Collapse!

September 26, 2019

Our civilization is going to collapse! What can we learn from history and archaeology about it?

The image of impending collapse pervades the intersection of environmentalism and popular history & archaeology. This is further promulgated by popular books such as Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” The language of collapse is now implicit in more academic research, illustrated, for instance, by the self-description of the CRASSH research center at the University of Cambridge, including reference to “catastrophic pitfalls” and “civilizational collapse.” We face “Existential Risk.” But as one entomologist put it to me – it’s not going to be the end of life on Earth, it’s going to be the end of human life on Earth – and they didn’t seem to think it was the worst thing that could happen to Planet Earth.

What does collapse mean? As an anthropologist, I know that concepts of ‘collapse’ are shaped by our own cultural blinders. Take, for instance, the French colonial fascination with the ‘lost’ empire of Angkor Wat and their attempts to both reconstruct those monuments and to revive their conception of ‘pure’ ancient Khmer culture. As Edwards so carefully shows, this was a reflection of France’s colonial civilizing mission, including discourse of the end of French power and grandeur (2008).[1]  Is ‘collapse’ the end of a culture and its people? Clearly not. The Mayan civilization collapsed, and Mayans are still here. The influence of the Roman Empire lives on in our language and political institutions. Angkor Wat was still an active ritual center when the French “discovered” it.

What I sought, then, was to disrupt the concept of collapse by thinking of ‘collapse’ as transformations in social institutions and turning our attention to what comes after. In short, let’s look at ‘collapse’ as a process.  For this, I was inspired in part by Christian Lundt’s concept of ‘rupture.’ We read Lund (2016), “Rule and rupture: State formation through the production of property and citizenship,” (for an overview of Lund’s current work, see “Rule and Rupture”).  Lundt’s work on “rule and rupture” is not directly related to the question of future transformations but opens up intriguing ways of thinking about the mediation of human/environmental relations through specific institutions, particularly political institutions and claim of ownership of natural resources such as land.  We also read portions of Sing Chew’s comparative historical work on periods of collapse and rebuilding, “Ecological Futures: What History Can Teach Us,” specifically the Preface, the Introduction, and the Conclusion (the section on “Hope in a hopeless world,” Chew 2008, pp. 139-142).

Perhaps the ‘end of civilization’ is in fact a transformation of what we see as legitimate means of governance, interpreted as ‘Mad Max’ chaos and disorder.

Dark Ages – Times of Transformation

What are ‘Dark Ages’?[2] An environmental historian (imagine, history as if nature matters!), Dr. Sing Chew came to an analytical comparison of ‘Dark Ages’ in different regions and periods of history.  In Over decades of study of environmental history, Dr. Chew turned to comparison of ‘Dark Ages’ in different periods of history. He highlights three recurrences of ‘Dark Ages,’ “when the world system

[was]

plunged into chaos and devolution” (Chew, p. 1). The core precipitate of these periods were ecological degradation, along with disease, natural disasters, and periods of regional climate change, and resulted in the demise of existing political structures.  What followed with the end of specific political and economic institutions was, he notes, undoubtedly a time of disruption, death, and chaos – but it is not permanent (Chew, pp. 3-4).

While Chew uses the term ‘devolution,’ which I find problematic due to its implication of the normalcy of supposed progress throughout human history, he in fact defines the term narrowly in terms of reorganization and reconfiguration of socioeconomic structures in response to “scarce ecological and natural resources…” (Chew, pp. 1-2). This, he carefully documents in his trilogy on World Ecological Degradation.

[1] Edwards, Penny. 2008. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

[2] My current favorite on Twitter is Dr. Eleanor Janga, @GoingMedieval, “I assure you, medieval people bathed,” 2 August 2019; and I must mention my colleague Dr. Dana Oswald as well! 

Collapse!

September 26, 2019

Our civilization is going to collapse! What can we learn from history and archaeology about it?

