A very meaty and real subject for SFNChat

Professor Jared Diamond Asks: "Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York’s skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?"

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculpture well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Ozymandias." by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

Examples of total failures of societies leaving substantial ruins, but virtually no survivors:
1. Those total collapses we know virtually nothing about:
a. The Dorset people of the arctic
b. The Cahokia people (St Louis)
c. The Anasazi in our southwest
d. Mohenjo Daro ruins - Pakistan
e. Machu Pichu and Tiwanaku in South America
f. Great Zimbabawe in Africa
g. Angkor Wat and Harappan Indus Valley in Asia
h. Easter Island in the Pacific

2. Those collapses we do know some details about.:
a. The Maya in middle America
b. The Norse in Greenland
c. Rwanda in Africa
d. Pitcairn and Henderson Islands

3. Societies with difficult situations that are still thriving:
a. Iceland
b. Tikopia (small Pacific Island)
c. New Guinea Highlands
d. Tokugawa Japan

e. Dominican Republic compared to Haiti
f. China
g Australia
h. Netherlands

Reasons for the collapse of societies and civilizations: Few collapses were due to a single factor as most were destroyed by a combination of these factors, all aggravated by expanding populations.

1. Environmental changes - fragility (susceptibility to damage) and resilience (potential for recovery)
a. Deforestation
b. Soil depletion and salinization
c. Water depletion
d. Wild food sources
e. Domestic food sources
f. sources for non-food goods

2. Climate change
a. temperature
b. rainfall
c. sunlight

3. Hostile neighbors (competition for resources)
a. wars
b. fighting and murder

4. Friendly trade partners
a. difficulty in transporting goods
b. availability of goods to trade
c. willingness to trade

5. The society’s responses to the first four
a. Population pressures
b. Power of the rulers
c. Willingness to cooperate.
d. Willingness to defend oneself from attack

My questions and possible subject for several great SF Novels is this:
How close is humanity to a total collapse (These collapses always happen - and usually very suddenly - immediately after great heights of material and cultural success are reached.) When will it happen? What signs and indications are already with us? How can it be prevented? (Steps and solutions)

Suggested reading: Collapse by Jared Diamond.
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There are many factors in the collapse and demise of isolated populations - usually on lands isolated by geography such as islands - or the earth, an island in space. What humans have done in the past to exterminate themselves and continue to do on a global scale. These factors are not listed in any particular order, but some are directly linked to others and all are accelerated and expanded by population pressures.

1. Elimination of large animals, predators first (they compete with us for food) prey animals later.
Examples: North America - bear, cougar, wolves, buffalo, deer. (I know, some of these have come back, but how much predation of humans by large predators will we be willing to tolerate?) Pacific islands - land birds, sea birds, large mollusks, fish, etc. Specific examples: the moa - New Zealand, the dodo - Mauritania, the passenger pigeon US, the giant palm - Easter Island, many land birds - Pacific islands. Easter islanders eliminated virtually all land animals, birds and near shore sea life. Their only remaining source of animal protein was chickens which they carefully maintained. The man eating tigers of the Zondervan in India are still preying on humans as the people there have decided to accept an amount of predation on local people rather than exterminating them. How much predation on American citizens would we be willing to accept in order to live with predators like grizzly bear and cougar?

2. Deforestation - A major factor in nearly all societal collapses, deforestation inevitably leads to some or all of the following: lowered rainfall, loss of habitat for wild food animals and birds, soil erosion and loss of agricultural viability, soil depletion, desertification and even climate change. Virtually all island collapses included the complete elimination of trees. Easter Islanders eliminated the largest palm tree on the planet as well as all woody growth more than ten feet tall. The Anasazi eliminated all trees in Chaco Canyon resulting in greatly lowered rainfall, crop failures and subsequent abandonment after many hundreds of years of successful occupation. Worldwide deforestation (now well underway) would lead to major climate change, probably far more devastating than the currently popular, global warming scenario.

3. Unsustainable harvesting of wild seafood - Over harvesting of wild food populations was a major factor in all Pacific Island collapses. The largest and most easily harvested disappeared first until finally, only very small shellfish remained. Currently, all ocean fisheries, except the Indian Ocean, are declining. In fact, the North Atlantic area fisheries have collapsed and will take many decades, perhaps centuries, to restore. The use of new technologies has enabled commercial fishermen to decimate the most productive fish populations with uncontrolled harvesting. While there is a tentative world accord aimed at this problem, the worst offender nations have not signed the accord and continue to plunder the oceans with ever expanding fishing fleets harvesting far more than the fisheries ability to renew the resource. A byproduct of this gross harvesting of wild fish for food is the destruction of sea floor habitats by heavy bottom nets and the killing of millions of tons of non-food sea creatures. Add to this the destruction of many areas where ocean fish spawn and their young can grow, protected from predation. Our wild ocean food source is declining at an accelerating rate with many popular species already virtually non-existent. Without a concerted effort at managing this dwindling resource it will be virtually gone in another thirty or forty years.

4. Soil depletion and salinization -

To be continued, edited and added to.