Study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? (Updated)

NOTE: NASA Clarifies Its Role in Civilization-Collapse Study
NASA is distancing itself from a new study that investigates how unsustainable resource exploitation and rising income inequality could potentially lead to the collapse of human civilization as we know it.
NASA officials released this statement on the study today (March 20): "A soon-to-be published research paper, 'Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies' by University of Maryland researchers Safa Motesharrei and Eugenia Kalnay, and University of Minnesota's Jorge Rivas, was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions."

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system

This Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely,  

• Population, 
• Climate, 
• Water, 
• Agriculture, and  
• Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features:

• "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and 
• "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" 

These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:


".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."

Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."

However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.

The two key solutions are to

• reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and 
• to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:

"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."

The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

How to Change Education - from the ground up

World-renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson delivers the long-awaited follow-up to his now legendary Changing Education Paradigms talk.

He addresses the fundamental economic, cultural, social and personal purposes of education, and argues that education should be personalised to every student's talent, passion, and learning styles, and that creativity should be embedded in the culture of every single school.

Chair: Matthew Taylor, RSA chief executive.

Supported by Samsung Mobile

ORIGINAL: RSA

01 Jul 2013

How Education Will Fix Itself

ORIGINAL: Big Think
by Niall Ferguson
August 19, 2013

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Let's suppose you are running the perfect state, the perfect government. You would want to go on a little world tour before you got down to business to see the best practices. What are the educational systems that really do well, that produce the kinds of things that are desirable - social mobility, innovation, creativity - but also high skill levels for the mediocre because that’s in many ways the most important thing.

That would be the first port of call. Let’s go to Finland or Singapore or pay a visit to the Shanghai Education District. They seem to be doing something right. And then take a long hard look at our system, and particularly at the high schools. I think the biggest weakness in the U.S. system lies at the level of secondary high school education where there are a great many public schools that do not deliver. And this is zip code related. It’s essentially bad schools in poor areas. I think that’s our biggest problem.

You can’t really solve this problem at the university level. You can’t say, we’ve got to redress this by making universities work differently because until you are doing a good job of secondary education, the game is already over by the time you get to SATs. So I think that would be the first part of the problem.

And then the question becomes, do you aim to produce a better system of public education, which would be a kind of Scandinavian solution? Or, do you say, that is never going to work here, we’re not Denmark. Let’s have more competition so that it’s not a monopoly of public schools, but it’s actually a competitive system. That’s the British solution, if you like. A solution where there’s a much larger private sector and in which the competition between the public and private sectors is the driver.

We’ve got that here, but only in the university sector. It’s only in the university sector that you’ve got private institutions like Harvard competing with public ones like Berkeley. My kind of preference is to explore getting more competition to percolate down into the secondary level. But there’s another way of thinking about this, which is really different. And that’s to say, this problem will solve itself. It will solve itself because technological innovation is revolutionizing how we learn so totally that the conversation we’ve just had about colleges and schools will look anachronistic in about 20 years.

The way one can learn through the internet is one of the most exciting things going on right now from my vantage point. And I believed in this from early on. I was even involved in a failed startup called Box Mind in the 1990’s that was supposed to make available the best quality academic lectures in the world to absolutely anybody. And we were ahead of our time.

We have, I think, now reached a point where that is doable and that is happening. In some ways, Big Think is part of that. One can have a tutorial with one professor and a million tutees. And that’s exciting. It’s also exciting that the textbook, in its old and tedious form is dying and is going to be replaced by eTextbooks that are interactive, web-enabled, and that is exciting not just because it’s cool and iPads are better than textbooks. It’s exciting because done right; the e-Textbook allows teachers to monitor progress of pupils much more efficiently. But once you’ve got people doing that sort of work it’s easier to monitor performance. You don’t have to check every single student; the little red light will tell you who’s really falling behind in the algebra exercises.

So I’m actually pretty optimistic about what technology can do for education. I think we know a lot more than we’ve put into effect about what works in the classroom and indeed, outside of the classroom. We’ve got a huge challenge on our hands because there’s another side to technology which creates what I call, the Attention Deficit Disorder problem where the technology is so good that the students can’t study. There’s a text every minute, there’s an email every 10 minutes that simultaneously on Facebook and on Khan Academy and on Google News and in fact they don’t learn anything. They certainly don’t read War and Peace. My test is, are you able – I mean, I ask my students this. Can you read War and Peace? Have you read it? No, of course not. Can you read it? Could you read it? Can you imagine being able to have read it by Monday?

So we’ve got to make sure that the technology enhances our learning capability, not destroys it. And we’ve tipped, finely balanced at this point. I think the opportunity’s definitely there, but right now I think it’s not working, it’s not happening. In fact, if anything, the power of technology is a source of distraction to the average student and not enhanced learning. So we’ve got to really make sure that it goes towards more efficient learning. Let’s get away from the lecture, the monologue where everybody sits and the professor bloviates for 50 units. Let’s make it interactive. Let’s recognize how long the typical attention span is. Let’s make the materials more interactive. Let’s take games and make them educational. Everybody loves to play games, especially the male of the species. Educational games are a huge part of where education is going. And we know that they work. We know that once you engage somebody in a strategy game, they learn more about history. A marketing game, they learn more about marketing.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.