The image of impending collapse pervades the intersection of environmentalism and popular history & archaeology. This is further promulgated by popular books such as Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” The language of collapse is now implicit in more academic research, illustrated, for instance, by the self-description of the CRASSH research center at the University of Cambridge, including reference to “catastrophic pitfalls” and “civilizational collapse.” We face “Existential Risk.” But as one entomologist put it to me – it’s not going to be the end of life on Earth, it’s going to be the end of human life on Earth – and they didn’t seem to think it was the worst thing that could happen to Planet Earth.

What does collapse mean? As an anthropologist, I know that concepts of ‘collapse’ are shaped by our own cultural blinders. Take, for instance, the French colonial fascination with the ‘lost’ empire of Angkor Wat and their attempts to both reconstruct those monuments and to revive their conception of ‘pure’ ancient Khmer culture. As Edwards so carefully shows, this was a reflection of France’s colonial civilizing mission, including discourse of the end of French power and grandeur (2008).[1]  Is ‘collapse’ the end of a culture and its people? Clearly not. The Mayan civilization collapsed, and Mayans are still here. The influence of the Roman Empire lives on in our language and political institutions. Angkor Wat was still an active ritual center when the French “discovered” it.

What I sought, then, was to disrupt the concept of collapse by thinking of ‘collapse’ as transformations in social institutions and turning our attention to what comes after. In short, let’s look at ‘collapse’ as a process.  For this, I was inspired in part by Christian Lundt’s concept of ‘rupture.’ We read Lund (2016), “Rule and rupture: State formation through the production of property and citizenship,” (for an overview of Lund’s current work, see “Rule and Rupture”).  Lundt’s work on “rule and rupture” is not directly related to the question of future transformations but opens up intriguing ways of thinking about the mediation of human/environmental relations through specific institutions, particularly political institutions and claim of ownership of natural resources such as land.  We also read portions of Sing Chew’s comparative historical work on periods of collapse and rebuilding, “Ecological Futures: What History Can Teach Us,” specifically the Preface, the Introduction, and the Conclusion (the section on “Hope in a hopeless world,” Chew 2008, pp. 139-142).

Perhaps the ‘end of civilization’ is in fact a transformation of what we see as legitimate means of governance, interpreted as ‘Mad Max’ chaos and disorder.

Dark Ages as Times of Transformation

What are ‘Dark Ages’?[2] An environmental historian (imagine, history as if nature matters!), Dr. Sing Chew came to an analytical comparison of ‘Dark Ages’ in different regions and periods of history.  In Over decades of study of environmental history, Dr. Chew turned to comparison of ‘Dark Ages’ in different periods of history. He highlights three recurrences of ‘Dark Ages,’ “when the world system plunged into chaos and devolution” (Chew, p. 1). The core precipitate of these periods were ecological degradation, along with disease, natural disasters, and periods of regional climate change, and resulted in the demise of existing political structures.  What followed with the end of specific political and economic institutions was, he notes, undoubtedly a time of disruption, death, and chaos – but it is not permanent (Chew, pp. 3-4).

While Chew uses the term ‘devolution,’ which I find problematic due to its implication of the normalcy of supposed progress throughout human history, he in fact defines the term narrowly in terms of reorganization and reconfiguration of socioeconomic structures in response to “scarce ecological and natural resources…” (Chew, pp. 1-2). This, he carefully documents in his trilogy on World Ecological Degradation. There is no doubt, according to Chew, that these Dark Ages are times of disruption, disease, death, and even chaos. But it is not permanent. Civilizational glories have been based on particular uses of resources,[3] leading to over-use of specific resources on which society has come to depend. Periods of collapse bring about periods of reduced human use of resources, ‘giving Nature a rest’ (p. 3). This ‘rest’ comes from reduced usage and population, but also more sustainable use of what has been made scarce and innovation in use of new types of resources or use of resources in new ways. ‘Dark Ages’ are not collapse so much as periods of disruption of reproduction of the system, periods of transition rather than of equilibrium (with concomitant shorter periods of oscillation). 

