guardian | A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has
highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could
collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation
and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that
warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the
study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that
"the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found
throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to
"precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite
common."
The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary
'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied
mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science
Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center,
in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study
based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the
peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.
It finds
that according to the historical record even advanced, complex
civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the
sustainability of modern civilisation:
"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."
By
investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of
collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors
which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the
risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture,
and Energy.
These
factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial
social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed
on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification
of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These
social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the
process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand
years."
Currently, high levels of economic stratification are
linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based
largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:
"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."
