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Source: Ecosophia
Surviving Catabolic Collapse: A Case Study
It’s an intriguing question. Imagine, for a moment, that Egypt had equal longevity. If that were the case, the people of Egypt would still speak a language descended from ancient Egyptian, and write it in a modernized form of hieroglyphics; while Egypt itself might be currently under the rule of a Marxist regime opposed to religion, the Egyptian expat community around the world would still have temples where incense was burnt to Isis, Osiris, and the other deities of ancient Egyptian religion; and as recently as the 1940s, Egypt would still have had a pharaoh. That’s the kind of cultural continuity China had from the Bronze Age right up to 1949, and (despite drastic changes under its current Communist government) still has to some degree today.
That doesn’t mean that China hasn’t had its share of collapses. During its recorded history, China has been through four major dark ages: during the late Zhou dynasty, 770-226 BC, when the Zhou emperor became a powerless figurehead and warlords fought over the wreckage of the empire; during the long interval between the Han and Tang dynasties, 220-618 AD, another age of warlords when some sixty short-lived dynasties struggled for power; after the fall of the Tang dynasty, 960-1271, another brutal period of war and chaos; and finally the period after the fall of the Ming dynasty, 1644-1949, when China fell under foreign rule, first Manchu and then European, and plunged into poverty and misery as its wealth was stripped away by its foreign masters and its government disintegrated into another round of rule by local warlords.
(Yes, I know it’s impolite these days to refer to such intervals as “dark ages.” No doubt I could use some more fashionable euphemism, but since I’m not employed by a university and thus not subject to the pressures of academic fashion and political thought police, I’ll pass. The term “dark age” has a respectable pedigree—it was invented by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro to talk about the age of chaos that preceded the rise of classical civilization—and it reflects a reality. There’s a difference, after all, between an era when literacy, trade, and urban life flourish and peace within the borders is the normal state of affairs, on the one hand, and an era where literacy falters, the rule of law becomes a dead letter, trade turns into a risky proposition, infrastructure collapses, and most of the population consists of farmers in impoverished villages who are at once defended and exploited by local warlords. The latter is a dark age. Thank you, and we now return to your regularly scheduled blog post.)
China has had its share of dark ages, as I was saying. What sets China apart from most other societies in the modern world is that during each of its dark ages, after a few centuries of chaos, it managed to pull itself back together and restore something fairly close to its earlier form: not just once, but three times in a row. (We’ll get to the aftermath of the fourth dark age in due time.) That’s not quite unique in history—another point we’ll get to in due time—but it’s worth noting, because there are very good reasons to think that modern industrial society is skidding down the overfamiliar slope toward a dark age of its own—yes, we’ll get to that too—and a fair number of my readers have wondered aloud whether there’s something we can learn from the Chinese experience before our own civilization crashes and burns. To address that, we’re going to have to start with a brief discussion of why civilizations fall.
It’s quite common in China and the West alike to interpret the rise and fall of civilizations in moral terms. A society rises because it’s virtuous, and then it descends into wickedness and that moral failing brings about its fall: that’s the common notion. May I be blunt? It’s a load of propagandistic hogwash. During the years when Britain rose to dominate the world, it had the most corrupt government in Europe—read the diaries of Samuel Pepys sometime if you think there’s anything new about the kleptocratic frenzy in today’s Washington DC—and London had more prostitutes per capita than any other city on the planet. Thus the moral character of human societies doesn’t have much of anything to do with their success in the world or the survival of their civilizations.
If we set aside morality plays disguised as history, what remains? There have been plenty of theories explaining how and why civilizations fall, of course, ranging from the profound to the absurd. Since the rise and fall of civilizations seems to track very closely to the expansion and contraction of economic life, the explanations that seem most sound to me are economic in nature. It so happens that a little over two decades ago I proposed a theory along these lines, that traces the fall of civilizations to an economic process hardwired into civilization itself. I named it the theory of catabolic collapse; you can read the original paper here.
The process of catabolic collapse can be summed up very straightforwardly. Every human society uses its available resources to create capital. What is capital? Any form of wealth you can use to turn resources into more wealth. A tool is capital; so is a field ready for planting; so is a factory, a road, a city, a university system, a government, an economic system, an educated population, and the list goes on. If it’s created by human labor and you can use it directly or indirectly to turn resources into goods and services, it’s a form of capital. Resources enter the economic process, and capital transforms them into wealth and waste. In the broadest sense, that’s how a society functions.
