The first stop on my road map is that groups may do disastrous things because they failed to anticipate a problem before it arrived, for any of several reasons. One is that they may have had no prior experience of such problems, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility.
A prime example is the mess that British colonists created for themselves when they introduced foxes and rabbits from Britain into Australia in the 1800s. Today these rate as two of the most disastrous examples of impacts of alien species on an environment to which they were not native (see Chapter 13 for details). These introductions are all the more tragic because they were carried out intentionally at much effort, rather than resulting inadvertently from tiny seeds overlooked in transported hay, as in so many cases of establishment of noxious weeds. Foxes have proceeded to prey on and exterminate many species of native Australian mammals without evolutionary experience of foxes, while rabbits consume much of the plant fodder intended for sheep and cattle, outcompete native herbivorous mammals, and undermine the ground by their burrows.
With the gift of hindsight, we now view it as incredibly stupid that colonists would intentionally release into Australia two alien mammals that have caused billions of dollars in damages and expenditures to control them. We recognize today, from many other such examples, that introductions often prove disastrous in unexpected ways. That’s why, when you go to Australia or the U.S. as a visitor or returning resident, one of the first questions you are now asked by immigration officers is whether you are carrying any plants, seeds, or animals—to reduce the risk of their escaping and becoming established. From abundant prior experience we have now learned (often but not always) to anticipate at least the potential dangers of introducing species. But it’s still difficult even for professional ecologists to predict which introductions will actually become established, which established successful introductions will prove disastrous, and why the same species establishes itself at certain sites of introduction and not at others. Hence we really shouldn’t be surprised that 19th century Australians, lacking the 20th century’s experience of disastrous introductions, failed to anticipate the effects of rabbits and foxes.
In this book we have encountered other examples of societies understandably failing to anticipate a problem of which they lacked prior experience. In investing heavily in walrus hunting in order to export walrus ivory to Europe, the Greenland Norse could hardly have anticipated that the Crusades would eliminate the market for walrus ivory by reopening Europe’s access to Asian and African elephant ivory, or that increasing sea ice would impede ship traffic to Europe. Again, not being soil scientists, the Maya at Copán could not foresee that deforestation of the hill slopes would trigger soil erosion from the slopes into the valley bottoms.
Even prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten. That’s especially a problem for non-literate societies, which have less capacity than literate societies to preserve detailed memories of events long in the past, because of the limitations of oral transmission of information compared to writing. For instance, we saw in Chapter 4 that Chaco Canyon Anasazi society survived several droughts before succumbing to a big drought in the 12th century A.D. But the earlier droughts had occurred long before the birth of any Anasazi affected by the big drought, which would thus have been unanticipated because the Anasazi lacked writing. Similarly, the Classic Lowland Maya succumbed to a drought in the 9th century, despite their area having been affected by drought centuries earlier (Chapter 5). In that case, although the Maya did have writing, it recorded kings’ deeds and astronomical events rather than weather reports, so that the drought of the 3rd century did not help the Maya anticipate the drought of the 9th century.
In modern literate societies whose writing does discuss subjects besides kings and planets, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we draw on prior experience committed to writing. We, too, tend to forget things. For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, we Americans shied away from gas-guzzling cars, but then we forgot that experience and are now embracing SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events. When the city of Tucson in Arizona went through a severe drought in the 1950s, its alarmed citizens swore that they would manage their water better, but soon returned to their water-guzzling ways of building golf courses and watering their gardens.
Another reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem involves reasoning by false analogy. When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations. That’s a good way to proceed if the old and new situations are truly analogies, but it can be dangerous if they are only superficially similar. For instance, Vikings who immigrated to Iceland beginning around the year A.D. 870 arrived from Norway and Britain, which have heavy clay soils ground up by glaciers. Even if the vegetation covering those soils is cleared, the soils themselves are too heavy to be blown away. When the Viking colonists encountered in Iceland many of the same tree species already familiar to them from Norway and Britain, they were deceived by the apparent similarity of the landscape (Chapter 6). Unfortunately, Iceland’s soils arose not through glacial grinding but through winds carrying light ash blown out in volcanic eruptions. Once the Vikings had cleared Iceland’s forests to create pastures for their livestock, the light soil became exposed for the wind to blow out again, and much of Iceland’s topsoil soon eroded away.
