Parts of the world may be headed toward doom, scholars suggest

The argument: Today's world has much in common with failed societies such as Rome and Tikal.

By Robert S. Boyd INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU

SAN FRANCISCO - Historians and archaeologists who study the downfall of ancient civilizations are warning that parts of the modern world may be heading the way of history's fallen empires.

Researchers say the overcrowded cities, water shortages and electricity brownouts in 21st-century California, India and Brazil are ominous reminders of the fate of ancient Rome, Babylon and the Mayan empire.

Previous prophets of doom, such as the English political economist T.R. Malthus and the "Club of Rome," which in 1972 predicted that the world's population would overwhelm its resources, have been proved wrong so far by the rapid progress of technology. This time, however, some researchers say the complexity caused by high technology could be mankind's undoing.

The Mayas, who dominated Central America in the ninth century, built elaborate irrigation systems to support their booming population. But they "suffered from problems that are startlingly similar to those today," said Vernon Scarborough, an archaeologist at the University of Cincinnati.

"Overpopulation was a major factor in making the Maya vulnerable to failure," Scarborough said at a conference on the "Collapse of Complex Societies" in San Francisco last month. "The trigger event of the collapse appears to have been a long drought beginning about 840 [A.D.]."

Although many factors, such as war and disease, contributed to the calamities of antiquity, speakers at the conference singled out two causes: too many people and too little fresh water. That one-two punch can become lethal, they said, when environmental problems such as a prolonged drought or a change in climate put too much stress on a society.

The movement of peoples into big cities such as Rome and Tikal, the Mayan capital, created great wealth, rich cultures and complex bureaucracies that ultimately proved to be unsustainable.

"Complex societies have been collapsing for 12,000 years - as long as they have existed," said Joseph Tainter, an expert on prehistoric American Indians at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Albuquerque, N.M.

"High population levels gave early societies a fragility that made them especially vulnerable to environmental changes," said Christopher Scarre, an archaeologist from Cambridge University in England.

"The societies themselves appear to have contributed to their own demise," Scarre continued. "They encouraged the growth of population to levels which carried the seeds of their own decline through overexploitation of the land. . . . It became only a matter of time before disaster struck."

According to Scarre, those failures were the opening chapters in "the long history of human interaction with the environment, which continues to be debated in contemporary concerns over CFCs [ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons], greenhouse gases and genetically engineered crops."

In his talk, Tainter pointed to California's electricity crisis and never-ending quest for enough water as today's version of the pressures that wrecked early societies.

The Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization in India, and early societies in Palestine, Greece and Crete all collapsed in a catastrophic drought and cooling of the atmosphere between 2300 and 2200 B.C.

Intensive agriculture and excessive irrigation led to the salinization of the Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq. Scarre said this "ultimately damaged the very landscape these societies were striving to improve."

In the American Southwest, the ancient Anasazi civilization "could not sustain three decades of exceptional drought and reduced temperatures in the 13th century A.D.," according to a paper in Science magazine by Harvey Weiss, an anthropologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and Raymond Bradley, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Now the world is facing an increasingly serious shortage of fresh water. Although water covers three-quarters of our planet, 95 percent of it is salty and 70 percent of the rest is locked up in ice.

Aquifers in Texas are being drained faster than they are refilled. The Aral Sea in Central Asia is drying up as the rivers that feed it are diverted to irrigate cotton fields. Lake Chad in central Africa is one-twentieth the size it was 35 years ago, also because of excessive irrigation.

A billion people lack adequate clean water, according to Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, Calif.

Water-borne diseases kill 10,000 to 20,000 children every day, said Gleick, author of a report "The World's Water, 2000-2001."

"Half the world's population has water service inferior to the ancient Greeks and Romans," Gleick said.

People all over the globe are abandoning small towns and villages and jamming into metropolitan areas, especially in poorer, Third World countries.

By 2015, population experts predict, there will be 28 "megacities," each with more than 10 million people. The Tokyo region is already home to more than 26 million people. Bombay, India, is expected to grow from 18 million to 26 million; Los Angeles from 13.1 million to 14.1 million; New York City from 16.6 million to 17.4 million.

To be sure, modern cities enjoy more advanced technologies than ancient metropolises. Nevertheless, the problems of crowding, pollution, crime and sanitation that overwhelmed societies in the past threaten to do so again, especially in less fortunate parts of the world.

"The lessons from history, or prehistory, are usually inconvenient and painful to deal with and easy to ignore," Scarborough said.

-- Chuck the fright driver (coming to america @ get scared. now!), March 30, 2001

Answers

We exist in a dynamic socio-biologic-physical system. It is self-regulating and continuously changing its point of dynamic equilibrium. The changes can be gradual or abrupt. Does it really matter?

Que sera sera.

-- (Dr_Vinnie_Boombox@RES.PECT), March 31, 2001.

Get scared now! Get REALLY scared!! Grab your guns and your home-made bullets! Shoot your neighbors or there won't be enough water for YOU!!!

-- Chuck the fright driver (this is it @ time to. go nuts!), March 31, 2001.

Chuck, glad to see you back. What with the skills you and Mrs. Fright have, you'll find work in no time at all.

-- Welcome Back Chuck (goBack@toYour.censorshipHeaven), March 31, 2001.

I just dont understand. I've been outside all day long with my ribs on the grill waiting for the solar pops.

And now this. Damn.

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), March 31, 2001.

LOL Sumer!

-- (cin@cin.cin), March 31, 2001.

I had to bring my ribs inside, it has begun to rain.

oh my what shall I do now?

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), April 01, 2001.