How would we want to live in 2025 and beyond?

Incan idol and Aztec calendar, remnant artefacts of vast urban societies that collapsed due to environment damage, climate change and hostile neighbours

Hi,

Here is a riddle for you (one answer is at the end of this post):

What do camels and frogs have in common?

But first, I read a very thought provoking article in the Straits Times dated 10 Dec 2008. Entitled "Back to the future", it was authored by Mr Ho Kwon Ping from Singapore Management University.

I have always been fascinated by the documentaries shown on National Geographic and the History Channel, on ancient civilisations, how they flourished for hundreds of years and then collapsed suddenly. Sometimes they leave behind great monumental buildings, beautiful temples, impressive dams and irrigation networks, gargantuan pyramids, and some other intriguing structures that we still do not know what their original purposes were to the builders and the occupants.

The key points Mr Ho makes in his article are as follows:

• 100 years from now, we can expect a world where multiple civilisations would co-exist just like in the past. Western civilisations, which has dominated the world for the past several hundred years, would have declined in its influence, the world would be more like in 1652.


• In 1652, England was a powerful nation, the Japanese shogunate was celebrating 50 years of power, the Manchu dynasty of China was very virile and influential and the Taj Mahal was completed in India.


• East Asian and Islamic civilisations were more advanced in science than in Europe.


• The Chinese, Indian, Islamic and Western Civilisations were all in contact with each other but one was not dominant over the other three.


• It took 200 years from 1652 to 1852 for the two ancient civilisations of China and India to fall. (It would take that long for them to rise again.) Western cultural norms will no longer be how societies will be measured by 2025.


• By 1752, western imperialism, colonialism and domination of economic, military and political power occurred. Two world wars were also fought in the last 100 years.


• By 2025 China, India and the Islamic world will be re-ordering the world. It will be the much feared (by Westerners) 'clash of civilisations'.

According to the author, one cause for all these changes in power and dominance is urbanisation. When a country has more people living in urban settings than in the countryside, then the country would have factories, armies and navies that propel that country into a powerful nation. China is expected to reach this point by 2015 and India by 2050.

While there is a lot of over-simplification in this description (for example, in defining "civilisation" - how do you talk about a single 'Western civilisation' when European nations historically have been virtually in constant war with each other?), I believe his prediction (of Indian and Chinese dominance) will not necessarily come to be. Not unless the environmental impact of man is taken into account. Gaia cannot support 9 billion ^ref1 people if everyone consumes the resources of the earth with abandon like people in the first world countries. The world's resources would not be sustainable.
This issue is covered in the book, "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. He contends it has always been environmental degradation that led to collapses of civilisations throughout history.

I have placed many haunting images here from the web on such civilisations with populations of thousand or even millions living in complex urban or city-like places with equally complex agricultural services that collapsed due to neglect of sustaining the environment.

In his book, written in 2005, the examples given covered a longer period of time, and more continents. I am still reading the book but have this much I would like to share with you.......

Ancient Egypt, lasted nearly 4,000 years through alternating periods of stablilty and anarchy. Egypt's longevity was owed to the endless rise and fall of the Nile's annual flood and its fertile silt. It was almost impossible to exhaust but the great dynasties were twice brought down when climate shifts interrupted the annual floods. Ultimately, new empires in Europe and Asia brought the rule of the Pharaohs to an end, chiefly Persia and Rome. ^ref2

Easter Island civilisation flourished from around 900 AD, producing the famous stone figures weighing up to 270 tons, and a writing system. By the time Europeans arrived in the 1770s, the island was barren, tree-less, without livestock and with an illiterate population, too few in numbers and resources to have achieved such flowering of culture. ^ref3

How did the Islanders deplete their natural resources so completely? Didn't they realise what they were doing? According to Jared Diamond, they didn't:

"Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm."

The Central- or Meso-American Mayan civilisation collapsed in the 9th Century. There are competing theories on why this happened, among them foreign invasion. But most ideas point to ecological catastrophes of various kinds, including social revolt due to over-exploitation of the people to build temples like the one pictured above. Drought, slash-and-burn agriculture and collapse of trade are other factors. That it was no one thing would have made it hard for the Mayans to see the disaster coming.

Sumeria in ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) "...fell to an Elamite invasion during the rule of Ibbi-Sin (ca. 2004 BC). It is believed that invasion was successful because Sumerian agriculture was in decline, so Sumer could not maintain a sufficient army. The root causes of that decline are still debated; some say it was caused by a long period of drought, others, that it was an inevitable consequence of Sumerian irrigation, which caused increasing salinisation of the soil and decline in its fertility." ^ref4

Angkor Wat in Cambodia, was a vast (3,000 km²) city of at least 500,000 inhabitants at the centre of a Hindu civilisation covering much of Indo-China that collapsed in the 15th Century due to drought, deforestation and environmental degradation. ^{ref5 ref6}

Borobudor in Java. This vast Buddhist stupa built during the Sailendra dynasty was abandoned for unknown reasons. A volcanic eruption, climate change and hostile neighbours are some postulated reasons.

Mr Ho writes that the downfall of of every single civilisation since time immemorial has been hubris. What is hubris? It is the greatest danger to any civilisation, the quality of believing what you want to believe of yourself. It is a lack of self-doubt which eventually clouds wisdom and overrides our better judgement. As the saying goes, 'pride comes before a fall'. A flaw in this argument is that the "fall" of civilisations has often been due to exhaustion of the environment through over-exploitation. You could say this was in turn due to never doubting that they would triumph over nature - or "hubris" - and yet, the destruction of the environment was often so slow that the more bountiful past was beyond human memory.

Of course, we have no such excuse today. I sure do hope there will be no collapses due to environmental degradation as proven time and again by history. Efforts by enlightened governments and political leaders around the world to take care of our environment and natural resources will go a long way to controlling our quality of life and our destiny. In the past, new civilisations would arise in less despoiled parts of the world. Now, this is no longer possible. The degradation is global. Whether there is one or many centres of power in the future is irrelevant: we are all gonna have to hang together (i.e. all nations must come together and take care of the environment) or we will hang separately (face civil collapse as nations point fingers at one another).

. . . . .

The answer to the riddle I gave at the start is connected with the cartoon above and an old proverb that "If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow." The camel's nose, like the tepid water for the frog, is such a small matter that we accept it, and the next advance, and the next, until...

Cheers

Footnote: October 9, 1997, The Washington Times, The Gore population problem

"We're actually beginning to experience some good news around the world with the beginnings of a stabilization in world population," Mr. Gore intoned with his usual deadly earnestness. "But the momentum in the demographic system is such that we're inevitably going to go to 8 or 9 billion. The question is whether these changes [in reproductive habits] will keep us from going to 10, 12, 14 billion."

Al Gore is a former US Vice President, Nobel Laureate and author of the documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. This editorial from 1997 mocks Al Gore's concern. I wonder what the newspaper's editorial stance is now, more than a decade later? See the full article here: The Gore population problem

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