A tragic and famous modern example of reasoning by false analogy involves French military preparations from World War II. After the horrible bloodbath of World War I, France recognized its vital need to protect itself against the possibility of another German invasion. Unfortunately, the French army staff assumed that a next war would be fought similarly to World War I, in which the Western Front between France and Germany had remained locked in static trench warfare for four years. Defensive infantry forces manning elaborate fortified trenches had been usually able to repel infantry attacks, while offensive forces had deployed the newly invented tanks only individually and just in support of attacking infantry. Hence France constructed an even more elaborate and expensive system of fortifications, the Maginot Line, to guard its eastern frontier against Germany. But the German army staff, having been defeated in World War I, recognized the need for a different strategy. It used tanks rather than infantry to spearhead its attacks, massed the tanks into separate armored divisions, bypassed the Maginot Line through forested terrain previously considered unsuitable for tanks, and thereby defeated France within a mere six weeks. In reasoning by false analogy after World War I, French generals made a common mistake: generals often plan for a coming war as if it will be like the previous war, especially if that previous war was one in which their side was victorious.
The second stop on my road map, after a society has or hasn’t anticipated a problem before it arrives, involves its perceiving or failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. There are at least three reasons for such failures, all of them common in the business world and in academia.
First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible. For example, the nutrients responsible for soil fertility are invisible to the eye, and only in modern times did they become measurable by chemical analysis. In Australia, Mangareva, parts of the U.S. Southwest, and many other locations, most of the nutrients had already been leached out of the soil by rain before human settlement. When people arrived and began growing crops, those crops quickly exhausted the remaining nutrients, with the result that agriculture failed. Yet such nutrient-poor soils often bear lush-appearing vegetation; it’s just that most of the nutrients in the ecosystem are contained in the vegetation rather than in the soil, and are removed if one cuts down the vegetation. There was no way for the first colonists of Australia and Mangareva to perceive that problem of soil nutrient exhaustion—nor for farmers in areas with salt deep in the ground (like eastern Montana and parts of Australia and Mesopotami
a) to perceive incipient salinization—nor for miners of sulfide ores to perceive the toxic copper and acid dissolved in mine runoff water.
Another frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it has arrived is distant managers, a potential issue in any large society or business. For example, the largest private landowner and timber company in Montana today is based not within that state but 400 miles away in Seattle, Washington. Not being on the scene, company executives may not realize that they have a big weed problem on their forest properties. Well-run companies avoid such surprises by periodically sending managers “into the field” to observe what is actually going on, while a tall friend of mine who was a college president regularly practiced with his school’s undergraduates on their basketball courts in order to keep abreast of student thinking. The opposite of failure due to distant managers is success due to on-the-spot managers. Part of the reason why Tikopians on their tiny island, and New Guinea highlanders in their valleys, have successfully managed their resources for more than a thousand years is that everyone on the island or in the valley is familiar with the entire territory on which their society depends.
Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. We now realize that temperatures around the world have been slowly rising in recent decades, due in large part to atmospheric changes caused by humans. However, it is not the case that the climate each year has been exactly 0.01 degree warmer than in the previous year. Instead, as we all know, climate fluctuates up and down erratically from year to year: three degrees warmer in one summer than in the previous one, then two degrees warmer the next summer, down four degrees the following summer, down another degree the next one, then up five degrees, etc. With such large and unpredictable fluctuations, it has taken a long time to discern the average upwards trend of 0.01 degree per year within that noisy signal. That’s why it was only a few years ago that most professional climatologists previously skeptical of the reality of global warming became convinced. As of the time that I write these lines, President Bush of the U.S. is still not convinced of its reality, and he thinks that we need more research. The medieval Greenlanders had similar difficulties in recognizing that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier.
Politicians use the term “creeping normalcy” to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it’s difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one’s baseline standard for what constitutes “normalcy” shifts gradually and imperceptibly. lt may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.
Another term related to creeping normalcy is “landscape amnesia”: forgetting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50 years ago, because the change from year to year has been so gradual. An example involves the melting of Montana’s glaciers and snowfields caused by global warming (Chapter 1). After spending the summers of 1953 and 1956 in Montana’s Big Hole Basin as a teenager, I did not return until 42 years later, in 1998, when I began visiting every year. Among my vivid teenaged memories of the Big Hole were the snow covering the distant mountaintops even in mid-summer, my resulting sense that a white band low in the sky encircled the basin, and my recollection of a weekend camping trip when two friends and I clambered up to that magical band of snow. Not having lived through the fluctuations and gradual dwindling of summer snow during the intervening 42 years, I was stunned and saddened on my return to the Big Hole in 1998 to find the band almost gone, and in 2001 and 2003 actually all melted off. When I asked my Montana resident friends about the change, they were less aware of it: they unconsciously compared each year’s band (or lack thereof) with the previous few years. Creeping normalcy or landscape amnesia made it harder for them than for me to remember what conditions had been like in the 1950s. Such experiences are a major reason why people may fail to notice a developing problem, until it is too late.