Chew therefore sees ‘Dark Ages’ as hopeful eras of innovation, potentially ecologically progressive.  These are periods of structural shifts. In this view, “collapse is not a condition that we should dread” (p. 139, Chew’s emphasis).  There will be conflict over natural resources. However, the decrease in surplus production will result in a flattening of existing social hierarchies, which is key to facilitating innovation. Decentralization of power will lead to localization of economies and polities, turning consumption toward local resources rather than expensive transport of goods all over the world (all controlled by an economic elite, to the long-term detriment of the majority of the population as elites pursue their own particular interests to the neglect of sustainability). Chew also assumes that ‘local’ will be more sustainable, as local resource management will be based in specific local knowledge. Localization will also bring about an emphasis on community rather than ‘invisible market’ management of resources. This can give rise to alternative forms of exchange. All of these new institutions will follow on ‘collapse,’ as people experiment, innovate, and transform existing political and economic institutions (pp. 140-1). 

Nevertheless, Chew sees a massive decrease in global population due to disease, lack of access to resources on which we (in the West, at least) have come to depend. There will be a period of wars over control of resources.  He takes a long-history view of ‘human evolution’ (or, I would say, development of social, economic, and political structures), in which “Nature” (his capitalization) is given a rest and humans reinvent themselves. There will be war, there will be death, there will be loss of treasured joys (the internet?). This is hardly encouraging to college students.[4] But it begins to give us new language for the idea of transition and transformation.

[1] Edwards, Penny. 2008. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

[2] My current favorite on Twitter is Dr. Eleanor Janga, @GoingMedieval, “I assure you, medieval people bathed,” 2 August 2019; and I must mention my colleague Dr. Dana Oswald as well! 

[3] Think of the concept of carrying capacity. For humans, this can only be calculated in terms of technology and cultural practices.  

[4] Our university focuses on non-traditional students and has for 50 years. Our students come from lower middle, working, and poor classes. Many are minorities – we’re one of the most diverse campuses in our state system – and many are adult students who previously ‘stopped out’ for a range of reasons. We have a high number of veterans. Others come to college after losing their jobs because the industry in which they worked has left the region. Almost all of our students work their way through college; some work nearly full-time jobs while also taking classes full-time. These are not the stereotyped entitled millennials that social media depicts.

Human Agency in The End of the World As We Know It

We are faced with daily predictions of ‘the end.’ It is disturbing, ineluctable, inescapable, unavoidable:  5-6 feet of hail in Guadalajara in June (NPR); melting of ice sheets and predicted rise in ocean levels (IMBIE Team, 2018); record flooding in the Midwest US (Scientific American 26 June 2019); and coastal states like Florida soon to be “wiped off the map” by sea level rise (The Guardian, 26 June 2018). The Climate Crisis is disaster written on a global scale. It will be “Mad Max,” “The Hunger Games,” and “Fear the Walking Dead” without the zombies.

It’s the end of life – but not really. As one botanist put it to me, it might be the end of our species, but not of life on the planet.[1] And the end of life as we know it does not mean the end of humanity.

Agency & Structure in the South Pacific

Intellectually, understanding the crisis plays into much of what I’ve thought about for the past decades as an anthropologist. One is the interplay between structure/agency. We are all part of cultural, political, economic, and environmental systems that we have little immediate control over. That is, we’re deeply embedded in and subject to those systems. Taken from the perspective of systems, humans as individuals or small social groups appear to have little or limited power. Yet clearly humans take actions as if we do have power. As I’ve been discussing in my work on the drug wars and international development, one way to think of this is as a topography of power – we have power within specific domains but not others. We can fight patriarchy in our own workplace (and on Twitter!) but does that change the system as the whole?

Here, I’ll veer off a bit to explain how I came to this interest. In the 1980s, I did research on infant feeding and weaning in response to the ‘breast is best’ anti-Nestlé campaign.[2] The goal of our research group[3] was to add in ethnographic detail to sweeping statements made in the campaign about breast-feeding in non-Western, non-state systems, which overwhelmingly romanticized breast-feeding as ‘natural.’ The campaign Orientalized/Othered these mothers in under-developed countries, depicting them as dupes of a big corporation; women with no agency, no strategies, no comprehension or ideal futures of their own. Breastfeeding was romanticized as a spiritual connection between mother and baby that continued for 3-4 years. Women were depicted as Mothers of Infants, rather than people who fed their entire families through their labor, cared for other children and family members, and did not lie around a hut with a baby attached to their breast all day!

