and they can break.” When Toronto was hit by SARS in 2003, the major surgical mask manufacturers sent everything they had, he says. “If it had gone on much longer they would have run out.”
The trend is for supply chains to get ever longer, to take advantage of economies of scale and the availability of cheap labor. Big factories produce goods more cheaply than small ones, and they can do so even more cheaply in countries where labor is cheap.
Lay points to recent hurricanes in the US and the 2005 fire at the Buncefield oil depot in the UK as examples of severe disruptions to the normal supply chain. In all of these instances, he points out, supplies from refineries were maintained. But those disasters were localized, and help could come from unaffected places nearby.
Disaster planners usually focus on single- point events of this kind: industrial accidents, hurricanes or even a nuclear attack. But a pandemic happens everywhere at the same time, rendering many such plans useless. “There are numerous assumptions behind our conclusions,” Lay admits. “If they prove to be flawed, we could struggle?”
The main assumption is how serious a pandemic could be. Many national plans are based on mortality rates from the mild 1957 and 1968 pandemics. “No government pandemic plans consider the possibility that the death rate might be higher than in 1918,” says Tim Sly of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.
Even a rerun of 1918 could be bad enough. In a 2006 study, economist Warwick McKibbin of the Lowry Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues based their “worst-case” scenario on the same death rate as in 1918. The result, their model predicts, would be 142 million deaths worldwide, leading to a massive global economic slowdown that would wipe out 12.6 per cent of global GDP.
This scenario assumes around 3 three per cent of those who fall ill die. Of all the people known to have caught H5N1 bird flu so far, 63 per cent have died. “It seems negligent to assume that H5N1, if it goes pandemic, will necessarily become less deadly,” says Sly. And flu is far from the only viral threat we face.
The ultimate question is this: what if a pandemic does have huge knock-on effects? What if many key people die, and many global balancing acts are disrupted? Could we get things up and running again? “Much would depend on the extent of the population decline,” says Tainter. “Possibilities range from little effect to a mild recession to a major depression to a collapse.”
Are we doomed?
The very nature of civilization may make its demise inevitable, says Debora MacKenzie
Doomsday. The end of civilization. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilization in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?
Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow; a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see page 28). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilization means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can – we must – act now to keep disaster at bay.
History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilization and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. “It’s not about saving the planet. It’s about saving civilization,” he says.
Others think our problems run deeper.
From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. “For the past 10,000 years, problem-solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies,” says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies.
If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organize dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
Diminishing returns
There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organization imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realized, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labor – or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare – diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.
To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle – and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organized on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.
Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilizations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilizations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart.
Western industrial civilization has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and diseases – the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. “Since problems are inevitable,” Tainter warns, “this process is in part ineluctable.”
Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organizations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighboring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organized.
“To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing,” Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.
This shift to decentralized networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. “I don’t foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity,” says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. “Our strength is in our highly-distributed decision making.” This, he says, makes modem western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralized.
Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down. “Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn’t.”
As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. “Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways,” says Bar-Yam. “This is not widely understood.”
The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. “The intricate networks that tightly connect us together – and move people, materials, information, money and energy – amplify and transmit any shock,” says Homer-Dixon. “A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilizing effects, from one side of the world to the other.”
For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
Credit crunch
Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where “a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere”. This is especially true of the world’s financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. “Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be enormous.”
“A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism,” says Bar-Yam, “random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep.” Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn’t clear – it may not even be predictable – which chunks of our densely-networked civilization are critical, until it’s too late.
“When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it,” says Bar-Yam. “Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilization is very vulnerable.”
So what can we do? “The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have,” Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our “global sheep” does not get injured in the first place – something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world’s fuel and mineral resources dwindle.
Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex overtime: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system.
“It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions,” says Homer- Dixon. But unusual conditions – an insect outbreak, fire or drought – can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.
Globalization is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximize profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximizes efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimizes resilience. “We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems,” says Homer-Dixon. “Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits.”
Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilization that managed to decline but not fall. “After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia.”
Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. “First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralized production of vital goods like energy and food,” he says. “Second, we need to remember that slack isn’t always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action.”
The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidize inefficiency in the public interest.
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls “tectonic” stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world’s rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns – just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy.
“This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn’t produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal,” Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonized and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.
Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. “The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilization, as we had in wartime,” he says. “There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, l am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it’s now a race between tipping points – which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?”
Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilization in the long run. “I sometimes think of this as a ‘faith-based’ approach to the future,” he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.
Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory New Mexico, support this idea. His team’s work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.
The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. “Today’s population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture,” says Tainter. “Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth’s population that is too gruesome to think about.”
If industrialized civilization does fall, the urban masses – half the world’s population – will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. “The people with the least to lose are subsistence farmers,” Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.
Linked from 12/4/2008 Journal