I suspect that landscape amnesia provided part of the answer to my UCLA students’ question, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say as he was doing it?” We unconsciously imagine a sudden change: one year, the island still covered with a forest of tall palm trees being used to produce wine, fruit, and timber to transport and erect statues; the next year, just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredibly self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable: yes, this year we cut down a few trees over there, but saplings are starting to grow back again here on this abandoned garden site. Only the oldest islanders, thinking back to their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents’ tales of a tall forest than my 17-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los Angeles used to be like 40 years ago. Gradually, Easter Island’s trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. At the time that the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, the species had long ago ceased to be of any economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the falling of the last little palm sapling. By then, the memory of the valuable palm forest of centuries earlier had succumbed to landscape amnesia. Conversely, the speed with which deforestation spread over early Tokugawa Japan made it easier for its shoguns to recognize the landscape changes and the need for preemptive action.
The third stop on the road map of failure is the most frequent, the most surprising, and requires the longest discussion because it assumes such a wide variety of forms. Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.
Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term “rational behavior,” arising from clashes of interest between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior “rational” precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn’t effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals. That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small, uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority’s grab. Examples include so-called perverse subsidies: the large sums of money that governments pay to support industries that might be uneconomic without the subsidies, such as many fisheries, sugar-growing in the U.S., and cotton-growing in Australia (subsidized indirectly through the government’s bearing the cost of water for irrigation). The relatively few fishermen and growers lobby tenaciously for the subsidies that represent much of their income, while the losers (all the taxpayers) are less vocal because the subsidy is funded by just a small amount of money concealed in each citizen’s tax bill. Measures benefiting a small minority at the expense of a large majority are especially likely to arise in certain types of democracies that bestow “swing power” on some small groups: e.g., senators from small states in the U.S. Senate, or small religious parties often holding the balance of pow
er in Israel to a degree scarcely possible under the Dutch parliamentary system.
A frequent type of rational bad behavior is “good for me, bad for you and for everybody else”—to put it bluntly, “selfish.” As a simple example, most Montana fishermen fish for trout. A few fishermen who prefer to fish for a pike, a larger fish-eating fish not native to western Montana, surreptitiously and illegally introduced pike to some western Montana lakes and rivers, where they proceeded to destroy trout fishing by eating out the trout. That was good for the few pike fishermen and bad for the far greater number of trout fishermen.
An example producing more losers and higher dollar losses is that, until 1971, mining companies in Montana on closing down a mine just left it with its copper, arsenic, and acid leaking out into rivers, because the state of Montana had no law requiring companies to clean up after mine closure. In 1971 the state of Montana did pass such a law, but companies discovered that they could extract the valuable ore and then just declare bankruptcy before going to the expense of cleaning up. The result has been about $500,000,000 of cleanup costs to be borne by the citizens of Montana and the U.S. Mining company CEOs had correctly perceived that the law permitted them to save money for their companies, and to advance their own interests through bonuses and high salaries, by making messes and leaving the burden to society. Innumerable other examples of such behavior in the business world could be cited, but it is not as universal as some cynics suspect. In the next chapter we shall examine how that range of outcomes results from the imperative for businesses to make money to the extent that government regulations, laws, and public attitudes permit.
One particular form of clashes of interest has become well known under the name “tragedy of the commons,” in turn closely related to the conflicts termed “the prisoner’s dilemma” and “the logic of collective action.” Consider a situation in which many consumers are harvesting a communally owned resource, such as fishermen catching fish in an area of ocean, or herders grazing their sheep on a communal pasture. If everybody over-harvests the resource, it will become depleted by overfishing or overgrazing and thus decline or even disappear, and all of the consumers will suffer. It would therefore be in the common interests of all consumers to exercise restraint and not overharvest. But as long as there is no effective regulation of how much resource each consumer can harvest, then each consumer would be correct to reason, “If I don’t catch that fish or let my sheep graze that grass, some other fisherman or herder will anyway, so it makes no sense for me to refrain from overfishing or overharvesting.” The correct rational behavior is then to harvest before the next consumer can, even though the eventual result may be the destruction of the commons and thus harm for all consumers.
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