What I and other researchers found is that infant care and feeding are diverse and culturally constructed. In the context of their own culturally constructed roles as women, ‘isolated,’ ‘primitive’ mothers made decisions for themselves. They were not victims who simply fell prey to Western advertising and propaganda.[4]

My work showed that mothers supplemented infants’ diet with solid foods from almost the first day of birth, due to the cultural belief that no human could live without a staple such as taro or sweet potato. Caretakers pre-masticated staples and spit them into the baby’s mouth, who was then given the breast to suckle (infants can’t swallow without suckling at this stage).[5] This practice was also utilitarian. When women returned to everyday life after a ritually enforced “baby-moon,” the mother could safely leave her infant with another woman a couple of times a week while she worked in her gardens to feed herself and the rest of the family; if the baby was hungry, anyone could pre-masticate food, spit it in the baby’s mouth, and then give the baby a breast or finger to suck so that the infant swallowed. In short, this early supplementation was the strategy of women who were not only mothers, but the main food providers for their families. In this context, the idea of a baby bottle was attractive; they filled it with breast milk or water to help feed their infants when mothers were working in their fields. Having discovered this new technology, women sometimes asked their husbands or brothers to buy bottles for them when the men were in town.  Formula was rarely if ever used; there were no local stores to carry it. When used, it was a treat, not a staple.

In short, these women were perfectly capable of observation, of looking for innovative and practical solutions to everyday problems they faced, of experimentation, and of adaptation based on those observations. Women were active agents in their own complex lives. Like all other humans, they experienced multiple, sometimes conflicting, obligations. New technologies offered them new ways of dealing with long-standing problems. They were also part of a cultural system – as are we all. This cultural system valued women as productive farmers as well as mothers and the sustainers of the patrilineage of their husbands and guardians of ritual systems. 

Climate Crisis & Agency – Disrupting Understandings of How We Live

How does this relate to the Climate Crisis and how to teach it? It taught me that people strategize, whatever the limits. I cannot take a materialist position that people are victims of a system, no matter how terrible their living conditions (Clint, Texas; Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh; Moria, Greece; Bidi Bidi, Uganda; Nauru Regional Processing Center for Australia), humans strategize (or tacticize![6]) to get what they need or want. We all attempt to understand our options, even if our understanding of possibilities is shaped, constructed, and limited by the cultural and political systems in which we exist.

This is the core of anthropology, to understand both the constraints of political / economic systems, and to see beyond the blinders of culture, the ways in which enculturation shapes the possibilities we assume are available to us, the generative principles of how we make sense of the world. Studying others is an ethical choice to attempt to truly understand others in their own terms, to take people’s accounts of themselves seriously. Another consequence is that in this work of understanding, we begin to understand our own blinders, to ‘see’ the core principles of our own culture – that which we assume, never question, and think of as natural and therefore typical of all humanity. Understanding these core principles of our own culture and our historically constructed political economy allows us to begin to recognize other ways of being in the world. To comprehend this, we needed to continuously explore that relationship between individual action and larger systems.

This class was designed to show students that the end of life as we know it isn’t the end of life. I needed to disrupt students’ understanding of ways that humans can live. This means questioning the idea of the tragedy of the commons and lifeboat ethics; individual autonomy as the zenith of freedom; the inherent selfishness of all humans; the assumption of Homo economicus and profit or surplus seeking as a main motivator for human behaviors. All of these are congruent with the culture of dominant groups in post WWII American society, but they are not universal.

What other ways, then, can we live?

