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So this week, we've been looking at reasons for the collapse or the decline of civilizations and societies. And what I'd like to talk to you about now is an interesting study about this. That was carried out by a team of scientists. These were systems scientists, natural scientists and social scientists, a whole team of different scientists at the National socio environmental synthesis center. So what these scientists did, they used a mathematical model to see how different scenarios would play out. They modeled different scenarios mathematically on a computer and basically, they they use this model to well, they put in different combinations of variables to see what the result would be if we had those different combinations of variables in reality, and what they found was that it's pretty likely if nothing changes, it's pretty likely that global industrial civilization could collapse in the coming decades, because of two key things, over exploitation of resources, unsustainable resource use, and also inequality, the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Now before I go on I think it's worth revisiting quickly what we mean by social collapse, we can define collapse as the decline or fall if you like of a complex human society. So this decline or fall could be sudden, like, for example, the Mayan civilization in Central America or it could be a more gradual process like the decline of the Roman Empire.
And what basically happens when the society declines is that it reverts back to less complex organization, simpler social structures, less complex governance, there's usually population decline and a period of a kind of loss of knowledge, less education, less literacy, poor health and so on. Basically, going back to a period of less development or less civilization, like the Dark Ages in Europe would be an example. So in this particular study, the scientists fed a lot of historical data into their model, and found that this process of rise and collapse is actually a recurring cycle found throughout history. There are many examples of severe social disruption civilizational disruption, because of the collapse of advanced complex societies, and these periods of disruption, these periods of going backwards, if you like, can last for for hundreds of years for centuries and have actually been quite common throughout history.
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So what are the reasons they found for the collapse for the decline? of complex civilizations? The research has investigated the interaction or the interrelationships if you like between humans and nature.
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And in these historical examples, and then these past cases of collapse, they identified five important factors which explain civilizational decline and these factors might also help to determine the risk of collapse today. These factors are population, climate, water, agriculture and energy. Now these factors can lead to collapse when they come together to create two important social features. The first of these features is the overuse of resources to the point where the environment can't support the society anymore. This is called exceeding the carrying capacity of the environment.
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The second is the economic stratification of society. In other words, increasing inequality between the rich or the elites we call the rich the elites and the poor.
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The study found that these two social phenomena have played a central role in the nature of or the process of the collapse in all the examples that they looked at from over the last 5000 years. So why did this happen? It's because high levels of inequality are linked directly to overconsumption of resources. And the elites or the rich are largely responsible for both the masses of the population the poor, produce the wealth, but only have access to a small portion of that wealth, while the elites control the wealth. Because the elites control the wealth, they're protected from the negative effects of resource exploitation. They're protected from the effects of environmental collapse much longer than the poor. And eventually, there's a collapse of the poor population. The poor suffer from famine, for example, there's no food for them to eat, while the rich are protected from these because they control most of the wealth and the resources. But eventually, because the poor collapse the population of the poor collapses.
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This means that the elites will eventually collapse to because there's no one to produce the wealth for them anymore, or there's a much reduced population of the poor to produce the wealth for them. It's really a loss of workers that causes the collapse rather than a collapse of nature, a collapse of the environment and it's the sort of mechanism that can help explain how historical social collapses were allowed to happen by elites, who seems to be unaware of the catastrophic path that this society was on.
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They weren't aware of the problems because they were protected from the problems because of their access to and control of resources and wealth, the elites and their supporters who were opposed to making changes so that they could protect their interests. They failed to see the long term unsustainability of their society. But this doesn't mean that collapse is inevitable. Policy and structural changes can avoid collapse and pave the way to a more stable civilization.
If the problems are recognized and addressed by the rich. The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality. So as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and also to dramatically read to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth.
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So what's the main lesson from this? It's that collapse can be avoided, population can reach equilibrium can reach a balance, if the rate of depletion in nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion, and these are decisions that our society can choose to make.