Capital doesn’t just show up out of nowhere, however. It takes wealth to create capital, and it also takes wealth to maintain capital. The costs of creating capital are generally well accounted for in complex human societies, but the costs of maintaining capital? In theory, sure; in practice, not so much. The more complex a human society becomes, the more of its resources and its existing capital have to be put into the process of maintaining its capital stocks. Some old capital gets turned into waste—buildings are torn down, ghost towns are abandoned, kerosene lamps end up gathering dust in junktique malls—but much of it remains in place because the costs of replacing it are too high. Consider the water pipes under New York City, which are so old and dilapidated that at least a quarter of the water that goes into the system leaks out before it reaches anyone’s tap. Could they be replaced? Not without digging up most of the city at fantastic cost.
So over time, the capital stock of any society becomes increasingly ramshackle, jerry-rigged, and expensive to maintain. Growth becomes harder and harder to pay for because maintenance costs eat up so much of the society’s economic product. Crisis arrives when the society reaches the point at which its annual product is insufficient to keep patching up its capital plant, and things start falling apart in a big way.
Crisis need not equal catastrophe, however. The single most effective way to get maintenance costs down to an affordable level is to let the largest possible amount of old, dilapidated, dysfunctional capital come crashing down. That way you can save all the wealth you’d have otherwise spent trying to prop it up, and it’s often possible to salvage valuables from the wreckage, the way that medieval stonemasons used to salvage stone blocks from Roman ruins. Thus one common pattern in history is for a society to build up a vast amount of capital in times of peace and prosperity, let most of it be converted into waste during a period of war and crisis, and then start thriving again once the crisis is over.
There’s a catch, though, because the recovery only happens if the resource base on which the society operates is stable and renewable. If the society depends on nonrenewable resources, or on the unsustainable exploitation of potentially renewable resources, resource depletion combines with maintenance crises to produce the standard stairstep process by which civilizations fall. Read a good history of the fall of the Roman Empire and you can see that clearly: there’s a crisis, a period of chaos and impoverishment, and then renewed stability arrives but on a less prosperous level; the same cycle occurs again, and again, and again, and after a few centuries you’ve got goats grazing in what used to be the Forum Romanum, helping to support a modest population of peasants in what used to be the capital of the western world.
This is where we return to China, because Chinese civilization has repeatedly managed to come through the process of decline and fall with enough of its knowledge base, population, and essential infrastructure intact to maintain continuity from age to age. It’s popular in some circles to suggest that this is a product of cultural factors unique to Chinese society, but that’s one of those arguments that’s impossible either to prove or disprove—lacking a few dozen Chinas in parallel universes with varying cultures as a control group, how could you be sure that it was this cultural quirk rather than that one that did it? Furthermore, and crucially, China’s not the only major civilization to go through multiple cycles of rise and fall. Egypt managed a quite respectable 3000-year run with three dark ages, for example, and Mesopotamia had a comparable run; neither of these societies had much in common with traditional China. Thus it’s helpful to look for other causes.
Chinese society, as it happens, was one of the examples I studied most carefully when I was developing my theory of catabolic collapse, and the economic approach to collapse explains the Chinese case with remarkable clarity. The most important resource base for any nontechnic society—that is to say, any society that gets most of its energy from human and animal muscle—consists of food and water. If you have those, you’ve got a stable population and thus a work force, while if you don’t have those, you have a desert full of bleached bones instead of a civilization. China’s climate is such that too little water is very rarely an issue in the core regions of the nation. As for food, China had the titanic advantage of evolving the first really stable system of organic agriculture our species has yet managed to come up with.
F.H. King’s classic book Farmers of Forty Centuries, one of the books that helped kickstart the development of organic agriculture in the western world, gives the details. The heart of China’s traditional subsistence economy was wetland rice agriculture, which used human and animal manure, nitrogen-fixing water plants, and hundreds of varieties of rice specialized for local conditions to provide a relatively robust food supply come thick or thin. Supplement that with dryland millet and soybean agriculture and animal raising that focuses on small livestock such as pigs, chickens, and pond-raised fish, and you’ve got a means of subsistence that’s impressively resilient. It doesn’t depend on extracting nutrients from the soil, as less sophisticated systems of agriculture do; instead, it systematically puts nutrients back into the soil. This is why there are areas in China that have been producing rice crops regularly for five thousand years.