Rupture & Collapse

The first step was to disrupt the idea of collapse. I did this introducing the concept of ‘rupture.’ We read portions of Sing Chew’s (2008) “Ecological Futures: What History Can Teach Us,” specifically the Preface, the Introduction, and the Conclusion (the section on “Hope in a hopeless world,” pp. 139142). We also read Lund (2016), “Rule and rupture: State formation through the production of property and citizenship,” (For an overview of Lund’s current work, see “Rule and Rupture.”)

And that will probably, at last, be my next post. I’m still working on it and this is more than long enough!

[1] And, of course, cockroaches will continue. Anyone who has lived in a cockroach-heavy environment (Hawaii, for instance) knows that cockroaches are ineradicable. They survive in office microwaves!

[2] The campaign was needed. It arose in the 1970s in reaction to the massive/flood of advertising in the ‘3rd World,’ with concomitant infant malnutrition and mortality when mothers were unable to afford formula and did not have clean water with which to mix that formula.

[3] We were an ad hoc group of Pacific Islands researchers responding to the anti-Nestlé infant formula campaign. We first presented findings at meetings of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO). I was working in the Solomon Islands with the Kwaio people of East Malaita (Sinalangu Harbor).  

[4] These findings, published in a special edition of Ecology of Food and Nutrition, horrified many global campaigners. My first experience with peer review was Western reviewers claiming that I had no idea what I was talking about, despite 4 years of participant-observation and interviewing. Fortunately, the editors were sensible in coaching me how to respond, which demonstrates the importance of strong mentors as we start out in our careers.

[5] See Lau 2015, Development of suck and swallow mechanisms in infants, Ann Nutr Metab 66, p. 7-14. Saliva helps to pre-digest these foods for the infant.

[6] Cf. Michel de Certeau.

What to Expect in the Climate Crisis in the Upper Midwest

The first module in the class after the introduction to anthropology and environmental anthropology in particular was to focus in on what we can expect in climate change, using the Fourth National Climate Change Assessment (the “Black Friday” report) and other supplementary science material. While these students are aware of the climate crisis and how specific ecosystems in our region have changed over the past decades, the 4th NCCA delineates specific risks and vulnerabilities for the region in which we now live, and where most of these students will continue to live.[1] This specificity allows us to pin down specific concerns and actions, counteract the sense of impending, impossible, inevitable disaster. 
The 4th NCAA is a masterful depiction of the specific conditions we can expect 20-40 years in the future.[2] It also allows us to start to consider issues of equity and adaptation. We read the Overview, the Midwest, and Key Messages.

In the Midwest, we’ll see the following effects in 20-40 years:

  •        Agriculture – Soil erosion, favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, degraded quality of stored grains, decreased yields due to problems with reproduction from rising extreme temperatures
  •        Forestry – Increased tree mortality in part due to invasive species and pests.  We’re losing (and will lose more) culturally important tree species. Our forest systems will change (conversion), or even convert to non-forested ecosystems by the end of this century.
  •        Biodiversity & ecosystems – our native species help with essential services such as water purification, flood control, resource provision, and crop pollination.  Our freshwater resources are at great risk given the combination of climate stressors along with land use change, habitat loss, pollution, nutrient inputs, invasive species.
  •        Human health – worsening health conditions due to poor air quality days, extreme high temps, heavy rainfalls and spread of waterborne illnesses through flooding, especially if our sewage systems are overloaded; extended pollen seasons; and, of course, modified distribution of pest and insects that carry disease. We’re expecting substantial loss of life and worsened health conditions by the mid-century.
  •        Transportation & infrastructure – difficulties in transportation of goods and people due to destruction of infrastructure in extreme weather events; this is made all the worse by the US’s continued refusal to invest in infrastructure
  •        Community vulnerability & adaptation – at-risk communities in the Midwest, especially due to flooding, drought, and urban heat islands. Tribal nations dependent on natural resources are deeply threatened. Given many tribal nations’ cultural emphasis on sustainability and local ecological knowledge, their capacity to build adaptive capacity and increase resilience would be a huge loss to ecosystems (NCA 4, p. 25).

The NCCA goes on to specify key points for adaptation or mitigation in each region. These became points of discussion in following classes.

