Collapse

Though the interests of business, environmentalists, and society sometimes align, often they don’t. Four industries—oil, mining, logging, and marine fishing—exemplify both the good and bad ways companies respond to environmental issues.

Diamond inspected two oil fields and found two different attitudes toward environmental issues. The first, on Salawati Island just west of New Guinea in 1986, was run by the Indonesian national oil company Pertamina on behalf of a dictatorial government unconcerned with environmental issues. At Salawati the company burned off natural gas instead of conserving it, cleared 100-yard-wide swathes of sensitive forests for roads, casually spilled oil everywhere, and decimated the bird species Diamond had come to study.

The second oil field, visited by Diamond four times between 1998 and 2003 in his capacity as an officer of the World Wildlife Fund, was the Kutubu field in Papua New Guinea. The operation had one narrow access road, and most of the drilling equipment was helicoptered in; officials were obsessed with safety and preventing spills; baggage was checked for contraband, hunting equipment, and pilfered plants and animals. Diamond found the forest essentially undisturbed; bird species prized for their meat or plumage, along with endangered mammals, were more numerous at Kutubu than nearly anywhere else in New Guinea. In effect, the oil field “functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea” (446).

Chevron learned that it’s much cheaper to prevent pollution than clean it up. Oil fields last for decades, and a serious accident can kill a project and waste the investment. Spills also are a public relations disaster. Local New Guinea communities, who worry about the forests on which they depend for survival, have great clout, and in the past have shut down major mining operations. Chevron used modern, highly efficient drilling equipment and made a point of working closely with locals to ensure the forests were barely touched. Chevron’s behavior has raised its reputation, but other companies, and their sponsoring bureaucrats, still have a lot of catching up to do.

While modern oil drilling can be managed cleanly, the very nature of hardrock ore mining is dirty and polluting. Nearly half of all reported industrial pollution in the United States comes from mines. Open-pit mining lays bare the landscape, while metals and extraction chemicals leach out or are dumped into rivers, water tables, and the ocean. Spills from containment ponds and dams are common.

Mining was encouraged to open the American West, and the laws gave mines royalty-free minerals from, and dumping rights on, public lands. To this day mining executives tend to feel exempt from responsibility and believe their job isn’t so much to improve shareholder value as it is to make a killing.

Mining revenue is highly unpredictable; profits have been sparse in the past few decades. Some firms owe as much in cleanup costs as their entire market valuation. This makes it hard to finance cleanup; meanwhile, many companies grossly underestimate those expenses when applying for a license to operate. Some outfits avoid paying altogether by working a mine for several years, transferring assets to a new corporation, and declaring bankruptcy.

Actual cleanup costs are as much as 100 times larger than the companies’ estimates, and US total taxpayer liability stands above $12 billion. Most jurisdictions now demand much larger up-front financial guarantees from mining operations. Public backlash has slowed mine approvals to a trickle, but governments remain highly solicitous of mining operations, so the problems persist.

An example of good cleanup practices involves the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Montana. After British Petroleum bought Anaconda, it discovered the mess Anaconda had made, tried to resist responsibility, then decided to clean it up and get it done with.

Another example is Stillwater Mining, which worked closely with environmental and community groups. Stillwater’s platinum and palladium lodes are the only large deposits outside South Africa; the ore will take a century to retrieve, which “encourages a long-term perspective rather than the usual rape-and-run attitude” (465), and extracting these metals is much less messy than, say, gold or copper.

British mining firm Rio Tinto, smarting from a disastrous and deadly years-long conflict with Bougainville islanders over the messy Panguna copper mine, decided to follow Chevron’s example, began fixing its operations, and now boasts the cleanest mine in the United States. Elsewhere, DuPont enforces strict contracts with titanium suppliers to ensure clean mining practices.

Forests and fisheries, unlike oil and mining, are renewable, but they’re not always treated that way. Logging companies in Southeast Asia often bribe locals or governments to let them clear-cut and depart. This rape-and-run strategy is profitable but highly damaging. Already, half the world’s old-growth forests are gone, but a mere 20% of the remainder could meet the world’s needs if managed sustainably.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a consortium of loggers, environmentalists, governments, and foundations, sets international standards for forest management, including sustainability, old-growth set-asides, waste disposal, and respect for local cultures. The FSC awards a seal of approval to complying forests, giving their owners access to markets that prefer green practices.

