The Safety Net by David Eagleman

Author:David Eagleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Saving Energy

Many civilizations have fallen fatally ill from a toxic cocktail of internal struggle, pestilence and foreign invaders. But a deeper look often exposes a common underlying problem that preceded their troubles: they ran low on the resources required to sustain the population – and that’s how they became so vulnerable.

What keeps scientists and historians up at night is the concept of carrying capacity: the number of people who can be supported by the resources available in an environment. As the environment feels the strains of massive population growth, carrying capacity shrinks, meaning the area can sustain fewer people than it could before. Populations cannot outlive the carrying capacity of an environment for long. Natural pressures – such as starvation, disease, parasites, and predators – reduce the population back down to a sustainable size.

At the timescale of civilizations, carrying capacity matters. When populations reach a point of insufficient water, food, energy, medical care, fertile soil, sanitation, or any of the other threads required to hold together the societal fabric, groups clash over the available resources. Sometimes the losers are simply the weakest members. Sometimes the conditions are such that the entire civilization disassembles.

Natural negative pressures work to keep carrying capacity at an equilibrium: as the population grows or the resources shrink, ills such as war and rampant disease follow until the overshoot is corrected. But the problem is the undershoot, which can induct a previously robust civilization into the ranks of the departed.

If you’d like to spoil your society’s carrying capacity, environmental depletion is one of the surest methods.

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond argues that a pervasive reason for societal failure is damage such as deforestation and soil erosion. In Ancient Maya, Arthur Demarest suggests that drought and loss of soil fertility stimulated the fall of the Mayans well before the smallpox arrived. Anthropologist Brian Fagan further points out that Mayan rulers strictly prescribed farming practices that ruined the quality of their soil. As it turns out, the Mayan leaders were also stoking population growth, and this lethal combination sent the Mayans careening over the carrying capacity threshold. Fagan writes: ‘The Maya collapse is a cautionary tale in the dangers of using technology and people power to expand the carrying capacity of tropical environments.’

The Minoan civilization, too, was on a crash-course for exceeding their carrying capacity. We saw earlier that the Minoans were scraped clean by a tsunami, but there’s another twist to the story: archaeological recovery at the Minoan site of Knossos shows evidence for deforestation of this part of Crete, suggesting that if a tsunami didn’t get them, they would have eventually been flooded with carrying capacity troubles.

It is with good reason that our modern population worries about food and water supplies, the overcutting of forests, and the depletion of fossil fuels. Our planet’s population continues to grow, and every human developing into adulthood desires the basic joys of zipping around in cars, illuminating their homes, and accumulating new possessions from afar.

So it is no surprise that

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