MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 9 July 2005
THE HIGHWAY TO DESTRUCTION
Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed," has gotten lots of attention lately. Diamond authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Guns,
Germs, and Steel," an examination of how and why Western civilizations
developed the technologies and biological immunities that allowed them to
dominate much of the world. In his
new book, Diamond looks at what caused great past civilizations to collapse
into ruin, and what we can learn from their mistakes.
Moving
from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the Native American
civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the medieval Viking colony on
Greenland, and finally to such modern collapsed societies as Rwanda and Haiti,
Diamond discovers a pattern of catastrophe that follows from environmental
damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and other causes. The book's subtitle summarizes
Diamond's central message: Failure
or success are not inevitable. We
choose them.
The
book is full of warning signs about our global society's choices today. Our clear-cut rain forests echo the
vanished forests of Easter Island.
Our globally warmed climate harks back to the human-caused environmental
changes that doomed the Anasazi.
Our global and local population explosions mirror the population
pressures that fueled genocide in Rwanda.
Here
in Northwest Arkansas, business leaders assure us of the inevitability of continued rampant population growth,
increasing congestion, I-540 widening, a glut of new shopping centers lining
the superhighway, big box stores, a new network of 4-lane feeder highways, and
more. It's all presented as though
we were talking about a law of nature, as though sprawling growth were like the
law of gravity rather than the cultural choice that it actually is. NWA has chosen the concrete and the big
box stores and all the rest. It
did not have to be this way.
Diamond
teaches us that every society's crucial choices are strongly conditioned by its
cultural assumptions. Easter
Island, for example, was densely forested when humans arrived around A.D.
900. The Islanders cut down trees
for firewood, cremation, houses, canoes, rope, and to assist in the construction
and transportation of hundreds of immense stone statues that apparently served
some ritualistic purpose and were a source of power and prestige for the rival
chiefs who built them. Forest
clearing continued for centuries as the tiny island's population ballooned to
15,000 by 1600. By the time
westerners discovered the island in 1722, the trees were gone and, largely
because of deforestation, the population had collapsed to 3000 starving
individuals who had moved permanently from their wood and thatch houses into
caves.
Easter Island is only about 10 miles across, so
Islanders could easily survey their vanishing forests, but the destruction
didn't really register with them because it was considered normal and
inevitable. What did they think as
they destroyed the physical basis of their spiritual and material survival--as
they reached, say, 1000 remaining trees, or 100, or 1? Diamond remarks that "the
parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly
obvious."
Our NWA population is on track to double every 20
years.. Interstate 540 is slated
for eight lanes by 2024. Seven new
shopping malls, ranging from 4 acres to 345 acres, will soon line I-540 in
Rogers. One developer describes
I-540, with its planned shopping extravaganzas, as our "main
street." This and other
"inevitable" development will create a "need" for a network
of new and widened roads throughout the region. The highway lobby originally built I-540 as a bypass around
the cities along U.S. 71. Now that
the cities are moving out to the "bypass," there is serious talk of
two new regional loops, one on the east and the other on the west, to bypass
the bypass. The western loop will
cut through the Ozark National Forest.
Sprawl continues in all directions. Regional governments are approving new decentralized sewage
systems that will permit "an expected bounty of development in the rural
areas of Washington and Benton counties."
Does all this remind anybody else of those enormous
abandoned statues on Easter Island?
Newspapers speak of the "inevitable widening of
I-540" and of "unstoppable growth." But none of this is inevitable. These are choices that you and I have made. We choose where we will shop, whether
we will drive, where we will live, where and what we will eat, how we will
spend our time, and how we will vote.
The new NWA megaprojects will contribute to gasoline
shortages, taxes, budget shortfalls, traffic congestion, overpopulation,
pollution, global warming, habitat destruction, the demise of our real main
streets, traffic injuries, deaths, resource consumption, and everyone's jangled
nerves. Far from improving our
quality of life, the new malls and the new concrete will help destroy it.
Perhaps it is too late to head off the new Los Angeles
that is looming out on NWA's "main street" where shopping structures
sprawl and eighteen-wheelers roam.
But given Northwest Arkansas' belief in the desirability of growth, and
our passionate addiction to the automobile, a new Los Angeles is the best we
can hope for. We continue to
choose these cultural beliefs every day of our lives, and they are dooming
us. Like the Easter Islander's
belief in the desirability of their revered stone statues and their addiction
to the massive harvesting of wood "needed" for the statues, we regard
our beliefs as normal and cannot fathom, even as the last true main streets
fade and the last oil reserves vanish, the harm we are causing and the other
paths we might have chosen.