CHAPTER 3
In Search of Sustainability: Past Civilizations
Summary
Points to remember from this chapter:
- development was primarily a dependency-control spiral of outside and inside opportunities and threats. The mechanisms behind growth and decline transitions are a positive feedback loop of expansion, reinforced by population density, followed by negative feedbacks such as overwhelming complexity and environmental constraints;
- the decline/collapse of several past civilisations can be assigned to overexploitation of the resource base in an environmentally fragile environment with (large) natural variability;
- with agrarianisation, the interaction between humans and the natural environment became more intense and socio-cultural processes gained in importance;
- with development, the spectrum of environmental risks widened from nearby and short-term to indirect and long-term – another element in the dependency-control spiral;
- environmental deterioration eroded the economic-financial basis of the ruling elites, creating social tensions and other disturbances such as sectarian violence, invasion by hostile neighbours and dependence on other states;
- short-term thinking of societal elites aggravated the impending crisis in the form of greed and hoarding, ineffective rituals in the form of sacrifices or monuments and resource-demanding oppression or warfare.
Quotes for Reflection
Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition.
— Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988
I saw a man,
An old Cilician, who occupied
An acre or two of land that no one wanted,
A patch not worth the ploughing, unrewarding
For flocks, unfit for vineyards; he however
By planting here and there among the scrub
Cabbages or white lilies and verbena
And flimsy poppies, fancied himself a king
In wealth, and coming home late in the evening
Loaded his board with unbought delicacies.
— Vergilius, 4th Georgica
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