Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (77 page)

tic bird-loving environmentalists but from hard-nosed economists, who are
asking themselves: would Australia be better off economically without much of its present agricultural enterprise?

The background to this rethinking is the realization that only tiny areas of Australian land currently being used for agriculture are productive and
suitable for sustained agricultural operations. While 60% of Australia's land
area and 80% of its human water use are dedicated to agriculture, the value
of agriculture relative to other sectors of the Australian economy has been
shrinking to the point where it now contributes less than 3% of the gross
national product. That's a huge allocation of land and scarce water to an enterprise of such low value. Furthermore, it is astonishing to realize that over
99% of that agricultural land makes little or no positive contribution to
Australia's economy. It turns out that about 80% of Australia's agricultural
profits are derived from less than 0.8% of its agricultural land, virtually all of it in the southwestern corner, on the south coast around Adelaide, in the
southeastern corner, and in eastern Queensland. Those are the few areas favored by volcanic or recently uplifted soils, reliable winter rains, or both.
Most of Australia's remaining agriculture is in effect a mining operation
that does not add to Australia's wealth but merely converts environmental capital of soil and native vegetation irreversibly into cash, with the help of
indirect government subsidies in the forms of below-cost water, tax conces
sions, and free telephone linkups and other infrastructure. Is it a good use of Australian taxpayers' money to subsidize so much unprofitable or de
structive land use?

Even from the narrowest point of view, some Australian agriculture is
uneconomic to the individual consumer, who can buy its products (such as
orange juice concentrate and pork) more cheaply as imports from overseas than as domestic produce. Much agriculture is also uneconomic to the indi
vidual farmer, as measured by what is termed "profit at full equity." That is,
if one counts among a farm's expenses not only its cash expenditures but also the value of the farmer's labor, two-thirds of Australia's agricultural land (mainly land used for raising sheep and beef cattle) operates at a net
loss to the farmer.

For instance, consider Australian pastoralists raising sheep for their
wool. On the average, pastoralists' farm income is lower than the national
minimum wage, and they are accumulating debts. The farm's capital plant
of its buildings and fences is running down because the farm doesn't yield
enough money to maintain the plant in good condition. Nor does wool yield enough profit to pay the interest costs on the farm's mortgage. The

means by which the average wool-grower survives economically are through
non-farm income, earned by holding a second job as a nurse or in a store, operating a bed-and-breakfast, or other ways. In effect, those second jobs, plus the farmers' willingness to work on their farms for little or no pay, are
subsidizing their own money-losing farm operations. Many in the current generation of farmers pursue the profession because they grew up
to admire the rural life, even though they could earn more money doing
something else. In Australia as in Montana, the children of the current generation of farmers are unlikely to make that same choice when they will be
facing the decision whether they want to take over the family farm from
their parents. Only 29% of current Australian farmers expect that their chil
dren will run the farm.

That's the economic value of much Australian farming to the individual
consumer and the individual farmer. What about its value to Australia as a whole? For any given piece of the farming enterprise, one has to take into account a broadened view of its costs to the entire economy, as well as its benefits. One big piece of those broadened costs is government support to farmers through means such as tax subsidies and expenditures for drought
assistance, research, advising, and agricultural extension services. Those
government expenditures eat up about one-third of Australian agriculture's
nominal net profits. Another big piece of those broadened costs is the losses
that agriculture imposes on other segments of the Australian economy. In effect, agricultural uses of land compete with other potential uses of the
same land, and using one piece of land for agriculture may damage the
value of another piece of land for tourism, forestry, fisheries, recreation, or
even for agriculture itself. For instance, soil runoff caused by land clearance for agriculture is damaging and locally killing the Great Barrier Reef, one of
Australia's major tourist attractions, but tourism is already more important
to Australia than agriculture as a source of foreign-exchange earnings. Or
suppose one wheat farmer on uphill land can make a profit for a few years
by growing irrigated wheat that causes massive salinization of larger prop
erties lying downhill, ruining those properties in perpetuity In those cases
the farmer clearing land in the reef's watershed, or operating the uphill
farm, may show a profit to himself as a result of his activities, but Australia
as a whole shows a loss.

Another case that has come in for much recent discussion involves
industrial-scale cotton-growing in southern Queensland and in northern
New South Wales, on the upper reaches of tributaries of the Darling River
(flowing down through agricultural districts of southern New South Wales

and South Australia) and of the Diamantina River (flowing down into the
Lake Eyre Basin). In a narrow sense, cotton is Australia's second most prof
itable agricultural export, after wheat. But cotton-growing depends on ir
rigation water provided at low cost or no cost by the government. In
addition, all major cotton-growing areas pollute the water with their heavy
applications of pesticides, herbicides, defoliants, and high-phosphorus and high-nitrogen fertilizers (causing algal blooms). Those pollutants even in
clude DDT and its metabolites, last used about 25 years ago but still persist
ing in the environment because they resist breakdown. In the downstream
reaches of those polluted rivers are wheat and cattle growers who appeal to
a high-value niche market by raising wheat and beef without adding their
own chemicals. They have been protesting vigorously, because their ability
to sell their supposedly chemical-free produce is being undermined by
those side effects of the cotton industry. Thus, while growing cotton un
questionably brings profits to the owners of the cotton agribusinesses, one
would have to calculate indirect costs, such as those of subsidized water and
damage to other agricultural sectors, if one wanted to evaluate whether cot
ton produces a gain or a loss to Australia as a whole.