The FSC awards chain-of-custody certificates to wood kept separate all the way to the commercial outlet. Major retailers such as Home Depot and IKEA, along with large forestry and wood-products companies, already participate in the FSC system. Some business consortia, however, have established competing certification systems with much lower standards, hoping to confuse the public.

Most fisheries in the world are depleted from overuse. Worldwide demand continues to rise, but the peak catch was in 1989 and has since declined. Marine fisheries cover vast areas of ocean and are hard to patrol, so fishing boats go for the biggest catch they can get instead of working together to sustain the resource.

Unilever and the World Wildlife Fund formed the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), patterned on the FSC, which certifies fisheries based on their sustainability and minimal ecological impact. Major food producers and retailers have joined the organization.

The public buys products from both good and bad businesses. As people become aware of damaging practices and demand products from firms dedicated to conservation, the situation begins to improve.

Twelve environmental issues confront societies today; most of these were faced by past civilizations. They involve destruction of resources, limits on resources, harmful human-made products, and population problems.

Four issues concern loss of resources. One, deforestation was the major cause of many past collapses and threatens societies today. Two, overfishing endangers the main protein source for 2 billion people; aquaculture replaces some of that but also lowers the price of fish, causing trawlers to increase their ocean catch to make up for the price loss. Three, insects and bacteria perform a lot of environmental maintenance for free, and loss of their biodiversity makes difficult or impossible many agricultural processes and interferes with the recycling of clean water and air. Four, soil depletion from overuse has damaged between 20% and 80% of all farmland.

The next three problems involve resource limits. Five, oil, gas, and coal are limited and will cost more to extract over time. Six, freshwater sources are mostly in use; aquifers are being depleted; desalinization is too expensive to make up the gap as world population increases. Seven, photosynthesis on Earth is finite, and human uses of the ground, including cities and farms, compete significantly with the natural growth of wildlands.

Three problems concern harmful things spread by human activity. Eight, artificial chemicals released into the environment, including pesticides, hormones, plastics, heavy metals, and detergents, are causing health issues, including retardation, birth defects, low sperm counts, and death from air pollution. Nine, alien species are introduced around the world, and some become pests, damaging local environments and crops. Ten, human-produced gases damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer and contribute to global warming.

Two issues concern human population levels. Eleven, the growth in numbers will continue to strain resources. It should level off sometime in the 21st century, but the final total is unknown. Twelve, resources consumed, and wastes emitted, by people is high in the first world and low in the third world, but as developing populations raise their living standards, resource consumption and pollution will rise by a factor of 12.

Within half a century most of these problems will have become unsustainable, and any single one of them could cause human civilization to stumble toward collapse.

Los Angeles, Diamond’s adopted home, typifies problems at the intersection of the first world and developing nations. The megalopolis suffers from smog, long commutes, traffic jams, and expensive housing, yet immigrants arrive, often illegally, to find work, freedom, and safety in America. Residents are of two minds about the situation, waffling “between needing immigrants as workers and otherwise resenting their presence and their own needs” (501).

Fire suppression has made hillsides susceptible to worse wildfires that destroy hundreds of homes every year. Introduced alien species have caused local plant and animal populations to crash; the state symbol, the California Golden Bear, is extinct. Salinization has damaged farmland; population increases and global warming threaten water supplies; several coastal fisheries have collapsed.

Some people argue that environmental issues are overdrawn, but for each of their concerns there is a rebuttal.

Ecology should be balanced against the economy. Environmental issues are costly, and fixing them quickly is much cheaper. Technology will solve the problems. This assumes innovation will henceforth solve more problems than it creates. CFCs and cars solved previous pollution problems—ammonia refrigerants and horse droppings, respectively—but soon caused bigger problems of their own.

If one resource fails, others can take its place. New resources require lengthy development of new facilities—the transition away from fossil fuels is taking decades, for example—while the current problems worsen. Hunger will be resolved with better distribution systems. The first world produces more food than it can eat; however, it shows little inclination to pay the costs of feeding billions of poor people, especially if the extra nutrition causes developing nations’ populations to increase and worsen the problem.

Conditions have been getting better worldwide. In some areas this is true, but prosperity is happening at the expense of environmental resources, which will reach a limit, followed by a sudden dieback, as with ancient cultures that similarly collapsed. Gloom-and-doom environmentalists often are wrong. So are the optimists, but environmental warnings are more often correct than not, and it’s better to be overly cautious and pay for a few false alarms than be inattentive and cause a worldwide collapse.