Let’s check this thesis against the other two really long-lived civilizations mentioned earlier, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Both of them had similarly robust agricultural systems, but that wasn’t a function of sophisticated resource cycling, as it was in China. In Egypt, the annual flooding of the Nile brought fresh sediment from East Africa and spread it over the farmland every year, renewing the soil; in Mesopotamia, the somewhat less regular floods of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers did much the same thing. That gave both civilizations impressive staying power; where many other civilizations exhausted their soils and plunged into terminal subsistence crises, Egypt and Mesopotamia had relatively stable agricultural bases. (Yes, there were famines, but those were always temporary phenomena.)
Both civilizations, in turn, ended not because their agriculture gave out—the great salinization crisis in Mesopotamia happened in the 12th century AD under Muslim rule—but because transport technologies improved to the point that they could be overrun by foreign invaders during periods of decline. That happened to China, too, but until modern times China was isolated enough that its invaders were steppe nomads who promptly settled down and adopted Chinese customs. Egypt and Mesopotamia weren’t so lucky; both were conquered in turn by Persian, Greek, Roman, and finally Arab invaders, and both had the last flickering traces of their old cultures stamped out by religious dogmatism on the part of Christian and then Muslim rulers.
All this implies challenges that the current version of Chinese society may not be well prepared to face. The old sustainable agriculture that made China so resilient for so long is a thing of the past. These days China uses more chemical fertilizer than any other nation on earth, by a significant margin. That’s not optional—more than a billion Chinese depend for their daily meals on the extravagant yields that only massive use of chemical fertilizers can provide—but it’s also not sustainable. On the one hand, chemical fertilizer feedstocks are mostly nonrenewable resources, and as those deplete, feeding China’s population is going to become more and more difficult; on the other, chemical fertilizers wreck the soil over time, so that an area that’s been farmed using chemical agriculture becomes more and more barren. That promises a very difficult future for China and the Chinese people.
And Western industrial civilization? We’re in even worse shape. The Western world has its own sustainable methods of agriculture, mostly developed over the last century with (as noted above) a great deal of inspiration drawn from Chinese sources. The problem, of course, is that not many farmers use these methods. Nor can you convert conventionally farmed acreage to organic farming methods overnight. Sri Lanka’s a great case study here; many of my readers will recall that its government a few years ago, pressured by the impressively clueless “experts” from the World Economic Forum, tried to impose organic methods on its agricultural sector all at once, and underwent a drastic agricultural and economic collapse as a result.
As any traditional Chinese farmer could have told them, organic methods have to be brought in a step at a time, as part of a whole system of resource cycling that involves changes to nearly every aspect of the farming process. Organic methods also aren’t well suited to mass production of cash crops for export, because—ahem—the manure of the people who eat the products of the farm is an important fertilizer source for next year’s crop. As long as our agriculture remains tied to a hypercentralized market economy in which crops are shipped worldwide and nobody lives off the agricultural produce of their own region, organic farming methods that permit long-term sustainability are going to be economically viable only in niche markets, and most farming in the industrial world will remain stuck in a self-terminating rut.
Of course that’s only one aspect of a much broader problem. Here in the United States, our farms are also hopelessly dependent on chemical fertilizers; we also burn up far more fossil fuel per capita than China’s ever dreamed of having, and far more of the products of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. None of that is sustainable. What that means, of course, is that sooner or later it will stop. That won’t be a sudden process, if only because oil and gas wells don’t suddenly turn off—they lose pressure gradually, descending to a trickle, and gimmicks such as hydrofracturing which boost production again for a little while have less and less effect the more often they’re repeated.
This time, in other words, China’s in for it, and so are we. There’s certainly a point to putting sustainable organic methods of agriculture, gardening, livestock rasing, and the rest of it into place in as much acreage as possible, if only because that’s what will be left once fossil fuel production drops far enough that chemical fertilizers price themselves out of the market, and people who know how to grow food using renewable inputs will be in a good position to teach others and save whatever can still be saved. The question is purely how much capital will be transformed into ruins, wreckage, and raw materials for salvage crews before the long ragged decline bottoms out a few hundred years from now and our descendants can begin laying the foundations for the successor civilizations of the far future.
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