These changes are in our near future. As residents in a wealthy country with a huge resource base (the entire globe), we have both contributed to more rapid deterioration in other parts of the world and been able to alleviate or mitigate our own experience of climate change. We simply don’t feel it, except in hot and cold days and occasional storms.  What can anthropology contribute to this?

Many of the peoples that anthropologists study have already experienced climate disaster. Regions of the US have already suffered climate crisis impacts, unlike most of the Upper Midwest. Anthropologists have worked with peoples who are experiencing climate disaster for over a decade – in Siberia, Alaska, Bangladesh, and the Pacific Islands, for instance. This is not the future, this is now. As Environmental Studies majors, too many of these students were unaware of the fact that around the world are already adapting to the climate crisis.
Climate crisis adaptation already an everyday occurrence. What can we learn about this through anthropology?

A key point I start to make here is that the effects of climate change will not be distributed equally. “People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events …” (NCCA 2018, p. 25). Mitigation efforts will be unaffordable for the poor or actually place more burden on them than on other parts of the Earth’s population. There will be huge costs in attempting to maintain infrastructure such as roads and electrical transmission lines. The costs of disaster relief will skyrocket and (as we have already seen), some groups will not be allocated relief for political and cultural reasons (cf., the lack of timely or sufficient relief to Puerto Rico, Florida, lower Midwest).  People at greater risk from the effects of the climate crisis include those who cannot afford to move away from a disaster – the urban poor, the rural poor – but also those who depend directly production – farmers, fishers, hunters.Discussing this allows me to introduce another key theme of this class – imagining a more equitable future.

We discussed the effect of cascading impacts, which make it hard to specifically plan for the future.  These effects will span across regional or national boundaries. As I’ve noted elsewhere, assessment of sustainable futures cannot be limited to the political boundaries of nation-states (Gillogly 2014). What we experience is local, but mitigation and adaptation must be global.

Take, for instance, water (one of my favorite topics). Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation reduce snowpack, intensify droughts, increase heavy downpours, and declining surface water quality. Clearly, these events will have varying impacts across regions. Here in SE Wisconsin, we’re likely to flood. Rapid runoff is likely to pollute our drinking water sources (Lake Michigan). This is far different from what dry regions will experience. But all of this will add to the stress on water supplies – both quality and quantity. This will also have national economic effects, since so much industry (think of power plants!) rely on a steady supply of water for cooling – that’s why industry was often located in places such as SE Wisconsin and the Calumet Region of NE Illinois / NW Indiana. Clean water won’t be reliable anymore, and we will be competing with large companies for access to that water.
All of this is exacerbated by our failure to maintain and upgrade water infrastructure – lead in pipes, leaking pipes. Do we have the funds or the political will to upgrade water infrastructure now? A poor city like Flint not only doesn’t have the funds, they were punished for being poor by giving the residents dangerous water when the city’s management was taken over by the State of Michigan.  Yes, a municipality can upgrade water infrastructure, but that’s often funded through bonds (and how often are those voted down by the people in new subdivisions or in semi-rural areas with their own private wells who don’t see why they should bear these expenses for ‘urban’ people they fled from?) or through surcharges to property taxes, which will adversely affect poor people.

With rising temperatures and uneven rainfall resulting in periods of drought interspersed with extreme rainstorms, we will see more soil erosion. The rise in average temperature will result in declines in crop yields. And since so much of our food comes from other parts of the world, we’re dependent both on conditions and adaptations in those places, as well as the reliability of transportation infrastructure. Clearly, rising costs of food would affect the poor more than the wealthy.

In this way, we make the social effects of the climate crisis tangible and immediate, while setting the stage for politically just responses to the new world in which my students will live. 

[1] Most of these students are working their way through college, living with parents, siblings, cousins, or grandparents to control costs. There is a very strong sense of attachment to place and to social networks in this region of Wisconsin. I doubt many will leave in the future, as they do not leave now.[2] It is, to my mind, also a political act to read this, given the state’s attempt to bury the report. I encourage students to download the entire report, in case it is later removed from government web sites. The web site is also beautifully designed.