The population will soon level off. The present population already exceeds environmental limits, and developing nations’ current populations, as they become more wealthy, will merely add to the stress. More people mean more minds solving these problems. The top 10 most affluent countries, except for the United States, contain small populations that are growing at slow rates; most of the largest nations are relatively poor but have high growth rates.

The first world has no business telling the developing world to cut back on environmental abuse. The third world is aware of its environmental problems, some of which are exacerbated by poverty and ongoing abuse in the first world itself. Any environmental disaster will take place way off in the future. Young adults of today will experience those catastrophes in their lifetimes; today’s children, fussed over by their parents, may not survive the disasters fomented by those same parents.

Modern society is fundamentally different from the ancient ones that collapsed. Today’s nations do possess vastly superior technology and tools, but this gives them the power to do much more damage. A list of the world’s ecological hot spots roughly matches a list of the world’s political hot spots; “it’s the problems of the ancient Maya, Anasazi, and Easter Islanders playing out in the modern world” (516).

Globalization greatly improves trade and communication, but this also allows the first world to transfer many of its environmental problems to the developing world. Western trash appears on Pacific island beaches. Advanced nations import woods from tropical countries, causing deforestation. Remote Arctic Inuit, whose diet includes tainted seafood, suffer the highest blood levels of toxic industrial chemicals in the world—an Inuit mother’s milk is considered hazardous waste—causing neurological, respiratory, and immune impairment. In turn, the third world exports exotic diseases, immigrant refugees, and terrorism.

The Dutch—who drained and diked large areas, called polders, for farms and residences—are especially environmentally aware; they like to say that “we’re all living in the same polder, and that our survival depends on each other’s survival” (520). The world is now like Easter Island: if it fails, there’s nowhere to go.

These problems are solvable with today’s technology, if societies possess the political will to engage in long-term planning and to “reconsider core values” (522) that interfere with survival.

The ruins of Angkor—capital of the Khmer empire that controlled one-third of mainland Southeast Asia a thousand years ago—are like, but much larger than, Mayan cities, with great palaces and temples next to farmland and tropical jungles.

Monsoon rainfall varied from 59 to 91 inches; droughts and floods were common. Nearby Lake Tonle, fed by the Mekong River, teemed with fish—to this day, those fish remain the chief protein source for Cambodians—and it would flood the surrounding flatlands every year, which was ideal for rice growing. Because they were hard to drain, floods sometimes mixed drinking water with sewage, causing disease.

Classical India influenced the Khmer, who by AD 800 practiced Buddhism and Hinduism, used Indian names, wrote in Sanskrit on palm fronds and paper (all of which are now lost), wrote inscriptions on temple walls (still visible), and managed an empire. For 500 years Khmer rulers vied to build ever-larger structures, including reservoirs five miles long that today are visible from space. The Khmer also traded extensively with China, sending them brilliant feathers, tusks and horns, spices and ointments, while receiving “gold, silver, silk fabrics, tin goods, lacquered trays, celadon ware, mercury, paper, and saltpeter for making gunpowder” (534).

The empire reached from Vietnam on the east to parts of Myanmar on the west. One emperor used 12,000 servants and administrators at his palace; a major construction project required 200,000 laborers. A vast and complicated system of reservoirs and canals reoriented river flow, captured rainwater, and provided transit, drinking water, and irrigation. At 400 square miles and a population of 750,000, Angkor was one of the largest cities on Earth.

By the 1300s the Khmer empire was well on its way to failure. As with other historical collapses, the five typical causes figured prominently. First, deforestation led to erosion, silting of the canal system, and more extreme flooding problems. Second, the climate changed, and a series of droughts, interspersed with exceptional rainfall, stressed the Angkor water system. Third, the empire suffered setbacks at the hands of enemies to the west and east. Fourth, trade shifted away from inland Angkor toward coastal maritime operations. Fifth, the grandiose canal-and-reservoir system proved unable to adapt to weather extremes.

Questions remain: Where did Angkor’s wood and fuel come from, if not from the already deforested plains nearby? How did the city manage its complex water system, given the many related structures whose functions are still unknown? And why did Angkor, along with so many other tropical cities like those in the Mayan region, not repopulate even centuries after collapse? Perhaps future archaeologists will find the answers.