The remaining example considers Australia's agricultural production of
the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. That's an especially seri
ous problem for Australia, because global warming (thought to result in
large degree from greenhouse gases) is breaking down the pattern of reli
able winter rains that turned wheat grown in southwestern Australia's
wheat belt into Australia's single most valuable agricultural export. The car
bon dioxide emissions from Australian agriculture exceed those produced
by motor vehicles and all the rest of the transport industry. Even worse are
cows, whose digestion produces methane, 20 times more potent than car
bon dioxide in causing global warming. The simplest way for Australia to fulfill its stated commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions would
be to eliminate its cattle!

While that and other radical suggestions have been put forward, there
are currently no signs of their being adopted soon. It would be a "first" for
the modern world if a government voluntarily decided to phase out much
of its agricultural enterprise, in anticipation of future problems, before be
ing forced in desperation to do so. Nevertheless, even the mere existence of these suggestions raises a larger point. Australia illustrates in extreme form
the exponentially accelerating horse race in which the world now finds it
self. ("Accelerating" means going faster and faster; "exponentially accelerat
ing" means accelerating in the manner of a nuclear chain reaction, twice as

PART FOUR

P RACTICAL
LESSONS

CHAPTER
14

Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

Road map for success
■ Failure to anticipate » Failure to perceive ■

Rational bad behavior
it
Disastrous values
■ Other irrational failures ■

Unsuccessful solutions
■ Signs of hope
■

E

ducation is a process involving two sets of participants who suppos
edly play different roles: teachers who impart knowledge to students,
and students who absorb knowledge from teachers. In fact, as every
open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers' assumptions and
by asking questions that the teachers hadn't previously thought of. I re
cently repeated that discovery when I taught a course, on how societies cope
with environmental problems, to highly motivated undergraduates at my
institution, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In effect,
the course was a trial run-through of this book's material, at a time when I
had drafted some chapters, was planning other chapters, and could still make extensive changes.

My first lecture after the class's introductory meeting was on the collapse of Easter Island society, the subject of this book's Chapter 2. In the class dis
cussion after I had finished my presentation, the apparently simple question
that most puzzled my students was one whose actual complexity hadn't
sunk into me before: how on earth could a society make such an obviously
disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which it depended? One
of the students asked what I thought the islander who cut down the last
palm tree said as he was doing it. For every other society that I treated in
subsequent lectures, my students raised essentially the same question. They
also asked the related question: how often did people wreak ecological dam
age intentionally, or at least while aware of the likely consequences? How
often did people instead do it without meaning to, or out of ignorance? My students wondered whether
—if there are still people left alive a hundred
years from now—those people of the next century will be as astonished

about our blindness today as we are about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.

This question of why societies end up destroying themselves through di
sastrous decisions astonishes not only my UCLA undergraduates but also professional historians and archaeologists. For example, perhaps the most
cited book on societal collapses is
The Collapse of Complex Societies,
by the
archaeologist Joseph Tainter. In assessing competing explanations for ancient collapses, Tainter remained skeptical of even the possibility that they
might have been due to depletion of environmental resources, because that outcome seemed a priori so unlikely to him. Here is his reasoning: "One
supposition of this view must be that these societies sit by and watch the encroaching weakness without taking corrective actions. Here is a major diffi
culty. Complex societies are characterized by centralized decision-making, high information flow, great coordination of parts, formal channels of com
mand, and pooling of resources. Much of this structure seems to have the
capability, if not the designed purpose, of countering fluctuations and deficiencies in productivity. With their administrative structure, and capacity to allocate both labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best (see, for ex
ample, Isbell [ 1978]). It is curious that they would collapse when faced with
precisely those conditions they are equipped to circumvent.
...
As it be
comes apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that
a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some
rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption
—
of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may
rightly hesitate."

That is, Tainter's reasoning suggested to him that complex societies are not likely to allow themselves to collapse through failure to manage their environmental resources. Yet it is clear from all the cases discussed in this
book that precisely such a failure has happened repeatedly. How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?

My UCLA undergraduates, and Joseph Tainter as well, have identified a
baffling phenomenon: namely, failures of group decision-making on the
part of whole societies or other groups. That problem is of course related to
the problem of failures of individual decision-making. Individuals, too,
make bad decisions: they enter bad marriages, they make bad investments
and career choices, their businesses fail, and so on. But some additional fac
tors enter into failures of group decision-making, such as conflicts of inter
est among members of the group, and group dynamics. This is obviously a